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Feb. 6th, 2010 @ 03:19 pm 
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Well, that was an efficient morning.
I cleaned the bathroom, did a ton of dishes, took out three bags of trash, and cooked epic food: beans (made with homemade bbq sauce!) and rice, rhubarb crumble (rhubarb was on sale again!), no-knead bread, and started some gravlax. I don't like the taste of cooked fish, but I like smoked, cured, or raw. Gravlax is a good balance between "can't easily get sushi-quality fish" and "don't like cooked fish". Between all that, the hummus, the avocados, the mashed sunchokes I'm going to make, and the GALLON OF CHEESE, I may go vegetarian this week. It's not that I want to, but I also don't want to have a heart attack when I'm 35.
I realise that a gallon of cheese will not improve my heart health, but it will make vegetarian food worth eating.
I also roomba'd the bedroom. Poor Dalek Suck, he works as hard as he can but sometimes he gets confused, and he always gets tired and stops going when he's under the bed. I also have to fold up all the folding chairs when I break him out, because he gets stuck under them and cries.
I am still going through feedback for CG -- hell, I'm still RECEIVING IT -- and February will no doubt be the Month Of Rewrite, but I've had a few inquiries and I wanted to make sure people were aware that yes, I will be typesetting and publishing Charitable Getting with Lulu.
I need to finish Valet of Anize and I also need to rewrite Dead Isle, but both have their own issues; I'm a bit blocked on Valet (I know where it's going but not how to get there) and Dead Isle...well, I want to rewrite and publish Dead Isle, but that is a difficult process.
My favourite part of The Dead Isle -- I think many peoples' favourite part -- is Clare's reveal near the end, but it is deeply problematic in light of some reading I've been doing lately. I love Dead Isle and I think it can be a good book, but I was also dismayed to realise that it suffers from an inappropriate plot structure, the Outsider Leading From Inside (there's an excellent article about this here, which is what opened my eyes to the problem).
There's a reason this story is so common; it's what's known as the Monomyth of Western Literature, though that article's preliminary summary reverses it a little. In one sense it's a hero leaving the mundane and entering the fantastic in order to fulfill their potential before returning to their own world; in another sense, it's the idea that a community can't combat an outside threat without being corrupted by that threat, so an outsider comes into the community to do that for them, and then, corrupted, can't remain. The latter part is not so much an issue with Clare because she forms a bridge between the indigenous community and the colonial threat, but on the whole it's a parallel.
In a book that is about a woman of colour realising her destiny and about the exploitation of an indigenous culture, the fact that I'm writing the Monomyth is troublesome, because even though Clare is of Aboriginal descent she's been raised as a white woman in a white culture, so I'm not entirely certain that there's a marked difference.
But I can't see a way around it without eviscerating a significant part of Clare's arc and destroying that fantastic reveal. That may simply have to happen; I'm examining my options. But Dead Isle is a long book and if that's the case rewriting is going to take a while. Just figuring out how is taking a while all on its own.
Anyway. OMG HIGH ENERGY SATURDAY! I wonder how much more I can do before I pass out. :D
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| From: | ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) starlady |
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February 7th, 2010 01:48 am (UTC) |
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I think (and this is easy for me to say because it's not my book) that there ought to be a way to keep the reveal on Clare while being sensitive to concerns about cultural appropriation. I remember you saying you wanted to amp up the agency of the Wiradjuri in the next draft, which I think was a great idea.
Iirc, as it stands there are almost no hints that Clare is of Aboriginal descent until the reveal itself; maybe one way to address Clare as an outsider is to play that up earlier.
With regards to The Dead Isle, which I haven't finished yet and OMG need to do, have you read many accounts of people discovering their Indigenous heritage and returning to their lands and relatives?
Obviously, awareness of the issues is the first step towards not falling into their traps.
I have read a few where Aboriginal Australians go in search of their cultural traditions, but "discovering" Indigenous heritage I don't think is that common, unless you mean discovery in a...more metaphorical sense. What I mean to say is that while you can discover that the culture exists, I think it's less common in Australia to discover that you have Aboriginal ancestors without having known it before, as opposed to America, where it's more plausible to find one has African ancestry and a white face. But it's a point, I'll do some more poking around in re: that.
Discovery in the sense of uncovering where they were taken from, rather than that they were taken at all, I think I meant. All I've read/know of is one woman going back to where her mother was taken from and an aunt there recognising her. I thought it might be of note for you in terms of how Indigenous communities welcome people who are relatives but outsiders.
Oooh. I'd love to read that, if you have the title!
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