Victoria Foyt's novel coming under fire...

[Stacia Kane]

Originally Posted by aruna

Found it! There's this one, taken on Tobago. Lots of tourists were having their hair done in cornrows on the island. http://www.hilaryjohnson.demon.co.uk/SharonMaas.htm

And this was the official author photo, shortly later: http://www.sharonmaas.co.uk/html/about_sharon_maas.html

Never had it done again, though. It's a pretty painful process! But it makes hairstyling easy for several months, so maybe it's worth it..

Wow! They look GORGEOUS on you!!

[Unimportant]

Originally Posted by aruna

And this was the official author photo, shortly later: http://www.sharonmaas.co.uk/html/about_sharon_maas.html

Wow! Also, wow! Gorgeous indeed!

I once had microbraids done; not painful, just a long boring day. They looked pretty, but they didn't last long, as my hair is the wrong texture

[Cyia]

Aruna, you look fantastic with your hair like that!

I'm a bit jealous, actually. Like Unimportant, braids don't last long on me, and they tend to tear my hair.

[K. Trian]

Seconding how gorgeous those braids look on you, aruna! you have the perfect head-shape for them! (is this a weird thing to say?)

No one I know can make cornrows, but they sure would be handy in sports and save me from bad hair days. Unfortunately I have a... spacious forehead (you could project a widescreen movie on it!), so e.g. french braids aren't really my most flattering hairdo, but I have to wear them in martial art training. Not that I'd really give a crap how I looked there...

[akaria]

Aruna, you look great in braids! Those pics are lovely. And yes, sometimes people have....unfortunate head shapes. It's like when a guy shaves his head for the first time. He's like "Where did that dent in the side of my head come from?"

I've been rockin' locs for almost ten years now but still miss getting braids. I'd always get bright blue or purple fake hair mixed in to express my punk rock side. Ahh...good times!

[Blarg]

Heh, that's exactly what keeps me from shaving my head, because otherwise I'm all about the convenience. Head shape matters a lot when you consider shaving your head while still wanting to look decent. In my case, no can do.

But if the choice comes down to bald versus a comb-over or tonsure, I'll probably bite the bullet and accept that wherever I was on the looks scale, I just dropped three points.

[batgirl]

Joining the chorus of how much you rock those braids, aruna!

-Barbara

[Kim Fierce]

Wow, there's a lot of conversation about this book! I can't see the braid pictures here though at work :-( I never heard of this book but I wanted to see what it was about here, and it sounds very strange.

My book is set in the future, and I am white, but I just thought that in the future most people would be considered multi-racial and wanted to experiment with a post-racial era. The skin colors are mostly described as light brown, dark, and pale. The last names are mostly Hispanic and Asian, because I wanted to show that no one judges by color, so using the old labels didn't make sense. So diversity in last names was the best I could think of. The main plot is about a dystopian world in which GLBT are forcefully separated from normal people, and I hope the world works!