I write fantasy and science fiction, including paranormal romance and young adult (YA) as well as more adult stories.
My agent is currently marketing my YA fantasy novel Bag of Tricks (sometimes known as The Talisman Bag),
and a paranormal romance called Kruegger’s World.
I update this site quarterly, with information about me, my fiction, and
writing in general. Older posts are available on the Archive link in the
left column. I update
my
blog at least two or three times a week with my thoughts on publishing, life in general, and speculative fiction in particular.
I’ve posted a short story on this site, a prequel to Bag of Tricks. The short story is called "Aveline's Price", and it is available under the Free Sample link to the left.
Genre vs. Mainstream
Genre is an interesting thing. As someone who writes a variety of types of stories, I often ponder what to call them. You could think of genre just as a label, a way to mark a book so that bookstores and libraries will know what kind of book it is. But that brings up an interesting point. Many libraries don’t shelve books the same way a bookstore does. Some libraries put all their fiction books (a.k.a. novels) in one section. They do break up their collections based on the reader’s age—children’s books, YA books, and adult books. But within the area reserved for adult fiction, they don’t always try to separate mysteries from “mainstream” novels, or science fiction or fantasy. Tolkien could end right next to Tolstoy. Some libraries do literally put labels on books to alert readers that is fits in a specific genre such as mystery or speculative fiction. Others don’t bother. To some extent, the library is a repository. Once you know what book (the title and the author), you want, the librarians want you to be able to find it without worrying what genre it is.
Bookstores are different; they have customers, not patrons, and they have to be able to
put books where customers can find them—not just the books the customer already knows
about, but any other books the customer might want to buy (i.e., books in the same genre).
Hence, bookstores have sections for mysteries, for science fiction and fantasy,
and for romance.
When you go into a bookstore, you expect to see each of these groups of books.
But what about books that cross genres? If a love story is set in a far future society, a religious dystopia that never existed, is it a romance, or is it science fiction? If a policeman is investigating a death of a fisherman in the Puget Sound, that’s a mystery, right? But what if the “mystery” is a beautifully-written novel that incorporates themes of love, attraction, racism, fidelity, and betrayal? Is it still a mystery or is it literary fiction? The former instance is my story Kruegger’s World, and I don’t care what you call it if you’re willing to read it. The latter instance describes Snow Falling on Cedars and most people called that book literary fiction, in spite of the mystery at its core.
The meaning of
Originally the word “romance” was spelled with a capital R and meant a secular story
written in a Romance language, like French or Spanish, as opposed a scholarly work in Latin. Even as late
as the 19th Century, the word romance when applied to fiction didn’t mean a love story, but merely
a story with an exotic setting, an exciting story line, or some other quality that made
it not prosaic and everyday. These days romance means a love story—a story in which a romantic relationship develops between two people.