It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! Every first Wednesday of the month we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to come up with solutions.
The IWSG question for this month: Other than the obvious holiday traditions, have you ever included any personal or family traditions/customs in your stories? At first I had a hard time answering this one because I’ve written so many stories involving different cultures and their customs that I couldn’t think of any specific ones. Maybe I had just taken for granted all those customs and traditions being reflected in my fiction that I just didn’t recognize them as such. However, I do recall two stories where customs and traditions are more emphasised.
“The Assassin”, my atompunk short story, has a race of humanoid aliens whose customs conflict with those of a retrofuture Earth. One of these beings is in in a kind of digital “cryogenic freese”, meaning she is stored as mere information in a database and so is unconscious, which is considered by Earth society as “non-existent”. This character comes from a culture where care for one’s family takes precedence over paying one’s own debts. Unfortunately, this custom is what caused this character to be put in her “non-existent” state.
Another story of mine called “Planet of the Dead”, from my collection “The Fool’s Illusion”, involves the heated conflict over the relocating of corpses from an overpopulated Earth to a cemetery colony planet. The conflict calls into question whether or not the relocation is a violation of post-mortem customs for certain people and cultures, in this story particularly the Mexican culture. Hence, the story has a Day of the Dead theme (although the story is not necessarily a seasonal one).
Do any of your stories have personal or family customs based on a character’s culture that is distinguishable from most known customs or traditions?
Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts: Jacqui Murray, Lisa Buie-Collard, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, and Shannon Lawrence! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels!
Until next time . . .
Planet of the Dead sounds interesting. Thinking of the movie Poltergeist - do you move the bodies or only the headstones? Or any of it?
ReplyDeleteRight. Only in this one the bodies are moved and some people aren't too happy about that, maybe even including the corpses.
ReplyDeleteThose are some really creative customs. I remember reading a story 40 years ago where the ones who were cryogenically frozen were being revived only during that time, aliens inhabited their bodies.
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