My favorite webcartoonist, Shaenon Garrity, is posting 12-panel summaries of X-Files episodes every Friday (because she can), and today she addresses something close to my heart: "Nitpicking details of the setting!" Because Season 3, Episode 19, "Hell Money," is set in San Francisco's Chinatown, and she lives in San Francisco. She pairs script assumption with reality right down the line, pointing out both cliches ("X-Files: Asian-Americans want to tell you colorful stories of your homeland! Reality: In my experience, they mostly want to tell you about their mini-comic." But then Shaenon's acquaintance in all ethnic groups is weighted toward cartoonists.) and obvious assumptions that aren't true ("X-Files: It's possible to hide bodies by burying them in cemeteries. Reality: Okay, this is the big one. San Francisco doesn't have cemeteries.")
This has got to be the most common, and the least explicable, type of research failure in all media. Most common, because we see it all the dang time. Least explicable, because we all pounce on media set in our familiar territories and nitpick the details. If the writer of that episode were to see a show set in his own home town he'd treat it in exactly the same way. "Ha! In Podunk, Nebraska, the grain silos are all on the west side of town! It's only in West Podunk that they have one near the watertower!"
It's not that complicated, guys. If you're setting a story outside your own stomping ground, go visit the place! If that's not practical, find somebody from there and have her vet the manuscript for you.
Because somebody is from there, and will notice.
Besides, walking out the story territory is fun and, in the case of travel locations, tax-deductible!
This is why all my stories are set in Texas, by the way. It makes walking out the territory so much simpler.
Friday, November 8, 2013
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Private Pleasures
One of the sweetest, least shareable things in the world is going back over a manuscript you'd lost all enthusiasm for, to run a polishing cloth over it out of a sense of duty because you get a submission window to a publisher you always intended to send it to but couldn't for whatever reason, and realize, This doesn't suck.
This is, in fact, pretty good.
Yes, it's good in a way that's hard to pitch, but if you can manage to get somebody past the sales pitch (always the problematical bit) it has a real shot at publication, and even at becoming one of those books that people love in isolation. Because it's not very likely to hit the zeitgeist in a bestseller kind of way, but an under-the-radar favorite kind of way, whose readers discover each other and rejoice and become a little private club, is not out of the question.
Which would be plenty good enough for me. But will a publisher see it that way in this climate?
Never mind. It's in the mail. It has its fair shot at the market. That's all I can give it.
Don't throw them away. You can learn to love them again.
This is, in fact, pretty good.
Yes, it's good in a way that's hard to pitch, but if you can manage to get somebody past the sales pitch (always the problematical bit) it has a real shot at publication, and even at becoming one of those books that people love in isolation. Because it's not very likely to hit the zeitgeist in a bestseller kind of way, but an under-the-radar favorite kind of way, whose readers discover each other and rejoice and become a little private club, is not out of the question.
Which would be plenty good enough for me. But will a publisher see it that way in this climate?
Never mind. It's in the mail. It has its fair shot at the market. That's all I can give it.
Don't throw them away. You can learn to love them again.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Halloween, and the Day After
At some point we stopped leaving our lights on for Halloween; part of our long withdrawal from the collective culture, you could call it. But I still pay attention. This year the people banning Halloween are Russian, but the arguments are just as unrealistic, ignorant, and divorced from the real Halloween experience of real people as ever.
Halloween is a popular holiday for authors, for obvious reasons. It gives us a natural, liminal setting for supernatural motifs and for fantasies of transformation. What if the masks reveal more than they conceal? What if they transform instead of merely disguising? The legitimacy of disguise and deception in a public setting is an ideal setup for the mystery author, or the comedian, to create confusion, particularly concerning identity. Agatha Christie loved a masquerade. Choice of costume illuminates character - remember how, in Freak the Mighty, the heroic-spirited Kevin dressed as Darth Vader? (If you haven't read Freak the Mighty, for pity's sake, go do so! The movie misses some of the point, though it has the major virtue of Gillian Anderson as Loretta, Heroic Biker Chick.) It's about so much more than candy!
