"Do you have an Asian fetish?" and other silly questions.

Someone who just started reading Suki With A Twist: Part One asked me if I had an "Asian fetish". I hadn't heard that one in a while. However I have written extensively about how we developed the character. I guess it's time to cover it again and I am doing this without looking back at what I wrote over one year ago, when Suki I, the first story in the first series, was published.

So, the way the process went, I wanted my female character to be heroic and exotic.  I prefer women with dark hair and eyes, especially fond of long straight hair. I also like taller women. Advanced intelligence is great, so I wanted her to be well educated and have decent common sense too. That was the baseline I began working from, for the first series.

When I started describing the character to Danielle, who jumped into the roles of beta reader and editor, she killed the idea of her being 6' tall.  The rest of the character development was done by me and my blog partner who uses the Suki handle in association with the books. We settled on 5' 6", 110-120, fit, dark eyes, straight dark hair to butt.

Next item was education. She needed to be smart and Sci-Fi readers love well educated women (as I do) so we began at the end, PhD from MIT in Robotics. To avoid technology errors in my story spinning, she was to stay in theoretical research for corporations and academic institutions.  Working back from that, Bionics sounded like a good story match and I found a top institution in Tokyo for that, the Tokyo University of Technology.  For her BS, I was thinking Chemistry, but Suki (character developer) overruled me. She had already committed to partner in the project and Chemistry was too close to her background for her comfort. Mathematics became the replacement.  Note: in the Suki With A Twist series I take all of this education away from her and her work is much different.

Another item was her cultural background. I like a Southeastern USA accent and my character developer is from the Richmond, Virginia area. We made her from that area and I had someone right there on the team to help with location specific details if needed as the series progressed. To go along with her intelligence, we gave her some good hobbies. Archery, wood carving, etc. I let my character developer pick her language list, which is pretty much the ones she wanted to learn but never did.

Before we decided on her parents (if they were still alive, their backgrounds, etc.) we had to pick a race. With long dark hair and dark eyes, her lineage could be from almost anywhere. A Google Images search for those traits came up overwhelmingly with images of East Asian women. Suki would be East Asian.

In order to direct the reader to the specific features, I did a little more research and decided a combination of Vietnamese, Thai and Korean would work. So we made her father Vietnamese, her mother Thai and Korean. My development partner did not want the character to be an orphan, or adopted. She really wanted Suki to know her parents, so I named the mother Jung and did a full character bio on her too. One thing for some of the behavior problems I gave the character, they commonly stem from a pre-puberty traumatic event. So Suki's father died in a commercial airliner crash in the Pacific when Suki was around ten years old.

Forgot if the Suki name was in my head to begin with or if I picked it after we had her fully described, but it is a name I have liked for decades. It is common throughout Eastern Asia and in the UK. Contrary to the people who launch into the Japanese legend of the same name, hers has nothing to do with Japan.  In the story, she gets it because her mother liked it when she was a girl in Thailand. In the later books, it is revealed that Jung wanted her daughter to be mononameonic and had to argue with the hospital staff over her naming.

Most of the above is true for the second series, other than where I noted her education.  One of the complaints from women was that the male lead was not "heroic enough" and Suki needed to be "dirtier".  When Avatar came out I got a good laugh at those folks from the way Neytiri saves Jake six times before he saves Pandora. Anyway, for the new series, I changed Suki to a very intelligent high school graduate, knowledgeable on current events, self educated in multiple languages and an incredibly talented full-service professional party companion.

As if this was not long enough already, I had a bit of tedium from someone who bought one of the books on Kindle. Numerous times, he has insisted that Suki is a real person. If she is and if there is someone out there just like the character that at least three people had a hand in making up, I have never met her. No introduction necessary, because the character's behavior is nothing like anything I want to put up with. Next, he insists that Suki is my "dream girl". I think I just covered that.

Lately, he mentioned having problems reading it because he thinks he is invading my fantasies. I really do not understand that one (even spelled the word f i c t i o n for him) and the objective is to have interesting scenes. The couple's scenes get much more interesting than I want to experience. For example, if anybody thinks I would want a woman I was dating to be kidnapped in my own home by her female ex-lover, drugged and raped by her and forced into a lesbian marriage to have her wealth stolen from her, they are nuts. Seek therapy. The cars? I love those, I love describing them and I have not owned a single one that appear in my stories. Would I take one? Certainly, the whole fleet, even the Polara limo!

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Suki Background Suki Series Tech Order the paperback edition of Suki V: The Collection Browse the series on Google: Suki I, Suki II, Suki III, Suki IV, Suki V Fan Fiction: John and Suki: Vacation Fun



John and Suki's news and comment area, from a Libertarian perspective.
Copyright 2009, 2010, SJE Enterprises, all rights reserved.

Random Babble

If you have been following me on Twitter @JohnTagliaferro this might be a rehash.

