Tag: no fear | A Banana Peeled

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.

I’m back to write about writing one more time. In the last post, I veered into ranting about the state of the world right now and how anti-inclusive it currently is (especially in America). I have been fighting this fight for thirty goddamn years, and I’m so tired. I did not realize that electing a black man would create a backlash this severe, but here we are.

I haven’t felt this hopeless in years. Politically, I mean. I don’t know if we as a country can recover from the shit that is happening right now. More to the point, I don’t know if we should. We are not really a country–we are a conglomeration of fifty small nations. A resentful conglomeration.

There is no compromise, by the way. You’re either for inclusivity or you’re not. If you’re the latter, then you’re part of the problem. If you can’t even tolerate people who are different than you, then we have no ground that is common.

Back in the day, many minorities didn’t ilke the word tolerate. They wanted to be accepted as they were. Which, yes, ideally, that would happen. You can’t legislate that, though. You can’t mandate how people feel (though, lord knows,the curret admiistration is trying to do so), but you can dictate how they act. I don’t care if people accept me or not, but goddamn it, they can at least be civil–even if it’s just by a thread.

I include all this in my writing because it’s a part of me. It’s the fabric of my life, and it’s not an affectation. This is what the alt-right doesn’t get–we are not being who we are to spite them: that’s just an added benefit! I’m not agender, queer, and Asian AT them–it’s just who I am. My life experience, and, indeed, my very being, include all those aspects of myself.

The fact that I died (twice!) and came back to life (twice!) has deeply affected me as well. I learned things from that experience that I could not have learned any other way. Unfortunately, it’s not something I can share with many people because it’s so out there. I want to include it in my novel, though, beacuse it’s just that unusual. Will people believe me? Probably not, but that bothers me not.

In my first few attempts at a novel after my medical crisis, I really tried to set it in the hospital. It was such a wild experience; I still haven’t completely digested it yet. At some point, I realized that everything I thought happened while I was in the hospital didn’t. Well, to be more precise, most of what I thought happened did not.

I was as high as a motherfucking kite, and I was delusional/hallucinating the whole time. Some of the things that I thought happened did actually happen, but not in the way I thought. For example, I was so impressed that there were so many people of color on my team. I live in Minnesota, which means the vast majority of people are white. My experience in the hospital was that everyone but a few people were non-white–specifically, they were Asian.

Tag Archives: no fear

November is novels all the way down (part seven)

Noveling all November long (part six)