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(This is partly because I know people are interested in my writing process, and partly to set all this down so I can remember it later.)

At some point during the writing of Daughter of Mystery I was spurred to thinking about default characters and about what sorts of people were present in the Alpennia of my stories whose identities were being erased by my failure to describe them in marked terms (since unmarked descriptions are going to default to the “cultural norm”). And given that my stories were loaded with women, and well supplied with sexual minorities, adequately peopled with folks of non-Alpennian nationality (generally indicated via names), and that I’d made some effort to note the vast numbers of non-privileged people who make my primary characters’ lives possible (who will get primary page-time in Floodtide), the major invisible population I was left to consider was that of non-white people.

I’ve been greatly inspired (as I’ve mentioned before) by the website Medieval People of Color in its efforts to bring a basic awareness of the non-white population of Europe in various historic eras. Visual art is particularly effective for making the statement "here's a bunch of stuff that just is" (keeping in mind that pre-photographic art is always highly deliberate and rife with artistic choices). But even with unambiguous images, it's possible to overlook things we aren't consciously expecting. So with that approach in mind, the question I asked myself was not “Hey, where can I stick some people of color into my stories?” but rather “Which characters that I’m already writing (or planning to write) about are actually people of color and I just haven’t noticed?”

The only one I knew about for certain at that point was Mefro Dominique, dressmaker to the fashionable in Rotenek, whose back-story (which I hadn’t had any opportunity to mention yet) was that she was one of the French emigrées that came to Rotenek during the revolution, but that she’d originally come from one of the French colonies in the Carribbean. The problem was: in Daughter of Mystery there was no real opportunity to make any of that explicit. I knew it, but there was no way for the readers to pick up on it. She was a very minor character, mentioned in passing by viewpoint characters who would not have found her presence unexpected and therefore would have no reason to call the readers attention to it. All I able to do in that book was to create the space in which her ethnic background was possible. So in The Mystic Marriage I made sure to add enough information that someone who was paying attention to details would know the basics of her story. But Dominique is a minor character. (She’ll be a bit less so in Floodtide because her daughter Celeste becomes BFFs with the viewpoint character.) And I was certain she wasn't the only non-white character whose life would intersect with my stories.

And then it came to me that there was another woman of color right under my nose: Serafina Talarico, one of the two primary characters in Mother of Souls. I didn’t even have a name for her yet at that point. She was “the Roman scholar”. All I knew was that she would run across some of Margerit’s mystery notes during her studies/research in Rome and would travel to Rotenek to study with her. And now I knew that she was black. And I knew that I needed to figure out why and how that was essential to my story.

First of all, where was she from? How did she (or her forebears) end up in Italy? Of course, a large percentage of black people in early 19th century Europe got there at some remove via the African slave trade, but I had an itch to give her a more purposeful background -- for her family to have arrived in Italy by their own choice. To look for inspiration, I started going down a rabbit hole of Google image searches looking for a face to inspire me. And then, there she was, staring at me from the screen. My Serafina. And she was Ethiopian. OK, I thought, reasonable proximity to European contact routes. Possible connections via shared Christian culture, though interesting potential differences. I’m sure I can come up with some reason for her family to have relocated to Italy in the recent past.

I was starting to visualize her background: a second-generation immigrant, her parents still looking back towards home, but Serafina herself knowing only the land she was raised in. Siblings perhaps. How much culture were they able to retain -- how much did they want to retain? How much had they assimilated -- how much did they want to assimilate? How did she end up a scholar? In what context was she educated? Where did they live? Originally my thought was to place them in the south of Italy and have her move to Rome only later. (Her name was taken from some genealogical records for the era from Calabria.) Why did she move to Rome? OK, she was married (need to ditch the husband somehow) and he took her there. Perhaps her father was a sailor? A merchant? Don’t need to decide quite yet. Need more research. And Google wasn’t cutting it even for just the broad brush-strokes, because when you plugged “Ethiopia” and “Italy” into Google, everything you got was from well after the date of my stories. So I set that part aside until I could do some library research.

In the mean time, I needed to know what her background meant to her. How it informed the part she’d play in my story. Most importantly: what does she want most in life? What drives her, both in terms of her journey to Rotenek and in terms of her story arc? What is she desperate for? The answer that came to me was “home”. Serafina was born in a land that would always consider her a foreigner, but would know nothing except vague stories of the land her parents came from. She would learn bits and scraps of traditions -- food, songs, stories, perhaps -- but always uprooted, and perhaps significantly altered by being transplanted. What she wants most is to feel at home somewhere. I had an image of her being intensely nostalgic for her earliest-remembered childhood, when her mother had created a domestic cocoon that still insulated her from the realization of being an outsider. And then as she matures, she sees her mother shrink in her imagination to a weary old woman, pulling the cocoon closer and tighter to keep out a strange culture she never managed to adapt to.

And why is Serafina so deeply interested in studying mysteries? Because once she experienced a mystery that made her feel essentially “at home” in a way she only barely remembered from early childhood, before she realized just how alien her life was. That returned to her that sense of all-encompassing and all-powerful love her mother made her feel, that she can't recapture on her visits home. And my conception of her mystical experiences changed a bit (enough that I had to revise her brief appearances in The Mystic Marriage) because as part of this disconnect I decided that she would have an exquisitely sharp perception of the workings of mysteries -- of the flow and change of the fluctus -- but she would be unable to work mysteries herself. Not a scrap. So she’s the eternal observer but never a participant -- a metaphoric reflection of her cultural experience. (She’s still figuring this out at the beginning of Mother of Souls.)

