Writing with Empathy, Compassion, and Respect

In my last entry, I mentioned that I’m interested in disputing/debunking certain bits of writing advice out there, one of which is the “write what you know” aspect. That’s the one that is going to be . . . difficult for a lot of people to hear, and I’ll get into those reasons in another entry.

I want to focus this entry on writing with empathy, care, compassion, and respect. This is the exception to the debunking the advice of “only write what you know”. Why are these things so critical when it comes to writing?

Because ultimately we are dealing with real people and representations of those people in our books. Even when the characters are fictional, when it comes to your genre, you are still dealing with real people. My TikTok feed is as diverse as I can get it right this moment with BIPOC and LGBTQ+ content creators, ranging from cosplay and DnD to authors to book reviewers to social justice movements, and I’ve been paying attention to what some booktokkers are saying when it comes to authors deemed problematic. I don’t have as many science-fiction and fantasy booktokkers as I’d like in my feed, but that’s something I can cultivate.

Here is what the BIPOC authors and booktokkers have taught me that I’m spreading on to my readers and fellow authors, ESPECIALLY my fellow white authors.

If you are writing BIPOC or LGBTQ+ characters, treat those characters with dignity, empathy, love, compassion, care, and respect. You do not need to write about the BIPOC or LGBTQ+ experience in dealing with racism, bigotry, and prejudice. In fact, we white authors are highly discouraged from doing this. Why? Because it is not our lived experiences. I stopped following a book reviewer who felt as long as authors did so in a respectful way, white authors could write about the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ lived experiences while ignoring what BIPOC authors and readers (primarily) were saying . She was giving permission that wasn’t hers to give. The problem with that is that white authors will receive the praise, rewards, and contracts for doing that over the people who are writing about their lived experiences BETTER than what we could ever do. We can (and should) write BIPOC and LGBTQ+ characters with the same love and care we’ve seen many white male protagonists receive over all other characters. (Seriously. How many times have you seen in fiction a white main male character be referred to in such derogatory ways and terms versus women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ characters? I know there are millions of books out there, but damn. Most of the ones I’ve read, not even the slightest hint of racism and bigotry towards a white main male character.)

If you are going to write BIPOC or LGBTQ+ characters, do so with the same dignity and respect as a white main male character.

This applies for fantasy settings as well. In fantasy, we white authors also want to avoid having a white savior for the non-white people who populate the worlds we create. Historically speaking, we have destroyed more than we have saved. BIPOC and LGBTQ+ readers deserve to have themselves represented with dignity and respect and with heroes and heroines who look like them. They do not need white authors being disrespectful to them in any way, shape, or form. Whether we like to admit it or not, the written word translates into thoughts, into emotions, and into action. While we are not responsible for the actions of others, we ARE responsible for the way we represent our characters and the situations we place them in.

Finally, remember this: this is all the bare fucking minimum we white authors can do. Bare fucking minimum. Our BIPOC and LGBTQ+ readers deserve much more from us than that.

Write Your Own Adventure

I’m going to give a big shout-out to the BookTok community on TikTok for inspiring this blog entry. I’m also going to remind everyone that I am grateful to one Katherine O’Kelly for inspiring me to take the leap from having a fanfiction blog under the name of Liana Bluestar (no, I wasn’t always nice or friendly to my readers) to this, and I also want to thank her for writing about her two rejections and how her burn-out from AbsoluteWrite and those two rejections caused her to give up. Her rejections prompted me to try self-publishing to rove that I could be a marketable science-fiction and fantasy author, with my first offering being Arc of Fantasy, Book One: Portal to Gaming.

This writing journey has been wild!

Today is some writing advice.

Stop trying to be 100% marketable for the traditional publishers. Traditional publishing is rife with misogyny and racism. One of the authors I follow points out that black authors only make up about 5.8% of all traditional publishing. That’s not a lot. James Patterson lamented a few months ago that it was tough being a white male author just as USA Today published a list of the Top 100 best-selling authors, and 99% of them were white. Men. Some of whom are deceased. One of whom was Mr. Patterson himself, and a white female author called him out on his lamenting. Good for her.

The alleged market still favors straight white men. Depending on our genres, we are expected to cater to the white male audience, the white male gaze. It’s still something that’s holding true even today, despite the number of female, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC authors out there making their dreams of authors being realities, be it as self-published authors, hybrid, or through independent presses. There are still some out there who believe that traditional publishing is the only way to become a “real” author.

I’m calling bull shit on that. I’m self-published. I’ve held my books in my hands, and I know how to get them into local bookstores across the U.S. I know authors published independently from the traditional publishers. They’re real authors, too.

So . . . write the story you want to read. Better yet: write your own adventures in whatever world you want to exist. I have a few novels in progress where my main female character is based off of me, and she’s going on the adventures I wish I could go on or could have gone on in my twenties. In my personal opinion, that is the purest joy of writing I can think of. To live the adventures I wish I could have had, could still go on, and be in worlds with magic and dragons and unicorns. I write of futures where people aren’t persecuted for the color of their skin, their gender identities, or their sexual orientations. To me, that’s beautiful, and I know my stories aren’t necessarily going to appeal to the so-called pure fans of my genre, the white boys who feel that authors like myself are ruining the genre just by existing.

