The thing about writing minority characters is that i never feel like I’m good enough as a writer or a person to do them justice, even when they are my own minorities.

You fuck up writing a white straight man? Make them too stereotyped or too weird? Make them too perfect or too broken? Nobody is going to fucking care. It’s all good. It’s one individual in a parade of other white straight men.

When you write a minority character though, they end up pretty much representing every single person in that minority. They end up being viewed as your personal opinion of that minority. They end up being analysed and critiqued and judged for *being* that minority, rather than being just a character you wrote.

And so I have queer characters and trans characters and non-western characters and female characters and disabled characters and i love them all, and i write them because i love them and because diving into their worlds is so much more interesting to me than diving into the worlds of straight white men, but i don’t dare publish. I don’t date show people. What if i didn’t do them justice? What if i offend them? What if i got it wrong? It’s not like they can just put it down, shrug and move on to all the other fiction doing a better job at representing them than i do….

And there's a chance at more representation... Gone.