One Simple Question & A Very Deep Rabbit Hole

Part Three: How Power Invented Race

If you’ve followed this series from the beginning, you already know two things that most people were never explicitly taught.

First — we are all one family. Theology and genetics arrive at identical conclusions via completely different routes. Every human being alive today traces their ancestry back to the same small population in Africa. Skin colour is evolutionary adaptation to geography. Nothing more.

Second — the power structures that came to dominate human civilisation weren’t inevitable or natural. They were built, deliberately, on the back of an agricultural revolution that created surplus, broke the social accountability of small communities, and created a vacuum that force and religion rushed to fill.

Which brings us to the darkest thread of all.

If power had already been building hierarchies for thousands of years before race entered the picture — if ancient Rome enslaved pale-skinned Britons and Germanic peoples without any racial ideology — then when exactly did skin colour become a weapon?

The answer is uncomfortably specific.

And uncomfortably recent.

The World Before Race

This is the part that genuinely surprised me when I went looking.

Race — as a systematic, codified ideology asserting the biological inferiority of dark-skinned peoples — is not ancient. It is not instinctive. It did not emerge organically from human nature.

It was constructed. By specific people. At a specific moment in history. For specific economic reasons.

Historian Nell Irvin Painter, in her landmark work The History of White People (2010), traces the origins of racial categorisation with forensic precision and arrives at a conclusion that should fundamentally change how we think about prejudice. The concept of a “white race” as a coherent, superior category didn’t exist in antiquity. The ancient Greeks and Romans categorised people by geography, culture, and citizenship — not by the colour of their skin.

Painter argues that what we understand as race today is a product of the early modern period — roughly the 1400s to 1700s — constructed to serve a very particular economic purpose.

Follow the money. It always leads there.

The Portuguese Pivot

In the mid 1400s, Portuguese maritime traders began systematically trafficking enslaved Africans. It was not the first instance of slavery in human history — not by thousands of years. But it was the beginning of something qualitatively different from anything that had come before.

Previous slavery, as historian Orlando Patterson documents in Slavery and Social Death (1982), was largely the product of conquest, debt, or criminal punishment. It crossed every ethnic and geographic line. A Roman slave might be from Britain, Germany, North Africa, or Greece. A freed slave’s children were free. The condition was terrible but it was not, in theory, permanent and inherited.

What the Portuguese slave trade needed — and what the Spanish colonial enterprise that followed required on an industrial scale — was something fundamentally different.

It needed a permanent underclass.

Not people who were enslaved because they were defeated.

People who were enslaved because of what they were.

Because if enslavement is a condition of defeat, it ends when the war ends, the debt is repaid, or freedom is granted. But if enslavement is a condition of nature — if it is written into the body, visible in the skin, ordained by God — then it is permanent. Inheritable. Self-perpetuating across generations.

Cheaper to maintain. Impossible to escape.

And there was another problem that needed solving.

The Theological Inconvenience

Europe in the 1400s was a deeply Christian civilisation. And Christianity — whatever its institutional failures — carried at its theological core the teaching that all souls were equal before God.

The Church had already, uncomfortably, banned the enslavement of fellow Christians.

So the machinery of colonial profit faced a genuine ideological obstacle. You cannot build a continent-scale slave economy on the labour of people your own religion tells you are your spiritual equals.

The solution, as historian Ibram X. Kendi documents in Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), was not to abandon the slave trade. It was to construct a theology and later a biology that placed African peoples outside the category of full humanity.

Church scholars produced tortured readings of scripture — most notoriously the so-called “Curse of Ham” from Genesis 9 — arguing that dark-skinned Africans were divinely marked for servitude. It was not, Kendi argues, a sincere theological position. It was a conclusion reached first, with justification constructed afterward to fit.

The cart before the horse. The verdict before the evidence.

And it worked. For centuries.

Science Gets Recruited

By the 1700s the ideological architecture was firmly established. But the Enlightenment created a new problem for the machinery of racial hierarchy.

Science was emerging as the new authority. Reason was replacing revelation as the dominant framework for understanding the world. If racial hierarchy was going to survive the age of reason it needed to stop relying purely on scripture.

It needed data.

And so began one of the most shameful chapters in the history of science.

Naturalist Carl Linnaeus — the father of modern biological classification — published his Systema Naturae in 1735, in which he categorised human beings into distinct racial types, assigning characteristics that were not merely physical but moral and intellectual. Europeans were described as governed by law and reason. Africans were described in terms that explicitly justified subjugation.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach coined the term “Caucasian” in 1775, constructing a racial hierarchy with Europeans at the apex. Samuel Morton spent decades in the early 1800s measuring human skulls, claiming to demonstrate scientifically that different races had different intellectual capacities. His data, as paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould forensically demonstrated in The Mismeasure of Man (1981), was riddled with unconscious bias and selective measurement — conclusions first, data adjusted to fit.

These were not fringe figures. They were the leading scientists of their era. Their work was cited in legislatures, courts, and pulpits across the Western world to justify slavery, colonialism, and later segregation.

An ideology invented in the 1400s to make the slave trade profitable had, by the 1800s, dressed itself in a laboratory coat.

The Australian Echo

Here is where the thread connects back to the conversation that started this whole series.

We noted in Part One that Australia has the highest skin cancer rates in the world — a direct biological consequence of a predominantly fair-skinned population living under UV radiation their skin was never designed for. And that Aboriginal Australians, whose ancestors evolved in this high-UV environment, were perfectly adapted to it.

