Who Can Know - Representation in Fiction

In acting school many eons ago, an instructor asked the class whether we thought actors had to be Russian in order to play Chekov. We scoffed en masse and said no! Or course not. We'd studied history and first person accounts of the end days of Tsarist Russia. With a little imagination, we could grasp the sensibilities of the time and place. No problem.

We were naïve.

We had our noses rubbed in our naiveté when a group from one of the big national theaters in Russia came to Seattle on tour. They did a show (in English) we'd all done several times ourselves. So we recognized the scenes, the situations, and the text. Yet, these people who'd lived in Russia all their lives and who'd absorbed the history of their nation and their people as lived experience, brought a deep well of nuance and resonating emotion to the play we'd never achieved as Americans and Canadians trying to reach for every sliver of meaning underlying Chekov's script. Granted. These people were professionals who had hundreds, if not thousands of shows under their belts. We were students. We were still humbled by our presumption that it'd be easy for us to get at all the richness of a script written about a culture and experience not our own.

Representation in fiction is, to me, entirely the same. No author can assume they can either know or imagine someone else's experience. The only thing any of us has to build from is what we know. Most of us have experienced alienation and deliberate attempts to cut us. Junior high, anyone? We can extrapolate from that and create characters who can speak that experience. But in no way can I conflate angsty preteen loneliness into any of the horror of having been a slave in the American South. Or a mother of color in the modern US having to bury a child who'd been shot by police. Or a mother separated from her child at a border. If I tried, I'd be that naïve college kid again, believing that another human being's deep pain was somehow fathomable.

Pretty damned arrogant.

As it is, I write from an extremely privileged position. Writing science fiction, I get to pretend that all cultures, all colors, all genders, no genders, nonbinary, and all orientations just are. I get to pretend that no one polices anyone else's existence other than being at war over resources/territory. There are still cultural clashes, yes. In fact that's part of the theme of Enemy Games. Jayleia comes from one culture and species base. Damen comes from entirely another. His species didn't evolve from apes. They evolved from a feline-like species. Their culture is based on that fact. He's openly bisexual, but no one bothers him or ostracizes him for it. The story touches more on the cultural differences between Jay and him and the main theme of learning to define family as something other than bloodlines.

In Enemy Storm, the heroine is deaf. It does play into the story and there are instances of prejudice and deliberate attempts to alienate her because of it. It's not the point of the story so I don't hit it hard (because not my wheelhouse), but it does show up. Not because I feel like I have anything unique or helpful to say about it, but because of who my characters are. That's where I think maybe one key lies - who are these people? What do they want? What do they need in the course of the story to step into becoming better versions of themselves? Edie has prejudices of her own to work through, so it was useful for her to face someone else's about her if she was going to decide she didn't want to be someone who judged other people based on nothing but where they had come from.

Will I make mistakes? Likely. I hope not, naturally. I do the best I can, and I check in with the communities I represent just to make sure I'm not being a dick. But what I Do Not Want is to pretend the future is all one color. All one orientation. Or culture. Or belief system. If the Chronicles of the Empire as a whole has an over arching theme, it is that diversity is strength and beauty. So I'll keep writing people and writing them as self-actualized beings as much as possible. Even when they aren't, strictly speaking, *people*. And I'll keep writing multiple skin colors, races, specific adaptations, sexual orientations, and identities.

Personal rules for writing diverse characters

I remember when Rogue One, the Star Wars spin-off movie, came out, there was a touching story of a young woman who took her dad to see it. Gal’s dad had a thick accent and was overcome with emotion to see that one of the lead characters, played by the talented Diego Luna, also spoke with an accent. Not just a side-character either: Cassian Andor was one of the main leads. And people not only understood him but identified with him and loved him, not despite his accent but including it. Reading this woman’s tale of her father’s amazement and tears got me all choked up, too. This story is what happens when representation works, and it is so beautiful.

It’s also really hard to pull off in a genuine way. I see a lot of cishet white writers populating stories with diverse characters, trying to capture that kind of magic, but they come across sometimes as performative. Like, see how savvy and sensitive and cool I am? No, honestly, you’re a bit cringey.

If a writer is creating characters who are just like her, is it easier? Maybe. I dunno. I’m very light-skinned, able-bodied, North American, cis-gendered, sexually uninteresting, and in all other ways extremely boring. So if I’m going to write about anything fun at all, I’m gonna have to veer outside my lane. Even if it’s whoa difficult.

