Before we get to the guest post, I would like to remind readers that they have a chance to enter to win a free book by Adan Ramie. Hurry before the contest ends on June 28th. Click this link for more details.
Take it away, Adan.
Through all the years I dreamed of being a writer, I never considered that one day I would be writing science fiction. For one, I didn’t like to read it. Sure, I enjoyed watching it, and could quote Star Wars and Star Trek with the best of them, but the books I normally read tended toward anything but sci-fi.
When I was a kid, I read like the words printed on the page were sustenance. I needed them to live. My main obsession was with darkness: horror and dark fantasy. I gobbled up one book after another, day after day, until I had run out of kid lit and moved onto the romance novels my mother kept lying around.
Later, when I finally came to grips with my sexuality, I would slowly introduce myself to the world of lesbian fiction and such authors as Sarah Waters, Karin Kallmaker, and the mononymous Jae.
It comes as no surprise that the first thing I published was an anthology of horror stories. Or, then, that I moved on to writing suspense novels reviewers called “gritty and dark” before trying my hand at romance. After all, those genres formed the basis of what I knew about writing.
Faced with that information, it probably doesn’t make sense to anyone that the last book I released was a space opera. Why would someone who occasionally watches science fiction but almost never reads it want to write a science fiction novel?
That’s right. I spent months brainstorming, writing, and polishing a novel way outside of my comfort zone on the wings of a dare. I carefully crafted a universe, filled it with alien planets, and populated those with multicolored life forms. I created characters who had rich pasts and childhoods on farms or among multigenerational, matriarchal family systems.
And, if I’m being honest, it was the most fun I’d had writing a book in a while.
The question people have been asking me since I first branched out from horror and into suspense is, “Why switch?” I can only answer it one way: because I must. I’m not the kind of person who can stick to the same hair style for more than six months; I can’t imagine handcuffing myself to a single genre for the rest of my life.
Thanks so much Adan for sharing!
Adan Ramie is a multi-genre author working primarily in the LGBT category. She lives with her wife and kids in a small town in Texas where she is working on reading her ever-growing TBR pile.
How to connect with Adan: Website / Twitter / Amazon
I love this story! I felt the same way about romance that Adan felt about sci-fi. I love to watch the movies but I only read a little of it. The mystery genre was always my first love. When I started writing lesfic mysteries, my lesbian readers demanded more romance (and sex) in my books. That stuff was outside my comfort zone but I learned quickly. I finally broke down and wrote a romance. And, like Adan, it took months of research and writing to get it all right. I’ve since written a second and I’m working on a short story series. It’s coming easier now but it’s still harder for me to write than mysteries are. I can’t even imagine diving into sci-fi!
Where did you find these demanding readers? I tend to get the quiet ones, no matter what genre I’m writing in! It’s definitely a learning curve to write in a new genre, but I’ve found that it was worth it, if only for the experience of doing something new. Thanks for the comment, Anne!
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