What the history in this post adds to that observation is something darker.

The same racial ideology constructed in Europe to justify the Atlantic slave trade travelled directly to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. Aboriginal Australians were, within that ideological framework, categorised as among the lowest of races — a classification that was used to justify dispossession, massacres, the removal of children from families, and policies of deliberate cultural destruction that continued, in various forms, well into the twentieth century.

The science that “proved” racial hierarchy was, as Gould and others demonstrated, fraudulent from the beginning. But fraudulent science embedded in law, policy, and popular culture causes real and lasting damage long after the fraud is exposed.

Australia is still, in many respects, reckoning with that damage today.

The Thread Pulled to Its End

Stand back and look at all three parts of this series together and a single arc emerges.

Humanity began as one family — cooperative, nomadic, and by archaeological evidence remarkably equal. We carry that origin in our DNA. Every genetic analysis confirms it. Skin colour is nothing more than our ancestors’ address from 50,000 years ago.

Farming created surplus. Surplus created hierarchy. Hierarchy needed justification. Religion provided it. For thousands of years, power organised itself around conquest, class, and divine appointment — but not yet around skin colour.

Then the economics of colonial slavery created a demand for a permanent underclass. And race — the idea that dark skin signified biological inferiority — was constructed, deliberately and cynically, to fill that demand. First by theologians. Then by scientists. Then embedded so deeply into law, culture, and education that it began to feel like nature rather than invention.

It was never nature. It was always a business decision.

Why This Matters Now

None of this is ancient history in any meaningful sense. The racial classifications constructed in the 1400s and 1500s were embedded in Australian law within living memory. The fraudulent science used to justify them was being taught in universities well into the twentieth century.

Ideas have long half-lives. Especially ideas that serve the interests of people with the power to keep them circulating.

But here is the genuinely hopeful thread running through all of this.

If race was constructed, it can be deconstructed. If the hierarchy was invented, it can be uninvented. If the story was written by people with economic motives, it can be rewritten by people with the full weight of genetics, archaeology, and honest history behind them.

We are one family.

The evidence was always there. We just needed to follow it.

One Simple Question & A Very Deep Rabbit Hole

Part Two: How Wanderlust Became Conquest

If you read the first post in this series, you’ll know it ended with a quietly unsettling conclusion — that humanity is one family that simply forgot it was related. Science, theology and genetics all point in the same direction. We started together. One ancestor. One origin.

So how did we get from there to here?

How did a species that began as small, cooperative, nomadic bands of extended family end up building empires, drawing borders, and constructing elaborate justifications for why some humans were worth more than others?

I went looking for the answer. As usual, the rabbit hole was deeper than expected.

It started with a grain pit.

The World Before Ownership

For approximately 95% of human history — we’re talking roughly 290,000 years out of our 300,000 year existence as a species — humans lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in small bands of around 20 to 50 people.

And here’s what’s remarkable about that way of life when you examine it closely.

Nobody really owned anything.

Not because early humans were philosophically opposed to ownership. Simply because ownership had no practical application. You cannot own land you’re constantly leaving. You cannot hoard food that spoils in three days. You carry only what you need and you move with the seasons.

Leadership existed, but it looked nothing like what we’d recognise today. The best hunter led the hunt. The wisest elder navigated disputes. Authority was earned, temporary, and specific. The best hunter had no particular say over where the group camped. The wisest elder didn’t control the food supply.

Power was distributed because concentration of power had no mechanism to exist.

Then, approximately 12,000 years ago, in the region we now call the Fertile Crescent — modern day Iraq, Syria and Turkey — something shifted that changed the entire trajectory of human civilisation.

We started farming.

The Grain Pit Changes Everything

The implications of agriculture are so enormous and so far-reaching that it’s genuinely difficult to overstate them.

Farming created something humanity had never experienced before — surplus. Food you didn’t immediately eat. Wealth you could accumulate, store, and build upon. For the first time in human history, it was possible to have more than you needed.

And the moment surplus existed, three questions emerged simultaneously that our species had never needed to answer before: Whose is it? Who protects it? And why them?

Those three questions — ownership, protection, and justification — are the architectural blueprint of every power structure humanity has built since.

Here’s what archaeology tells us though, and this part genuinely surprised me.

The earliest farming settlements weren’t immediately hierarchical. One of the world’s first known towns, Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey, dating to around 7500 BC, shows remarkably equal sized dwellings in its ruins. No grand palace dominating smaller structures. No elaborate royal tombs towering over simple graves. The burial sites suggest broadly similar social status across the population.

Equality, it turns out, appears to have been the human default setting.

So what tipped it?

The Problem of Scale

Small communities self-regulate beautifully. When you live among 30 people you’ve known your entire life, social pressure is extraordinarily effective. Your reputation is everything. Cheating, hoarding, or grabbing more than your share has immediate and visible social consequences. Everyone sees. Everyone remembers.

But surplus attracts people. Successful farming settlements grew. And as they grew, something subtle but catastrophic happened to the social fabric.

You started living among strangers.

The intimate accountability of the small band dissolved. And into that vacuum — that space where social pressure no longer worked because nobody knew everybody anymore — stepped something entirely new.

Institutionalised authority. The first chiefs. The first priests. The first soldiers.

And with them, for the first time in human history, the urgent need to answer that third and most dangerous question …

Why should WE be in charge and not YOU?

