It has taken me a while, but I think i'm starting to get the feel for the pronouns in my alien world. The writing feels much more natural. Here's a sample:
Jamie stopped at jes grandparent’s home. It stood on an oak platform. It had a single roofed room where jes grandparent kept a few items that couldn’t survive being outside in the weather. Grans loved to read. Gi had a small shelf of gis favorite books. Gi also kept a number of items to remind gir of family, including a drawing that Jamie had made as a child. Gi kept it in a frame hung on a wall.
Gi had a second room with full sized oak walls and two large windows. There were no window panes, but there were curtains that gi shut when gi was reading so as not to entice her neighbors to stray from The Ideal. Jamie noticed that the curtains were shut. Gis reading room had a door that opened onto gis porch and down into a lush, grassy yard.
Gi would have loved adding a white picket fence, but that metaphor evoked too much of a sense of ownership. People respected each other’s personal space not because of a sense of the rights of ownership, but because it felt neighborly to do so.
It was custom in the community not to enter someone’s area without a welcome--custom, not a rule. Gi had placed a post, like the corner of her idyllic picket fence, on the edge of her area. It was painted white and carefully carved, as if all the craftsmanship of a whole house was imparted on that one post. Many of the houses in this ring of the compound had such knocking posts for people to announce themselves. Jamie knocked on Gis. Jes grandparent opened gis door and stepped out onto gis porch. Jamie beamed at seeing gis welcoming smile.
Note the two pronoun formats: Je for Jamie and Gi for Grans. This alien world doesn't have a male and female dichotomy, indeed, it has no concept of gender among people. Its pronouns are built around wealth, which is visible to everyone based on how many nanobots you are made up of. The 'e form for people with the full complement of their possible nanobots, and the 'i form for people with less. The first initial comes from the name of the person, and is completely omitted for people with less than half of their full nanonbots potential--the poorest of the poor.
The 'i form is used without any overt disrespect. It's just a pronoun, and feels as natural as "he" or "she" does to us. But, just like in our world, the pronouns come from a power imbalance, which in this world is based on wealth rather than gender.
You'll see the pronoun variations--je for 2nd person, jer for 3rd person, jes for possessive--are similar to our usage, but I've had to make some choices so that they don't evoke specific gender as a rule, but are close enough to be understood by the reader.
I've had two kinds of major difficulties writing this. The first is that pronouns are so natural as to be invisible in writing. I have added a task to go back and check for our pronouns slipping in, which they do to me all the time. The second difficulty has been trying to set aside my own natural tendencies to think of people as male or female. As much as I try to push the idea out of my head, each character has a natural gender in my mind. I can see it in how my pronoun errors fall in. For example, if I see "he" falling into my text, that's a clear indicator that I'm thinking of the character as male, possibly bringing my own unconscious biases into how I write them. It's a fabulously challenging exercise.
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