I have basically two personal rules for doing this: 

1. I don’t write the pain of someone who is unlike me. My characters can protag all over the place, but if they experience othering or discrimination, I make sure that I’m not in that character’s point of view—because I have no idea what that would feel like and cannot presume to show that pain in an authentic way—and also make for-damn sure that my character and/or her allies call out the otherizing asshole. (Note: I’m Texan and my Texan characters talk smack about where they come from a lot. But it’s all fairly good-natured, like, I can ruffle my little brother’s hair, but don’t you dare put a paw on him. Possibly this is how own voices authors feel? Regardless, it ain’t right to ruffle the hair of somebody else’s little brother.)
2. I research the hell out of everything. If I screw something up, it won’t be because I was too lazy to read beyond Wikipedia. Honestly, this means I live in fear every time a story comes out, because I’m human and of course I’m going to get some things wrong. But it’s very important to me to get the big things right, and to not be afraid to ask for help from folks who know more than I do.

Do these two rules limit me as a writer? Um, yes. Of course they do, but that’s not a bad thing. I have lots of stories and story fragments that I’m not comfortable sharing until or unless I can get an expert to vet them and make sure I won’t hurt someone.

Because that’s the kicker, right. All of this care and attention and angst isn’t to avoid inconveniencing or even offending someone. It’s to avoid hurting a reader. As a teller of stories, a seller of books, that should be our prime directive: don’t hurt readers.

And white-washing an entire cast, pretending that the universe isn’t crammed full of gorgeous, fascinating, illuminating diversity, is essentially hurtful. To all of us.

#Fantasy #Romance Release Day: THE ORCHID THRONE by @JeffeKennedy

Our very own RITA Award-Winning Author, Jeffe Kennedy launches a new Fantasy Romance Series Forgotten Empires today with THE ORCHID THRONE!

THE ORCHID THRONE
A PRISONER OF FATE

As Queen of the island kingdom of Calanthe, Euthalia will do anything to keep her people free—and her secrets safe—from the mad tyrant who rules the mainland. Guided by a magic ring of her father’s, Lia plays the political game with the cronies the emperor sends to her island. In her heart, she knows that it’s up to her to save herself from her fate as the emperor’s bride. But in her dreams, she sees a man, one with the power to build a better world—a man whose spirit is as strong, and whose passion is as fierce as her own…

A PRINCE AMONG MEN

Conrí, former Crown Prince of Oriel, has built an army to overthrow the emperor. But he needs the fabled Abiding Ring to succeed. The ring that Euthalia holds so dear to her heart. When the two banished rulers meet face to face, neither can deny the flames of rebellion that flicker in their eyes—nor the fires of desire that draw them together. But in this broken world of shattered kingdoms, can they ever really trust each other? Can their fiery alliance defeat the shadows of evil that threaten to engulf their hearts and souls?

Available in eBook and Paperback

BUY IT NOW:    Amazon | B&N | BAM! | IndieBound

Representation in Stories: Intention Matters

I can't believe that THE ORCHID THRONE releases this week! Feels like it was forever away for so long, and suddenly it's here. Woo hoo!

Our topic at the SFF Seven is Creating representation in our stories – how do you do it, and make sure you do it well. That last bit is key, right? Because about the only thing worse than not having representation of marginalized groups in our stories is having them in there, but in awful ways.

Yeah, we've all seen it - those cringeworthy stereotypes that only point up the problem.

The last few years have seen accelerating and intensifying conversation on representation of marginalized groups. Most everyone - with the exception of trolls and fascists (oops, is that redundant?) - agrees that representation is a positive thing that needs to happen. The thing is, authors not in those marginalized groups are nervous about doing it well.

This is a big topic, and I'm looking forward to thoughts and methods from the rest  of the crew here at the SFF Seven, and I'm going to focus on a first step.

Intention matters.

Yeah... we all know about good intentions and the road to hell. That saying comes about because simply having good intentions without thoughtful execution can go sour real quick. Also because "good" intentions often aren't. They're motivations shrouded in the appearance of goodness. Motivations that are selfish or self-serving, or plain terrible.

So, the first thing to do is examine our own intentions behind the desire to create more representation in our stories. In other words, if we're setting out to do this because we're afraid of getting in trouble if we don't, or because we're "supposed to," or because that's the hip thing to do, then there's a problem - and those are the kind of surface "good" intentions that lead to hell on earth.

One clue? If you're looking for a set of rules to follow, or boxes to tick off, then maybe you're not setting out with the right intentions.

A better mindset is to start from a place of wanting to include characters who don't share our exact life experience. Get in the habit of indicating the skin color of ALL characters, the sexual orientation and self-identified gender of your characters, having people from a broad array of socio-economic backgrounds. Keep a list if you have to and check to see if they're all, say, het white guys. It might be equally weird if you have one each of some other flavor. Mix it up. And you don't have to put it on the page necessarily - especially if you're trying to tick your boxes for the reader - but be aware of that character's lens on the world.

