{"id":15740,"date":"2014-06-18T11:56:21","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T15:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=15740"},"modified":"2016-06-18T13:31:57","modified_gmt":"2016-06-18T17:31:57","slug":"potpourri-june-18th-2014-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/potpourri-june-18th-2014-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Potpourri, June 18th (2014 edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JES,<\/a>[Latest in the apparently annual <\/em>June 18 tradition, of (as I said last year) commenting about whatever the heck I want to…]<\/em><\/p>\n

Ongoing genre confusion:<\/strong> As a rule, readers of fiction tend to latch onto a favorite sort of fiction, to the exclusion of others. They may or may not read “literary” fiction, or that large, unclassifiable body of titles called “mainstream” — but they often return to mysteries, say, or romance, or fantasy, or science fiction, especially for “escape” purposes. They also do not<\/em> in general read one or more of the other categories.<\/p>\n

Which can be a problem, for certain writers anyhow:<\/p>\n

Agents, publishers and retailers need to know how to optimize their pitches for a book. Readers who prefer a certain kind of SF, for instance, might be put off by a book cover featuring a man and woman dressed in gauzy lavender; a horror or Western fan, visiting Amazon or the bookstore or library for the umpteenth time, will tend to return to the same genre-based sections, over and over.<\/p>\n

So you’ve got to know how to classify your fiction (which comes down to: you’ve got to know your audience, whether they’re book professionals or not).<\/p>\n

For the past six or eight months, I’ve been enjoying writing something SF-ish — one long story and one (yet incomplete) novel, as of today. It’s real<\/em> science fiction: adventures in space, technology, and time. But it also falls squarely into the mystery genre. Furthermore, and maybe worse, it falls into a particular mystery sub<\/em>-genre. If you know the old Thin Man<\/em> films, from the 1930s and ’40s, you’ll have the right idea: a charming, sophisticated, and (I hope) funny husband-and-wife team solve crimes which may involve blackmail, murder, and so on… but not crimes of the grisly action-packed thriller sort.<\/p>\n

Oh, no: I didn’t even come close to inventing the mystery\/SF blended genre, as even a fairly simple Google search<\/a> will tell you. But modern readers — and the people charged with getting books to them — tend to have edgier tastes. “Nick and Nora Charles in space” does not seem a tagline likely to draw many readers.<\/p>\n

…Sigh. It’s hard enough to write without worrying about all this. It’s one of the dilemmas which drive people to self-publishing: I’ll write whatever I want<\/em>, they say, and I won’t waste time trying to win over professional go-betweens like editors and booksellers. Readers like <\/em>good books, regardless of genre!<\/em><\/p>\n

But I don’t really believe genre doesn’t matter, do I? Do<\/em> I?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A man’s reach vs. his grasp: <\/strong>Last year<\/a>, I claimed to still be posting occasionally at Medium. A tally of my output there shows that I posted exactly zero<\/em> times after making that assertion. For what it’s worth, here are the five entries current as of a year ago, and still current as of today:<\/p>\n