The Original Protection Racket

This is the part of the history that makes you sit back in your chair.

When archaeologists and historians trace the emergence of the earliest states and kingdoms, a pattern repeats itself across cultures so consistently it can’t be coincidence.

The earliest rulers essentially presented surrounding farming communities with an unspoken proposition.

“You have something valuable. Others will come for it. We will protect you — for a price.”

Which sounds reasonable until you examine who the threat actually was.

In many cases, the people offering protection were the threat. Or were indistinguishable from it. Pay tribute to the warlord who protects you from other warlords — who are running identical operations in the next valley.

Political scientists have a term for this dynamic. They call it a protection racket. The rest of us might recognise it from organised crime narratives. The structure is identical because the underlying logic is identical.

Create or amplify the threat. Position yourself as the solution. Extract payment indefinitely.

But here’s where it gets genuinely clever.

Pure force is expensive and unstable. You need a lot of soldiers. Those soldiers need paying. They develop their own loyalties and ambitions. Empires built on naked power alone tend to collapse relatively quickly because someone stronger always eventually comes along.

The really durable power structures needed something more than force.

They needed a story.

When God Joined the Payroll

Every major early civilisation independently arrived at the same masterstroke.

The ruler wasn’t just the strongest man in the valley. He was divinely appointed. God’s chosen representative on earth. The Pharaoh wasn’t merely a king — he was a god in human form. The Emperor of China ruled under the Mandate of Heaven. European monarchs ruled by Divine Right.

The genius of this move is almost elegant in its cynicism.

Because if the ruler’s authority comes from God, then questioning that authority isn’t just dangerous — it’s blasphemous. You’re not disagreeing with a man. You’re arguing with the divine order of the universe.

Dissent became not merely illegal but cosmically wrong.

And the priests — the interpreters of divine will — became the indispensable partners of political power. A relationship that has shaped human history in ways we are still untangling today.

Religion didn’t create this dynamic because religious people are inherently corrupt. Early spirituality was genuine community meaning-making — humanity trying to understand its place in a vast and mysterious universe. That impulse is deeply human and largely beautiful.

But power recognised a useful tool and picked it up.

The spiritual became the political. The political wrapped itself in the spiritual. And for thousands of years the two were functionally inseparable.

What This Built

By the time you reach the great ancient empires — Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, China, the Aztecs — the structure is fully formed and remarkably consistent across cultures that had no contact with each other.

A tiny elite at the top, holding wealth, military force, and divine sanction simultaneously. A slightly larger administrative class managing the machinery. A vast base of farmers, labourers and slaves generating the surplus that fed the entire pyramid.

And crucially — a story explaining why this arrangement was natural, inevitable, and ordained.

The wandering, curious, egalitarian bands who had shared meat around fires for 290,000 years had become, in the space of a few thousand years, a species of hierarchies.

The Thread That Connects

Remember in the first blog we noted that the diversity of human skin tones is simply evolutionary adaptation to geography? That your ancestors’ skin colour is just a postcode from 50,000 years ago?

Here’s where these two threads begin to weave together.

The power structure we’ve just traced — surplus, protection, divine justification, hierarchy — was operating across human civilisations for thousands of years before skin colour became meaningful to it.

Ancient Rome enslaved conquered Britons and Germanic peoples — pale-skinned Europeans — without any racial ideology. Slavery was about conquest, debt, and defeat. It crossed every colour line indiscriminately.

So when did skin colour get conscripted into the machinery of power?

That’s a very specific historical moment. With very specific economic motivations.

And that’s exactly where we’re going in Part Three.

The Uncomfortable Summary

Pull back far enough and the arc of the last 12,000 years looks something like this.

Humans are by nature cooperative, curious, and — when communities are small enough for accountability to function — remarkably egalitarian. The archaeological evidence suggests equality was our default, not our aspiration.

Surplus broke the scale that kept us accountable to each other.

Power rushed into the gap.

And power, in every culture it emerged, reached for the same two tools — force and story. The sword and the scripture. Usually in that order, though sometimes simultaneously.

The wanderlust that carried us out of Africa and across every continent on earth was a genuine and beautiful human trait. The same curiosity that drove us over mountains and across oceans eventually brought us into contact with peoples whose surplus we wanted.

And somewhere in that collision, exploration became conquest.

Not because it had to.

Because the power structures we’d already built at home made it profitable.

One Simple Question & A Very Deep Rabbit Hole

Part One: From Eden to Melanin

Have you ever started pulling on one small thread of curiosity and found yourself three hours later in a completely different universe of thought? That happened to me recently, and I want to take you along for the ride.

It started with one of the oldest questions in theology. If Adam and Eve were the first two people on earth and they only had two sons — where exactly did their wives come from?

Simple question. Surprisingly deep rabbit hole.

What the Bible Actually Says

It turns out Genesis 5:4 quietly mentions that Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters beyond the famous brothers. The two sons get the dramatic storyline, but the text acknowledges there were more children. So the most logically consistent answer — within a literal reading — is that Cain and Seth married their own sisters, or nieces from later generations.

Early church fathers like Augustine accepted this without much fuss. The reasoning was straightforward: early humanity had no prohibition against it, and genetic diversity wasn’t yet a concern.

Uncomfortable? Perhaps. But here’s where it gets genuinely fascinating.

