Home from my weekend visit to my mother. It is her birthday today and we had a nice visit. C graceously stayed home with the pre-schooler and I got more sleep than I often get over the week.

We also got a chance to take the Max in and make the pilgrimmage to Powell’s. I could live in that bookstore, I swear! We spent several hours there and I completely skipped some areas when my feet started to hurt. I was also limited by just what I could carry on the Max so I couldn’t indulge my book collector self TOO much :)

Despite my best intentions, I got absolutely no writing done while I was there. I did get a few pieces critiqued for my crit group but nothing done on my WIP.

On the drive home (about 2.5 hours) I had some interestind new ideas for stories. In case anyone is interested, it’s not the best idea to try to scrawl down the ideas while driving. I ended up pulling off at a McDonald’s and getting a soda so I could write down the ideas without endangering myself or others.

But home now, just have to get moving again on my writing….

I was surfing blogs this morning and ended up going to the blog of author Monica Jackson. In the post for Feb 8, she talks a little about the issues black romance authors face in the industry, including the fact that black readership is simply smaller than non-black readership as a whole and what seems to be a segregation issue in anthologies and such.

After sitting and thinking about this for a while, then looking through my TBR pile, I wonder if I am even weirder than I thought.

I have books that contain all sorts of characters – white, black, asian, latino, american indian, middle eastern, etc. Heck, even aliens, werewolves and other paranormals. Honestly, it’s not something I use as a factor in whether or not I purchase a book.

To me it’s one of those non-issues. If the book is well written, shouldn’t it pull me into the head of whoever the character is? I hear from some of the authors that people won’t buy ‘x’ book because the author isn’t a white, middle-class woman. Or people won’t buy ‘y’ book because the couple is interracial.

I just don’t get it and I keep wondering why my reality seems so different from what I hear is the reality of the majority of the market. What’s the deal? LOL

I consider myself a pretty darned average person. I did grow up in science fiction fandom so I had a lot of very early exposure to a wide variety of people and interests. I grew up in a small southern California town where there was a large latino population. I work in the software industry which is highly diverse and in a hugely diverse company even in that industry. I’m a pagan, the community of which is also highly diverse. And I live in Seattle which is also very diverse. My boss at work (until I got this new job) is black, if that matters, my peer is Phillipino.

But what about other people? Do you have issues with romances written or staring people of ethnic origins different from your own? Does it play a role in whether you buy a book? If so, why? What about interracials?

Go Anon if you don’t want names, that’s okay. I’m honestly curious here.

Day job, that is! I was stressed because I really wanted it. After 4 hours of interviews yesterday, I was told verbally that I had it. Now I’m just waiting for HR to cough up the paperwork….

Yeehah!

Angela Knight has a great post on her blog today about Saving the Book from Hell. I love reading AK’s posts because they offer me (the newb) some great insights that I think it may take me years to discover on my own.

I know that I already get bad cases of “suckitis” about the WIP I have going. And it doesn’t seem to matter how many people tell me it’s good.

I’m glad to know it’s not just me!

In the process of working on my WIP, Raven’s White Hart, I’ve learned some interesting lessons about POV and what’s referred to as “head-hopping”. , I knew that it disturbed me as a reader when a character in a story I was reading would know something they couldn’t or would make an observation that seemed totally out of character, but until I learned more about it, I wasn’t fully aware of why specifically it bothered me or what it was called.

I’ve been trying to be careful in my WIP to make one re-reading pass focus on POV and staying true to it – I catch it more frequently than I would like to but I’m glad that I look for it. Hopefully I’ll start to do it less and less the more writing I do.

Today, I was reading Alison Kent’s Blog and she had a link to an interesting post on POV Slippage from Storytelling. I thought I’d link to it here for anyone else who is interested in an interesting short blurb on it.