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edenfallingI meant to work on "Secrets." Instead, I got distracted by "Harvest," one of my many in-various-states-of-progress original stories. The rough draft is currently 10,450 words long, and while I'm still several scenes away from the end, I do think I've entered the final section of the story. In other words, while Ekanu and Denifar are going to give this sexual/romantic relationship thing one more try, they've both started to realize (at least subconsciously) that it's probably not going to work out. And while Denifar's waterworks project has just been indefinitely extended, Ekanu's job sorting Yfane's papers is drawing to a close, so unless she wants to stay in Ileara as that chapterhouse's permanent music mistress, she's going to get on a ship and leave within two months at the outside.
Tangentially, following RaceFail09 has made me aware that I haven't really addressed ethnicity within Firsthome. Now, given that Firsthome is a completely independent secondary world, none of the racial, cultural, or religious groups of our world are going to have exact parallels there (and I doubt most cultures conceive of sex, gender, and sexuality in modern Western terms either -- I know the Domaris don't, for example, though Estaria may use categories similar to our 'normative' ones), but it's still something I should have thought of.
I did create noticeable cultural differences in some areas -- one of the points of Ekanu as a protagonist, in fact, is that she's from a foreign culture pretty much everywhere she goes, and as such she notices differences in language, religion, ideas about intimacy, etc. -- and I also deliberately made most Firsthome cultures more gender-equal than most Earth cultures were during a similar stage of technological development... but I've hardly written a word about differences in physical appearance and the stereotypes that may have arisen from them.
Some of this is because I have a very non-visual imagination -- the descriptive details that come naturally to me are emotional reactions, thought processes, and a kinesthetic sense of body language -- but I am embarrassed to admit that an equally large component is that when I was paying any attention at all, I was making everyone in Firsthome more or less belong to the same racial type, which comes off white with an occasional dash of Hispanic: straight to wavy brown or black hair, tanned or slightly dusky skin, relatively sharp faces, brown or blue eyes. And when I wasn't paying attention, the physical descriptors I used had a (in retrospect, disturbing) tendency to shade even more stereotypically white. (Note Marcan's reddish hair, for example, in "Learning to Listen.")
*headdesk*
So now I am going back and looking at my general background files and trying to add in stuff about what the people in various regions look like, to go along with my existing scribbles about their governments, their religions, their languages, and broad sketch overviews of the history of their nations (or other forms of social organization). And while the native people of Estaria remain white/Hispanic-looking, it's fun to realize that an awful lot of other people in Firsthome don't look like that at all. Instead, they are all the colors of the human rainbow, with different heights, facial structures, average body types, hair textures, and so on.
(And man, does this new dimension complicate my world history something fierce! But it will be better for this work. Of that, I am firmly convinced.)
Tangentially, following RaceFail09 has made me aware that I haven't really addressed ethnicity within Firsthome. Now, given that Firsthome is a completely independent secondary world, none of the racial, cultural, or religious groups of our world are going to have exact parallels there (and I doubt most cultures conceive of sex, gender, and sexuality in modern Western terms either -- I know the Domaris don't, for example, though Estaria may use categories similar to our 'normative' ones), but it's still something I should have thought of.
I did create noticeable cultural differences in some areas -- one of the points of Ekanu as a protagonist, in fact, is that she's from a foreign culture pretty much everywhere she goes, and as such she notices differences in language, religion, ideas about intimacy, etc. -- and I also deliberately made most Firsthome cultures more gender-equal than most Earth cultures were during a similar stage of technological development... but I've hardly written a word about differences in physical appearance and the stereotypes that may have arisen from them.
Some of this is because I have a very non-visual imagination -- the descriptive details that come naturally to me are emotional reactions, thought processes, and a kinesthetic sense of body language -- but I am embarrassed to admit that an equally large component is that when I was paying any attention at all, I was making everyone in Firsthome more or less belong to the same racial type, which comes off white with an occasional dash of Hispanic: straight to wavy brown or black hair, tanned or slightly dusky skin, relatively sharp faces, brown or blue eyes. And when I wasn't paying attention, the physical descriptors I used had a (in retrospect, disturbing) tendency to shade even more stereotypically white. (Note Marcan's reddish hair, for example, in "Learning to Listen.")
*headdesk*
So now I am going back and looking at my general background files and trying to add in stuff about what the people in various regions look like, to go along with my existing scribbles about their governments, their religions, their languages, and broad sketch overviews of the history of their nations (or other forms of social organization). And while the native people of Estaria remain white/Hispanic-looking, it's fun to realize that an awful lot of other people in Firsthome don't look like that at all. Instead, they are all the colors of the human rainbow, with different heights, facial structures, average body types, hair textures, and so on.
(And man, does this new dimension complicate my world history something fierce! But it will be better for this work. Of that, I am firmly convinced.)
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Date: 2009-03-11 08:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-11 10:06 pm (UTC)