This is US Women’s Bobsled team. Look closely at the skin tones…what would it mean if I described a character as “black?”
My WIP is set on a human-colonized world about a thousand years in the future.
Humans from all over the Earth were part of the original colony 500 years ago (er…from now?) and even more diverse people emigrated to the planet over the next few centuries.
The result? A planet where the way a person looks has little or nothing to do with what part of the globe they’re from.
In many ways, this imaginary world is not diverse, because people on this planet share a similar lifestyle, traditions, and community goals. Sure, there are pockets of people who might share a particular characteristic or customs, but those are trivial compared to the differences within 21st century humanity.
Although I have certain visuals in my mind of each character to start with (Christian Slater and/or Ricky Schroder show up in almost every story…) when I’m fleshing out the character I like to think that they could have the physical characteristics of a conglomeration of human ethnicities in any combination. Descriptions can be difficult when you get beyond height, skin tone, eye color, and hair color.
Even more difficult for me is how a twenty-first century audience will interpret my character descriptions as related to that character’s other traits.
I was recently thinking about how some of my characters might look. I can’t have a Christian Slater in every story, even though many characters start that way. I also tend to have a tall, handsome, red-headed Scotsman in every story, and I will make a point to change that in edits. After I had found some images I liked and defined my characters’ appearances more specifically (and diversely) I panicked. These characters had flaws…one was really oblivious to his friends’ feelings, another struggled with a post-traumatic mental breakdown. Others had a variety of personal issues.
“OMG…I can’t do this…what if someone thinks I’m saying that all ____ are _____?”
Of course, I’m not saying this. One of my overall writing goals is to say that people are people, that humans are diverse and yet the same in so many ways! But of course, I run the risk that a reader might look at just one story, put the implied ethnicity together with the character’s personality traits, and assume I’m making some kind of statement. It almost makes me want to take out my gaming dice and roll a random number to generate each character’s skin tone, facial features, and other physical characteristics. Of course, some characteristics are necessary to the character. Scharona (Under the Radar) might have the hair and skin of Lolo Jones, but Scharona has a muffin top that is far from Olympic perfection.
Goals for this round of ROW80:
- Do something writing-related every day: Mostly. One day it was just re-reading a little, but I give myself a B+ overall.
- Do some actual writing every week: Oh most definitely. I could do more, but I’ve cranked out a good number of brand new words.
- Engage with other writers every week: Just the usual little social stuff and commenting on blogs. Nothing much, but enough.
- Stay away from the NaNo story for at least a month: My brain does still go back to the story every once in a while, and I have to distract myself. I sometimes second-guess my decision to spend January working on other stories in the same universe…maybe I should have got my brain completely out of that world…
- Get sleep: This continues to be a struggle. Yes, I am getting sleep, but sometimes at the cost of actual living time. My best writing time is around midnight (it’s 12:13 AM now) and the wee hours, and my hubby takes care of the morning routine so I can sleep in the mornings. Sleep issues and anxiety attacks are another blog post.
Tuesday was a major milestone in my writing career.
If I divided an hour into one hundred minutes (likewise seconds to minutes) then it would not superimpose itself onto a twelve hour clock, but it would fit with a twenty hour clock. However, the twenty hour clock (assuming ten hours in the AM and ten hours in the PM) doesn’t have the kind of symmetry as the twenty-four hour clock.
AmyBeth Inverness 
Let Me Count the Ways
I like writing rough drafts. I like reading my finished, polished product.
Everything in the middle…
Ugh. Work.
Well, it’s not all that bad. Although I’d rather be flat-out producing words on the page, there is some satisfaction to going back over those rough words and smoothing out all the difficult parts that I cringed through (or was oblivious to) the first time around.
When I’m writing a rough draft, it’s easy to count how many words I’ve written. MS Word does it for me. Editing is not so simple. Yes, I can say how many chapters I “went over” and fixed. But that’s misleading…I might go through a couple of chapters that have very little to change, and then another chapter that either goes through a major overhaul or is cut completely.
My current ‘work’ as far as writing is concerned (I started my Springtime day-job today-teaching Spreadsheets and Databases) is going through a story I wrote a couple of year ago and post-outlining it. As in…separating it into chapters and writing a short summary of each chapter as I go. I’m splitting it into several books. I want to make sure I include all the relevant scenes without repeating myself.
So, the weekly goals, as outlined last week:
Do something writing-related every day. It can be writing, editing, or hashing out details.
Do some actual writing every week, even if it’s a ‘junk’ story or a scene that won’t ever fit into the WIP.
Engage with other writers every week, either via social media or blogs. Maybe…just maybe…in person. Wow. That could happen…
Stay away from the NaNo story for at least a month, but no longer than March. Go back then and do revision one, then send to beta readers.
Get sleep. I wrote 90k in December by staying up all night and sleeping during the day when the kids were either at school or when Daddy was home. But I can’t keep doing that.
I was doing pretty good on this until last night.
My natural sleep schedule would be to stay up later and later every night, sleeping during the day, until I was up so long that the sun was shining brightly and I had to crash and reset to start the cycle again. Well, that doesn’t work in any practical way. Second, my NaNoWriMo routine (being massively productive whist consuming unhealthy quantities of Cherry Coke) was to write until around 3 or 4 in the morning, then sleep until I had to pick up the kids from school the next afternoon. Also, impractical. Knowing that my teaching job was starting and I needed to be awake during the day, I worked logically and methodically to reset my natural clock to go to bed closer to midnight.
So what happened last night?
A sick kid. My kindergartner woke up around midnight, puking from both ends. We were both up until around 4AM when I finally coaxed her back to sleep. Fortunately, my husband, my knight in shining tighty whities, took a sick day from work to take care of our daughter. I got two hours of sleep, then got up again and went to teach my class. Fortunately, it was the first class, meaning we go over all the introductory stuff, and I’ve done that many many times. I could do it in my sleep. I might have today…I don’t remember…
I came back home and found that our daughter had also slept very little, so both she and I went back to bed. She woke up after dinner, confused as to why it was dark outside and her big sister was going to bed. It’s 2AM now and we’re both wide awake, watching Despicable Me II (an excellent movie!) Hopefully I can coax her to sleep again soon. She does seem to be feeling better, but still has no appetite.