Available now:
- Extra Time in Hub #99
http://www.hubfiction.com/2009/10/hub-99/

Various friends of mine, including  marshallpayne1 and aliettedb, have recently posted diversity analyses of the main characters in their published short fiction, which make for interesting reading. My rather paltry stock of published stories means that I'm going to take a purely qualitative view of my own work rather than crunch numbers.

If I have any strengths when it comes to depicting diversity, I suspect that it is in my female characters. I say this purely on the basis of feedback I've received from female readers, writers and editors. Two of my fourteen published stories feature female narrators. I feel that Family Tree (transcriptase.org/fiction/stanger-vaughan-family-tree/) and Slices of Life are two of my strongest stories; the latter was published in 3SF by Liz Holliday, who (take it from me!) would not have accepted an ineptly presented female lead. Several of my unpublished stories also feature female narrators; one contains an exclusively female cast.

I have written several stories that feature exclusively male characters, generally because the historical setting and/or derived events required it. A typical example is The English Dead (www.hubfiction.com/hub/Hub_36.pdf), published in Hub #36, in which Mallory and Irvine's attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1924 is recreated. My stories of elderly Apollo astronauts -- Sons of the Earth and Dying of the Light (aka TLP) -- are similar in that respect.

The ages of my characters covers a very wide spread, most memorably in The Peace Criminal, where the antagonist is a centenarian. Two generations of children are depicted in Family Tree (I'm rather proud of the Appleheads). Of course, quite a lot of my characters have ages similar to mine when I wrote their stories, or a little younger. I guess that's a common phenomena.

Sexuality is not an area my stories have touched on to any great degree, although there is certainly some sex (e.g. in Family Tree, In Deep with Janine and Slices of Life). Interestingly though, the adult Appleheads in Family Tree have formed a menage a trois. It occurs to me now that the two males might be bi-; it certainly didn't occur to me at the time of writing. The other story that has a (very weak) gay context is The English Dead, but more because of the speculation in some quarters about the real Mallory and Irvine than anything actually depicted in the story.

Regrettably, my published stories contain no people of colour and very few characters from cultural backgrounds significantly different to my own. However, things are not quite as simple they seem, because my various unpublished and/or unfinished stories contain characters drawn from a much wider range of backgrounds, including one PoC narrator. It frustrates me that none of these stories has sold yet, but perhaps the truth is that I'm not yet skilled enough in that aspect of writing. Hopefully I will improve, because I firmly believe that diversity in fiction (as in all else) is important.

(With the exception of The English Dead, all stories mentioned above are available for purchase at AnthologyBuilder: www.anthologybuilder.com/authordetails.php)

Vaughan