We Are All, Technically, Cousins

If you follow that literal thread, the theological implication is breathtaking — racism becomes completely incoherent. If all humanity descends from two people, we are not just metaphorically family. We are literally family, every single one of us, regardless of skin colour, nationality, or belief system.

And here’s the thing — science arrives at exactly the same conclusion, just via a different route.

Modern genetics has identified what researchers call “Mitochondrial Eve” — the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of every living human being. Every person alive today traces their maternal line back to her. Scientists place her in Africa, approximately 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Scripture and science. Different timelines, different methods. Same destination.

Geneticists have also calculated that if you go back far enough — and it doesn’t take as long as you’d think, perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 years — every person alive today shares a common ancestor. Some researchers suggest that anyone with European ancestry is likely a literal descendant of Charlemagne.

We are squabbling with our own relatives. We always have been.

So Why Does Eve Look Like That?

Here’s the irony that stopped me cold.

If Mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa 150,000 years ago, she was almost certainly a dark-skinned woman with African features. And yet virtually every iconic depiction of Eve in Western art shows a fair-skinned, light-eyed European woman.

Why? Because the artists who created those images were European — Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer — painting during the Renaissance and Medieval periods. They painted what they knew. They painted people who looked like themselves.

It wasn’t malicious. It was simply cultural projection. But those images became so dominant, so deeply embedded in popular imagination, that they hardened from artistic interpretation into assumed truth.

The same thing happened with Jesus, who was a Middle Eastern Jewish man routinely depicted as blue-eyed and fair-haired in Western churches for centuries.

Art shaped perception. Perception became assumption. Assumption became, for some, justification.

The Science of Skin — It’s Just Geography

So how did we get from one dark-skinned African ancestor to the extraordinary range of human skin tones we see today?

Sunlight. That’s genuinely the whole answer.

Dark skin evolved as protection in high-UV equatorial regions. Melanin acts as a natural sunscreen, preventing DNA damage. As human populations migrated north into Europe and Asia where sunlight is weaker, lighter skin became advantageous because it could absorb what little UV was available to produce sufficient Vitamin D.

Your skin tone is essentially your ancestors’ postcode from 50,000 years ago. It tells you where they lived. Nothing more, nothing less.

And cultural and religious differences? Those emerged from 70,000 years of geographic isolation. Small groups migrated, separated, faced different environments and different survival challenges, developed different solutions, different stories, different spiritual frameworks — with no communication between them. Desert peoples, rainforest peoples, Arctic peoples — of course their relationship with the natural world looked different. The forms of belief diverged wildly. The underlying human need to find meaning never did.

Which Brings Us to Australia

Australia has the highest skin cancer rates in the world, and the reason is essentially a biological mismatch.

A large percentage of the Australian population carries fair skin inherited from European ancestors — skin that evolved for low-UV northern environments — now living under one of the most intense UV exposures on the planet. The southern hemisphere sits slightly closer to the sun during summer. The air is cleaner and clearer. The UV hits harder.

Dark-skinned people who migrate to Australia, research confirms, are at low risk for skin cancer even if they live their entire lives here. The melanin that evolved over millennia in high-sun environments does exactly what it was designed to do.

Meanwhile, Aboriginal Australians — whose ancestors evolved in high-UV environments and retained their protective pigmentation — have significantly lower melanoma rates than the European population that arrived and displaced them.

Nature had already solved the problem. The indigenous people of this land were perfectly adapted to it. The crisis of skin cancer in Australia is, at its biological core, the consequence of a population living in an environment their skin was never designed for.

There is a painful irony layered in there, if you sit with it.

The Thread Pulled to Its End

So here’s where the deep dive lands.

One theological question about where Cain’s wife came from leads, if you follow it honestly, to the conclusion that all of humanity is one family. Science confirms it through genetics. The diversity of our skin tones turns out to be nothing more than evolutionary adaptation to geography. Our cultural and religious differences are the natural result of thousands of years of isolation — different expressions of identical human needs.

And Australia’s skin cancer epidemic is, in a very real sense, a biological echo of colonial history.

None of this is divisive if you follow the logic calmly. It’s actually the opposite. The evidence — theological, genetic, evolutionary, medical — all points in the same direction …

We were always one family. We just forgot.

When First Draft Resembles a Crime Scene

I am a pantser and always will be. No matter how many plotting tools I’ve tried to use over the years, I remain a stubborn pantser. My characters run around like free range chooks creating havoc in the paddock, and I follow them around picking up the eggs and cleaning up after them. It’s what they do. No amount of training has changed a darn thing. Add to that a mind like an internet browser trying to run a thousand open tabs on a dial up connection (remember that Gen-X?) Hence why my first drafts resemble a messy crime scene full of red herrings and false information.

After ditching a plotting program that was never going to work for me, I came across AutoCrit. Tab number 567 in my mind shouted, “Hallelujah!” while my bank account sighed and said, “Here we go, another fancy program to sit and gather dust on the drive.”

Excited, I uploaded Messy First Draft A into the program and waited. Colourful dots bounced around the screen for a while before spitting out a full, chapter by chapter analysis. My chooks scattered as they ran for cover under threat of being organised like ducks. I found myself with a clear synopsis, conflict, character list, world building, possible contradiction events, a timeline analysis, foreshadowing events, plot thread tracking, and a genre analysis. Chapter by chapter, I had myself a post-mortem plot, the ideal tool for a pantser edit.

