How to present diversity

Okay, so I've been busy writing my book and not this blog.  Sorry 'bout that.

But an interesting conversation I had on Twitter about presenting your characters that are people of color brought up issues that I have struggled with in the "Sleepwar Saga" series I'm writing now.  The poster made a very good point, and yet I can't say I 100% agree, either.

The Tweeter in question advised writers to state up front the ethnicities of their non-white characters.  The poster said that the presumed-white mentality is so strong that if you don't bring ethnicity up as one of the first things about your character, they will be assumed white by your audience and that view will be hard to shake.

I agree with this, actually.  I think diversity is important - not just in regards to race, but sexuality and physical ability, too - and so it is important that the reader recognizes this about your characters so as to experience the diversity correctly.

However...  I worry about stating up front that a character is black, South Asian, Hispanic, whatever.  Why would that concern me?  Well, for a couple of reasons.

One is that when you're being introduced to a new character, you are absorbing their primary traits in an attempt to understand who they are.  If one of the main traits I choose to mention is that a character is (say) Vietnamese, then the worry (possibly unfounded) is that the reader will pigeonhole that character as "Asian" above and beyond any other attributes.

In other words, they'll remember that the leads include: "the smart one, the athletic one, the nerd, and the Asian chick."

Yes, I can have a well-rounded character with all sorts of subtleties, but if I have prioritized her ethnicity as a defining feature, will the reader do the same?

Also, I never want to "other" my characters.  That is to say, if I feel the need to state one character is black, but never think I have to point out that the others are white, I have singled out "blackness" as aberrant.  I am presenting white as default and describing any deviation from the assumed norm.  And I never want to do that.

Most of the time, I try to describe one characters whiteness for every instance I talk about another character's non-white color.  To ensure that it is a descriptor applied equally and not to demarcate those people who stand out as non-standard.

What, then, is the solution?  Probably what that Twitter poster said, but I still go back and forth.  I don't want to disrespect either my characters or my readers by having race be any kind of defining aspect of my characters.

Their upbringing (of which culture, and society's response to their ethnicity, will be a part) certainly is a strong influence on who they are.  But the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes ought not to be who they are.  On any level, as far as I am concerned.

I like to use strong and unique names for my characters when I can.  If everyone is "Pete", "Dave", "Sandra", "Jill", then it is all too easy for the reader to forget which bland label belongs to which individual.  If they have stronger, less common, names then it is easier to tell them apart.

Luckily for me, this also helps with the dilemma of introducing a character's ethnicity.  In "Straw Soldiers" two minor characters (Kaz's friends at school) were named "Julia Ng" and "Daisy Rivera".  I hope that any reader knows the ethnicities of these girls without being told.

Similarly, my current work in progress features an extremely minor character named "DeShawn" whose skin color I do not feel needs to be stated.  His personality is not a stereotype, but his name is recognizably African American in the way that "Brian" would not be.

This can't be done for every character who is non-white, of course, but on occasion is does bypass the problem I struggle with.

What do you think?  How problematic is it to single out a character's ethnicity for comment?  And how problematic is it not to do so, and have the reader just assume everyone is white?

Inspiration (Part One)

Compensation is 99% inspiration, or so they say.

(No they don't.)

But what exactly is inspiration?  For me, at least, it is certainly not wholesale lifting from other sources.

Most often, an character's arc, or a fantastical element, in one piece of fiction will lead me - stepping-stone-like - to a somewhat related idea that I flesh out on my own to create something brand new.

Sometimes (very rarely) it will be about stealing an idea someone else had.  But in these cases, it's more like turning a throwaway comment into a full-blown novel.  Like reading an offhand remark about 'a YouTube comment by a man who never existed', and then creating from that an entire story about someone who was erased from reality, but gained a second life as a sentient online footprint.

It's not about stealing.  It's about great works of fiction stirring your imagination to create your own (hopefully very different) art.

For this post, I want to talk about my series of pulp science-fiction e-novellas: "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe".

I've talked before about the origins of this series, but basically I wrote an unsolicited spec for a defunct series of pulp e-novellas set in 1970s North America.  At the time, a paperback collected edition was being mooted, but as the project was put on hold, my story (which was strongly being considered for inclusion in the book) went to limbo.

But the experience prompted me to realize that I could write (and would have fun writing) my own series of pulp adventures, of a similar length.  At the time, I thought I could bang them out one a month at a decent quality (provided I went into the thing with a sufficient number of ideas) and because of my love of Victorian-era pulp SF, I immediately conceived the story of a gentleman of the era finding himself on a journey through outer space, becoming an unlikely hero as he floundered his way through the cosmos to make it back to Earth.

The action-adventure pulp series I had written for was a main inspiration - but only for tone and format.  The content of my novellas would be quite different.

