All Feelings are Universal by Paty Jager

I'm Paty Jager, a generista who tends to write characters who are a different culture or way of life than I am, but who I empathize with and try to show the injustice.

It's hard to follow B.A. Binn's post from last Saturday on writing diversity. She had some excellent points and comments.

In grade school there was a classmate who used crutches. I stuck up for him when others were not so nice. I've always been the friend of the classmate who was picked on and as a writer I tend to have characters in my books that have suffered an injustice and I try to show they are no different and in some cases even more deserving of the reader's attention.

My first novel, which was a mystery, had a next door neighbor who was in a wheelchair. He was an integral secondary character. I didn't know anyone in a wheelchair, but I could empathize with how it would feel to not be able to do everything you wanted. That's how I tackle writing diverse characters.

While I may not have lived through what they have, I can read books by people who have or did live through historical experiences and put myself there-feeling, experiencing. The one thing I came away with from a one day conference last year on writing diversity was the comment, "All feelings are universal." By putting myself in the character and writing the emotions I feel, I hope I am capturing them well enough to show the reader not only the character but how they would respond given their upbringing.

But I know I can't rely on reading and my own emotions. I also have used "Sensitivity Readers" when I'm dealing with another culture. These are people of the culture or religion I write about that I don't know. They read my rough draft and give me tips on how to make the characters more authentic. They are a huge help.

As I said before, when I wrote my first book I had a wheelchair bound character, which I knew little about. Having had an elderly blind relative stay with us several summers, I watched her and listened to her complaints about being blind and then I wrote not only one hero, but two, who were blind. I felt, through her, I understood enough about being blind that I could portray a character with that disability.

I have several African American characters in my books. Some are historical and some are contemporary. While these are secondary characters and I used book research for the historical books and just my interactions with friends of that race, I am using a sensitivity reader for my current work in progress that has an African American heroine. I want to make sure, because she is a main character and I have to get into her internal thoughts that I make sure, I do it correctly.

My Spirit Trilogy that has 80% Native American characters, both main and secondary, I read a lot on the history and how they lived and personal accounts by some of the warriors and chiefs. Then I contacted a woman and a man of the same tribe and asked them questions to better portray the tribe and the people. While I had one person being rude when I was on a blog tour, I had the council for the tribe tell me they knew about my books and that they were a good portrayal.

Now, I have two Mystery series. One with a half Native American main character and a full Native American character in the other. I also have a friend who is married to a Native American and lives on a reservation who is my sensitivity reader. She helps me keep my characters real to the life that is on the reservation even though my characters only visit. And she helps me keep my characters grounded in their heritage.

I believe that while I would love to read more books written by writers of diversity, that those of us who don't make our books "white" should do all we can to make sure the characters we portray who are not like us, should be given more research to make sure we are giving an accurate accounting of their life.

I spent two years as the assistant to Myrlie Evers Williams. She is an African American who had gone through a lot of tragedy in her life , including the murder of her first husband in the South in the 60s to become the Chairwoman of the NAACP. We'd sit and talk nearly every day before I'd start working. One day we were talking about something that was happening in the news. She had told me some stories that many didn't know about political people she'd met. She shook her head and said, "There are good and bad people in all races."

I agree with this statement and that is why you will find good and bad people of all cultures in my books whether they are historical or contemporary, romance or mystery.

Paty Jager is an award-winning author of 37 novels, 6 novellas, and numerous anthologies of murder mystery and western romance. All her work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters. Paty and her husband raise alfalfa hay in rural eastern Oregon. Riding horses and battling rattlesnakes, she not only writes the western lifestyle, she lives it.

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A Life- Changing Event In A Galaxy Far, Far Away... #StarWars #scifi

Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of scifi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions. I had to think long and hard about this post. I'm a believer in alternative timelines and parallel universes, that every decision we make in life - even the small ones - changes the path we take while another version of ourselves is sent down another track. So for me, even a minor decision can be potentially momentous, creating multiple alternative possibilities in time and space, and a concept I've used in my time travel series.

But before I get too sucked in by the theory of alternative universes... I think most people have a least one significant and life changing experience. Not long ago I wrote about my near death experience, so I didn't want to go over that one again - it was terrifying but surprisingly didn't prompt any big changes in my life other than relief that I survived it. My marriage, the death of my mother when I was 19, the birth of each of my children - all have had an impact, and probably the most major.
But I've decided I want to talk about something that changed my life as an author and led me to write what I write. It might seem somewhat frivolous to some, but for the the eight year old me it was transformational.

