I started out as a newspaper journalist, moved on to magazines, then nonfiction books, then dramatic episodic TV, then TV movies and pilots, then low-budget features, and now I'm working on a novel.  Been at it since 1974.  My father instilled my love of language and my high regard for the most goodest grammar plausible. Look for Dotted Babe, Now in Red to come out in 2009.   Here's how it starts:             Caught in peripheral vision, she could have snapped a man's neck -- a streamline moderne hourglass of a body, vacuum-packed in dotted swiss.  The photo's so old I have to stretch it taut to keep it from curling into a cylinder.  Lana Strain's skin looks blemish-free, the color of milk with just a pinch of chocolate.  Her wavy black hair covers her face like a silk veil falling slightly open at the part to reveal one eye, a startling mosaic of greens and golds.  If there's a flaw in her beauty it's the back of her head, which some jerk has seen fit to splatter across her million-dollar Lichtenstein.             She's slumped like a life-size rag doll.  What remains of her head twists forward at an awkward angle, chin on chest.  Her one visible eye is dulled by death.  She looks dwarfed against the enormous painting, the perfect spacing of its half-tone dots disarrayed by the spray-painted blood.             I can feel Lois watching me as I eyeball the gruesome shot.  "Too bad about the painting," she says.  "I wonder if they ever got the bloodstains out?"             Some cops just don't get it.  "Why would they want to?" I ask.  "A good story just jacks up the price.  Dotted Babe, now in red."             Lana's dress bothers me.  I remember pictures of her in jeans, leather jackets, tight T-shirts, short skirts, sometimes sundresses, but '40s vintage?  Seems wrong.  Not as wrong as the back of her head, but still…             I flip the 8x10 back onto Lois' desk which is so tight to the wall that she has to lift her feet over the seat of her chair to get her legs into the kneehole.  That's the only configuration that makes it possible, in front of the desk, to fit a folding chair for visitors.  Steel.  Unpadded.  God forbid I should get too comfortable and overstay my welcome.              I lean back in the flimsy chair and feel a bump where it hits my back.  Someone must have kicked a dent in the steel.  Lois can have that effect on people.