More Writing.

Welp, I wrote this post on my lunch break and then my stupid app didn't post it, so now I'm trying again and hopefully I remember everything.

More on the steampunk Cinderella idea. I want to name her Ann because her father loved his anvil. He was a blacksmith until his second wife convinced him to go for gold. Later he died in a mining accident. I want an old west type of setting. Ann learned smithing from her father, mostly as a hobby but she makes some money off it. She sells her stuff through a male blacksmith/whitesmith in town, because after her father quit smithing, she discovered that no one wanted to buy stuff from a female half-Mexican smith. (Half-Mexican because I figure the stepmother wouldn't have married a Mexican man.) The new smith came to town and they work together because she is better at blacksmithing than he is, but he is a good whitesmith, and this way she can sell her work without anyone knowing. Which is agreeable enough for her stepmother, who thinks that smithing is an embarrassingly low-brow job, and inappropriate for a woman. The stepmother, to support her family after the father's death, does need to work, so she goes for something that she considers respectable enough and requires no hard labor--managing a hotel is what I'm thinking. (Not a brothel-hotel.)

Definitely want a snarky comment about how the stepmother thought gold was more important than iron and that's how they got to this point in their lives.

Something about having to rappel off a mesa.

Government guys post in newspaper "FOUND: small shoe, covered in goldwork. To obtain, prove ownership by producing mate. Red Plains Police Office." Stepmother finds the second shoe somewhere, gets all gold-greedy, takes the shoe in, and gets arrested. Ann is gone by then.

I like the old west setting because it's apropos for steampunk without being the usual Victorian England type. I also like the fact that it is a playground of a lot of different cultures coming together in a new, different, hostile place, for different reasons. I haven't done a ton of research so excuse me if I'm mistaken, but off the top of my head: Plenty of Europeans and eastern Americans coming for gold mining, cheap land, hunting, trapping, exploring, lumberjacking, searching for isolation to create their own communities. Chinese (and Irish?) immigrants coming to work on the railroad. Black people hiding after escaping slavery, or later on, having been freed from slavery, trying to make a new life in a place away from Southern culture. And of course, the Native Americans and Mexicans who were already there.

People, it seems, don't like being told that POC existed significantly in European and American culture. Even though they did. People cling desperately to their whitewashed history. I'd like to believe that people are more willing to accept racial/cultural diversity in a fantastical setting, that is clearly not supposed to co-exist with real history, and therefore doesn't need to be "historically accurate," but... well, diversity in media and its reception is a whole other huge topic. Let's just say I'm sick of everyone being white all the time.