Writing, and the kind of stories I tell

When I first started really writing as an adult, which is about three or four years ago now, people would always ask me "what kind of writer are you?" and I really had no idea. It takes you a minute to really figure that out. I cut my teeth writing fan fiction, but that's not really something you tell people when they ask you. And that's not really a genre, in the sense that most people mean it.

Because my fan fiction always pushed the characters out of the world they were in and into another one. I explored genres: high fantasy, mystery, historical fiction, superheroes. "What kind of writer are you?" "I'm writing everything now, because I don't know yet."

What I did know was that no matter what genre I ended up settling down upon, I wanted stories that centered the kinds of folks that tended to get left out: female, POC, queer, autistic and disabled people. People who've always had stories but haven't always gotten represented.

Which led me to the realization that not only do those stories exist now, but that they always have. My geeky love of history has led me to research how many more women have been on battlefields than we had previously believed, how openly bisexual most of feudal Japanese society was, how European pirates had the most egalitarian attitudes about physical disabilities and invented the first labor contracts, and just how long black people have actually been in England (since the Romans built London, actually).

But my love for fantasy and speculative fiction never really went away. So what has come into focus is that I love a good historical fiction, but you may find here and there a sprinkle of the supernatural. And that I occasionally dabble in some rural low fantasy, if I've got the right collaborator. But no matter the time or place, the stories always try to give space those who got written out of history, or are being written out of it as we speak. No, not to get on a soapbox and talk about them, but just give them the opportunity to have the same adventures as any other heroes.

So, stick around and enjoy the brain babble.