Characters of color, I write them
Sep. 30th, 2010 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anthimeriaWorking working working.
Brought in my first paycheck, which is good! It isn't enough to pay off the debts I incurred getting out here, which is less good. At least I will (theoretically) be getting those paycheck thingies regularly, and they soon will amount to enough to pay off those debts.
In more exciting news, I read the rd of Skywatch for the first time!
After being so enthusiastic and confidant about this book while I was writing it, it worried me that it took several days to get through the first half a dozen chapters. Part of it was work, but part of it was just that I wasn't hooked. WORRYING.
Then I hit chapter seven, and all of a sudden my characters became three-dimensional people I cared about and laughed with. Chapter seven hooked me and got me all the way through the end (eighteen chapters total) in one night. It was a ton of fun to read and I really cared about what happened to Eshe.
Of course, there's those first six chapters to deal with, now. I'm staring a serious read-through in the face and going, ". . . that's gonna take some work." Blargh. I really hope I don't have to write a new beginning for Skywatch the way I had to write a new ending for The Novel. That would annoy me in the extreme.
But it's early days yet. I still have to sit down with the thing and figure out what's missing from those first chapters, and how to weave it in.
I am using my Sword and Sorceress icon today because I stayed late at work and couldn't face Skywatch, and thus I am working on a short story instead.
The icon reminds me that, for as excited as I was to see the cover (my story's going to be published in a book! With a cover! That people can buy in stores!), I was a little disappointed as well. As far as I can tell (I might be wrong, someone please correct me if I am!), Sword and Sorceress has never had a woman of color on the cover.
On the one hand, I can understand this. Like women who take hold of their own destinies, COCs are thin on the ground in sword and sorcery. It's possible that there are no women of color in many of the anthologies. But S&S is a feminist collection that's about breaking away from the sexist habits of sword and sorcery, and since all the characters in my story are of color, I admit to a faint hope that this would be the first collection to have a woman of color on the cover.
Alas. Maybe next year.
In the meantime, it still has a woman with a sword!
UPDATE: I STAND CORRECTED!
It has been pointed out to me that I'm very, very wrong! And I'm cool with that! Take a look here, where I get schooled, and also follow the shiny link to S&S XXIV's cover, which I had never seen.
Brought in my first paycheck, which is good! It isn't enough to pay off the debts I incurred getting out here, which is less good. At least I will (theoretically) be getting those paycheck thingies regularly, and they soon will amount to enough to pay off those debts.
In more exciting news, I read the rd of Skywatch for the first time!
After being so enthusiastic and confidant about this book while I was writing it, it worried me that it took several days to get through the first half a dozen chapters. Part of it was work, but part of it was just that I wasn't hooked. WORRYING.
Then I hit chapter seven, and all of a sudden my characters became three-dimensional people I cared about and laughed with. Chapter seven hooked me and got me all the way through the end (eighteen chapters total) in one night. It was a ton of fun to read and I really cared about what happened to Eshe.
Of course, there's those first six chapters to deal with, now. I'm staring a serious read-through in the face and going, ". . . that's gonna take some work." Blargh. I really hope I don't have to write a new beginning for Skywatch the way I had to write a new ending for The Novel. That would annoy me in the extreme.
But it's early days yet. I still have to sit down with the thing and figure out what's missing from those first chapters, and how to weave it in.
I am using my Sword and Sorceress icon today because I stayed late at work and couldn't face Skywatch, and thus I am working on a short story instead.
The icon reminds me that, for as excited as I was to see the cover (my story's going to be published in a book! With a cover! That people can buy in stores!), I was a little disappointed as well. As far as I can tell (I might be wrong, someone please correct me if I am!), Sword and Sorceress has never had a woman of color on the cover.
On the one hand, I can understand this. Like women who take hold of their own destinies, COCs are thin on the ground in sword and sorcery. It's possible that there are no women of color in many of the anthologies. But S&S is a feminist collection that's about breaking away from the sexist habits of sword and sorcery, and since all the characters in my story are of color, I admit to a faint hope that this would be the first collection to have a woman of color on the cover.
Alas. Maybe next year.
In the meantime, it still has a woman with a sword!
UPDATE: I STAND CORRECTED!
It has been pointed out to me that I'm very, very wrong! And I'm cool with that! Take a look here, where I get schooled, and also follow the shiny link to S&S XXIV's cover, which I had never seen.