That gave me the multi-layered idea of where she’s coming from that I needed to get started. (Now I have to find a beta-reader or two who can tell me whether I succeed in creating anything close to an authentic "feel" to this part of the story.) And her journey will be one of finding what she desperately needs in a form entirely different from what she expected. It seemed to “click” perfectly for me in terms of her immigrant background and the expectation of how people would treat her as “foreign” even in the city she was born in.

And to add to that on the personal side, she is starved for love and has at best been treated as useful or entertaining. Remember that pesky husband? The story that started developing in my back-brain was of a somewhat self-centered, absent-minded scholarly type who ran into an educated girl with low marriage prospects at a time when he was desperately in need of a clerk for his work. He married her because it was cheaper than hiring someone. Occasionally, some project of his sends him off wandering and he almost forgets that he even has a wife. He was not particularly attracted to her, for reasons of cultural prejudice, (mind you, the image I have as my model for Serafina is absolutely stunning, probably objectively the most beautiful of my primary characters so far) and while their marriage goes beyond being “in name only”, let’s just say that she finds it unsatisfying on a personal level, though convenient for her own intellectual interests. She first got involved with women because it was “safe” (no risk of disgrace or pregnancy), and despite often finding herself being treated as an exotic entertainment, she’s found a taste for it. (I might have been a little hesitant about making my first non-white primary character be promiscuous except that I already had Jeanne with the same behavior so it wouldn’t stand out as uniquely associated.)

So now all I needed to do was convince myself that her family background was plausible. Off to the library and a handful of beginner books on Ethiopian history. The basic history fell into place nicely. A few paragraphs on Ethiopians traveling to Europe gave me the story of Abba Grigorewos who was living in Rome in the mid 17th century (ok, over a century too early, but let’s keep following) in a house established by the Vatican for Ethiopian pilgrims and students. He’d left home due to getting in a tricky political situation (ok, this sounds useful) and ended up named in history books because he was the teacher and primary informant for a German named Hiob Ludolf who was studying the Ge’ez language and went on to write a history of Abyssinia. Ok, but what about contacts a bit closer to the time of my story? The histories note that although there were cultural and political contacts between Abyssinia (yes, I’m alternating names -- sorry for the inconsistency) and various European groups in the 15-17th centuries, they mostly broke off around the time of Grigorewos. There were individual European travelers to the area later: a Czech Franciscan missionary in the mid 18th century, a Scottish explorer in 1769, various British diplomatic visitors in the early 19th century. No information quite as useful in the other direction -- at least not easily uncovered. (Perhaps somewhere there's a roster of people who lived at that pilgrim house in Rome.) But given the existence of Ethiopian pilgrims to Rome in the 17th century, and the role that Christianity played in Ethiopian society and government, it seems plausible that there continued to be individual contacts in that direction.

So the story that started solidifying in my mind was that Serafina’s father had visited Rome in his youth and had some sort of fond memories of his time there, so that when it became politically expedient for him to leave home with his wife and very young son (Serafina’s brother), he took it into his mind to pack them all off to Rome ... where I imagine him to have discovered that the reception he got as a temporary single visitor was a bit warmer than what he got as a family group intending permanent residence. At any event he found some sort of living while his wife (as immigrant women often do) scrambled to keep a family going in a place where she has no ties, no support system, no language skills, and no formal occupation. Serafina was born there in Rome. Her older brother eventually married an Italian woman who moved in with them and usurped her mother’s place as head of the household. (I’m imagining the daughter-in-law being horrified at the remnants of “foreign ways” and proclaiming, “I’m doing all the cooking from here on out!”) And Serafina got an education. Why? Because she sees visions -- she has a holy gift -- and in the magic-laden world in which Alpennia exists, such a gift seems adequate as a reason and plausible as part of a cultural tradition from her homeland.

Oh, and why did the family leave Abyssinia in the first place? Well, if Serafina is in her early 30s in 1823 -- so let's say born ca. 1790 -- and she was born in Rome after her family fled political troubles in Abyssinia, allowing ample time for difficult travel and delays -- so maybe push that back to ca. 1785 -- then the specific context likely to have set it in motion (which might have happened a year or two earlier) could be … hmm, we're smack dab in the early part of the turbulent and periodically interrupted reign of Emperor Tekle Giorgis I whose first dethroning was in 1784 … yes, I think this can provide sufficient excuse. (It's not as if the specific details that led to the move are going to get mentioned in my story. There will be handwaving and reference to incomprehensible arguments she recalls her parents having.)

Two of the English travelers to Abyssinia in the first decades of the 19th century left extensive personal accounts and diaries of their time there. And while I’d hate to rely on them for an even-handed ethnographic account, there’s actually a great deal of value in “tourist diaries” for giving you bits of cultural information that a resident would never think to mention (even if I had accounts by residents available). So between Henry Salt, the secretary to Viscount Valentia, and a rather disreputable Englishman-gone-native, Nathaniel Pearce, I have a great many notes on food and meals, music and songs, social structures into which the practice of my world’s magic could fit naturally, and other tidbits that might have filtered through to the second generation.

Oh, and how did she end up with the name Serafina Talarico? I confess I'm rather punting on that one. Given that she was born in Rome, it makes sense that she would have been christened with an Italian given name. For the surname, since it appears that Italian women of that era didn't typically take their husband's surname, it's most likely an Italianization of whatever her father's surname was back home. And I don't know enough to say anything for certain, but there's an Abyssinian male given name "Takla" present in the right era that might reasonably be corrupted into Talarico with a bit of metathesis. I probably won't ever have to say anything outright on that point. (Oh, and she was originally named "Angela" until my alpha-reader pointed out that I had entirely too many female characters with names starting with "An-" at this point.)

So there she is, ready for her time on stage.