So what inspired me beyond them?  HG Wells, of course, was a main inspiration, and I sought ought some of his books I had not read up to that point, to immerse myself in the right tone.

Also - and quite in opposition to the staid pacing of late 19th Century literature - I was greatly inspired by (and wanted to emulate) the flow, rhythm, and structure of the Flash Gordon serials starring Buster Crabbe.  Not the newspaper strips (which I liked as well) but the cinematic serialized adaptations.

If I could somehow evoke the fun of those serials, with their frequent cliffhangers, while also emulating the style and content of early SF works that I loved, then I would be onto a winner (as far as creating what I intended to - I never expected, nor received, financial success from those books).

My main influence, though, was a little loved book called "A Honeymoon in Space" by George Griffith.  First published in 1901 (the same year my Victorian gentleman set out on his celestial adventure) this book describes a dashing man who rescues his old flame from an unwanted marriage in his newly-invented spacecraft.  Together the two take to the stars to see what wonders the solar system has to offer.

In its light-hearted and adventurous tone, its fascination with bizarre alien life and how such societies would evolve, and its utter lack of concern for real-life science, I found something I wanted to emulate in spirit - though not in content.  Its resonances with the concerns of the novel "The Time Machine" gave me much fuel for the fires of my creative writing.

Throw this all together with my love of Sherlock Holmes, adventure serials, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books, and with just a whiff of steampunk about the whole thing, and you have a series I was very proud to more or less succeed at producing once a month (for the six months it endured).

If you want to, you can buy the collected e-books for Kindle for $5.99.  "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe" - one of my favorite things I have ever had the pleasure of writing.

National No Writing Month

Wow.  I've been gone for a while...

So, many of you will know that for a large number of writers, November was NaNoWriMo: "National Novel Writing Month".  Basically, you set strict word count goals so that during the month of November you write a full (first draft of a) novel.

Pretty cool.  I did my own NaNoWriMo: "National No Writing Month".

Why was that?  A bunch of reasons.  I work retail (managing a shoe department) and the Christmas season is a very busy one, leaving me with little time and energy to devote to my writing.

In addition to that... well, I don't want to get into it too much here, but I'm American and early November saw a major event occur that didn't put me in a good mental state for the next few weeks.  I stayed away from all social media for a while, just to avoid dealing with people and their ways.

You guys know what I'm talking about.

As of now, I still don't have the time or energy to put in any serious writing, but I am going through my notes for The Sleepwar Saga Book 2, soaking up all of the details again.  And I'm steeling myself for a more hard-nosed writing schedule at the beginning of the new year.

If I do this right, I could have a (very rough!) first draft by the end of February no problem.  (But, knowing me, I won't - and the end of March will be the earliest.)  Then comes the real work of rewriting.  Yeuch.

But have no fear: I haven't vanished off the face of the Earth!  And with any luck, I will come out the other side of Christmas refreshed and ready to write better than ever before.

I'll believe that when I see it...

My Journey to Self-Publishing

How does one get started on self-publishing?  Well, I'm sure there are many different paths to that.  Sit down around the campfire, folks, and hearken to my own tale.

It all started with reading; it usually does.

Unfortunately, I shall have to be somewhat vague here as there is still the possibility of something happening with this property, but suffice for now to say that there was an incredibly fun series that I was a big fan of.  It was a pulp-style, 70s-set, series of e-book-only novellas starring an entertaining character in a crazy world where it seemed like anything could happen.

They were fantastic, and a lot of fun, but unfortunately a lack of interest caused the series to come to a close eventually.  This disappointed me, but it was not unforeseen.  A niche product like that will be limited in its appeal, but if it - by chance - finds that target audience then it can really take off.  This one didn't (quite).

Some time later, I (who have always been a writer since my youth, even if I had never sought out publishing in any way before) contacted the creator of this series and wondered if he would be amenable to me sending a spec manuscript over to him.  I knew the likelihood of the character making a return was low, but I figured I may as well give it a shot - I had a couple of vague ideas for what I would like to do if given the chance.

To my surprise, the creator messaged me, saying that he was actually considering a hardcopy collected version of the stories, and would like some new novellas to be included so as to make the paper version appealing even to those who already owned the stories electronically.  And he was willing to take a look at my submission!

Energized by the possibility of being published even by a small press like this one (especially one whose works I had been such a fan of) I set to writing straight away, using the concept that most interested me out of the few I had conceived.  I finished a 20,000 word story quite quickly, and sent this first draft off to the man in charge.

And this is where things fell apart.  For various reasons, the project was now not a priority in any way - and although he was enthusiastic about the parts of my story that he read, he never finished it or got back to me with any notes.  The book was dead in the water, and took my story with it.

