Diversity in Helen

I tried to make the characters in the Helen stories as diverse a group as possible.  Not initially; at first I was subconsciously trying hard to make them diverse in appearance.  That was probably a youthful desire; I was thinking very visually.  I was very much into physical beauty, so Helen's Scandinavian appearance was offset by Janet's German heritage.

Much later, I chose to make Dr. Martha Singer a Jewish person, even if a non-religious one.  Then I made Lorna a Jewish girl as well.  The name Esposito—Lorna's family name—I had believed was Jewish.  (It isn't.)

One missed opportunity was to make either Elly Krebs or her husband (Janet's parents, and therefore Janet) Jewish.  I had made Janet's brother and sister David and Rachel already.  Elly's maiden name was Murray, and that's Scots, I believe.

Kay

P.S.:  I forgot to mention that, in later stories, a number of ethnically diverse characters are introduced. 

Elly & Tommy:  Grandma Elly was intended to have Scottish ancestry, and some Native American; Jason Kolb is described as having Mediterranean heritage, so Elly is a mutt.  Tom, the child of Grandma Elly and John Nordstrom, would be half Scottish, and half Norwegian.

Amy Salvatori: is definitely Italian.  I don't know whether the character, as I have written her, is sufficiently Italian to satisfy those who have an opinion about it!

Lalitha & Sita: these are definitely Indian.  I don't know what sort of Indians they are, because there is a huge variety of ethnicities within India itself.  They're definitely Hindus, so not from the Kashmir region, and not from the far Eastern region either!

Juliana Hoffman: is described as from the part of Germany closest to France.  Leila, an early lover of Helen's, was intended to be of an interesting European heritage, but I've forgotten!

Sophie (Cocteau?): is French.

Nadia: is Belgian.

Sirikul: is Thai.  Most of the segments including her have been cut out. 

Cindy, or Mary-Catherine O'Shaunessy: Irish.

I have no idea why I invented such a specific background for a character in my story!  It probably had to do with things I was reading at the time. 

Aeonica

I have just finished reading the first book of an epic trilogy by David Musk.

The trilogy is named Aeonica, and this first volume is called The Lost Redeemer.

There are lots of aspects of this story that I like; the main protagonist is a girl, Nahlia.  She is a library assistant.  She is a child of mixed parentage: half human (from her father's side) and half aeon (from her aeon mother).  The Aeon are sort of analogous to Elves, in conventional fantasy; they are indistinguishable from humans, for the most part, except for their eye-color.  They have some extra abilities; mostly invisible abilities.  Our girl, Nahlia discovers that firstly, she heals very fast indeed, and secondly, that she has the ability to heal others as well, merely by touching them.  She can purge poisons from their systems—and her own—by sheer effort.

She can fight; she can even turn her hands into something like flamethrowers; you have to read the story to get the details.  The details are everything!  But she isn't a born fighter; she has to force herself to fight. 

I love everything about Nahlia; all her attributes; her relationship with her mother—long dead—and her love of reading and digging into lore, are all traits that I relate to fiercely. 

But there are aspects of the story that I do not like very much.  There is war, and war, and more war; preparation for war, chases, prisoners, secrets, blackmail, racism, prejudice, tunnels, caverns; the list of fantasy elements is endless.  This sort of thing is called World-building, and Mr. Musk (no relation, I assume) builds his world with a will.  There is a high degree of consistency; it all fits together nicely.  But another thing that's endless is the list of characters.  All the people in Nahlia's home village, the people she meets on the run, the people she meets once she gets to relative safety, the numerous students and teachers in the academy to which she's sent, to train.

I just looked back at the story, to remind myself about an interesting female character, and saw again a strange phrase, which had amused me when I first saw it.  The author describes a garden as a massive garden.  Massive?  There are lots of alternatives for describing large gardens: extensive, overwhelming, vast, enormous, staggeringly incredible, and so on.  But massive doesn't work, because of how it alludes to weight, or literally mass.  A good writer often writes fast, to jump on the momentum that a new idea brings, and that speed also brings forgivable mistakes with it, especially those like the present one where 'massive' signifies just 'large', in common teen parlance.

Now, because of how long a period over which I wrote some of the longer stories of my own, I often invented characters on the fly, to move a part of the story forward.  But then, much later, I would refer to this same character, because his or her character traits fit the need of that future passage nicely, or not recycling the character would imply inventing yet another character for the same job.  So I'm guilty of the sin of character proliferation myself.  Lots of characters make for a realistic story, because most people know hundreds of people, even if they interact with just a handful of them on a regular basis.

Well, a thumb up; but I don't think I want to commit to reading the next volumes!

Kay.