Sen. Barbara Boxer, novelist

WASHINGTON —  Infighting and power, alliances and revenge -- it’s just another day in the Capitol. California Sen. Barbara Boxer has mined her workplace for a suspense novel in which the main character is an activist senator who does battle with right-wing ideologues.

That may sound familiar to anyone who knows the liberal Democrat’s record. But Boxer said the as-yet-unnamed novel, her first, is purely a work of fiction, though the characters and scenes are drawn from her 12 years in the Senate.

“A lot of what is in the book clearly comes from my world,” Boxer said. “The clash of the political and the personal, it became very interesting to me, and the role of the media in all of this. And so I took all of those things and I wrote a story.”

The novel is set for publication on election day 2005 by Chronicle Books in San Francisco. It tells the story of Ellen, a social activist who runs and wins a Senate seat after her husband, the original candidate, is killed. The third main character is an ambitious, right-wing journalist.

Boxer began writing the book longhand in 1999 on flights to and from California, and teamed up with San Francisco novelist Mary-Rose Hayes a year ago to finish it more quickly.

“I thought, by the time I get this done I’ll be in the nursing home,” Boxer said.

Boxer declined to disclose how much she was paid as an advance. Senate ethics rules allow lawmakers to keep profits from books they write, but Boxer said she hasn’t decided what to do with the proceeds.

Boxer is only the latest member of Congress to try her hand at fiction. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) published a pair of thrillers in the mid-1990s -- also featuring a female senator -- while former Sens. Gary Hart of Colorado and William S. Cohen of Maine teamed up on a couple of spy thrillers in the mid-1980s.