InsaneJournal

Current mood:	uncomfortable
Entry tags:	chroma, writing, writing woes

Chromatic Values
When verb_noire was announced, I was really excited. Not for myself in particular, so much, as I think it's an idea whose time really has come. As someone who grew up reading SFF, a habit inherited from two parents who read SFF, I'm aware of how few of those beloved epics contained characters that looked anything like me, let alone protagonists and, simultaneously, I'm aware of how—as a result—I absorbed some fucked up messages and internalized racism.

As a fan of the genre, as someone who loves it, and as someone who is still unpacking the damage the genre they left with the good, I feel like there is absolutely a greater need for diversity and representation in the genre.

Which, indirectly, brings me around to my own writing. There is the awareness that a lot (if not all) of my very early stories (original fic, all) are extremely whitewashed. It's a realization I came to a while ago—before I even entered fandom—and something that I've tried to address in things I've written subsequently.

In my interlinked stories about Paradigm (most of which are not posted here or even entirely written), Morgan Devoreaux was my first touchstone character, French and Kenyan and, in retrospect, a great deal like me: struggling with her identity and her family and herself. So too with the half-Chinese Miranda Liu. And on the one hand, their ethnicity is deeply tied up with their identity. And on the other, they both exist in a largely white world. Their best friends, their romantic entanglements, the world that surrounds them…it's pretty much white.

My novel Storm Moon came out of a dream involving me and my best friend at the time and thus, though not really explicit, it was always in my mind that the characters were racially analogous to us (biracial and Mexican, respectively) and I tried to infuse some of that into the characters. But even so, I don't think that it reads as explicitly ethnic and… I don't know. I feel like I lack the vocabulary to express what I mean and I don't want to buy into the idea that there's a right or wrong way to be a PoC writer, but, at the same time, I don't know if there's a functional difference in the story told by Storm Moon versus all those white-washed books I read as a kid, other than the characters are brown in my mind.

Appetite, my currently stalled m/m werewolf romance feels to me like it's got a lot more of the texture I'd like to have to it, texture I drew from my own life—teenage years of hanging out in a reggae club I was no way supposed to be in, the drop-in casual flavor of Roger's Park, which is the part of Chicago I think of as home… At the same time, the m's of the m/m are white.

I'd like to believe that it can't be reduced that simply. I think there is a statement in the fact that both Matt and Gabe, outcasts in their own communities for their homosexuality, have found welcome and sanctuary in a town full of PoCs…but, as ever, I question—is that enough?

I don't know. I don't have an answer for that. I'm not even sure what "enough" looks like.

My reason for thinking about this now is twofold. One, I posted yesterday about the eid_fic community and its crossover challenge with daysofawesome and I'd been musing about whether I had anything in me that I could write for either or both. And I really disliked that I didn't feel like I did. That I don't know enough to take that on, when I used to believe I could write anything.

I'm also thinking about this because I was thinking whether Storm Moon would be appropriate to submit to Verb Noire. And…again, I don't know. It's not ready in it's current state; it still, after all this time, needs a good edit and polish and for me to untangle the mess of the beginning edits, where I started to mess around with verb tenses. But…even after I did all that, even if I made it shine like a diamond…is it something Verb Noire would even bother taking a look at? Or is it still too white?

I think we're all doomed to want and long after things we don't have, talents we don't possess. I think it's a big stretch to say that I don't (and never will) possess the talent to write something that draws more deeply from my other cultural roots; I think I absolutely can. At the same time, I feel a little wistful, a little embarrassed and a little angry that it doesn’t come more easily to me. That it's something I'm going to have to work for. And that I have so much more to unpack.

Postscript: I know I have amazing, supportive friends, but this isn't a quest for reassurance. I'm arrogant confident enough that I'm a decent writer. I just don't know if I'm the writer I want to be.