Elves

Well, I hate to be so capricious (inconstant, mercurial, unstable--Google) so that you readers are unable to rely on what I say, but ... though I said that I'm unlikely to do any more writing at all, I have started a---quite unambitious---writing project!

I have recently embarked on a completely new story, unrelated to almost anything I have written before, about an African-American girl and---get this---an Elf!

Now, I have noticed that many stories, especially fantasy stories, have something in common, that is, that their chief protagonists are celebrities, or nobility, or rulers, or people otherwise with a certain degree of financial power.  Let me confess this situation in my own stories first:

Alexandra ---the queen of her country.

Helen stories ---a particularly wealthy woman, who has her own corporation, etc, and at one time was  a college professor, a movie/TV star, and a conductor.

Jane ---a somewhat wealthy girl, because of her artwork.

I have excuses.  The reason, at least in my case, for choosing occupations, or circumstances, that give these protagonists so much (financial) power is to enable them to do things that they otherwise could not do.  I myself cannot fly anywhere I want to go, or get a room in a hotel anytime I want; but I wanted my heroines to be able to do that.  But now, I'm beginning to want different things.

All my life, though, I had to be clever about how I traveled, how I saved up money to stay in a hotel, etc.  I wasn't broke, but I had to be careful about what I spent.  I used to have a car, and drove carefully, to use up the least amount of gasoline, and calculated the shortest paths between where I was, and where I wanted to go.  It was strange to write about a person who could pick up and do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

Lately I have been reading a lot of popular literature---I couldn't possibly read enough of it to be able to say that I'm familiar with the genre; there is so much of it!  But quite a lot of it deals with ordinary people, with no particular claim to power, and I found that strangely attractive.  It is important, from an educational point of view, not to represent (in fiction) that being wealthy is a normal condition, just because it isn't.  The wealthy have appropriated most of the wealth of this country, (and the world), and if we pick a person at random---and surely my readers ought to be typical citizens; I would hate to think that my audience consists of people who come from the wealthy classes exclusively---we must assume that that person must be of limited means.  And I must assume that it is annoying, or at least disconcerting, to read of a protagonist who was inexplicably wealthy.  (But this is America, and most ordinary people love to read about people who are many orders of magnitude richer than they are; for instance, that's all what Reality TV is about.  One of the stars of Reality TV even ran for president, and won.)

So my two protagonists are going to be very ordinary people, including the one who was an elf.  I must create a world where the elves have poor people among them, too.

Kay