Include those different people because they enrich the story and flesh out the worldbuilding. Think about what makes a fully realized world - do you have people of all ages and degrees of ability? Are there those in your world who have chronic diseases or disabilities? How does your world handle the nurture of children? Please don't just stick them back at the village with their mothers. Likewise, don't bury the disabled in their huts - they should be out living their lives, too. A lot of people fall somewhere on the spectrum between straight and gay, so flavors of bisexuality can be part of who a character is. Skin color is a descriptor, but making the choice whether that has political implications should be thought out and part of the worldbuilding.

See what I mean? It's a complex effort, sure, to incorporate greater representation in our books. It requires careful thought to move past our knee-jerk recapitulation of our own experiences.
It also requires the best of intentions - the authentic kind.

Examining the Story Starters for My Science Fiction Romance Novels

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is our most frequent story starter -- idea, milieu, character, theme, what-if, trope, editor request, etc.

As usual, I don’t think I can break this down into a neat answer. Right off the bat let’s eliminate writing to market (what’s currently hot in other words), which I never do, or writing something in response to an editorial or agent request. I don’t have either of those individuals. (Yes, I hire freelance editors to do  edits on my books but it’s not the same as an editor at a traditional publishing house telling an author what they’d like to see written for a contracted book.)

My mantra is pretty much “I write what I write and I write what I like to read.” Fortunately for me, there are quite a few wonderful readers out there who seem to also enjoy the way my Muse works in crafting stories! Thank you, readers!

Now that we’ve cleared up those issues, back to the topic of what inspires me to write any given novel.

Looking over my backlist in order to write this post, apparently the majority (not all) are situation-driven. My first ever published science fiction novel with romantic elements, WRECK OF THE NEBULA DREAM, is basically “Titanic in space…” as one reviewer said, inspired by the events of the Titanic’s sinking, but set in the far future, on an interstellar luxury liner. So I had the basic story idea and then I worked to identify who the hero would be (a Special Forces soldier) and why he was on the ship at all. The same for the heroine (a businesswoman) and all the other characters.

STAR CRUISE: OUTBREAK - what if there was an epidemic on an interstellar cruise ship? STAR  CRUISE: MAROONED  - what if a group of passengers went down to a planet for a day and were suddenly abandoned?  The Alien Empath series, like DANGER IN THE STARS – what if alien empathic priestesses from a less advanced planet were kidnapped by the interstellar crime syndicate and forced to commit crimes? TRAPPED ON TLANQUE – what if an Ancient Observer was left behind by her people thousands of years ago, and still sleeps in stasis?

In each case, the situation leads naturally to who the characters need to be and what kinds of things will happen over the course of the novel.

My award winning science fiction romance series Badari Warriors (Sectors New Allies) started as a situation – genetically engineered soldiers held captive by the alien scientists who created them and now joined by an entire colony of humans, kidnapped by the same scientists for experiments. The books within the series are now driven by the main character for each book and what adventure that person will have, as well as the overarching series arc I have going on.

One standalone novel, MISSION TO MAHJUNDAR was sparked in part by two photographs.  Here’s what I said in a post explaining why I wrote that book: “First, in college one of my best friends was an amazing woman named Cheryl, who had been blind since birth. I’d never known anyone who was blind, prior to meeting her, and Cheryl was awe inspiring, amazing in her refusal to accept any limits. She taught me many things, particularly how to use the other senses when one sense is denied. I always wanted to honor Cheryl by imbuing a character with her spirit and determination. …one day I saw a photo of a windswept, abandoned temple, standing alone on a plateau, somewhere in the Middle East. The image remained with me and I pondered – as one does – what adventure would bring people to this remote location and what would happen to them there. What would they be seeking? Would they find whatever they needed? This became the temple of the Mahjundan Ten Gods, where Shalira must go on her wedding journey, to seek a key to her mother’s long-closed tomb. ..Third, and this was the key thing that put all the other elements together in my mind and set off the plot, I happened across a perfume ad in a magazine. The illustration was very dark in tone, with a woman in a purple-and-gold hooded cloak holding a beautiful crystal bottle that glowed golden. The light from the bottle illuminated her face. And I thought, that’s it! That’s Shalira inside the tomb. Then I needed to know who would be there with her…and my Sectors Special Forces soldier, Mike Varone, told me he would be, of course!”