The opening to Star Wars: A New Hope when it was first shown on TV. I'd never seen it. Never heard of it. With Christmas coming up it was a special premier in the days when you had to wait years for films to reach TV, and videos were still an expensive luxury. That explosion of music, the novel scrawl of a written prologue, then a tiny spaceship pursued by one that swamped the screen with weapons blazing...I'd never seen anything like it before. I was instantly transfixed.
Despite being a life long Whovian (my parents were fans, and I can remember the first episode I ever saw - Planet of the Spiders - when I was just three years old), until that point I had been writing fantasy. I was still in love with the elves of Tolkien, young Garion of the Belgariad saga by David Eddings, and the magic of the Shannara trilogy. Spaceships came a poor second to unicorns, and blasters to swords and magic stones.
Until the day I saw that opening. Everything changed. It was like being able to step into one of those alternative universes, where there were still knights but they wielded mind powers instead of magic and lightsabers instead of metal swords. I. Was. Hooked. I was also deeply in love with the main character - Luke Skywalker - a crush that is still with me to this day (though maybe not quite so deeply, lol). I wanted to be a Jedi, wield a lightsaber, convince my parents that it wasn't bedtime yet with my mind powers, and zoom around a galaxy far, far away in my very own X-Wing.

That passion has never left me. I switched from writing fantasy to a version of Star Wars, then onto space opera and scifi of my own. Though many years later I went back to my Whovian roots and wrote a time travel romance that became my debut publication, the thrill from that first view of Star Wars has never left me. I felt it again when I saw The Force Awakens at the cinema this Christmas just past - almost thirty six years to the day after seeing it the first time - with Disney staying loyal to the fanship by retaining the films iconic opening. Even thinking about the music and the script crawling up the screen can set me bouncing in my seat. It was the same excitement I felt when I was lucky enough to attend the three day Star Wars Celebration Europe in London less than a month ago, and where I got to see my childhood crush in person (even if I didn't get close enough for a photo).

Right now I'm reworking what I call my Star Wars story - Gethyon - having got the rights back so that I can re-release it in September. While it has elements from my time travel series to which it's connected, this is the one most loyal to my love of Star Wars: a young man who feels out of place in the universe, struggling to manage the powers he discovers and to face his responsibilities instead of running away. I can't wait to put it back out!
Somewhere out there may be an eight year old me who didn't get to see that film and have her life changed forever. I'm just glad that one isn't me!
Want to chat? Find me on Twitter as @pippajaygreen where I'll talk all things geek, books and chooks (and other things beside).

Guest Post - Writing to the Future #scifi #futuristic #dystopian #romance

Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of scifi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions. But my preference is definitely for science fiction, whether it be set in the future, on an alternative timeline, or on an alien planet. I rarely write in the here and now, and when I do it tends to be a real place that 'might have been'.

My personal view of the future is pretty dystopian. Unfortunately real life events mean I have a rather dim and dismal view of humanity's future and that's often reflected in my books. Even the ones where humans have ventured out and colonised other worlds, sometimes genetically or mechanically enhanced (or even fully converted to an artificial body), the Earth has usually been destroyed or fallen so far into myth no one believes in it. I'm just hoping that enough of us manage to leave the planet before its destruction.

The future fascinates me. We've made so much progress in the relatively short time human beings have existed. Things written about in SF a few decades back are now reality, and some like teleportation and invisibility shields are being tested out. My hope is to live long enough to see human beings step on the surface of Mars. But since I'm not likely to see human beings go further than that, and won't get to do it myself first hand, I explore the possibilities in my books instead, or think about what might have happened should history have taken a different tack...

In When Dark Falls I combined my love for all things Art Deco with superheroes and an alternative post apocalyptic city somewhere on Earth. Everything is diesel powered, but we have flying bikes as well as zeppelins, lots of advanced tech for the era but cast in brass, chrome and bakelite, cyborgs with body parts made from clockwork, goggles and gasmasks, and a villain one reader referred to as a 'steampunk Darth Vader'. My superheroes have been driven underground and are fighting not just for the city, but their own survival.

When Dark Falls

For most of my scifi romances, I've moved far from Earth in both distance and time. My time travel romance series has given me the opportunity to revisit another time period I enjoy - the medieval - while also jumping to alien planets and using futuristic technology. That just might have been influenced somewhat by my life long love of cult British TV series Doctor Who. 

The Redemption Series

With my series and other SFR titles I get to explore my favourite subject - science - while mixing it with fantasy, paranormal and adventure elements, the kind of things I enjoy while watching films like Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy, or other scifi series like Farscape and Star Trek (all incarnations). The research is so much fun for me: new or theoretical drives for spaceships, artificial gravity, alien ecosystems, and even things like studying frozen frogs and what happens to a body in vacuum (grim I know, but then it means I can come up with facts like, 'did you know you can survive for 90 seconds in open space provided you don't hold your breath?' Um, yeah, possibly not that helpful to the average person unless you like dazzling people with interesting and obscure facts... :P

I have cyborgs and aliens, a race of genetically engineered assassins called Inc-Su who can walk through walls and suck the life force right out of their targets, android avatars with real human minds, zombies walking the swamps of an alternative Louisiana or a utopian city of the future, the curse of immortality, asteroid miners and rebels on the run. In all my stories I live out the adventures I would have loved to take part in myself. Okay, maybe more watch from a safe distance...

But no matter how dark my vision of the future is, there is always hope. Love conquers all, even if it's just the hero's personal demons so that they can go on to save the day.

Want to chat? Find me on my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter as @pippajaygreen