Here's a piece that I think is ripe for fictional exploration: Halloween as the Queer Holiday.
The place of Halloween in the social history of gender identity is persistent. Particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, where social disapproval of genderbending dress was supported by laws punishing the wearing of males clothes by women and vice versa, Halloween was the Great Exception. In cities in which wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a shirt that buttoned up the wrong side could get you arrested 364 days of the year, you could prance down the street in full drag on this one day. Establishments catering to a particular clientele under the constant threat of raids could hold huge Halloween bashes with impunity. Teen-agers who didn't dare be themselves in public could put on their real selves and call it a costume, and even gain admiration for doing so - if they were smart enough. If the bullies were imperceptive enough. If they made enough people laugh.
If the spoilsports weren't trying to ban Halloween on ridiculous grounds in that particular locality that year. Or maybe, even if they were. Maybe, in defying the forces of willful blindness, oppression, suppression, and depression, Halloween is the night of triumph.
Somebody is always trying to ban Halloween, and that somebody is always missing the point. Or is, perhaps, terrified of admitting the point. Is hiding behind nonsense about non-existent occult or psychological threats because they can't deal with the truth of the holiday in practice. Because the anxiety created by the fluidity of identity is too much for them.
Comedy, tragedy, thriller, fantasy, domestic novel, novel of self-discovery - it works for all of them.
And then everybody has to get up the next day and carry on daily life. But does that mean putting the mask back on? Or does it mean negotiating a larger space for oneself?
Because that's the rest of the story.
Halloween is a popular holiday for authors, for obvious reasons. It gives us a natural, liminal setting for supernatural motifs and for fantasies of transformation. What if the masks reveal more than they conceal? What if they transform instead of merely disguising? The legitimacy of disguise and deception in a public setting is an ideal setup for the mystery author, or the comedian, to create confusion, particularly concerning identity. Agatha Christie loved a masquerade. Choice of costume illuminates character - remember how, in Freak the Mighty, the heroic-spirited Kevin dressed as Darth Vader? (If you haven't read Freak the Mighty, for pity's sake, go do so! The movie misses some of the point, though it has the major virtue of Gillian Anderson as Loretta, Heroic Biker Chick.) It's about so much more than candy!
Here's a piece that I think is ripe for fictional exploration: Halloween as the Queer Holiday.
The place of Halloween in the social history of gender identity is persistent. Particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, where social disapproval of genderbending dress was supported by laws punishing the wearing of males clothes by women and vice versa, Halloween was the Great Exception. In cities in which wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a shirt that buttoned up the wrong side could get you arrested 364 days of the year, you could prance down the street in full drag on this one day. Establishments catering to a particular clientele under the constant threat of raids could hold huge Halloween bashes with impunity. Teen-agers who didn't dare be themselves in public could put on their real selves and call it a costume, and even gain admiration for doing so - if they were smart enough. If the bullies were imperceptive enough. If they made enough people laugh.
If the spoilsports weren't trying to ban Halloween on ridiculous grounds in that particular locality that year. Or maybe, even if they were. Maybe, in defying the forces of willful blindness, oppression, suppression, and depression, Halloween is the night of triumph.
Somebody is always trying to ban Halloween, and that somebody is always missing the point. Or is, perhaps, terrified of admitting the point. Is hiding behind nonsense about non-existent occult or psychological threats because they can't deal with the truth of the holiday in practice. Because the anxiety created by the fluidity of identity is too much for them.
Comedy, tragedy, thriller, fantasy, domestic novel, novel of self-discovery - it works for all of them.
And then everybody has to get up the next day and carry on daily life. But does that mean putting the mask back on? Or does it mean negotiating a larger space for oneself?
