I'm anticipating some degree of cultural appropriation brouhaha, down the road.  Right now, an editor of a major publishing house is looking at my big historical novel about shipwrecked African slaves who moved in on indigenous peoples in sixteenth-century coastal Ecuador and founded a community that endured for generations, despite several colonial Spanish expeditions meant to reduce them to subservience.  I certainly have not portrayed these people as primitive, because they were inheritors of sophisticated cultures which I've done my best to understand and put on the page.

Compounding the fuss, if there is one, will  be the fact that the Canada Council gave me a major grant to keep me fed while I was researching and writing four drafts.  If any controversy develops, I suppose I will finally have to dig into my father's family's genetic history to settle the longstanding question as to whether or not I am of mixed race.

But first I need to sell the book.