Welcome
to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's
time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop.
If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog
hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy,
ideas, and networking. If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek
behind the curtain of a writing life.
Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the July 2 posting of the IWSG are Rebecca Douglass, Natalie Aguirre, Cathrina Constantine, and Louise Barbour!
This month's question:
July 2 question - Is there a genre you haven't tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?
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I love trying out new genres, themes, styles, etc. For me, that's some of the joy of writing: going "I've never done that before, so let's go!"
I'm in the middle of writing my first romances right now and it's a BLAST! After finishing my Menopausal Superhero series last year, I found that really wanted new project energy. So instead of returning to one of my back-burner projects, I decided I'd write romances featuring women in their 50s finding love: GenX romances.
The first one is off for editing now and I'm nearly done prepping the second one for editing, then I'm back to finish drafting the third one.
What will I do after that? I think I'll go back to the Gothic I started a couple of years back.
Often, when I want to try out a new genre, I write a short story first. It lets me play with something new at a lower commitment (in time, energy, etc.) than taking on a novel. It's been fun, and it's really built my catalogue since I've gotten 24 of them published in anthologies over the past ten years.
There's a lot of horror in that list (I LOVE writing short horror), but there's also urban fantasy, literary fiction, women's fiction, alt-history, fantasy, science fiction, weird, ghost, romance, fable/fairytale, and dystopian in there, especially since crossover genre is a real thing and you can end up with a weird urban fantasy alt-history with romantic elements and have to ask yourself what genre it is.
I haven't yet written any steampunk. Besides the Gothic, I've also got a historical women's fiction trilogy I'd like to get back to and finish, and well as a young adult fantasy. I've never written a thriller or a mystery. OOOOH, maybe a western would be fun. I love to read weird westerns, so writing one would probably be even more fun.
So far, I don't have much interest in writing straight up realistic fiction or military scifi, but otherwise, there isn't much I'm not interested in trying. Trying on new genres is a delight.
How about you? Are you a genre-hopper as a reader or writer? Or do you have favorite lanes to swim in?
