characters with disabilities

Reziac · Feb 24, 2015

LittleMissAlice said:
Ha, ha! Yes, I actually love telling people how everything works. It makes me feel smart. And of course so you could save me if something comes disconnected and I'm blubbing for air like a fish. lol

<sticks tube in different hole, words come out>
Oh! much better.

LittleMissAlice said:
I wish I could tell everyone that I would much rather them come over and ask questions instead of acting like I'm an odd species of human. It makes me very self-consious. I think people feel weird about it, though... Do they?

Yeah, cuz we're not supposed to be curious about others' differences. Then why ask how someone did their hair, or where they got that nifty tattoo? It's part of them and their life, so how is it intrinsically different?

And if I didn't wander over and ask about it, I'd miss out on a fun new friend.

LittleMissAlice said:
Not to brag, but my wheelchair is electric and it goes so fast that I have to watch on the turns cause I could possibly flip it.

Wheelchair racing as an Olympic sport

Does yours climb stairs? I remember when that was experimental some decades ago but it didn't seem to catch on, maybe it was just too hard to get right before miniaturization and computerized control. Now there are some pretty sophisticated stair-climbers, tho I haven't seen one in person yet.

Just occurred to me that a robot like BigDog could be adapted as an all-terrain wheelchair. I wonder if that's been done yet?

LittleMissAlice said:
PS: How do you quote individual lines?

I'm turning the brackets into curlies so the forum software doesn't get confused, but:

Copy and paste the poster's identifying tag ahead of a bit you want to quote. Then "close" it with a closed-quote statement, thus:

{QUOTE=SomeName;bunchofnumbers}
Text you want to quote.
{/QUOTE}

(The do-this part, "quote", is NOT case-sensitive.)

Rinse and repeat for however you want to break up a quoted post to make your replies less monolithic.

HannahJensen · Feb 25, 2015

As a lurker, I've been dying to chip in on this thread as it's a subject very close to my heart. My simple view is that writing about people with disabilities is fine as long as you don't let the disability define the person. This relates to the old distinction between a disabled person and a person with a disability and it's really about emphasis.

The short stories I am working on are autobiographical in nature and my husband is wheelchair bound having had an accident some 15 years or so ago. I should say that the emphasis is on our sex life too and the stories are firmly in the erotica genre. You can imagine some of the reactions we have encountered in combining my husband's condition with erotica but both are central to the story that I'm telling.

Not sure how much I want to say or how much people here want to read about all that, but I can say that I was strongly encouraged to write about our sex life by close friends and, in actual fact, the trajectory our sex life took about 6 years ago was actually encouraged by a therapist of sorts.

Prevailing notions of normality and abnormality mixed with right and wrong are fine for some I imagine, but for us they were just causes of negative emotions and, since we were doomed through no choice of our own to lead an abnormal life, they served no useful purpose for us.

LittleMissAlice · Apr 7, 2015

Hey, sorry I kinda dropped off the face of the Earth. I've just been super busy. Anyway... To answer your question: no, mine doesn't climb stairs which sucks. I've seen those before & I think my dad looked into it but something about it didn't work. It was a really long time ago.

Reziac said:
Just occurred to me that a robot like BigDog could be adapted as an all-terrain wheelchair. I wonder if that's been done yet?

(I hope this works. lol) They might be working on it. My chair is kind of all-terrain but it doesn't handle hills & bumps too great. It's a really good idea though. I could definetly use one. lol

Reziac said:
Yeah, cuz we're not supposed to be curious about others' differences. Then why ask how someone did their hair, or where they got that nifty tattoo? It's part of them and their life, so how is it intrinsically different?

Exactly! I couldn't have said it better myself. I can ask you about how you did your hair so why can't you ask me about my tech & how it works? It's kinda the same thing.
So if you see me wheeling around the mall or bookstore-preferably Barnes & Nobles-just shout: "Yo, Nicole! Wassup?" I'll know who you are. XD

Reziac · Apr 7, 2015

HannahJensen said:
You can imagine some of the reactions we have encountered in combining my husband's condition with erotica but both are central to the story that I'm telling.

Huh. Dunno how I was supposed to react, but my first thought was, "That's interesting," followed by, "I wonder how they... [fill in the blank] ??" Aren't writers supposed to generate curiosity, so the reader will continue reading?

I know there's other "disability erotica"(had a friend who was into it) so it's not like it's terribly weird. :tongue

LittleMissAlice said:
Hey, sorry I kinda dropped off the face of the Earth. I've just been super busy.

Just the other day I was wondering where you went... didn't realise I'd cast a summoning spell.

LittleMissAlice said:
Anyway... To answer your question: no, mine doesn't climb stairs which sucks. I've seen those before & I think my dad looked into it but something about it didn't work. It was a really long time ago.

Might be worth looking into again, if it'd be useful to you. Recent advances in robotics and miniaturization have greatly impacted a lot of tech that used to be ridiculously unwieldy.

LittleMissAlice said:
(I hope this works. lol) They might be working on it. My chair is kind of all-terrain but it doesn't handle hills & bumps too great. It's a really good idea though. I could definetly use one. lol

I vaguely recall hearing that someone using a chair climbed Mt.Everest a while back, tho with its increasing popularity as a climber destination, that's not real surprising. (Mt.Everest has become quite the tourist trap ... last video I saw of the lower trail, the place was downright crowded!) The logistics musta been a nuisance for the first one, but I imagine it's since been worked out.

<goes off, looks it up>

Dunno if the one I heard of was either of these, but anyway:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...th-legs-reaches-summit-of-everest-478517.html

http://disabilityhorizons.com/2011/06/the-mountain-climber/
(I'm sooo tempted to caption that photo "Me and my sled dogs.")

Riding a BigDog would practically be cheating. You don't have to feed it like you do the donkey.

LittleMissAlice said:
Exactly! I couldn't have said it better myself. I can ask you about how you did your hair so why can't you ask me about my tech & how it works? It's kinda the same thing.
So if you see me wheeling around the mall or bookstore-preferably Barnes & Nobles-just shout: "Yo, Nicole! Wassup?" I'll know who you are. XD

If I ever see ya around, I'll definitely do that. :Hug2:

characters with disabilities

Reziac

Resident Alien

HannahJensen

LittleMissAlice

we're all mad here

Reziac

Resident Alien