AutoCrit is not intended to be used for a final edit before you hit the publish button. I still highly recommend a human editor for that. What it does do is help you work through your first draft and keep track of the storyline while making changes. It’s not perfect, by any means, especially the possible contradiction events it throws out, but it highlights possible flaws for you to go back and polish.

Let’s look at that analysis for a moment:

The synopsis (speaks for itself really) summarises events, characterisations and settings.
Conflict – tells me if I have enough conflict to drive the story forward
Characters – a great way to remember who popped in at what point. Also helps you remember how to spell their names and track their growth as a character. 😉
World Building – I like this one. It highlights the general geography, flora and fauna, resources, culture and conflicts to help build settings. It tells me things like: “The main resource mentioned in the chapter is food, with Bridey preparing soup for Thom’s lunch and planning to give leftover bread with Vegemite to their children. Additionally, there is a reference to whiskey being consumed by Thom” OR “There are indications of economic struggles on the farm due to drought and other challenges”.
Possible Contradiction Events – highlights those red herrings and plot fails to revisit. Like I said, not exactly accurate but it does make you go back and check that you have expresssed the intent clearly.
Time Line Analysis – another one I love because time is not my friend. This analysis itemises each plot trigger in the chapter and confirms (or denies) that you have your ducks in a row. The chooks hate it.
Foreshadowing Events – another pat on the back for the pantser when it confirms that the author has indeed written actions and descriptions that set up expectations for future events that may unfold as the narrative progresses.
Plot Thread Tracking – does what it says. Helps you keep track of the plot.
Genre Analysis – another great feature at the end of each chapter in the report so you stay in your genre. At the moment, I’m writing a contemporary rural fiction drama / thriller / suspense with romantic elements. AutoCrit tells me: the chapter delves into the emotional turmoil and challenges faced by the characters in a realistic and relatable setting, focusing on themes of grief, family dynamics, and resilience. The narrative style captures the complexities of human relationships and personal struggles in a modern-day rural community context. (Thank you, AutoCrit! Mission accomplished.)

The analysis report is just one of the many useful features of this program, so do go and check it out. I like that it tells me about pacing, dialogue, strong writing and readability. I love that it highlights overused or repeated words and tells me how many I should cut to meet (or exceed) the industry standard. The best feature of all? I can edit in AutoCrit and then run another analysis as many times as I like before sending it off to my human editor.

To sum it up: I write in Scrivener, analyse and edit in AutoCrit, and upload parts of the analysis to Plottr to create a library to track a series and the characters. All three of my writing investments working together for pantser me. What works for you?

Disclaimer: This blog is an honest opinion of the software. I was not requested to review or promote any of the products mentioned.

Speed Date an Editor

There is nothing I love more than helping writers shape their stories to be the best they can be. I have learned so much from all the editors I’ve had over the years, and I want to pass that knowledge on to the authors I work with. But finding the right editor for your books is a bit like speed dating. You’ve got to keep looking until you find one you like. The editor you choose should be in it for the long haul, just like a new life partner, and you need to get along with each other.

Editing requires patience, flexibility, and a willingness to learn, both from the author and the editor. Sometimes that willingness also needs to include understanding, especially when your editor suggests rewrites – BIG ones! As authors we see our work from a different point of view to the editor’s. We’re too close to see all the flaws, the plot holes or the pacing issues. The editor is coming in off the cold face. They have no emotional involvement from a writing perspective but, as a seasoned reader, they can quickly spot the things that the writer’s eyes may have overlooked.

I mentioned the dreaded rewrites. They happen more often in the early stages of newbie and emerging authorship, but sometimes even the most seasoned authors can find themselves in a plot knot that requires some cutting and pasting. The willingness to take an editor’s advice on a rewrite is the key to a good working relationship. I’m not saying you have to blindly accept their advice (it’s your story!), just seriously consider it. Look at the explanation of why they’re recommending the changes and ask yourself if the story will be better or worse for making them.

The first thing I do before taking on an editing project is read a sample of the author’s work to get a feel for their writing voice. Voice is a good indicator of the level of editing that might be required, and if I will be comfortable editing their work. Then I challenge their willingness to learn from the editing process with my speed dating questions, because learning is growing, and to be successful, we need to grow.

Speed Date Me:

What inspired you to write a novel?
Is this your first fiction novel?
Do you know which genre it fits to?
What is the final wordcount you’re aiming for?
When do you expect it to be ready for editing?
Do you plan to do a self-edit or a peer critique of the first draft?
Are you planning to self-publish or submit to a traditional publisher?
What are your expectations for working with an editor?
Which of these types of edits are you looking for:
1. Substantive editing/developmental editing – suggesting and making changes to content and organization ensuring clear, coherent delivery. With fiction this means looking at plot, characters, setting, pacing, and point of view.
2. Copyediting – fixing errors with grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation; suggesting changes to sentence structure and word choice, ensuring your language is clear, fluid, and pleasurable to read; and ensuring consistency.
3. Proofreading – fixing remaining errors with grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation; fixing formatting errors; and commenting on any awkward phrasing (this service comes after editing).
What are you expecting to pay for an editor based on the options above?
Do you believe that editing is part of your learning journey as an author?
How open are you to considering a complete rewrite of your manuscript if required?

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
– Elmore Leonard (1925-2013)

Diffuse with Doterra – Essential Oils for Concentration:

Peppermint for alertness and energy, Rosemary for memory, and Lavender for calm and brain fog.

