August Author News + FREE Shifter Books
Body Diversity
Recently, I decided to focus on writing main characters who are overweight or obese.
This decision has been long in coming. Like many, many others, I have had a lifelong struggle with weight, body image, and disordered eating. Yet despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of Americans are overweight or obese (according to recent surveys by the CDC), I sometimes manage to feel alone.
Back in February, Netflix released the results of a diversity audit they did on their shows. Now, let me stop here and say that I love Netflix on the grounds that they are the only streaming service that has taken audio description for the blind and visually impaired seriously; they were the leaders in ensuring all new content contained audio descriptions and they continue to work to add descriptions to old content, including adding it to movies and TV shows that they themselves did not create. For this reason, Netflix has won my strong loyalty. The same culture that inspired them to make me feel more welcome at Netflix than at any other network inspired them to take a hard look at their overall inclusion scores, where they found they needed to do more to represent several different groups, most especially people with disabilities which apparently make up 27% of the population. Despite counting myself among this group, I had no idea, and no wonder – there just aren’t that many on screen, especially in prominent roles.
Yet as I struggled to reconcile my own reality against this audit, one thing was painfully clear to me: They didn’t even try to look into body diversity. It wasn’t something they asked themselves.
Around the same time, I started listening to a new podcast called Maintenance Phase, which attempts to debunk the junk science overwhelming the health and wellness industry and how this impacts our culture. One of the two co-hosts, Aubrey Gordon, your “fat friend” on the internet, also wrote a book in which she points out, among many other things, the starkness of fat representations in popular culture.
This observation hit me where it hurt most – right in the muse. The truth is, I’ve often wanted to write larger characters but have been shy about doing so do to early (and bad) writing advice suggesting my readers would not sympathize with such characters. There’s a lot to unpack in that bad advice, which I’ll leave in your capable hands, but the bottom line is a lifetime of insecurities had me all-too willing to hear it.
I did proudly write a beautiful, insecure overweight main character in Madison’s Song, one of my own personal favorites. Now, I plan to carry that pride forward into any new material I produce. Because if we’re serious about showing people as they are, then we need to show them in all different shapes and sizes.
Speaking of Madison's Song...
August Giveaway
This month, I’m giving away Madison’s Song as part of the Free Shifter Books promo. There are also 50 other titles available, so check it out!
Author’s Corner
Fingers crossed, but I’m hoping to finish my second draft of Knot of Souls (which finally has a title) this month. This is a new, stand-alone fantasy novel about a Fae prince on the run, accused of murder, who tries to hide inside a dying human – only to discover he’s jumped too soon and her soul is still in there. Now, they’re trying to work together to solve the murder, but the more time they spend together, the less they can be certain where each of them ends and the other begins.
I’m hoping to have this book ready to shop with agents by the end of the year, after one more round of critique and one last round of deep, sentence-level revision.
Featured Review
This month, I’m featuring a short-and-sweet review of Stolen Dreams, the fourth book in the Cassie Scot Series (the one that concludes the main plotlines).
“This series in2 days. Cassie had to go a long way for her happy, but it’s all worth it in the end.”
Love it! Thank you to everyone who takes the time to review my books, whether you like to explore your thoughts through many paragraphs or a few short words.
Best,
Christine
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