Hi all… for today’s topic, I’m tapping into my current experience on a story I’m reworking. It was originally a “straight” sci fi story that I wrote maybe 25 years ago. Needless to say, the tech is waaaaay out of date. In my initial update, I brought it up to now, but because this is a future story, I got called on it, and am working out what tech will be like in 10-15 years.
But that’s not today’s topic. Today, I’m ruminating and masticating (new word of the day calendar, anyone?) on changing a character from female to male, and from straight to gay.
As part of the rewrite, I’m changing Iris, femme fatale, to Aiden… hmm, what do you call a male fatale? In the process, I’m having to change a lot more than the name. He moves differently, acts and thinks differently, etc.
So my questions today – as writers, have you ever changed genders of a character in a story (not as in a sex change, but as in rewriting who the character is from m to f or vice versa? What was it like, and what issues did you run across? And as a reader, have you read anything where the character was clearly the opposite sex in the writer’s mind at one point?