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(This is partly because I know people are interested in my writing process, and partly to set all this down so I can remember it later.)
At some point during the writing of Daughter of Mystery I was spurred to thinking about default characters and about what sorts of people were present in the Alpennia of my stories whose identities were being erased by my failure to describe them in marked terms (since unmarked descriptions are going to default to the “cultural norm”). And given that my stories were loaded with women, and well supplied with sexual minorities, adequately peopled with folks of non-Alpennian nationality (generally indicated via names), and that I’d made some effort to note the vast numbers of non-privileged people who make my primary characters’ lives possible (who will get primary page-time in Floodtide), the major invisible population I was left to consider was that of non-white people.
I’ve been greatly inspired (as I’ve mentioned before) by the website Medieval People of Color in its efforts to bring a basic awareness of the non-white population of Europe in various historic eras. Visual art is particularly effective for making the statement "here's a bunch of stuff that just is" (keeping in mind that pre-photographic art is always highly deliberate and rife with artistic choices). But even with unambiguous images, it's possible to overlook things we aren't consciously expecting. So with that approach in mind, the question I asked myself was not “Hey, where can I stick some people of color into my stories?” but rather “Which characters that I’m already writing (or planning to write) about are actually people of color and I just haven’t noticed?”
The only one I knew about for certain at that point was Mefro Dominique, dressmaker to the fashionable in Rotenek, whose back-story (which I hadn’t had any opportunity to mention yet) was that she was one of the French emigrées that came to Rotenek during the revolution, but that she’d originally come from one of the French colonies in the Carribbean. The problem was: in Daughter of Mystery there was no real opportunity to make any of that explicit. I knew it, but there was no way for the readers to pick up on it. She was a very minor character, mentioned in passing by viewpoint characters who would not have found her presence unexpected and therefore would have no reason to call the readers attention to it. All I able to do in that book was to create the space in which her ethnic background was possible. So in The Mystic Marriage I made sure to add enough information that someone who was paying attention to details would know the basics of her story. But Dominique is a minor character. (She’ll be a bit less so in Floodtide because her daughter Celeste becomes BFFs with the viewpoint character.) And I was certain she wasn't the only non-white character whose life would intersect with my stories.
And then it came to me that there was another woman of color right under my nose: Serafina Talarico, one of the two primary characters in Mother of Souls. I didn’t even have a name for her yet at that point. She was “the Roman scholar”. All I knew was that she would run across some of Margerit’s mystery notes during her studies/research in Rome and would travel to Rotenek to study with her. And now I knew that she was black. And I knew that I needed to figure out why and how that was essential to my story.
( This is going to get a bit long. )
At some point during the writing of Daughter of Mystery I was spurred to thinking about default characters and about what sorts of people were present in the Alpennia of my stories whose identities were being erased by my failure to describe them in marked terms (since unmarked descriptions are going to default to the “cultural norm”). And given that my stories were loaded with women, and well supplied with sexual minorities, adequately peopled with folks of non-Alpennian nationality (generally indicated via names), and that I’d made some effort to note the vast numbers of non-privileged people who make my primary characters’ lives possible (who will get primary page-time in Floodtide), the major invisible population I was left to consider was that of non-white people.
I’ve been greatly inspired (as I’ve mentioned before) by the website Medieval People of Color in its efforts to bring a basic awareness of the non-white population of Europe in various historic eras. Visual art is particularly effective for making the statement "here's a bunch of stuff that just is" (keeping in mind that pre-photographic art is always highly deliberate and rife with artistic choices). But even with unambiguous images, it's possible to overlook things we aren't consciously expecting. So with that approach in mind, the question I asked myself was not “Hey, where can I stick some people of color into my stories?” but rather “Which characters that I’m already writing (or planning to write) about are actually people of color and I just haven’t noticed?”
The only one I knew about for certain at that point was Mefro Dominique, dressmaker to the fashionable in Rotenek, whose back-story (which I hadn’t had any opportunity to mention yet) was that she was one of the French emigrées that came to Rotenek during the revolution, but that she’d originally come from one of the French colonies in the Carribbean. The problem was: in Daughter of Mystery there was no real opportunity to make any of that explicit. I knew it, but there was no way for the readers to pick up on it. She was a very minor character, mentioned in passing by viewpoint characters who would not have found her presence unexpected and therefore would have no reason to call the readers attention to it. All I able to do in that book was to create the space in which her ethnic background was possible. So in The Mystic Marriage I made sure to add enough information that someone who was paying attention to details would know the basics of her story. But Dominique is a minor character. (She’ll be a bit less so in Floodtide because her daughter Celeste becomes BFFs with the viewpoint character.) And I was certain she wasn't the only non-white character whose life would intersect with my stories.
And then it came to me that there was another woman of color right under my nose: Serafina Talarico, one of the two primary characters in Mother of Souls. I didn’t even have a name for her yet at that point. She was “the Roman scholar”. All I knew was that she would run across some of Margerit’s mystery notes during her studies/research in Rome and would travel to Rotenek to study with her. And now I knew that she was black. And I knew that I needed to figure out why and how that was essential to my story.
( This is going to get a bit long. )