I can forgive readers who might think my fiction is reality in disguise.  Fiction writers who say that annoy me Grow an imagination. - John Tagliaferro

I can't say the above enough. I try not to get frustrated with other writers, but the ones who think fiction can't consist of a made-up story are relentless.  It is as if they can't imagine making up a character out of features that make them likable or awful without them being based on a real person from your life.  It is pretty easy really.  Real-life Suki (not her real name either) and I created fiction Suki from the idea of an attractive woman with dark hair and dark eyes.  All we started with.  Yep, we both know women like that, even some who have not always been women.  Cloning a real person from our history was never even a thought.
 
Next step, I wrote out a list of other features.  High education, tall, lean, athletic, brilliant, exotic.  At first, she was going to appear sweet but she and her mother were really high-tech grifters.  In the next round of changes, Suki and I think Danielle talked me out of a 6' tall hot chick.  Just because I like that does not mean anybody else will.  The character became 5' 6" long dark hair, dark brown eyes (or "coal black") and a few other details.
 
If she is highly educated she had to go to school somewhere.  It is in the future so people are getting Masters and Doctorates like they get BA degrees today, so that had to be unique.  Geek guy mind to the rescue.  Sci-fi readers and watchers, like me, are suckers for the hot brainy girl in the lab, we love gadgetry and technology.  The character got her Mathematics degree from the University of Virginia, Bionics masters at the Tokyo University of Technology and PhD in Robotics from MIT.  I had to look up where a Masters in Bionics was offered and TUT was the first one I found.  Made for a good location if I continued the series and needed some exotic history for her too.
 
While outlining the first story, the mother/daughter grifter team just wasn't working for me, so that got modified, I also realized that the character needed parents, but we had not yet decided on her race.  Dark hair and eyes are the most common combination on earth, so I used Google Images to see what was most popular.  Asian, hands down, are the most popular female images that come up with that search.  Keeps with the exotic looks requirement for the character too.  We fleshed out other details, like a knack for linguistics, hobbies, other skills.  I stuck with things that I am at least conversant on, after having to look up so many other things for her.
 
If you have noticed my not using the character name for a few paragraphs, that is because her race and name were decided last.  I met a waitress with that name in the 1980s, who does not resemble Suki at all.  Neither do my character development collaborators.  So, I was almost ready to write, but I did not have a back story for her.  Real-life Suki came to the rescue on Google Maps, making a map of where her parents and other relatives might be from, where John is from, etc.  I tweaked a few things and Suki became a small-town girl from outside Richmond, VA.  Daughter of a now deceased South Vietnam fighter pilot and Thai/Korean mother who waited until late in life to have a child after they moved to Virginia.
 
Actual work time on this was just a few hours stretched over weeks, including changes.  I was working on the other characters at the same time.  John is not "me" at all, but he does have a background that I can write about.  Suki and John needed some friends, so I made up a few for them.  They were easier, since they are not as prominent, I found the farther I got away from the main characters the more I could stretch out into fields I was not as conversant in.  Suki's best friends are a CPA and a Secretary.  John's is a Security Manager, former Marine.  John's character was always going to be a nice guy, much nicer than me, so I only had to do some minor revisions when Danielle and Suki read his description to make him more attractive to readers.
 
With the characters set and an ever changing plot in my head, I put the first outline aside.  It had some good ideas in it, so I didn't get rid of it.  I think I had read a few things about romances and erotica that I needed to do.  The readers need to know why the characters are attracted to each other.  There has to be a threat to them getting together, can't be a "slam dunk."  Threats to the relationship have to appear and they need to triumph over them.  So, Suki and Jung, her mother, became good people.  Suki wasn't always good, she has a pretty bad past, in spite of having a great mother.  No, I don't know the people you know like that, lol, they are all over the place.  Actually, I made them becoming such a high hurdle that I felt like I was cheating giving Jung and Suki hypnosis powers.  Then I ran into enough people who think it works (I am not convinced) and like it in fantasy stories that I didn't feel so bad.  It became something fun to work with, along with the future drugs and appliances I was making up as the series progressed.
 
The bondage theme is a remnant from the original outline.  I didn't think anybody wanted to read about a plain vanilla romance.  They are both down to earth, incredibly successful in different fields, deeply interested in each other, and far from perfect.  I know a little about that scene, but still needed to research a few details.
 
With a decent new outline in hand, I began writing, without stopping, for a few weeks.  At 90,000 words I was more than double my target length.  I should have divided it into three books, but I didn't.  I did decide to make it a series and used what I learned for the rest.  An afterthought, John was supposed to be successful and nice, but that was to set him up to be the victim of Suki and Jung in a much racier story.  Nobody has said he was too nice for this.  Happy accident.
 
Part of my decision on making an alternate future Suki series was feedback on the first one.  Other authors use time travel as a tool in their stories.  I use it to write the story I should have begun with.
  Suki Series Background Suki Series Tech Order the paperback edition of Suki V: The Collection Browse the series on Google: Suki I, Suki II, Suki III, Suki IV, Suki V Fan Fiction: John and Suki: Vacation Fun
John and Suki's news and comment area, from a Libertarian perspective.
Copyright 2009, 2010, SJE Enterprises, all rights reserved.