Courting, budding love. Romance seems to have been (ever more flowfully) drained from my being this last few years. I can't feel I'm writing it right when I'm faking it.
It's not really a topic, but I can't write mystery (even as a sub-plot) for love or money. My brain absolutely cannot figure out how to reverse-engineer any type of whodunit.
Budding [anything] I guess is when signs of potential or promise are just coming into view/being experienced and one would expect a flourish thereafter.
I struggle with any topic that has racial/ethnic implications (like writing fiction about the situation experienced by indigenous people in the 19th century American and Canadian west) because I'm so afraid of getting things wrong. The last thing I want to do is perpetrate any misconceptions or reinforce stereotypes or whitewash what settlers and the military arm of the US/Canadian governments did to the Indian population of that time. It's one of those topics where the more I learn, the more I realise I don't know anything much at all. It doesn't mean I totally avoid the issue (I can't), but I'm always nervous about it. On the one hand, there is what we know now. On the other hand, I can't ignore what people who lived in that era on both sides of the racial divide would have believed. If I write true to certain portions of my fictional population, then I have to accept that they may not have been as enlightened as we are now. It's difficult to get the tone right.
This is incorrect! Dance Of The Cybergoth and The Magical Anna spring to mind. Short stories do count! It's a slippery slope from humility to pessimism.
