Excerpt: PAPER MOON

Okay, so Kerry / @uppington talked me into growing a pair and doing this. Those who know me know I’m a little sketchy about posting stuff from WIPs here, though I don’t really worry about the random one-off snippets I do for writing exercises. For me it’s a bit strange to post something from a draft that might change completely by the time I finish and edit it. But I haven’t posted in over a week and it’s either this or a long rant from editor-Adri (who spent this morning buried in the slush pile and is too cranky after the past week to say anything helpful) about knowing your genre, so…I guess I’ll be posting a chapter from the rough draft of PAPER MOON.

It’s dystopian, YA, fantasy – not swords-and-sorcery or urban fantasy, but just a darker world. To be blunt, it’s a gender-swap story that takes place in a totalitarian future regime with strong flavors of Paris under German occupation, and it explores gender perceptions by completely swapping male and female roles with the understanding that it’s not considered strange or abnormal in their society, nor a reflection on their sexuality, but simply part of daily life. To them the roles aren’t reversed; this isn’t cross-dressing, and there’s no fetishization of the reversal.

It’s something I’m really enjoying writing, because by placing men and women in opposing gender roles without trying to justify it based on preconceived notions of masculinity and femininity, I’m discovering a lot about common gender perceptions in society and my own thoughts about them. On LJ, it sparked a really interesting discussion about how certain characters are perceived, certain assumptions made because they don’t act the way they “should” for their gender. Might be a little heavy for YA, but the classification fits with the story progression I have outlined for my 16-year-old protagonist.

But I should probably stop talking about it and let it speak for itself. So…yep. Chapter.