lilacfield

Writing For the World, at sfnovelists.com. From what I've gathered, basically it says that in the fantasy genre, when writing about cultures not your own, you can only reimagine them, and it's understandable if you don't get it right every time. There's more leeway here than in, say, (the writer's own example) historical fiction.
That being said, I believe there are rules in the culture you're basing your world off of that can't just be conveniently ignored. I once read a YA novel (set in 1970's Europe, not of the fantasy genre) where there's a supposedly Japanese character called Hatsimoto. I spent the rest of the book thinking, "There's no character for 'tsi' in Japanese, is there?" Which leads me, maybe in a roundabout way, to this comment on the above blog entry.
And maybe that's another reason non-whites, Asians included, should write for a large audience, in any genre.
(Sons of Tangential: 1) Thankfully, in this era of search engines, doing research should be easier. 2) I have pages of printed material - taken from the Internet - about the Uyghurs and I still haven't had the opportunity to put them to use)
(I keep revising this entry. If there's still anything inappropriate, feel free to point it out to me)

Writing progress

June 6 1,400 words for the wuxia novel, bringing it to a total of 66k words. Sadly (?), I don't think this is a 100k-story.