This time on the blog chain Margie started off with a question about genres.
How did you come to write your YA genre (e.g. contemp, fantasy, etc.)? AND (yep, it’s a 2 parter), if you weren’t writing that, what genre would you be interested in exploring?
As I've mentioned before, I've already played around with a few different genres.
My first novel was a contemporary romance. Why? Because I've been devouring romance novels since eighth grade. The biggest influence in writing my contemporary romance was Susan Elizabeth Phillips, a contemporary romance novelist whose books I re-read on a regular basis. Also, at the time I was also reading a lot of chick lit, and elements from those books worked their way in as well. Unfortunately, I think my influences sometimes manifested themselves as imitation - and this ultimately hurt the book. However, I have two other contemporary romances that I began and abandoned in a file folder somewhere. Someday I'd like to hunt them down and give this genre another go.
My second novel was an urban fantasy. And genre wise, it's actually not that big of a change from contemporary romance. Like my contemporary romance this book had romantic entanglements - just no happily ever after. And the setting was the same modern world... except with a few demons thrown in for flavor. My biggest influence here was Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And all things Joss Whedon.
And now, I am working on a young adult urban fantasy. Again, not that far of a jump. Still in an urban fantasy world, just with a younger protagonist. It was really the idea I had for this one that demanded the young adult genre. For me, it wasn't Harry Potter or the Twilight series that brought me back to the YA genre as an adult (I'm actually not a huge fan of either of those series). I actually found my way back to YA in my early twenties, when I was in that section of the library picking out a book for my youngest sister. Turns out, she have any interest in reading the book, but I did. The book was, A Killing Frost by John Marsden - the third in his Tomorrow series. I ended up hunting down the entire series at the library, and then everything else he had written, and after that YA books were regularly rotated into my reading queue.
As for other genres I might write in... well, I don't know. I'm actually pretty happy with these three, but I also wouldn't rule anything else out. Who knows there might be a Western lurking somewhere at the far reaches of my mind... but I doubt it.
What about you? Are you true to one genre, or do you also like to play the field?
And make sure to keep following this chain. Shannon's daily pie post was before mine and Amanda will be up next.
