Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

A thing I run into quite frequently (read: daily) at the library is a fear of genre. It's okay to have your reading preferences; I certainly do. Myself, I don't read a whole lot of mysteries. It doesn't mean I won't, but rather they aren't the books getting my attention. We all are more than allowed to make those choices. But what really gets me is people making those decisions without having ever even put a toe outside their comfort zone, or people making those decisions even when it's an author they're familiar with.

For example, Dean Koontz has his Odd Thomas books, right? One of them came out at a graphic novel and only as a graphic novel. Patrons who reserved it by merit of it being Dean Koontz and Odd Thomas, like you do. An unmeasured percentage of them, once they saw it was a "comic book", said "Oh, I don't want that" with a particular wrinkling of the nose and returned it unopened. Didn't even leave the building with it.

John Grisham has a series based around Theodore Boone, a 13 year old lawyer. Across the libraries in my system, that might be shelved in Young Adult or might be shelved in Juvenile (what we call MG). People come in asking for the new Grisham, or for that Grisham in particular, and when they find out it's "for kids", there's that nose wrinkle again. By the way, J is where we shelve our Harry Potter and Y is where our Hunger Games are, and people will check those out, typically after they've seen the movie. Seeing that currently with the Veronica Roth Divergent books.

We actually have a display right now, of subgenres, inspired by a conversation I had with a patron who was taking out Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest, and had never heard of Steampunk. She didn't end up liking it, but I thought it was cool she was interested and willing to give it a try. There are people who come in looking for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and when they discover it's a mystery, some don't take it. There are people who come in looking for Ray Bradbury, or Ursula LeGuin, and are put off when those are in the Fantasy and Science Fiction section.

There are the people who think Fantasy and Science Fiction should be shelved separately, because they aren't the same thing. There are people who are confused (I'm in this camp) by the fact that we shelve vampires, zombies, and Neil Gaiman in the regular fiction.

We have limited space at my library, and the catalogers aren't all familiar with genre. But it genre an all or nothing prospect? I don't think so. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, say, doesn't necessarily belong in the Fantasy/SciFi section, but he could fit there. Ray Bradbury could be comfortably shelved with the "regular" (literary and commercial) fiction. The time travel romances (with or without highlanders, but really, why are there so many Scottish Highland time travel romances? When did that become a Thing?) aren't in the SciFi, nor is H.G. Wells, but we have one Lovecraft there and the other in regular fiction.

I kind of wish my library would actually just Dewey Decimilize the whole damn thing. Just assign each book its number and let people look for it by merit of that, not by the fast-and-loose genre categorizing we're currently doing. You want fiction? It's in the 800's, then look for the author's last name. Done.

Book Review: Winter Soon, by David Michael Martin

I guess I should preface this by mentioning the author of Winter Soon is my maternal grandfather. That little fact had an interesting effect on my reading, to say in the least.

It's always interesting to read something written by somebody you know. For everything you know about a person, or have talked about with a person, there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Maybe some of that is pulled back, with all of our microinstantblogging social network extravaggrandizement (I might trademark that phrase, be warned), maybe not. We have our public face and our private face, and our family face.

 (cover art by Marina Ermakova-Martin, linked from Amazon)

Writing outside your box

We all have a type of story we like.

I tend to write male protagonists, or female ones that lack feminine personality qualities. Mostly because I lack many of those qualities; girly girls irritate me, frequently, I don't get them in any kind of nuanced or detailed way.

But, occasionally, it's good to write something that you don't know. To step outside of the box or the cave or the secret fairy forest that you go to when you're in your creative space, trying to work your magic. Just out of college, I wrote a few short stories that were deliberate "chick in chain mail with big sword" fantasy, with a slightly hapless male sidekick. No romance involved, just hero --> problem --> solution style. Those didn't get me published either, of course, but they got me the first (and only, if I remember aright) personalized rejection I've had to date.

Now, with everybody in a frenzy over Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, I've wondered about why people latched onto it. In fact, my coworker and  I have a game we play. When one of the books comes across the desk (and no patrons are within earshot) we open it at random and read a couple of sentences aloud. Romance, you may have guessed, is not my genre. Erotica isn't either. However, I got the idea for a story that I could make fit into that genre.

The idea is kind of cheesy, has a mythology attachment, and will have a somewhat girly girl main character, her flamboyant gay friend, glitz and glamor and sex. I don't really write sex; we'll see how this goes. If it goes; it might still just be an amusing idea.

It's hard to think outside your box. Even when I wrote chick in chainmail fantasy, it was still writing that I tried to make as solid as possible. I tried to build something that I would want out of such a genre piece. Maybe that would be the key to breaking down this wall too, who knows?


Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?