Because that's the rest of the story.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
I Brake for Civic Duty
Bitching and moaning aside, I did get a query out this morning, so go me. If you copy/paste the stuff you need from the webpages you need, and turn the damn thing off, and write what you're going to write as if it were going out in the mail, and then connect again and copy/paste in the specified e-mail/online form/whatever, it can be done without making a fool of yourself.
I hope.
This afternoon is devoted to early voting. It's time to amend the Constitution in Texas, again. The Texas Constitution is a model of how not to write one - you need to amend it to change procedural rules, for pity's sake! But there's usually one item of import that can't be neglected. This year, we need to fund the long-overdue state water policy.
I don't normally post politics, but it is important not to get so head-down in one's personal, professional, and creative life that we neglect our duties as citizens. If we want to keep our rights, we must do our duties.
Besides, if I go vote today, it's an excuse to go downtown. On the bus. I can read on the way. It'll be restful.
I'm also considering making an apple pie; but it's raining a lot and the dough might be too hard to work. Apple crisp is good, too...
For many of y'all, tomorrow begins National Novel Writing Month. Since all months are novel writing months, to me November is Kitchen Sanitation Month. So we'll all be hard at work, one way or another.
I hope.
This afternoon is devoted to early voting. It's time to amend the Constitution in Texas, again. The Texas Constitution is a model of how not to write one - you need to amend it to change procedural rules, for pity's sake! But there's usually one item of import that can't be neglected. This year, we need to fund the long-overdue state water policy.
I don't normally post politics, but it is important not to get so head-down in one's personal, professional, and creative life that we neglect our duties as citizens. If we want to keep our rights, we must do our duties.
Besides, if I go vote today, it's an excuse to go downtown. On the bus. I can read on the way. It'll be restful.
I'm also considering making an apple pie; but it's raining a lot and the dough might be too hard to work. Apple crisp is good, too...
For many of y'all, tomorrow begins National Novel Writing Month. Since all months are novel writing months, to me November is Kitchen Sanitation Month. So we'll all be hard at work, one way or another.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Discipline is for the Disconnected
The trouble with discipline these days is, you need to have the internet open to do so many things that you don't want to do and need to. Which means you have access to all your distractions just when you need to shut them out most.
Remember when you could accomplish all your important writing tasks by the simple expedient of shutting yourself into a small space with just your typewriter, the immediate references you needed, and a dictionary? A print dictionary that you could put outside if you started looking up etymologies instead of writing your query?
I think the policy of requiring submissions via Facebook must be a nefarious plot to keep us from ever querying at all. But I also think it's more likely to swamp them in even more half-assed queries; because who meticulously revises and hones a Facebook post?
I used to be able trick, bribe, and bully myself into doing things, but I seem to be on to myself more and more these days and don't fall for it.
Remember when you could accomplish all your important writing tasks by the simple expedient of shutting yourself into a small space with just your typewriter, the immediate references you needed, and a dictionary? A print dictionary that you could put outside if you started looking up etymologies instead of writing your query?
I think the policy of requiring submissions via Facebook must be a nefarious plot to keep us from ever querying at all. But I also think it's more likely to swamp them in even more half-assed queries; because who meticulously revises and hones a Facebook post?
I used to be able trick, bribe, and bully myself into doing things, but I seem to be on to myself more and more these days and don't fall for it.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: A Display Piece
This one is not mine to give away. I'm just putting it up for show.
One of the many interesting people I talked to at the Paleoamerican Odyssey conference was (if I have all my information correct, and I think I do, but it's hard to keep track of names at a conference) Kelly R. Monteleone, who was presenting a poster showing a process of winnowing down the vastness of Beringia into a range of "most promising places to look for sites," including offshore sites. Since Beringia is mostly under the Arctic Ocean now, this is important work to do - underwater archeology is difficult and expensive enough when you do it in Florida or Texas; when you do it in Alaska, Siberia, and points between you want to be able to go straight to what you want when you finally commit to a dive, or even to sending out a boat with fancy technology to see through the water and ocean deposits to narrow down "most likely place" to "place where you'll definitely find something or other."
