Starting Over, Or So It Seems

I finally tried Monday to get started back on Wraith of Talera, and I realized that the layoff while I was in Cross Plains, and then taking the next few days off to do some other writing I had deadlines for, had brought me to a dead standstill on the book. In fact, reading over it I thought to myself, “man this sucks.” That’s probably not a completely accurate feeling, but I need to really hit it hard tomorrow and try to get back into the mood. Maybe I need to conceptualize the story a bit better. Layoffs are just killers for me, and take so long to recover from. Anyone else find the same thing?

Another of my pet peeves has raised its weary old head again, as well. A heroic fantasy story with an effeminate male villain was criticized. The person doing the criticizing assumed immediately that the villain was homosexual, even though it never said so in the story. The point that bothers me is that, so what if the villain was homosexual? You can’t have a homosexual villain? That’s ridiculous! Does every villain have to be a white, heterosexual male? I can see that it might be an issue if every villain was drawn as homosexual, or as black, or as freaking Irish for that matter. But it’s going to get pretty “vanilla” if you can’t occasionally have a villain of some non-white, non-male, non-hetero persuasion. The truth is that villains come in all flavors, and writers should be allowed to work with that variety.

Don’t forget that Book Roast is still going on. It’s been great fun so far, and I won Bernita Harris’s book.
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