All that Glitters

Turn negative feedback into writing gold

In this final instalment on how to get the best out of negative feedback, I’m going to give you some tips on where to find great feedback from your peer group. For seasoned authors, this is probably old news, but for the newbies out there who might be wondering where to begin, here are a few places to start:

Enter competitions

These are a great way to get feedback but do be aware that some judges may be quite harsh on you. Most will offer you genuine, constructive feedback, others might offer very little in the way of comment but scores can also tell a story.

Join a critique group

I can vouch that if it wasn’t for my lovely critique partners, my writing would not have grown and developed the way it has. Their feedback has been invaluable over the years. I was also very lucky to have an internationally acclaimed author-mentor who has written over 100 books. Her nurturing, generosity, and willingness to share her experiences in the publishing world, as well as her knowledge, helped make me the writer I am today.

Attend workshops and conferences

RWA conferences were gold for me as a newbie/emerging writer. I learned so much from the workshops and by simply chatting to other writers. These are people who have experienced the ups and downs of writing, and who understand you in a way a non-writer can’t. Conferences are also a great way to find new friends. I attended my first conference in 2013 and am still friends with people I met there today. We’ve written a series together, brainstormed together, and been there for each other when the going gets tough.

Find a good editor

This is one I can’t stress enough. It’s not an easy task, but find one you connect with, one who understands you and your writing style. Having your high school English teacher or a friend who is good with grammar and punctuation read it, is not enough. A qualified editor has training, an understanding of the reader market, experience within the publishing industry, and knows the difference a good plot and sound structure can make to a book.

Analyse feedback

Be objective with your work, analyse the feedback, pick it apart, find the good stuff, throw away the bad, and make the changes that will add the polish to your manuscript.

Apply the 2-in-3 Rule

A guideline I use in my critique group is that if 2 out 3 pick up on the same thing in their feedback, I have a real problem, and I need to investigate it.

Don’t take it personally

Okay, it is personal. It hurts and it de-motivates. Get that emotion out of the way first. Let the feedback rest and simmer until your mind is ready to accept that you can read it objectively and make the necessary changes.

Keep an open mind

If you don’t open your mind, you’ll never receive all those wonderful ideas that could turn your book into a reader’s favourite. That very comment you might dismiss in anger, could be the missing piece that brings your story together.

And that’s a wrap, my friends. If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact page. I’d love to hear from you.

Contact me today

Breaking Bad

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Cracking the code on negative feedback

In this blog, I’m going to show you how to crack the code on negative feedback. It’s not hard, there are no equations or algorithms involved. All it takes is a little common sense and an open mind. Ask yourself these questions after reading any feedback:

Is the feedback helpful? In a review of Whispers at Wongan Creek, a reviewer commented: “Somehow this read a bit too much like mills and boons to me; just couldn’t get absorbed into the story and abandoned it.“ Was this helpful to me as the writer? Yes! It tells me that a) the reader recognised it as a romance, b) I nailed it genre-wise, c) this reader is not my target market. The book was listed as a rural romance in the romance category, so I’m not sure what this reader was expecting.
Has more than one reader said the same thing? This can apply to critique partners, editors, reviewers or competition judges. The rule of thumb I use is that if 2 out of 3 readers say the same thing, I need to consider an edit. In Montana Daughter, a few readers picked up repetition in the story. “There were parts of the romance that seemed a little forced and contrived, maybe even too cheesy that messed with the chemistry for me. I felt like I read certain explanations more than once which didn’t help ingratiate the characters to me as a couple.” After the four rounds of edits and the complete rewrite this book went through, I was mortified to find that the reviewer was right, and that is a good lesson in why you should have a fresh set of eyes on your final draft.
Can I take the risk? Editors aren’t always right, but what you need to figure out is if it’s worth the risk not to take their advice. Even if you disagree with their comments, remain the professional. In this example where the protagonist is looking to rent the antagonist’s studio apartment, he says: “That’s no problem. I’ll take you down to the barn and you can choose furniture for the studio. Then I’ll see if Mason is free to help me move it across .” My editor came back with the comment: “The women are right there. Why don’t they help do it? Gendered. It’s a cultural conversation in play and some readers these days might be more inclined to question the gender stereotyping.” Could I take the risk, ignore the feedback and lose a reader? Or would it be more sensible to swallow my pride and simply reword it?
Is this reader my target market? “Not for me… Couldn’t be bothered with it. Far too overly dramatic about nothing for my taste – read about 40 pages and quit it.” This review of Home to Bindarra Creek says it all. Can I do anything with this feedback? Yes, it tells me there is nothing wrong with the book, the plot, or the writing. This book was simply not the kind of book the reader was looking to read.

Once upon a time I knew an emerging author whose lead characters would throw themselves willy-nilly into danger. While trying to create proactive characters, the author overlooked their strengths and highlighted their weaknesses instead. This unconsciously became a common thread in the books and, unfortunately, this reviewer had a good point:

“The lead character frustrated the ever loving heck out of me. I started off liking her, I really, really did. I thought she was cute, if rather naive and somewhat innocent, and then she got annoying. She turned into one of those typical heroines in horror movies where you tell them “do not go into the haunted house alone”, so what does she do? She goes into the haunted house alone, repeatedly, and then needs to be rescued, repeatedly, and puts the investigation the guys are there for in jeopardy, repeatedly. It’s like she was a perfectly sensible girl, and then the hero comes along, and BAM! suddenly all her brains leak out of her head. In her own way, she thinks she is helping but instead she makes a big muddle of things and then not only does she not help the investigation, she goes off and gets herself in a situation where she is the one who needs rescuing and all efforts end up being focused on that instead. Sheesh, she drove me bananas. I even vented my frustrations on Goodreads.”

