I am what I refer to as Distantly Danish. That means my great grandparents and great, great grandparents on my mother’s side all came from Denmark, and that I have cousins there who I’ve visited and who have visited me, but Denmark would never give me citizenship or anything like that.

Danes are a tall lot, and I am tall myself, almost 5’10”, but somehow I guess I never realized that the rest of the world is not necessarily as tall as my family. Oh, sure, I’ve noticed that I am tall for a woman, but if you’d asked me, based on my family, including my husband, what the average height for an American man is, until a few minutes ago, I would’ve said, “Oh, maybe 6’2″?” And I would’ve been sooooo wrong! The average height is 5’9″!!

So that got me thinking about the characters in my books. I have been known to have a character think something along the lines of, He wasn’t tall or short…maybe around six foot. Apparently six feet is tall! In my defense, a six foot tall man is not even tall enough to date if he doesn’t want you to wear heels (not that I’m dating, of course, since I have a husband), but the reality is that my characters are not reflecting…well, reality!

The main character in Restoring Harmony is about 5’5″ in my mind, but I consciously made her what I thought of as short! In fact, the average height for a Canadian woman is 161 cm or 5’3″! Molly is taller than average and I didn’t even know it.

In most of my other books, the girls are around my height and I never really thought twice about it. I think I might have to look more carefully at height if I choose to include actual numbers in my books so that I don’t get a reputation as “that author who writes about freakishly tall girls”.

What about yourself have you discovered is not the norm, but you thought it was, and included it in your writing?