Since I got to her poster during a slow period in the poster room (these were rare; everyone wanted to see everything and it was hard to move a lot of the time) we had a little bit of conversation as well as her explaining the poster, and - as often happens when people find out what I do - she told me she had an idea for a children's book herself, but didn't mind if I stole it. She said she kept thinking, What if - you took an artifact, made in Siberia, and it got used and reused and handed down and lost and salvaged and repurposed and eventually wound up on the northwest coast of North America? You'd do it as series of connected short stories, illustrating the nature of the trip (which was almost certainly not conceived by the people involved as a trip at all, certainly not as a single one) and also how the nature, use, and meaning of an artifact, presumably made out of a rare resource that needed to be conserved, can change over time. By the time it reached North America, it would almost certainly have lost its practical value and gained some less tangible, but more vital, meaning, as objects that survive use by our ancestors do; until it is finally definitively lost, discarded, or destroyed. Perhaps eventually to be found by someone like her.
This, I believe, is a good and workable idea; and I also believe that she is the only one who can write it. She can't yet, because it's not ripe. She needs more information - which she is uniquely positioned to get if she pursues this line of inquiry - even to determine what the object is, much less who used it in what different ways and what kinds of stories it figures in over time. It could take her entire career to write it.
And that's fine. There's no point going off half-cocked with something like this, especially when writing isn't the center of your professional life. You have to let it get ripe.
If she keeps holding this in the back of her mind, she might sit down twenty, or thirty, or forty years from now, maybe on retirement, and find all the stories fully-formed in her head, ready to pour out of her in nearly final form. She might pick up an object in the lab one day and realize, This is it. This is the Thing that connects the stories.
This sort of thing happens.
So that idea you keep returning to - don't give up on it. Hang onto it. Take it out and turn it over in your hands sometimes, note how it's slowly transforming, swelling up and changing colors and acquiring an appetizing smell.
Be ready to pick it, the moment it comes ripe.
One of the many interesting people I talked to at the Paleoamerican Odyssey conference was (if I have all my information correct, and I think I do, but it's hard to keep track of names at a conference) Kelly R. Monteleone, who was presenting a poster showing a process of winnowing down the vastness of Beringia into a range of "most promising places to look for sites," including offshore sites. Since Beringia is mostly under the Arctic Ocean now, this is important work to do - underwater archeology is difficult and expensive enough when you do it in Florida or Texas; when you do it in Alaska, Siberia, and points between you want to be able to go straight to what you want when you finally commit to a dive, or even to sending out a boat with fancy technology to see through the water and ocean deposits to narrow down "most likely place" to "place where you'll definitely find something or other."
Since I got to her poster during a slow period in the poster room (these were rare; everyone wanted to see everything and it was hard to move a lot of the time) we had a little bit of conversation as well as her explaining the poster, and - as often happens when people find out what I do - she told me she had an idea for a children's book herself, but didn't mind if I stole it. She said she kept thinking, What if - you took an artifact, made in Siberia, and it got used and reused and handed down and lost and salvaged and repurposed and eventually wound up on the northwest coast of North America? You'd do it as series of connected short stories, illustrating the nature of the trip (which was almost certainly not conceived by the people involved as a trip at all, certainly not as a single one) and also how the nature, use, and meaning of an artifact, presumably made out of a rare resource that needed to be conserved, can change over time. By the time it reached North America, it would almost certainly have lost its practical value and gained some less tangible, but more vital, meaning, as objects that survive use by our ancestors do; until it is finally definitively lost, discarded, or destroyed. Perhaps eventually to be found by someone like her.