(Or so it seemed: there remains the possibility - I am told - that the book could still happen, so watch this space for news.)

I had fun writing it, though.  A lot of fun.  Indeed, I had so many ideas for subsequent stories in this property that I would have loved to have taken over publishing the stories myself - even at a schedule of one novella per month (I thought).  Despite having had a couple of ideas for novels in my head for a few years (which will be written... eventually) I had never seriously tried to write something for publishing.  Or self-publishing.  But now...

The existing IP was something out of my hands; I knew this.  But what if I invented my own pulp novella series, that I could put out there myself.  Would such a thing be possible?

Indeed it was (a quick bit of internet searching later on showed me) and I spent the idle hours of one day at my job thinking about the possibilities.  Immediately, my love of old-fashioned pulp SF made me think of a concept involving a Victorian gentleman having adventures in outer space.  Perhaps it could be called Josiah Kensington: Space Adventurer?  Or maybe The Star Journeys of Dr Jeremiah Fotherington-Smythe?

Very quickly, this became The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe, and I set about giving myself a target of 18,000-22,000 words per story, at a rate of one per month.  I would give it six months to have a chance of catching on, of finding an audience, and if after that it was going nowhere then I would end it.

Anyway, fast forward to six months later (during which I had also written a couple of other novellas or short stories) I completed the series with Book 6: "The Free World".  As expected, it had not found its audience and, much as I adored the character and his world, I wrapped up the story.  I had ideas about where the story could go later on, should it unexpectedly find a late following, but for now it was done.  (A paperback and eBook collected version was later released.)

Quite disheartened, I decided to treat all of the previous time as warm-up.  Like it didn't happen.  I wanted not to think of that as wasted effort, but instead as little more than rehearsal.  The real writing, the real career, would start now.

Looking for something that could theoretically be commercial but that I would still be just as in love with, I devised a series of Young Adult novels called The Sleepwar Saga.  In it, a group of six teenagers who don't know each other would find that, when they slept, they were together in another part of the country.  Fighting evil, questioning their reality, learning to work together.

It took some 8 months before the final draft of Straw Soldiers was ready, but it is the work I am most proud of, and I'm ecstatic about it and the rest of the series to come.  Whether this find its audience or not I cannot yet say, but even if it does not I will be thrilled to write the rest of the installments, so in love am I with this series and these characters.

Other books fight for idea space in my head, however.  There's the fun Lawyers vs Zombies: The Legal Dead which I can't quite forget about, ever.  The Universe Device was actually plotted out to a great degree and ready to be written, until I decided that I needed more novels under my belt before I could attempt that one.  (The structure is more complex than I feel I can do justice to yet.)

I also have a Christian thriller in mind, a sci-fi murder mystery, and a few horror shorts that I began but lost track of when I didn't feel I was quite hitting the mark.  (I'll get back to them later.)

I love writing.  I love self-publishing.  I hope someday I can focus on it as a career, instead of that thing that takes up all of my time when I'm not at my "real" job.

But it never would have happened if I hadn't been inspired to contact the creator of a book series I loved and asked about writing for his characters.  I'm so glad I did.



Some links for people looking into self-publishing:
Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing
CreateSpace for the paperback version
Draft2Digital or Smashwords (which I haven't used, but are important if you don't want to be Kindle-exclusive)

Defining Characters by Groups

A little trick I taught myself when writing screenplays was not to rely on defining a character as himself or herself, but to define each person in relation to the others.

To some extent, this applies to prose as well - not as much to POV characters as to others, but even then it can be helpful.

But let me back up a little.

In print, the reader has access to the POV characters' innermost thoughts and feelings. What this means is that it is not only their actions that define them, but what goes on inside their heads.

On screen, this is not so.  Nor is it for characters on the page whose thoughts the reader is not privy to.  What does this mean for the writer?  Allow me to explain my thoughts.

No matter what work you put into a character's design - their backstory - what matters to the reader is what they see.  If the things you invented do not impact the story, the reader sees none of it and your detailed character bio results in nothing but a 2D stereotype that the eye merely glances over and forgets.

An example: your main characters stop at a sandwich shop three days a week for lunch.  You have a beautiful bio drawn up for the guy behind the counter.  He fought in Operation: Iraqi Freedom - two tours - but when he came back he was a changed man, tortured, haunted, and his wife left him.  Since then, he has become a Buddhist and is seeking inner peace and enlightenment.  His father back in Idaho is dying of cancer, but the sandwich man can't leave his job to go and take care of Dad because he needs the money.

How does this manifest on the page?  "Here's your sandwiches, ladies.  Enjoy!"

