Being A Black Paranormal Demon Writer In A Color Struck World

Hello my lovelies!  Happy Saturday, January 19, 2013 to you!  Only 339 days until Christmas so get your shopping done early!

There are some things you’re going to notice about me straight from the gate.  One, I’m black.  For real…glance over to the right…go on – it’s okay.  See that pretty Nubian Goddess?  That’s me…at 47 years old on Planet Earth and not a wrinkle on ole girl!  You know what they say – black don’t crack!  LOL! 

Two, I’m a Paranormal Demon writer.  What exactly is that?  Well, I’ve had to define it because the genre really doesn’t exist.  You see, I’m a former fan fiction writer who wrote Sesshomaru/Kagome fan fiction in the Inuyasha Fan Fiction as an Alternate Universe writer.  Alternate Universe is taking the characters from a particular canon universe and altering them or the scenes.  In other words, in the Manga and Anime, Inuyasha and Kagome are married.  In my world, I’ve paired her with his brother Sesshomaru because I read a story by a writer named ‘Trouble_in_Shangri La’ who paired them up and it just rocked my world.  I’ve never looked back. 

Finally, I’m going against known type in the writing game by not picking a genre and assimilating to it because I honestly think that my world can stand on its merits; hence, the genre “Paranormal Demon.”  I’ve written across the spectrum as far as this is concerned; romance, action/adventure, mystery, and western.  Yep…I even pulled a django western out of my hat.  I'm still writing that one though.  I think most writers look down on fan fiction writers because we use characters from another writer’s universe and incorporate our own twist into it but shit, let me tell you – it took me two years to write my biggest story so I aint tryna hear somebody tell me I aint a for real writer!

  

Some fan fiction writers have decided to go “mainstream” and change their characters from demons to human but I’m not going to do that.  I’ll take this as far as I can and see what happens because I think there’s a market for it.  So far, I haven’t had a bite on the ole query line but I’m in the early stages of the game and have chosen to learn as much as I can to be more business savvy in regards to protecting my rights.  Oh I still send query letters out but I temper it with joining sites and befriending people who might aid me in my journey to become a published writer and I've really learned a lot.

I know there are plenty of black paranormal and science fiction writers out there but for some strange reason some have been pigeonholed to the “black” or “African American” section of the bookshelf and I really hate that.  It’s disrespectful and implies that only black readers would be interested in what a black writer has to say.  The unfortunate thing about this is readers of any genre tend to miss out on something very special because it doesn’t occur to them to wander over to the “black” section to see what’s there. 

E.L. Harris published “Fifty Shades of Grey” and while I don’t playa hate on her success (when I grow up I wanna be just like her - shit, make that money, honey!), Zane has been knocking the bottom out of this type of erotica for a lifetime and a half and you don’t see her success mainstreamed, unless you go to Cinemax and watch Zane’s Chronicles.  But then again, not everybody has Cinemax and it comes on at 1:30am.  Until a year ago, I had never heard of Octavia Estelle Butler, a black science fiction writer who passed away in 2006 without having any of her fine works adapted to the silver screen.  One of my closest friends, Liane Moonraven, wrote two fabulous books, “The Broken Sword,” which is a retelling of the King Arthur story, and “The Ravens,” a journey into bullying with a vampire twist to it.  Another friend, Cheris Hodges, writes black romance novels but there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream market for them unless you make the coupling an interracial one or you make the woman a cougar and the man is some eager 21 year old hunk in tight pants and rippling muscles who likes older women.  I think it’s a shame that many black writers are relegated to the shelf in the back of the store and are virtually ignored by the mainstream.  I wish Spike Lee would quit complaining about that Tarantino movie and pick up one of these fine books and adapt it. 

But that’s just me.

As for me, not only do I plan on keeping my demons as demons, but I plan to cross the color rainbow.  If I’m writing about Japanese demons, the characters will remain Japanese. If I’m writing about Norwegian demons, they’ll be eating lutefisk.  Why am I able to do that if I’m black?  It’s called “research,” baby.  At first I thought to use a pseudonym to write under; Angela Saxton, Vanity Moreau and James Pearcy were among them.  At the end of the day, I want my mother to look at my book and say, “that’s my baby!” and not have to explain who the hell “Torrance Hartley” is. 