This, I believe, is a good and workable idea; and I also believe that she is the only one who can write it. She can't yet, because it's not ripe. She needs more information - which she is uniquely positioned to get if she pursues this line of inquiry - even to determine what the object is, much less who used it in what different ways and what kinds of stories it figures in over time. It could take her entire career to write it.
And that's fine. There's no point going off half-cocked with something like this, especially when writing isn't the center of your professional life. You have to let it get ripe.
If she keeps holding this in the back of her mind, she might sit down twenty, or thirty, or forty years from now, maybe on retirement, and find all the stories fully-formed in her head, ready to pour out of her in nearly final form. She might pick up an object in the lab one day and realize, This is it. This is the Thing that connects the stories.
This sort of thing happens.
So that idea you keep returning to - don't give up on it. Hang onto it. Take it out and turn it over in your hands sometimes, note how it's slowly transforming, swelling up and changing colors and acquiring an appetizing smell.
Be ready to pick it, the moment it comes ripe.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
It's Getting Better. Let's Pick Up the Pace Here.
It is never wise to rely too much on the assumption that what you happen to come across is a fair representation of reality. After all, we all see what we see because we look where we look. In order to understand the world, we have to examine it consciously and go into new places, look for new things, pay attention to details where we normally look at wholes, and at wholes where our attention is usually zoomed down to fine details.
But we all start with what's in front of us, and a juxtaposition of stuff floating across the screen in front of me when I was noodling around yesterday startled me into an invigorating, if intimidating, glimpse of reality.
First came a much-reblogged Tumbler post concerning the depiction of same-sex relationships in popular media, specifically movies; how "The girls are never supposed to end up together," how boy-girl relationships can be anything, go anywhere, be intercepted by story at any point. If a boy and girl are best friends at the beginning of the movie, we know and they know that by the end of the movie they can be lovers and this can be accomplished by one kiss, no angsting, as part of a larger arc that may or may not focus on their emotional lives. But if a girl and a girl are best friends at the beginning of the movie, the odds are huge that by the end of the movie the one who isn't the protagonist will be standing on the sidelines being sweet and supportive of the all-important heterosexual relationship her BFF has gotten into during the movie; or even if they do wind up together, the movie will be about the struggle to face up to the fact of same-sex attraction. Most stories with queer protagonists are still coming-out stories first. And, given that we structure our lives around narrative, this is discouraging for the young queer, or the old one, trying to find the storyline that works for her life.
Immediately under this in my dash was a picture sequence of two male sims getting engaged.
I see a lot of such pictures on Tumblr, because I use it mostly to post pics from my game and follow what other people post about their games. The Sims2 program starts everybody off dead center on a scale of attraction to male or female, and the player (or a program modification installed by the player who wants less control of the process) determines the sexual preference and to a certain extent the gender orientation of the characters by decisions and actions during play. It's difficult, though not impossible, to model bisexual and transgender identities in the game; but any player can pretty much make any sim gay or straight at will. The sims themselves do not care.
And hardly any simmer I've ever run across didn't love having same-sex couples in their games. Sororities seethe with Lesbian Drama; male couples raise rampaging hordes of adopted and alien-hybrid children; generals and high-level politicians and small-town matriarchs welcome their sons' husbands and their daughters' wives with open arms; children grow up with two of one parent and none of the other, or with three grandfathers and only one grandmother, or (I have a kid like this in my game) two mothers with two fathers living next door, and never think it strange. Because it isn't. The vanilla code distinguishes between joined unions and marriage, but you can mod that out. You can even get same-sex pregnancy mods, if you want, or use a simple cheat to simulate artificial insemination.
What this tells me is that the movies, and to a certain extent even books (which are always ahead of the visual media in reflecting social change, if you read the right books) are missing a trick here.The General Public, or at least an economically viable chunk of it, is way past ready to get beyond the coming out narrative. We're ready for media to get with the program and treat normal stuff as normal, to proceed with the story (and get to the cute animations that we can't help snapping pictures of and showing each other online because although yeah, we've all seen the wedding video and the slow dance and the leap-into-arms hug in our own games, the pixels are individuated enough that they do not get old.)