Sometimes my novels are inspired by the character. Looking over the list of 35 or so books, that seems to happen mostly when I want to write a sequel. As with HOSTAGE TO THE STARS, the sequel I wrote for Johnny, a secondary character in MISSION TO MAHJUNDAR where it was already established he was a Special Forces operator.  Here’s what I said in my “why I wrote” post: “Johnny had more story to tell… the good friend and loyal team mate, but I kept wondering what he would do after the adventure ended, he really was out of the military service and back on his home planet. Turns out he was restless, unable to settle down and plagued by flashbacks. I’m very fond of Johnny and I hated leaving him at loose ends like that.  He needed something to draw him out of ordinary life and provide him a new focus. A way to transition into the new chapter of his life, if you will… So I thought what if Johnny was put in a situation where he had to return to active duty for reasons (no spoilers here), to accompany a hostage rescue team, and then there were complications? So the team goes in, locates the woman they were sent to extract, and only then learns of another woman prisoner from the Sectors. The team leader refuses to go after this second person and Johnny – of course – sets off to find and rescue her by himself.

The situation was much the same for Khevan and Twilka, two survivors of the WRECK OF THE NEBULA DREAM, which readers had been asking about since WRECK first appeared.  My notes: “Once I had my cup of tea ready, removed the cat from the table and concentrated on just Khevan and Twilka, it hit me like a lightning bolt that I wasn’t interested in telling the story I had in mind. OK, that’s a bad thing LOL. So I tried to turn the entire concept inside out in my head. I asked myself what happened to the real Titanic survivors who were Twilka’s equivalents – rich, society people who didn’t lose loved ones on the ship. They pretty much went on with their lives. As I said to myself, you don’t normally have two Titanic-level events in one lifetime. (Unless you were ship’s crew but that’s a different story.) So what would Twilka have done with her life, if she and Khevan weren’t together? And of course, WHY wouldn’t she and Khevan have stayed together? That’s the key question - was it only their wildly different life styles and places in Sectors society? Or?”

A few of my stories are created based on the need for an alien pet. Four years ago, my friend author Pauline B Jones and I started the Pets In Space® annual anthology of all new SFR, with the goals of supporting a worthy charity, Hero-Dogs, Inc., and hopefully garnering new readers in the process. PISA4 releases on October 8^th by the way and can be pre-ordered here. 

So each year I’ve had to ponder what alien pet I want to write about and then what the storyline will be. So far all the stories occur on my Nebula Zephyr star cruise liner.  Here are my comments on why I wrote last year’s story, STAR CRUISE: MYSTERY DANCER: “I started with the concept of the pet because that drives my plot for these PISA adventures. For some reason I kept seeing a mental picture of a Siamese cat, but with a third eye. But I’ve done a cat and a catlike alien before, for PISA1, although Midorri, the alien pet there actually is kind of a cross between a red panda and a tribble who acts like a cat. So I wanted something very different and I started thinking about what if the cat wasn’t actually a real animal at all? I ended up making F’rrh a ‘jenfellini’, which is something like a genie, living in a beautiful lacquered box. Visualize the gorgeous painted boxes that come from Russia.

Then, the tenuous link to Russia reminded me of the whole tragic story of the last Tsar and his family, and how they were murdered but for years rumors persisted one of the children might have survived. Various individuals claimed to be ‘Anastasia’ or another of the siblings, and of course there have been movies and plays written with that theme. I always flash back to the version with Yul Brynner (such an intense actor) and Ingrid Bergman because that movie was one of my mother’s favorites and also left the answer to the question of “Is she or is she not Anastasia?” somewhat open at the end. My daughters loved the animated fantasy version of the tale, with the voices of Meg Ryan and John Cusack, when they were growing up.

So I had the heroine – a possible princess on the run – but how could she fit into the Nebula Zephyr? Since the hero would be one of the former Special Forces soldiers who make up the ship’s security force, I had to be able to make the two interact and fall in love in a situation fraught with danger and suspicion.

I’ve wanted to do a story about the Comettes dance troupe which performs aboard the cruise liners since I wrote my very first published scifi romance, Wreck of the Nebula Dream (a sister ship of sorts to the one I write about nowadays). Dancing is a skill a maybe princess might have at a high level, right? So let her be a new member of the dancers….throw in a fabulous jewel and we have the story!”

So there we have it, a closer look at what kicks off a story in my mind and how the various threads come together to create a plot!

The Origin of Story

Story starts in darkness, in the cracks of the self. In nightmares and in dreams. Story starts in everything I believe I hate. It starts in all the self-loathing that drifts through the gray matter spiraling up and flashing like fireflies signaling for mates. It coalesces into noxious fruit I can pluck and examine. Until I learned better, I used to consume that terrible fruit and feed the monsters living inside. Somewhere along the path, and this probably saved my life, I learned to hold the nastiness in my hand and instead ask, "How is this useful?"