That's it.  None of the backstory you devised, the intricate personality you worked out in detail, shows itself to the reader, because the story being told has nothing to do with any of it.  In practical terms, he is not any of those things in your bio: he's just the guy who says, "Enjoy."

So what if you define him in relation to other characters.  Maybe he's like the Soup Nazi and is combative with your leads.  Or perhaps he owns the sandwich place with his sister who is a flake and sleeping on his couch, and so every time we are in the sandwich shop there is some nice conflict happening between them.

Even if it's just a little color, it is something.  He's no longer just the guy who hands your MCs their sandwiches; he is a character.

Your other characters can benefit too; it doesn't have to be just bit-parters.  If you have decided that Jack's younger brother was bitten by a poisonous spider and almost died while vacationing in Brazil, unless your plot is about spiders then the most we will see (unless you shoehorn in some dialogue to explain it - which is itself problematic) is Jack staring suspiciously at a spider in the corner of the room.  Not compelling drama.

So start again.  Make Jack a control freak, and Betty a free spirit who is offended by structure.  Together they spark, and will create drama simply from the way they respond to every situation.  This particular example is a cliche, but there's a reason for that: it's a good one.

The point, though, is that while backstory is not a bad thing, if it doesn't show up on the page then it isn't a good thing either.  Define your characters against one another, make it so that the way they behave is in direct contrast to everyone else.  How they respond should not only be about the events of their past, but about how other characters will respond to the same stimuli.

If you want drama, if you want entertaining characters, if you want depth, then that bio sheet alone is probably worthless.  Think about they way every character relates to, and contrasts with, the others.  Know their alliances, their clashes, their romances.  Define the group together, so you know they complement and contrast.

Make good drama that doesn't just exist in theory.  Then write it.

Book review: "The Martian Girl"

The Martian Girl
by Paul Magrs
(Firefly Press)


Let me get this out of the way first: it's not quite as good as "Lost on Mars" was.

But given that I rated them both 4 stars on Goodreads, there's obviously not much in it.

Like the first book, it's quite episodic and doesn't feel like the plot really gets going until rather late in.  The first 50% or so of this book is kind of picking up the pieces of "Lost on Mars" and reshuffling them to get to the place this book needs them to be.

Most of this part is still good reading - although I found the ambivalent way the novel treats Professor Swiftnick to be somewhat disorienting.  At one point, it appears as though we're going to be expected to suddenly treat Swiftnick as a friendly character - though this is soon negated again.  It's probably just bad reading on my part, but it feels to me as if Paul Magrs momentarily gets lost in recreating the feel of certain other books and places the character in a role unsuited to him for a brief time.

That quibble aside (and it's a minor one) this is a very enjoyable book from start to finish.  I don't feel it has the strength of the early portions of "Lost on Mars" which had a very nice "Little House on the Martian Prairie" feel - but neither does it have the wrenching quality of that book's episodic format.

This still follows the same storybook format of a series of differentiated adventures, but somehow the whole feels somewhat more "tied together" than before.  To me, "Lost on Mars" somehow only felt as though it had arrived at the real story it was telling when Lora made it to the City Inside.

That location is where we pick up in "The Martian Girl", and remain for the first half of the book.  Even though it still takes a goodly while for this book to wind up at the next phase of the adventure, it is so breezy and fun to read that you'll never feel like the time spent is too long.  Indeed, I could have remained in the City Inside for the entire book and never felt cheated.

But that's not what this series is doing.  No, as I stated earlier, the kind of storybook, episodic format keeps us always rolling along to the next set of circumstances - and here there is a distinctly more pronounced L Frank Baum air to the whole thing than I recall from the first book.  Whether this comparison is intended or the product of my own reading preferences is of no consequence; the similarity is there (for me, at least) and is something I appreciated.

It's a necessity of any sequel, but I felt slightly let down at the fact that some of the odd occurrences in "Lost on Mars" are given explanations here (or at least a hint in that direction) which dilutes the impact of them rather - but only in the way that Poirot revealing the murderer will always be vaguely less compelling than the investigation to undercover him in the first place.

Lora's world is still zany, enthralling and well-drawn, and most of the characters refuse to remain as they are, instead developing as the story goes on.  Plenty of mystery is still left regarding events and people from the first book, and although I am eager to discover the truth I am happy to wait while I enjoy the desire for eventual enlightenment.  There's so much still to find out, things that will no doubt alter the way we understand the world of this Mars.

And Lora herself still has room to grow, to become the woman it seems she is likely to be.

Oh - Barbra the Vending Machine finally made it into the story here.  I was hoping it wouldn't take her long...

Buy the e-book on Amazon US

99c sale!

September 15-19

"Straw Soldiers" Kindle edition is on sale for:


99c from the Amazon US store

99p from the Amazon UK store



Pick it up, before this sale ends!