Not exactly the kind of review you want, right? And you absolutely don’t want a reader venting their frustrations on social media or book blogs. But this is a good review to learn from. Perfect timing, strong characterisation, good plot structure – these are the key to an engaging read. There is a place for action, a spot for humour, and always room for a cuddle or two in a book. The important thing is to know where they belong and that the timing for delivery fits. Fortunately, the author took the feedback onboard and made the changes. Because they were so close to their plot, they couldn’t see the weakness in the lead character’s behaviour. The second edition of the book produced much more rounded, sensible, proactive and loveable characters.

Next Up: Turn Negative feedback into writing gold

Don’t Feed the Trolls!

I know it’s tempting…

It’s tempting to respond to negative feedback. An email to that dreadful competition judge, a response to the social media trolls, a reply to a review on Goodreads, a blistering response to the editor’s comments on a manuscript. I’m not going to lie … I have responded once or twice, but I too have to remind myself that for every action there is a reaction. And once you get that stone rolling and it begins to gather moss, there is no stopping that snowball from growing (pardon the mixed metaphors, but you get the picture, right?)

Trolls are attention seekers. They will only stay when they are being fed or given attention. Engagement encourages them, and then they’ll descend on you like a swarm of angry wasps and perpetuate your pain. The same goes for that competition judge who gave you a low score. Perhaps their response stems from inside themselves, from some inner frustration that prevents them from writing and submitting an entry. You never know what’s happening in that person’s life at that point in time. Some people are just plain nasty, and you’ll never change that. Sometimes reviewers aren’t even real reviewers, they might be someone wanting to draw attention to their own new release or a fan from someone’s street team looking to put their favourite author in the spotlight instead.
Respond graciously if you must, but bear in mind that it’s not about you, it’s about them. ‘Like’ their review. It shows you are paying attention and taking feedback onboard, even though it may not be constructive criticism.

A fabulous 5-star review of Shadows over Wongan Creek resulted in a touchy discussion of the cover. I thought carefully about my response:

Reader YYY: Great review XXX. That cover though….seriously??? They are getting worse! He looks like a giant cowboy towering over the countryside.

Reader XYZ: Oh YYY your comment had me laughing, but you’re so right 😊 Great review, XXX!

Reader ZZZ: I do agree with you YYY – I wish they’d move past the guys and girls in hats and put them into perspective!!

Reviewer XXX: I don’t take a lot of notice, except when they’re really good! And I don’t let them stop me reading the inside 😉

ME: Thanks for the lovely review. I’m so pleased you enjoyed Fen and Kieran’s story. Ladies, I’m sorry the cover disappointed you 😥 While I understand the whole balance and perspective of a cover, the one thing that struck me when I first saw it was that the cover artists nailed the scarred hero perfectly. I hope you will see past the cover to the message between the pages. Happy reading.

My favourite negative review ever came from this Netgalley reviewer on Goodreads. I made her ‘dropped’ shelf. Go me!

Shelves: dropped
Review:
There was definitely a darker element to this series that dealt with suicide, depression, abuse, and death. Normally elements like [this] would instantaneous [sic] draw me in but this series was just missing that “it” factor to really win me over. I felt like it was more than a chore to finish this and that’s something no reader should feel. My motivation shriveled down to finish this chapter after chapter and I decided it was probably best I dropped this before it was too late. I will notate [sic] I would definitely consider picking this back [up] in the future to see what the outcome was.

My first clue? Cue the flashing banners. Who does it draw attention to? The reviewer or the book?

My next clue was the writing scrawled across the top of the GIF – “Oh the shenanigans, stay frosty my friends”. My interpretation (or maybe my dose of chocolate) was that the review graphics screamed ‘look at me, look at what a clever girl I am’. It’s designed to attract other readers’ attention and distract them from the 4 & 5 star reviews. Her review is an opinion piece, not constructive feedback. The fact that she got more than half way before dropping the book and the 3 stars she gave it means she actually liked most of it but couldn’t spoil her ‘frosty’ reputation by admitting it. All her reviews, bar a couple, are the same.

Another clue – the writing. The reviewer is clearly a reader not another writer which is good. That’s not to say that she doesn’t have dreams of writing her own book one day. She certainly put effort into her review. The good thing is that it’s a reader’s review. I don’t care that she dropped the book halfway through, what’s important is that she’s said she may pick it up again to see what happens. I haven’t completely lost her attention but, at the same time, maybe this reader just isn’t my target market.

So what could I take away from this review? What made this reader feel like she was dragging herself through mud to get to the end? Could I have done anything differently? These were the clues I looked for when I went back and read the manuscript again.

Now, to work! Here is an exercise to help you recognise areas of improvement for your own writing:

Think about a book you’ve read recently but haven’t enjoyed:

What didn’t you like about it?
Was the plot unclear, mixed up, too complicated, not complicated enough?
Were the characters drawn well, did they jump off the page?
Were you engaged from Chapter 1?
At which point did you stop reading?
What do you think the author could have done to make it better?

Write a quick review – one paragraph, a few lines and then write a review of one of your own works to think about what you could have done differently and if it’s an improvement or not.

