1. People (and not just soldiers) who died unceremoniously of the flu and other diseases during wartime, because I’ve yet to see a soldier come home to his beloved only to find her dead and gone.
The Army and Navy medical services may have tamed typhoid and typhus, but more American soldiers, sailors, and Marines would succumb to influenza and pneumonia than would die on the industrialized battlefields of the Great War.
- ncbi
2. Kids who love reading AND sports, who are actually pretty well understood by their parents and friends, because reading isn’t actually all that weird and nerdy.
3. Characters who do manual labour not as a temporary redemptive situation, but all their dogdam days, because life is unfair like that, and someone right now is out there doing it.
4. People who use a public bathroom without being bullied, abused or otherwise traumatized by the experience. (Though I suppose uneventful visits to the toilet can be justifiably edited out.)
5. Working mothers and Female Antiheroes
6. This:
7. Capable older women as protagonists in crime fiction:
Despite women being the largest consumers of the genre and, judging by their presence at events, a loyal fanbase, they seem to stop being of interest to crime writers once they’re too old to make a pretty victim or a – eugh – feisty investigator. They become hard faced senior coppers, the murdered teenager’s saggy mother, and when they’re pushed into background roles, there and gone in a couple of paragraphs, the language can get distinctly Medieval; do the words ‘hag’ and ‘crone’ really still have a place in contemporary fiction? Turns out they do. See also; housecoats and blue rinses.
It’s common complaint that as you age you become invisible and right now that is the only way fiction is chiming with real life. But when I look at women of my mother’s generation I see a lot of highly capable professionals, well put together and worldly; children of the sixties who broke free from the constraints their own mothers were bound by.
These are women we should be writing about.
- from Do Some Damage
And here’s a rundown of older woman protagonist stereotypes with which we are mighty familiar, from Bad Reputation.
8. What can happen to women even after a ‘natural’ birth? These stories need to be told conversationally.
9. Manic pixie dream boys, who rush in to start a relationship with a complicated older (preferably black) woman.
10. Black women in science fiction
11. Where are the stories about genuine female friendships, in all its different forms? (If you follow the link you’ll see I came across some.)
