Hey everyone! A very con-brained Mary here, just back from Shore Leave, which was lots of fun and full of that special con chaos. One of the panels I was on was titled "Never Have I Ever" and consisted of panelists discussing writing-type things they haven't yet done and would like to, plus a few things they'd never do. Biggest surprise of the panel was that prolific tie-in author Greg Cox had never even WRITTEN an original novel until the pandemic (the guy has, like, 100 published titles).During this panel I realized that my list of genres I've never written in (but would like to) has gotten rather short, and it's all thanks to short stories. I think I've written about this topic on this blog before, but short stories really are a great way to stretch those creative muscles in directions you haven't taken them in before (yes, I'm encouraging everyone to become genre contortionists).
Thanks to having lots of friends who like putting together indie anthologies, I've had the opportunity to write a bunch of funky little tales that I otherwise wouldn't have. So far, these include:
- A Western
- A full-blown horror tale (rather than my usual dark fantasy)
- A cruise ship murder mystery
- A dark academia story
- A sci-fi fairy tale retelling
- Historical fiction
- What might be best described as a "visual poem" for a comic anthology
- A superhero story
- A contemporary story
- A cryptid story
And next on the list, for THRILLING ADVENTURE YARNS 2022, will be a 1950s-style noir detective tale, just because I like noirs but have never written one. On the list of things I haven't tried yet but would like to is a rom com (I also keep threatening to write a cheesy Hallmark-style Christmas story) and hard sci-fi.
Sometimes these short stories turn into something more, like how what was supposed to be a one-off Sherlock Holmes reimagining turned into several more short stories and a novel manuscript (Kickstarter coming 2023?? I keep getting asked about it...).
There are some genres I would steer clear of just because I'm not interested in them (sorry, military fiction), but in general, I like genre-hopping because you never know where it might lead you. Hey, if you'd told me in 2012, when I was working on my debut novel and thought I'd be writing mostly adult fic, that perhaps my best-received book would be a YA sci-fi romance, I would've been like "WTF I don't write YA or romance" (HAH! After that debut and its sequels, everything else I wrote was YA other than short stories).
Are there any genres you've been hankering to write it?
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