Thoughts and Questions about the Decades Challenge (Emotions, Ethics and Historical Perspective)

I hope you still like it! I didn’t read a lot about history or historical fiction as a child because I was very easily upset. I wouldn’t even read the word ‘die’ out loud in a book if I was praciticing reading with my mum or a teacher!

I get why you worry though, because even though I know there’s elements of my own story that are controversial and there’s use of some language no longer considered appropriate, I do worry about both causing legitimate upset and accidentally upsetting the occasional folk who expect historical stories to be entirely progressive… : p I think back in the late 2000s and earlier 2010s there was more of an idea on a reader’s side of ‘okay, this isn’t for me’ and moving on when encountering uncomfortable but otherwise inoffensive content. And with the increase of people using content warnings that you think that would have gotten better, but it seems to be now the responsibility is entirely on the writer sometimes. Like I’m not saying ‘waaa people are easily offended nowadays!’ because being upset or offended isn’t always a bad thing, but the decision on behalf of a reader to do their part to curate their reading experience doesn’t seem as widespread an idea.