Welcome to my writing blog. Here
you can read about works in progress, as well as novels already launched or
about to launch. I am exploring a two-pronged approach in my novel-writing
career: self-publishing some novels while going the conventional publishing
house route with others. It’s an uncertain time in writing and publishing. Some
see doom and gloom in the digital publishing revolution, while others see
enormous opportunity. I personally think that change is good. Stasis is death.
And the future happens regardless.
First, I must pause to say a few words about this gorgeous
website created by Maddee James of www.xuni.com. Maddee has truly
captured the personality and emotion of my writing with her skillful use of
imagery, color palette and texture. Maddee also created the stunning cover of
my gothic suspense novel, Angel of Highgate. Truly, the girl has mad skills.
As Oscar Wilde famously said: “I
have the simplest of tastes; I am always satisfied with the best.” My tastes
precisely echo Wilde’s. In my opinion, Maddee is the best: a visual magician,
easy to work with and a true professional.
The same is true of the literary
agency I am currently signed with, Kimberley Cameron & Associates.
Kimberley is a terrific agent—wonderfully kind, supportive and responsive. Conventional
publishing is weathering a stormy time, and I consider myself fortunate to be
teamed up with a seasoned pro with a terrific track record in order to navigate
the choppy waters.
In addition to updating readers on
my writing adventures, I also plan to give back to the writing community by
creating blog entries with tips on novel writing and fiction technique.
Bookmark this site, I plan to post
frequently. Once again, welcome, fasten your seat belts, and I hope you enjoy the ride.
Genre-Bending or . . . Paradigms Lost
That’s genre-bending, not gender-bending.
(No Boy George references here, thank you.) Much of today’s cutting-edge
fiction is a volatile admixture of two or more established genres combined to
create something new. Of course, this kind of practical alchemy is precisely
what agents and publishers have been admonishing writers not to do for years.
Conventional wisdom has always urged writers to being by determining “where in the
bookstore your novel will be shelved.” That is, unless your novel can be pigeonholed
into a traditional genre: mystery, horror, literary, etc.—it will not find its
target audience.
I’m sure many brilliant novels have
been lost to literary history, rejected out of hand because they ignored this
literary shibboleth.
But writers, being the unruly,
creative types they are, have proved unable to resist the urge to build a new
beast by cutting-and-pasting disparate elements into new forms. That, after
all, is the definition of creativity. Sometimes this leads to a Frankenstein
monster, but it can potentially spawn a modern Prometheus.
In recent times, the blurring of
boundaries, once a slow, steady creep, is now landsliding onto on the bookstore
shelves aisles and into the great wide open of self-published eBooks. Many
genre-benders have not only been best sellers, they’ve accomplished the
unthinkable by forcing bookstores to relabel their shelves and agents and
publishers to accept the legitimacy of new genres. Hence, we now have urban
fantasy, where the creatures typically confined to a fantasy world—wizards,
warlocks, werewolves, dragons and demons—now lurk in the shadowy alleys of
large cities, or hold down day jobs as parking meter attendants or may even be
the kid in the drive-thru window asking “would you like fries with that?”
The huge success of Diana
Gabaldon’s Outlander series has led
to the creation of an entire “time-slip” genre. More recently we have entered
the age of the literary mashup, with Regency heroines doing battle with zombies
and sea monsters, and hard-boiled detectives and their vampire sidekicks
cruising L.A. freeways chain-smoking Marlboros while solving murders.
One of the masters of the mashup
(arguably, the earliest exemplar of the form) is the British writer, Kim
Newman. Typically pigeon-holed as a “science fiction writer”, Kim’s novels
feature a mélange of literary classics, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes
mysteries, sixties British TV superspies, historical fiction, historical
fantasy, and whatever else fell to hand when Newman was cooking up his mashup
mulligan.
A perfect example is one of Newman’s
most recent novels, Professor Moriarty:
The Hound of the D’Urbervilles. The
title alone gives the reader a wink and an elbow in the ribs and foreshadows
the literary hijinks Newman gets up to in a novel where “The Napoleon of Crime”
and his head henchman serve as an inverted Holmes and Watson. Moriarty’s
sidekick, Colonel “Basher” Moran, supplies a first-person narrative voice that
is bitingly British and howlingly funny. I snortled from beginning to end.
My own novel Angel of Highgate (which I describe as a “Victorian suspense
novel”) received a dance-on-my-desk-and-whoop-with-joy review from Kirkus
Reviews in which the reviewer described it as: “a romantic, mystical tale of adventure set in Victorian
Britain that seamlessly blends elements of history, fantasy, and horror . . .”
Uh . . . okay . . . whatever. I’m
not sure I would have gone as far as horror (which for me conjures images of ghosts,
werewolves and similar supernatural beasties) but I’m not about to quibble with
such a stellar review. Still, I think it illustrates that modern fiction, like Alice, has
stepped through the looking glass into a realm where genre boundaries are as
porous and shifting as panes of mist.
So my advice to new writers
formulating novel ideas? I would argue that you can never go wrong staying
firmly in the established genres. By doing so you stay within the comfort zone
of agents and editors. Alternatively, if you produce something wholly original
that fits in no established genre, you face a very hard sell. I have committed
this sin myself with novels that are gathering dusty bunnies under the bed
right now. Agent-Speak for this is: “I love it but I don’t how to sell it.”
That said, if you were the kind of
child whose crayon invariably strayed outside the lines, flex your creative
muscles, but remember that editors and agents want familiar materials with a
unique twist. Good luck inventing the “next hot thing” in literature.
