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I'm working through a couple of blog topic suggestions, since I want to encourage people to give me prompts and the best way to do that is to use them! This one was: How do you balance "writing what you know" with too much self-insertion?

On the face of it, you might have a hard time finding any self-insertion in my Alpennia novels! Take a look at Daughter of Mystery. The protagonists are orphans (nope), one a skilled and highly-motivated athlete (nope), both with scholarly interests (yep). They are devout religious believers (nope) and find their True Love at a young age (nope). Oh, and they live in the early 19th century (nope) in Europe (nope) in a world in which magic exists (nope). So if you're thinking of "write what you know" as meaning "write what you yourself have experienced", I'm definitely not writing what I know!

On the other hand, behind the scenes I've done a fair amount of struggle to write characters whose lives and personalities are different from my own. Writing in another time and place was an easy decision; I'm all about the escapism, and while I don't know Europe as someone would who was born there, I spent two years as a non-tourist in two very different European countries and I definitely draw on those memories in creating the look-and-feel of Alpennia. Choosing to have my initial protagonists be young, and therefore necessarily to find love at an early age, could almost be considered laziness rather than a deliberate creative decision. I had to work much more against tropes to create the character of Jeanne de Cherdillac (who is much closer to my own age) and find her story.

The religious lives of my characters was something I spent a lot of effort getting right. My default (and it can be seen in much of my short fiction) is to overlook explicit expressions of organized religion when world-building. It's a fault not uncommon in fantasy world-builders. It would have been easier for me to make Margerit more of a seeker, a doubter, perhaps a covert agnostic. But I wanted to make as many of her attributes as possible "normal" for her time and place, so that the exceptional aspects of her life wouldn't place her completely outside the the fold of plausibility. (I also had in mind the rants I've heard from a number of my religious friends who are tired of Christianity and Christianity-analogues often being the villain or the buffoon in historic fantasy.)

When it comes to my characters' personal lives, I'm mostly writing way outside "what I know". To be frank: I entered my first long-term relationship in my 50s and can count the number of previous interactions that went beyond a single date on the fingers of one hand. I have a rather uncertain relationship with the concept of "being in love", to say nothing of "being in lust". So it's a bit of work to envision characters with much more active romantic lives. Antuniet probably comes closest to "writing what I know" in terms of relationships: rather oblivious and driven much more by intellectual attraction than physical response. I've been very mindful about giving my main characters a wide variety of attitudes towards romance and sex because otherwise I suspect their relationships would all end up looking a lot like fairly asexual romantic friendships.

But as to making them all brainy, creative women...ok, fair cop. That's self-insertion. They may have other interests as well. Barbara is very focused on maintaining her physical competence--it's a big part of her self-image. (Which should be a warning sign that she's going to have some challenges in this area eventually.) Jeanne is supremely socially competent and a massive extrovert as well as having a very active sex drive. Definitely not self-insertion! I definitely looked outside myself for models to base her character on. Luzie (whom most of you haven't met yet) has organized much of her life around trying to give her sons their best step up in life and is constantly torn by the way this separates her from them much of the time. Another challenge since I have no children and never really wanted them. But I'm not going to apologize for writing about brainy, creative women because those are my favorite people in the whole world. Aren't they everyone's?