What’s in a Genre?
f there was one question I wish people would stop asking it is the following: Oh you’re a writer? What genre to you write in?
I love that people are interested in the fact that I’m a writer, and as a general rule I love being asked questions, I could talk about writing for days (clearly if you’ve seen this blog) but the reason I dislike this question so much and all it’s many derivatives. Is because every time I give them my honest answer they look at me as though I have three heads. 
I don’t really like to be bogged down in one genre. I reply, waiting for the look of confusion, perhaps, shock, and horror.
You’ve gotta have a favorite. Do I? I wasn’t aware I had to do anything.
If you want the honest truth, the closest thing I can say I have to a genre that I can pretty much promise you will always find my books in, is LGBT. And that’s a pretty BROAD spectrum. True, currently I am writing Fantasy, I like fantasy, I love writing it, I love reading it. But I don’t want to spend my whole life doing it. I want to branch out. Maybe do romance, historical fiction, action, political drama, thriller, super spy thriller, contemporary. I mean if you think about it in realistic terms, no book is just one genre. Bridge of Memories alone probably constitutes, romance, political thriller, fantasy, a dash of horror (maybe?), a little action, a little light erotica (or is that just romance). What makes it mainly fantasy and not the rest of those things is that we prefer if a book have one or two genres at most. What are the CORE themes of your novel? That’s what set’s the genre, the core themes of all my novels is powerful gay characters, and drama (which I suppose is more of a theatre/t.v. term) but if you insist on putting me in a genre, because I get it, authors have made quite a killing by sticking in one genre. Danielle Steel (I see what you did there E.L.James), Stephen King, John Grisham and the like. They’ve made their living off writing one specific genre. They are what I like to call serial authors. They write the same book, over and over, using different characters, perhaps different locales, (unless your Stephen King) and somehow people continue to read it as if they’ve never seen it before. Sure the dialogue and characters are different but I imagine there are only so many love stories, and ghost stories and dirty lawyer stories you can tell before they all start to blend together. Unless you want to write about a dirty lawyer who doesn’t know he’s dead and falls in love with a live person who for some reason can see him.
OH GOD.
I may have created a monster.
Or a best seller.
Who knows.
The point is, for the most part it’s all been done before, so why would you want to stay in the same genre and keep doing it forever? Ten years of Secrets has been enough. If I don’t write another fantasy novel for another twenty years I would be very happy. I like it, but I don’t have the patience or the energy to write the same thing. I like variety. Call me crazy, but I don’t want to be stuck in the same genre. Maybe when I’m in my thirties or forties (like the aforementioned authors) I’ll want to write one genre forever, but for now, my genre is Gay, Fiction. See book for more specific details.