Yet the institutions of media continue to behave as if this stuff is controversial, uncommercial, and barely in demand at all.
And then a little later, across the same dashboard, I get another reblog which gradually led me back to the UCLA Newsroom website, and a story about a study demonstrating that shows with racially diverse casts and creative teams do better in the marketplace than shows with primarily white casts and creative teams. Which nevertheless still outnumber the diverse shows.
Which is huge, as anyone in YA and children's literature can tell you. Non-white characters and authors are out there - but it can be so freaking hard to track them down, to get people of color onto bookcovers even when the protagonists aren't white, even to keep character tags that indicate ethnicity, and the reason we're told time and again is that white characters sell better and that non-white characters have to be handled with kid gloves so as not to offend anyone.
As if being left out completely isn't offensive.
Yeah, well, when all the books with black people on the cover are shelved under "African-American Studies" instead of "General Fiction" in big box retailers, it's not surprising if they don't sell it well. That's not the fault of the characters or the cover designer! But the place to deal with that isn't on the supply side; isn't to capitulate before being challenged; isn't to assume that this perceived marketing reality is inevitable and unfightable.
Or even true, as anything other than a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The moral of yesterday's dashboard is clear. The audience for diverse stories about diverse people exists. It is easy to be afraid of the economic consequences of writing for an invisible audience - but the secret, I see, is not to limit oneself to the visible audience, but to go forth and tear down the screens blocking them from your sight. They're out there. We can find them.
For one thing, we are them.
Now we just have to stand up nice and tall and speak nice and loud and make ourselves visible to the gatekeepers. This is taking too long, and media representation is an important part of social change. It's not enough to hang out whispering to each other on tumbler and Facebook. We have to vote with our dollars and our library cards. Complain as loudly and directly and vociferously of being stifled as the whiny minority complain in order to stifle us. Go into bookstores and ask for books with transgender protagonists; they'll find them for you. Go into libraries and check out books by Hispanic authors (whatever "hispanic" means anyway) on a regular basis. Talk up your favorite diverse shows to your co-workers in such a way as to coax them out of their comfort zones to watch and enjoy them too. Squee loudly about realistically depicted disabled characters, in public. Do amazon searches for "bisexual protagonists," "Native American / Indian authors," "black YA" whatever, and gripe to the management when you get inappropriate results.
Don't be didactic, but be proactive.
Write the book you want to write; and at the same time, create the demand you want to fill.
You are not the only one.
But we all start with what's in front of us, and a juxtaposition of stuff floating across the screen in front of me when I was noodling around yesterday startled me into an invigorating, if intimidating, glimpse of reality.
First came a much-reblogged Tumbler post concerning the depiction of same-sex relationships in popular media, specifically movies; how "The girls are never supposed to end up together," how boy-girl relationships can be anything, go anywhere, be intercepted by story at any point. If a boy and girl are best friends at the beginning of the movie, we know and they know that by the end of the movie they can be lovers and this can be accomplished by one kiss, no angsting, as part of a larger arc that may or may not focus on their emotional lives. But if a girl and a girl are best friends at the beginning of the movie, the odds are huge that by the end of the movie the one who isn't the protagonist will be standing on the sidelines being sweet and supportive of the all-important heterosexual relationship her BFF has gotten into during the movie; or even if they do wind up together, the movie will be about the struggle to face up to the fact of same-sex attraction. Most stories with queer protagonists are still coming-out stories first. And, given that we structure our lives around narrative, this is discouraging for the young queer, or the old one, trying to find the storyline that works for her life.
Immediately under this in my dash was a picture sequence of two male sims getting engaged.