And finally, why you should read reviews:

Learn not to make the same mistakes,
Reviews are a portal to what readers are looking for,
Reviews will help you define your own target market.

Up Next: Breaking bad, making good

Armour Up!

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Don on Your Emotional Armour

Stock up on chocolate, coffee, wine and concrete. To embark on this journey you’ll need all the armour you can find. And don’t forget the Kleenex, because it’s also okay to cry.

Have you ever been told to ‘take the emotion out’ of a situation (at work, at home, in an argument etc.)? Ignore that advice. It’s human to react emotionally. We are emotional beings. Emotions are a creative’s gold. How else could we win over a reader’s heart and keep them reading? It’s also okay to be emotional about negative feedback. This is your book baby after all.

But how do we deal with the battering of emotions that come from a negative review or feedback? I’ve given you the physical tools, now let’s deal with mental support.

Cry and Stamp your feet: Get the emotion out of the way. Throw a tantrum, kick a box (but please don’t kick the cat or dog!) Have a good cry if you need to, that’s why I gave you Kleenex. Whatever you do, resist taking your emotions to social media. Bagging a reviewer publicly may only cause more harm. I know … it’s hard. The temptation is huge, but all that will do is wake up the trolls. Have some chocolate instead. The important thing is that you allow yourself to feel first so that you can move on to the next step which is to see the feedback more clearly.

Put aside your ego: Put aside your writerly ego for a moment. Feedback is not about you as a person, and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. Feedback is how the reader (be it an editor, a competition judge, critique partner or reviewer) has perceived the story. Let the feedback rest for as long as it takes to get over it, then come back and analyse it logically when the emotion is spent.

Phone a Friend: Let’s say you’ve entered a competition, and the feedback you’ve received (while hopefully constructive!) isn’t quite what you were expecting. Critique partners and beta readers are gold in this situation, and I would advise on using them before you submit anything to a publisher or competition entry, or consider self-publishing. Have someone you trust (who can see things objectively) read over your manuscript, review or entry feedback. Often they’ll see the things you can’t because you’re too close to your story.

Understand that you can’t please everyone: Your style won’t suit every reader. And not all feedback will be gospel. Editors, judges, critique partners aren’t always right. The trick is to know when they are. The important thing is to identify the helpful points out of that negative feedback and turn them into a positive development for your craft.

Remember readers aren’t all necessarily writers: They may not have the same gift for words that writers do, and often they don’t think about how they’re phrasing their feedback. They react emotionally to the story. The author is an unknown entity, a name on the cover. They may not recognise or think about the fact that behind that book is a human being who has spent months/years bleeding their life blood onto the page. They don’t know you. Don’t take it personally.

Never forget who you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armour and it can never be used to hurt you.
George R.R. Martin

Next Up: Don’t Feed the trolls!

The Great Feedback Debate

Should I read reviews of my books?

To look or not to look? That is the opening of a great debate among authors since the rise of internet reviews. Ask any writer and you’ll receive mixed responses. Some say do, some say don’t, but today I’m going to ask you to make up your own mind. In this series, Getting the Best from Negative Feedback, I am going to guide you through getting the best out of reader feedback.

Before we start though, my first piece of advice is to don on your emotional armour. Negativity in any form can be bad for your mental health. Reviews, competition feedback, critique, edits; all these can be hurtful, soul-destroying and passion-killing but they can also be a good learning curve to identify areas in which you can improve your writing, plot or characterisation. Remember, the reader is your target market. They are the reason you’re writing, and you want to win them over to sell your books. In order to win them over, you need to know what they’re looking for and be able to supply it. A good writer never stops learning – from the good and the bad.

Before you embark on this journey of discovery, be sure that you are emotionally and mentally ready. Do whatever it takes to prepare and open your mind to read between the lines and see past the negativity. Try not to absorb any negativity in the feedback, but rather address the facts. Take a walk outside, meditate or go out into the garden with a cuppa for a while and allow the feedback to filter through. Negative feedback can help you grow – if you put emotions aside and study the facts. Not all feedback will be helpful, some might even lead you in the wrong direction, and that’s where the importance of having writing buddies comes in. People who you can trust to tell you the truth without destroying your confidence. Carefully delivered constructive criticism is a great writing aid. How you choose to deal with that constructive criticism is the key.

Writers are like every other artist, which means many of us are plagued with self-doubt. The voice in our head telling us we’re not good enough. For others, the anxiety can grow strong enough to stop them from writing altogether.
Mark Dawson (Self Publishing Formula)

Next up: Don on your armour

Part Three: How Power Invented Race

The World Before Race

The Portuguese Pivot

The Theological Inconvenience

Science Gets Recruited

The Australian Echo

The Thread Pulled to Its End

Why This Matters Now

Further Reading

Part Two: How Wanderlust Became Conquest

The World Before Ownership

The Grain Pit Changes Everything

The Problem of Scale

The Original Protection Racket

When God Joined the Payroll

What This Built

The Thread That Connects

The Uncomfortable Summary

Further Reading

Part One: From Eden to Melanin

What the Bible Actually Says

We Are All, Technically, Cousins

So Why Does Eve Look Like That?

The Science of Skin — It’s Just Geography

Which Brings Us to Australia

The Thread Pulled to Its End

Further Reading

Turn negative feedback into writing gold

Cracking the code on negative feedback

I know it’s tempting…

Don on Your Emotional Armour

Should I read reviews of my books?