Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: DEI

November is novels all the way down (part seven)

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In the last post, I wrote about diversity and how it’s not a dirty word. I also wrote about how it’s a part of me and not an affectation. I will say that it’s deliberate in that I choose to make the majority of my characters minorities. So, yes, in that case I’m doing it on purpose. I am not doing it at anyone in particular, but if I upset certain people in the meantime, well, that will please me greatly.

Some people are worth pissing off is what I’m saying. Yes, we need to be civil in general to work as a society, but when people break that social contract by being bigoted assholes, I am no longer beholden by that social contractor to those people.

There are going to be three main characters, and nary a cishetwhiteman among them. I will admit it amuses me to see how far I can go without having one as a main character. I have three or four other characters in mind (not fleshed out yet), and none of them are CHWM, either (figure it out).

I have a snapy beginning to my novel. The first few pages have been written–in my mind. This is how I write, by the way. I write in my brain before I write for real. That’s my way of planning/scheduling/outlining. I do a big brain dump as I’m musing things over in my mind. Then, I write in my mind for a few weeks. Then, I start the actual writing, and it’s like a brain dump agai, but in a more orderly fashion.

Before my medical crisis, my writing regime was pretty uniform. I wrote 2,000 words a day like clockwork in the fashion I outlined above. I edited as I wrote, though I tried not to do that. I rarely had a writer’s block, and I could finish a novel in a few months.

When I used to do NaNoWriMo, I had no problem meeting the word count. Why did I start doing it? Just to get back in the habit of writing again. I set my own goal of 2,000 words a day, and I was able to do that with ease. One year, I did 5,000 words a day–that was exponentially more difficult. In the later years of doing it, I started breaking the rules. I edited a novel one year. I wrote a novel and the the beginning of a sequel another year. I started on a day other than the first of November in yet another year. Before November, I mean.


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If I ruled the world, part three

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I have more to say about my ideal world because of course I do. In the last post, I was talking about From games, cishet white dudes assuming they’re the norm, and a bunch of other things.

Side note (yes, this early): That’s the way my brain works. I have discovered this is a neurodiversity thing, which makes sense. People get very exasperated with me because I can’t keep from going off on a tangent. In my writing, I love a side note, a footnote, an aside, and just anything that takes me down a different road.

Everything is interconnected to me. I can’t compartmentalize, which is to my detriment. I find it funny that I was talking about interconnectedness about a decade before it came a thing. I did not understand looking at, say, race without including gender. Things have an impact on most or all aspects of my life in different ways, and it isn’t as if I could turn off, say, being Taiwanese for a day.

There are some things about me that you wouldn’t know right off the bat just by looking at me. And there are some that you would. In the latter category, the following are included: fat, Taiwanese (Asian) American, AFAB, and old (although I look younger than my actual age).Included in the former are: neurogivergent, agender, and bisexual.

Even though I listed them separately here, I feel them all at the same time to varying extents. Each is a piece of the puzzle that makes up me, and if any one of those pieces is missing–well, it’s just not me.

There are other pieces, of course, including me being a writer, Taiji (especially the weapons) and now Bagua, my passion for FromSoft games, and others.

In my ideal world, I would be able to talk about any of these with ease. I would not feel like I had to hide any aspect of my personality/being. Not to say that I would talk about any or all of them all the time because there’s a time and place for everything, but ideally, I would not feel I could not talk about any of them at all.

I did not begin to suspect I had a neurodivergency until I was in my thirties. Even then, it was just a whisper of a hint of an idea. I have mentioned that the fact that I was talking about ADHD on Twitter with a friend and I said that I didn’t think I could have it because I was able to focus on one thing –sometimes, for a very long time.

He told me that hyperfocus was actually an indication of ADHD, which was news to me. I didn’t pursue it at the time, but I filed it away for further reference. Then I didn’t pull it out again for at least a decade.


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I am the diversity

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I go through my life being a weirdo and pretty much ignoring all the evidence that I am a weirdo because I know I’m a weirdo and I don’t really care. Most of the time. Plus, that’s too many uses of the word ‘weirdo’ in one sentence. But I’m making a point. The point being that I’m a weirdo.

Anyway, the reason I’m thinking about it is beacuse I’ll read old posts at Ask A Manager as a way to wind down at night. The one I chose last night was from someone who knew a new hire from working with him in a different place. In the last place, there was rampant sexism because they hired from a Christian college that proclaims that women should submit to men. The letter writer asked how, if she had been on the hiring board, could she probe for this kind of attitude?

Alison said (broadly paraphrasing), that she would ask about diversity issues. This was for a managing position, so the questions were geared towards that. One of them was, “How do you think about equity and bias around things like race and gender when hiring or developing people?” She had possible follow-up questions to each question. the one for this question was, “How have you known when your efforts to foster equity were working or not?”

I have seen other posts (not necessarily from her) about asking people how they work with people of different genders, races, ethnicities, religions, etc. It’s funny to me beacuse I always have to work with people of different everything. I’m the minority in almost every category I can think of. Protected by law, I mean. Gender, religion, race,  sexual orientation, and age. Agender, areligious, Taiwanese, bisexual, fifty-something. Back in the day, I used to joke that I was a triple threat (race, sexual orientation, gender) and that was before I went even more buckwild.

That’s why I get frustrated when people try to lecture me about looking at it from other points of view. Not that I can’t afford to widen my horizons because of course I can. Everyone can. But it’s irritating because it never feels ilke it’s a two-way thing.

About a decade ago, when being more aware of social inequities came to the forefront, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Any time issues of, say, gender or sexual orientation were brought up, white cis dudes were given a free pass. What I mean is that the people most pushed on the isuses were minorities themselves. I understood it was partly because of the whole ‘a reasonable perosn will more likely change than an unreasonable one’, but it was frustrating.


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