I see a lot of such pictures on Tumblr, because I use it mostly to post pics from my game and follow what other people post about their games. The Sims2 program starts everybody off dead center on a scale of attraction to male or female, and the player (or a program modification installed by the player who wants less control of the process) determines the sexual preference and to a certain extent the gender orientation of the characters by decisions and actions during play. It's difficult, though not impossible, to model bisexual and transgender identities in the game; but any player can pretty much make any sim gay or straight at will. The sims themselves do not care.
And hardly any simmer I've ever run across didn't love having same-sex couples in their games. Sororities seethe with Lesbian Drama; male couples raise rampaging hordes of adopted and alien-hybrid children; generals and high-level politicians and small-town matriarchs welcome their sons' husbands and their daughters' wives with open arms; children grow up with two of one parent and none of the other, or with three grandfathers and only one grandmother, or (I have a kid like this in my game) two mothers with two fathers living next door, and never think it strange. Because it isn't. The vanilla code distinguishes between joined unions and marriage, but you can mod that out. You can even get same-sex pregnancy mods, if you want, or use a simple cheat to simulate artificial insemination.
What this tells me is that the movies, and to a certain extent even books (which are always ahead of the visual media in reflecting social change, if you read the right books) are missing a trick here.The General Public, or at least an economically viable chunk of it, is way past ready to get beyond the coming out narrative. We're ready for media to get with the program and treat normal stuff as normal, to proceed with the story (and get to the cute animations that we can't help snapping pictures of and showing each other online because although yeah, we've all seen the wedding video and the slow dance and the leap-into-arms hug in our own games, the pixels are individuated enough that they do not get old.)
Yet the institutions of media continue to behave as if this stuff is controversial, uncommercial, and barely in demand at all.
And then a little later, across the same dashboard, I get another reblog which gradually led me back to the UCLA Newsroom website, and a story about a study demonstrating that shows with racially diverse casts and creative teams do better in the marketplace than shows with primarily white casts and creative teams. Which nevertheless still outnumber the diverse shows.
Which is huge, as anyone in YA and children's literature can tell you. Non-white characters and authors are out there - but it can be so freaking hard to track them down, to get people of color onto bookcovers even when the protagonists aren't white, even to keep character tags that indicate ethnicity, and the reason we're told time and again is that white characters sell better and that non-white characters have to be handled with kid gloves so as not to offend anyone.
As if being left out completely isn't offensive.
Yeah, well, when all the books with black people on the cover are shelved under "African-American Studies" instead of "General Fiction" in big box retailers, it's not surprising if they don't sell it well. That's not the fault of the characters or the cover designer! But the place to deal with that isn't on the supply side; isn't to capitulate before being challenged; isn't to assume that this perceived marketing reality is inevitable and unfightable.
Or even true, as anything other than a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The moral of yesterday's dashboard is clear. The audience for diverse stories about diverse people exists. It is easy to be afraid of the economic consequences of writing for an invisible audience - but the secret, I see, is not to limit oneself to the visible audience, but to go forth and tear down the screens blocking them from your sight. They're out there. We can find them.
For one thing, we are them.
Now we just have to stand up nice and tall and speak nice and loud and make ourselves visible to the gatekeepers. This is taking too long, and media representation is an important part of social change. It's not enough to hang out whispering to each other on tumbler and Facebook. We have to vote with our dollars and our library cards. Complain as loudly and directly and vociferously of being stifled as the whiny minority complain in order to stifle us. Go into bookstores and ask for books with transgender protagonists; they'll find them for you. Go into libraries and check out books by Hispanic authors (whatever "hispanic" means anyway) on a regular basis. Talk up your favorite diverse shows to your co-workers in such a way as to coax them out of their comfort zones to watch and enjoy them too. Squee loudly about realistically depicted disabled characters, in public. Do amazon searches for "bisexual protagonists," "Native American / Indian authors," "black YA" whatever, and gripe to the management when you get inappropriate results.
Don't be didactic, but be proactive.
Write the book you want to write; and at the same time, create the demand you want to fill.
You are not the only one.
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