The answer is that it's useful in creating characters and plots and conflicts. You'd think I'd be writing horror based on this, but I'm not all snakes, spiders, and blood dripping down the walls. There's the other side of the coin - the deeply, (maybe naively) optimistic part, wanting to believe the best of everyone and everything at all times. That's where the romance and the HEAs come from. The dead bodies and violence are courtesy of the shadow version of me that loves nothing more than to stab happy me in the back with grotesque nightmares and manipulative old awful thought patterns. You know those memes about "Oh, you're trying to sleep? Here let me replay the past 20 years of everything you've done wrong, ever." That's the shadow's favorite weapon.

Grab that weapon, though, turn it over in your hand and ask how it applies to the book you're writing right now - where does my character feel like this - and the blade dulls. It doesn't hurt as much when your shadow tries to stab you with it again. Since I'm doing my best to pretend this is all totally normal and not that I might out to be trussed up in a fancy white jacket, I want to hope this resonates with readers. I hope that my characters and stories and conflicts feel true. Even if the beings experiencing them are darting around the galaxy.

Speaking of which. Guess who got a cover for Enemy Games, Chronicles of the Empire Book Two? This is the first look. Isn't it pretty?? Can I just shout out how much I adore my cover artist, Debbie Taylor?

The release date for this book is October 16, 2019. If you've read this book, I did some rewrites that altered a few scenes. It doesn't change the trajectory of the plot in any way. But there are changes. If that sort of thing matters to you.

Where the Stories Start

It's really hard for me to pin down where, exactly, I start a story from, but I definitely think it starts with the world.  I'm a big believer in starting with the world as a whole, and develop it until it shares its stories with you. 

For example, the world that the Maradaine books are set in, I had been building and growing that world for years.  Years.  And I had a real problem finding the story for a while, in no small part due to wanting to craft a story that matched the scope of the world I had made.  Which?  Mistake.

Here's a thing I've learned: stories work better if they are in a setting where you can tell there is a richer tapestry being woven all around it.  That doesn't mean you have to do crazy, masochistic worldbuilds for every book (but you CAN), but... you want to give the sense that the world around your story also has so many other stories.

I'm not going to name names or point fingers, but there are plenty of stories-- big, notable stories-- where it's very clear that the world was crafted around that particular story.  Which is fine!  Nothing wrong with it.  But then you'll see attempts to tell more stories in that world, and it's clear the scaffolding was not built to support that.

So that's my method: first build the sandbox, and THEN start to play. 

Though with the next book I'm writing, The Velocity of Revolution, I'm pushing myself out of the comfort zone a bit by not quite doing that.  Quite.  It'll be a different process.  But I'm excited for it.

All right, back to the mines.

Stories are freaking EVERYWHERE

What’s the seed of a story, for me? I mean, everything.

A song.

A yearning.

A thou-shalt-not.

An image I can’t get out of my mind. (Wanted and Wired’s earliest moment was Heron pulling up to the curb to whisk Mari to safety after she did a Very Bad Thing. I didn’t know what she’d done or why he wasn’t upset about it or even who those people were, only that it was raining and the world was ruined and they had each other’s backs.)

A book that almost accomplished its purpose but ultimately failed and frustrated me enough to try and do the story better.

A movie or TV show. (The scene from the Farscape episode “A Dog with Two Bones” inspired almost everything I wrote for, like, months. Years?)

Impotent fury. (I wrote Perfect Gravity in 2016. Of course it was about a powerful woman bringing down a corrupt government and taking over the world.)

Science. (On Saturn the rain is made of diamonds. Tell me that doesn’t make you want to write something.)

A might-have-been. (I’m currently obsessed with pre-colonial Africa, and not just because Black Panther made me cry.)

A news or human-interest story. (There was a Daily Beast article about a Paris apartment that had been locked up and untouched for seventy years. It was just crammed with stories waiting to be told.)

A nuance of psychology. (How is it that someone who has been abused has learned to move forward and take control of her life when the people who were never harmed are still holding life-destroying grudges on her behalf?)

Point of all that is a story can start from anything, and the suckers are literally everywhere. I can't put my finger on just one source. I mean, I dare you to stop ideas from jumping right out at you in traffic, in the shower, in a look, in a lyric, in some stranger's voice, in a broken earring wedged in your seat at the theater or a strange storm-wet stray on your doorstep when you never even knew you needed a cat. We only need to notice these magic seeds, and then, if we take our charge seriously, to nurture them into stories.