Friday Five

[jimhines]

1) After spending all that time working on Red Hood’s Revenge, it’s amazing how quickly the short fiction goes.  One week from short story seed to finished first draft?  I could get used to this!  Now to go back and make the whole thing coherent and cohesive.  (Right now it’s 3700 words of themeless mess, but that’s okay.  It’ll get better.)

2) A

Comments

[greenmtnboy18]

While the character starts out "evil" and certainly has moments of being comic relief, I really love Massha from Robert Aspirin's MYTH books. Her growth as a character is lovely to watch, and I *love* that he gave her a great love interest/love story. While Skeeve is a little stunned at the man's interest, it is portrayed very natural and sincere. Massha struggles with her self image, but by and large accepts herself as a "fat broad" and really runs with it. She's funny, sweet, and becomes much more sure of herself.

Lois McMaster Bujold had an interesting overweight character in her Paladin of Souls, in the person of the priest of the Bastard (who is notably not ascetic).

Not many others pop to mind. But then, I'm not reading much fiction at the moment, and haven't for a while now.

The body type issue is big for me in novels/stories, particularly as it relates to women, because there are so many "waifs" in fiction, or women who are just in GREAT shape.

In my own writing, I try to bring it in. I just finished a story with an overweight female main character, and I write a male main character on a regular basis who constantly struggles with it, though it doesn't always make it explicitly into the story line. I don't think it always needs to be IN the story line, I just appreciate the peopling of a world with more body types than buff, slim, tiny, fit, rippling with muscles, toned, etc.

Frequently, I see authors write characters I take to be aimed at NOT being "picture perfect" attractive, and they often do so by making them underweight. Lean, skinny, underfed, slim to the point of muscle and bone, slight, etc. And yet in our society, that is often actually an attractive characteristic.