Real Life Diagnostics is a weekly column that studies a snippet of a work in progress for specific issues. Readers are encouraged to send in work with questions, and I diagnose it on the site. It’s part critique, part example, and designed to help the submitter as well as anyone else having a similar problem.
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Submissions currently in the queue: Four
Please Note: As of today, RLD slots are booked through October 7.
This week’s questions:
I'm trying to do two things here: first, establish the setting where the characters are and the setting where they recently were—it's a portal fantasy, you see. Am I establishing the settings and genre coherently and as intended?
Second, and this is the one I'm more worried about, is establish pronouns. As my fantasyland's three big gender categories do not map well to the modern USA's two big gender categories, I want to use the fantasyland pronoun sets for the protagonists and the fantasyland characters. (People who have never been to the fantasyland will still use whichever English pronoun set as appropriate.) What am I conveying about the protagonists' respective genders in this scene, or am I just confusing my audience? Further, with the a/tas/tan set, there's potential confusion between 'a' the fantasyland pronoun and 'a' the English article. Do I need to adjust that pronoun set to eliminate the confusion, or does context make things sufficiently clear? ("tas" rhymes with "mass", "tēn" rhymes with "main".)
Market/Genre: Fantasy
On to the diagnosis…