They can go fuck themselves as far as I’m concerned. My stories are the ones that I want to read, not what they want to read.

I might just make a series of either disputing or debunking a few things. That could be fun. We’ll see how things go because some of the advice I’d like to dispute/debunk treads some very thin lines, so writing about them needs a great deal of care and compassion.

That said, this is mostly more encouragement than anything else. Write the adventures that you want to go.

Next writing advice: writing with empathy, care, compassion, and respect

Update on My Rewards System

I posted briefly about this to Facebook, but I’m going to post it here, too, albeit a bit more in-depth.

Yesterday, I wrote about setting goals. I’d also previously written about utilizing a rewards system for myself to help me meet those writing word count goals. Last night, for the fourth installment of my Arc of Fantasy series, I started setting some and then realized I may need to adjust my word count milestone rewards. This is mainly due to the fact I am trying to move in July of 2023, and I would like to save as much money as possible in addition to keeping the collections down to a minimum. I also know me, and if I don’t allow myself some fun spending, I really am going to blow it. My current plan for this month is to reach the milestones then do a shopping session to get those items instead of an immediate purchase.

I also realized last night, as I was setting those goals for The Journey to New Atlantis, that I have three other novels I can fit into the rewards milestone system. Trying to reward myself for four novels in a month is . . . just not happening. I set my vacation up in such a way that I’m not being paid for a full forty hours, and next week is going to be short fifteen hours of pay. Yes, that was done on purpose so I could have more vacation time, should I need it by my anniversary date.

Anyway, financially, trying to do that much in a month for milestone rewards is going to be a bit much, so I’m spreading them out over this month through January. There are exclusions to the rewards system.

For starters, my fanfiction isn’t going to be part of any of it. In addition to just writing those stories because I love the fandoms, one of my goals is reconnect with readers and to try and establish a once-a-week publishing schedule to rebuild that connection. Adding in fanfiction for any of it could seriously stress me out.

Also not included in any of the rewards systems are stories in the editing process. They’re done. They need the polishing for the publishing. I feel if I try to include them in the milestones, it’s just me finding another reason to spend money that I don’t need. Again, my overall monetary goal is to save up what I can for moving and for school.

I may have to adjust my milestone rewards for The Journey to New Atlantis. I’m still buying Alfajiri by Michael Laborn for completing the rough draft (no word count finals) as well as The Name-Bearer by Natalia Hernandez for completing the first draft of The Ancient Lore of Yggdrasil: Idunna’s Apples. Those are givens, but the smaller steps to having a final word count are the ones that may need the tweaking.

We’ll see how the month of October plays out.

Happy writing,everyone!

Setting Your Writing Goals

I wrote about this once before at the beginning of my original writing career thirteen years prior. I still thank a specific aspiring author for inspiring me to take that leap, but I now also refuse to name her. LOL. My journey, my journal, my choice. She’ll know who she is if she ever sees this anyway, and she’ll also know why I refuse to name her in anything anymore.

I find looking back at the start of her journey and mine to be quite interesting. I’d tried setting daily writing goals for myself, and I remember her commenting on that entry, asking about how it was working for me. At the time, it didn’t quite work out, and I thought she genuinely was interested. After various conversations over the years later, I do wonder whether she was being genuine or if she was mocking me behind my back when she asked such a thing. (I was also severely socially isolated for a few years there, too, which didn’t help with conversations or conversation cues. I digress.)

I am, once more, working on setting daily writing goals for myself. When I did my grocery shopping this past Wednesday, I looked for treats to give myself upon completing those daily writing goals (original only, and excluded from this are the stories I’m trying to transcribe and edit), and I found myself in quite the dilemma. The treats the aspiring author used thirteen years ago no longer appeal to me. Don’t get me wrong. I do love my sugar treats but as a reward system? Man, it was hard. I knew I wanted to use pocky, so I got me some of that. My store sells a limited selection of Japanese treats, and I bought one of each . . . except for the strawberry pocky. I love me some strawberry pocky. I also bought me some small packages of cookies, like Tate’s and Pepperidge Farm. I’m very particular about cookies. I grew up quite spoiled. My mom baked cookies for the holidays and school parties. (Maybe I should bake myself some peanut butter cookies as an extra special treat . . . yum. My favorite kind of cookie.)

Now, because I had this dilemma, I decided that I wasn’t going to start implementing the daily reward system until the start of this month. Yesterday was my birthday, and I’m still working through a lot of trauma and grief. Granted, those are going to be lifelong issues, but that’s okay. Yesterday was my birthday and all about me anyway for myself. LOL

Today, after I get my writing planner updated, I’ll be implementing the daily word count goals and going from there. This is something I’m setting up for myself in order to reach some of the goals I have set for myself.

