Soul Service Inc.

From WowCondoms

(XX)
Well ... now for something completely different! CQTRose develops the Halloween theme in a hilarious spoof with a science fiction setting. The alien viewpoint is a great way to make us see our world in new ways, and offers plentiful opportunity for funny misunderstandings. 

This story obviously has so much more coming (ho ho!). Surely these great characters with their well depicted world are not going to have just one story to their names? Please let Rose and Sweetie ride again! LOL.Can they come (ho ho) back for Christmas? They are surely on my list to Santa.

There is lots of sex in this hilarious romp, and there are lots and lots of condoms, and like many of the commentators, I laughed long and loud and frequently while reading Soul Service, Inc. No no, I can't say any more, I would spoil it for you, LOL. Make sure you read the comments, or you might miss one or two of the fab puns and jokes packed into this one.

There is also good effort to include multicultural characters. Unfortunately this is an area in which I am an expert! (If you'd like my chapter on writing black and minority ethnic characters, drop me a note - seriously.) So although it's a bit heavy for this one fun little story, I am unable to resist the chance to talk about this. Please let me make clear! I'm not having a pop here at all, CQTRose has made a good fist of things. I'm just taking the opportunity to explore some difficulties of character portrayal.

Given that there is an alien viewpoint, a good way to go would be to allow the humans their normal view of people with different skin tone and have the alien puzzle about that. It actually is odd that we lay so much emphasis on people with quite small physical differences belonging to different groups. One of my students and I were recently laughing, because her set essay was about tourists who go on beach holidays and bake themselves in the sun in spite of multiple warnings about skin cancer. "So," she said incredulously. "These people are going at risk of their lives to try to get the same skin colour that I have had all my life, and which I was teased mercilessly about at school?" 

I am not sure an alien would know what chocolate was, TBH. There is a tradition of describing people with darker skin tones as food, we tend to do more of the cinnamon, coffee and chocolate than we do the milk white. White is usually just .... not described. We assume whiteness. It's not easy to write descriptions of different skin tones when readers are assuming whiteness is invisible. 

Free painting lesson here!

In my own stories, I sometimes find I've written different ethnicities so subtly that readers miss that a character is from a minority ethnic group. I enjoy working at the different conundrums of multicultural character development. Should I describe the hair as wiry? Is it really wiry or is that an assumption? Since I gave this character's skin colour as ochre, shall I describe that one as flake white?

*Snaps* to CQTRose for being inclusive and thank you for the opportunity to reflect on this topic.