Hey – don’t pick up “Vanity Moreau.”  I might use that one day.

I never started out as wanting to publish anything.  I write because I love it.  After a hectic day at work and walking through that gauntlet of hellish existence otherwise known as co-worker central, I want to sit back and relax to the groovy vibes of having my characters do the funky monkey and have bare butt nekkid sex in various positions in various parts of the world.  You know, it’s not even so much as that.  I enjoy the release in creating various scenarios and adventures for my characters.  I think it’s true that most writers are writing what they’d like to experience or how they see their lives.  I decided to publish after Liane approached me about my writing and I sent her my story, originally entitled “Utopia,” and she felt it was good enough to publish so here I am.  I yanked the rest of my stories down, not because I wanted to publish them all but because they were getting flamed by amateur internet anal porn stars who had nothing better to do and after warning them that I would delete everything, I got another flame and there went the stories. 

I couldn’t use the name “Utopia” because it was written by Sir Thomas More back in the 1500’s and is still in popular print.  He actually coined the term so I had to change mine to “Kurai" Utopia, which means “dark” in Kanji.  After much soul searching, I decided to keep the characters in the same demon subtext, hence the need to create a genre to describe it.  If I changed them to humans, then the story wouldn’t carry the same weight or the same message.  I don’t think I want to sacrifice that.  I think it would be cool if demons lived among us.

This brings me back to my original point.  I’m a black writer but I don’t want to be classified as a black writer.  Does that make sense?  I want to appeal to all groups of people but what I think will happen is if I’m lucky enough to get published, I’ll be relegated to the back shelf in the last row on the bottom of the stack in the bookstore, only to be traipsed out during the month of February.  Since outing myself as black writer, I know it’s going to be a difficult journey for me to take but I’m committed to it.  It’s that Virgo nature in me, I guess. I even wrote a synopsis, which I posted on another forum for critique and although nearly thirty people viewed it, no one responded.  I mean no one.  It was discouraging and made me feel as though it wasn’t good so I took it down and plan on rewriting it.  Would you all like to read it?  Here it is and tell me what you think:

Kurai Utopia Synopsis

An epic battle.

A defeated race. 

Lives changed forever.

Demons and humans coexisted on the Earth for thousands of years until the humans decided that the demons had to die.  The brutal battle for dominance waged across the world for nearly three hundred years, but the invention of a new style gun and chemical warfare leads to the brutal genocide of the demon race. Females, children, older demons and even infants were not spared from the mayhem. 

Memories fade, atrocities are forgotten and time surges on. 

Society grows by leaps and by the mid 21st Century, society has propelled into the future with most common diseases and cancers eradicated, colonization of the planets, free education for all, worldwide distribution of wealth and the end of wars.  With cleaner oceans, global warming under control, a better quality of life and a population of more than six billion, weapons of mass destruction were destroyed and most armies decommissioned to basic guard status.  Humankind relaxed into complacency and was at its pinnacle of its existence.

By the beginning of the 22^nd Century, the birthrate has fallen to five billion.  There is no immediate cause for concern until it was discovered that nearly 85% of the population is sterile.  The Heiwa-7 vaccine, invented by a team of Japanese chemists and doctors, seemed to restore the balance and for a generation, the population surges and humanity relaxes into complacency and enjoys peace and tranquility.

At the end of the century, however, viruses and diseases such as small pox, anthrax, typhoid, pneumonic fever, yellow fever, polio, Spanish flu, SARS, and Ebola, long thought destroyed, returned with a vengeance, wrecking havoc on billions around the world with a voracity not seen since the Black Plague of the 14^th Century.  It is soon discovered that the Heiwa-7 vaccine, once declared the “wonder cure,” had an autoimmune, self-mutating agent that all but destroyed the immune system and the vaccines of the past are rendered ineffective.   Humanity sinks into a cycle of despair and fear as high crimes such as robbery and murder run rampant around the world.