I won’t sit here and say that setting goals is something every author must do. I won’t because each author is different when it comes to what it is they want to accomplish. Will setting goals help an author, though?

I believe that the answer is yes. Setting a goal answers the question of what it is the author wants to accomplish. Setting a goal answers the question of how the author can get there to see the accomplishment.

For example, I saw a meme on Facebook several months back with a depiction of bookcases loaded with books. The PoV was that of a dad who claimed to have helped his daughter install said cases. She then started putting the books she’d written on some of those shelves. That was probably that young woman’s goal and having the bookcases right there kept her inspired. How many authors and aspiring authors can relate to wanting to see their books on a shelf somewhere, be it in a library, bookstore, or their own home? I know that’s a goal of mine thanks to that meme!

So there’s one of my goals: to have a bookshelf filled with books I’ve written. To get there, setting more goals will help me to realize those dreams and to help keep me disciplined. Setting my daily word count goals for specific projects is keeping me motivated, has me trying to claw out whatever words I can get down while at work and before work. After work, I tend to want to decompress more than anything because it’s mentally and emotionally exhausting to work in customer service eight hours a day. My goals are keeping me centered.

Another one of my goals is have at least . . . at least . . . a dozen books published by November 2029. In order to get there, to have that many books published by that particular month and year, I need to sit my ass down and write. I need to build an audience (something social media and fanfiction websites are for).

Granted, I don’t meet all of my daily word count goals. My schedule fluctuates, and I’m considering speaking with my supervisors at work to set something a little more consistent up, at least for November because NaNo is right around the corner. I really want to participate in that this year.

I digress. I don’t meet all of my daily word count goals, which is something I’m trying to change. Hence, the daily rewards for in-progress original stories. Transcribing will see the word count milestone rewards, such as a new coffee mug or candle, unless, of course, the story started out on my laptop. Sometimes I do that. LOL

These are concepts I’m utilizing to keep myself on track, on task because, well, I have a move planned, a move to Norway to go back to school to gain degrees in Old Norse studies and gaming design. Having a supplemental income will help go a long way as a student. (I’ve looked into this: I can work part-time, not full-time, and that’s refreshing for me. I still need to be able to support myself, though, and my cats. Yes, they’re going with me.)

I do have other goals in mind, like eventually setting up a website where I can directly sell my ebooks and possibly physical copies of my books. (There are things I need to look into first to be sure I can make that a reality.) I’d love to sell my books in multiple languages, in audio, and in Braille. The Braille goal has been there since I spoke with a young man who said, while large print was beneficial, Braille would be even better. These are intermediate and long-term goals that require more financial resources, but they are goals all the same.

Keeping Track of the Goals I’m Setting:

I’m doing this in a couple of different ways. To start, I have a planner that I’d purchased through Happy Planner. I love their planners. They inspire a lot of creativity within me, not just to get my writing done but with the planners themselves. I use different colors of pens to write in them for the different things I’m trying to get done. It’s a lot of fun, and I can definitely spend a few hours just writing in the planner itself.

My writing planner is covering EVERYTHING: to try and promote myself daily, the different projects, editing, critiquing, blurbs, and so on. For the different projects, that’s where I write what I’ve written down for the day. I also have reminders of the kinds of things I need to be doing, such as setting myself up a budget for various writing tools, promotions and promotional events, weekly sales goals, and so on. I’ve got a list of my daily word count goals for each project, and each word count goal is a minimum. I do allow myself to go over the actual goal. I take note of what I’ve completed and when. Fanfiction is included in this because, well, I do love writing it. At one point, I also had query letters and writing synopses in this, but I’m currently no longer interested in traditional publishing. I’m not ruling it out. Far from that. But with the stories I want to tell and publish, self-publishing is right where I need to be.

Because I’m also busy with full-time work, I have two notebooks set up for keeping track of my word counts, specifically one for editing and transcribing and the other for my in-progress stories on my laptop. (I really need to get a third notebook going to keep track of the in-progress novels in notebooks.) This helps me with any and all backlog with my writing projects. Granted, I’m not keeping track of the editing and transcribing projects word counts in my planner, but I am keeping track.

I write about this in the hopes it helps someone out there who is struggling with any kind of writing project. Again, this is not a “must do” type of thing. Each author is going to find a system that works for them when it comes to getting the writing done. This is just my process. I understand that not everyone can afford a planner like the Happy Planners. That’s okay. If you like the idea of a planner, you can peruse the stationery and office supply sections and stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Staples, and Office Depot. You can use a fifty-cent notebook in your favorite color. And, like I said, you don’t even have to keep track of your goals or set any at all. The point is to ultimately find something that works for you to help you realize your writing dream.

And remember: Goals can be evaluated, re-evaluated, and adjusted at any given time. Allowing for life’s curveballs will keep you from beating yourself up from not accomplishing something on any given day. This is just one tool in your writing toolbox. Use it as you see fit.

Until the next time!