Amazing Exchange

I was paging through Facebook and Twitter, as I do from time to time, and I came across a woman asking about characters with disabilities. I answered that the NewEarth Series has at least one disabilities described in each book, a challenge that a character, human or dragon, has to work with and she asked if I knew who wrote them. I answered that I did and gave her the link to my website. It was a bit surreal, especially when later I went back to the post and saw recommendations from other readers that recommended Tory Haden classics and self-help nonfiction books. ( I have read every Tory Haden book)

The NewEarth series is not about disability education, I certainly don’t emphasize a character’s inability over their abilities, but if one is looking carefully, one can find the issues.

I include so many types of differences in my fiction because I believe that each of our unique talents and challenges makes us who and what we are. When we scrub fictional characters of differences, I think we devalue and marginalize people who are different in our society and encourage conformity. Unfortunately, I believe striving for conformity leads to bigotry and mediocrity, and not acceptance and excellence.