Just as the humans were about to give up on the Earth, the demon race, once thought destroyed, come out of hiding, this time nearly annihilating a weakened human race.  With the ability to fight back nearly impossible because of the dismantling of the world’s military forces and the shortage of healthy fighting men and women, the demons slaughtered nearly three billion people and with the over one million dead or weakened due to pestilence, the world leaders surrendered, begging for an end of the heinous slaughter. 

It is learned that the surviving demons from the Youkai Cleansing of 1866 had gone underground to regroup and would soon emerge and assimilate into human society, learning human weaknesses in an attempt to find a way to destroy them.  After discovering that humans gave the Native American populations blankets filled with smallpox, the demon scientists saw that they could infect the humans in a similar, more sinister way.  With the discovery of vaccines, they realized that they could created a self-mutating virus that, while not killing the humans, would eventually lower the ability to reproduce and, in larger doses, would kill the immune system altogether.  This change would not take place immediately, but over the course of two centuries until humanity was at its weakest; then the demons would rise and reclaim the earth.

Defeated, humanity surrendered to its demon overlords.  Demons and their half-demon (hanyou) brethren, bred as a military and police force, take over the planet and relegate humanity to third class citizenship.  They are unable to hold high level jobs, political office, practice religion, obtain higher education and live in human-only designated zones.  They cannot marry without permission.  Many are sterile and cannot breed without assistance from the clinics run by the Human Labor, Benevolence and Welfare Department or the HLBW.  Human women who are born fertile are sent to a sorority house from the time they are twelve until they reach the age of twenty; then they are sent to the City of Bliss on the island of Hokkaido to become breeders of the hanyou race.

Fast forward to the 26^th Century.

Lord Katashi Takumashii is the Demon Lord of the Western Japanese Protectorate, a territory encompassing Japan, Korea and China. He is a ruthless demon, having witnessed the execution of his mother and younger sister and the heartless impaling of his infant brother in 1866.  These events scar him, making him a ruthless demon incapable of mercy or empathy and will kill anyone who creates discord within his borders. 

He soon becomes privy to a plot by the Chinese demons to usurp him and take back the mainland.  Its leader, a Chinese white tiger demon named Bai Hu, takes a fancy to a human waitress and sometimes cage dancer named Hikari Shimazu who works in a nightclub owned by Tomoya Takumashii, Lord Katashi’s hanyou brother.  Hiring her to obtain information from the tiger, Katashi and Hikari are plunged into a world of mystery, murder, deception and intrigue.  Along the way, they find love in each other’s arms, which is against the guidelines that he himself set up for his utopian society.

But unbeknownst to Hikari, there’s something about her that’s capable of destroying every demon on the planet. When she discovers this after she agrees to help Katashi, how can she keep her head in the game, protect her family and save the world?  She soon discovers that her new found super being status isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be and those who claim to support her just might destroy her, just as Katashi discovers that there are more sinister players in this game and he has more to lose than just his lands.

Who is the real enemy here?

A wily cage dancer and a demon lord; thrown together by the chaotic quest for supreme domination.  Will their forbidden love overcome the laws of the land?

---

I think the base problem of it is the length, but the criteria for posting a synopsis is 1,000 words or less on that particular site.  I still think I should cut it down.  The issue I had there is not related to me being black though; my picture isn’t posted although my name could be construed as ethnic but again, I don’t think that’s the problem.  It’s too wordy. 

Anyhoo, if I passed up books because they were written by non-blacks, can you imagine the literary greats I would have missed out on?  I would have thought “The Great Gatsby” was that creepy guy who did magic tricks for children’s parties, or “East of Eden” is where the shopping district is located.  My favorite book reads as a young person were Greek and Roman mythologies and anything Judy Blume wrote.  I never asked “where all the black people at?”  I just enjoyed the storytelling, especially Greek myths.  I think this is what started my daydreams of faraway lands.  I’m not sure why I never wrote in that universe; maybe because after watching many movies and shows that took ridiculous liberties with them, it made me want to preserve them as they were.  I don’t see race when I read; I see something that entertains me, that sustains me and send my imagination on a journey.  I ask that you, as the reader, take that journey with me and see what I can show you. 

I just might blow your mind.

Peace!

nnb