So let’s see what going on in my brain matter today. . . I could write about the election results and all the controversy surrounding that and how Trump is making up election fraud stories and how most of the republicans are standing by and just letting him say untrue things like they always do. Nah, I don’t want to write about that!
I usually write about word oddities of English or I could explore the pairings of words possibly never heard together before such as salacious pantaloons or a jaunty skedaddle but no, not this time. I think this time what is about to leak out of my brain matter has to do with writing, or maybe even my own writing.
The book I published last year, War Paint, is a novel set in 1972 in the Vietnam War. I think it’s a pretty damn good story. Then I wrote a psychological crime thriller that I am currently querying to literary agents in an attempt to land a traditional publishing deal. I am currently working on a novel that I think could be the first in a series. The protagonist is Kaz Turner, who helps people in difficult and dangerous situations. Think John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee character--an unofficial private eye who steps in to take on the cause for people who have been wronged. I’ve also had a less than half-finished science fiction novel sitting around for a few years that sometimes beckons to be completed. And there is another novel about a criminal television preacher that I will be doing a major rewrite on one of these years soon.
So my point is that apparently I am a very eclectic author. This runs counter to some writing advice I’ve read over the years that lays out the difficulties of doing this rather than sticking to one genre and developing a following within it. But there are of course novelists who have been successful writing a variety of categories. John Updike, Isaac Asimov and Ken Follett are three who come to mind without taking time to go and look up more examples. General fiction isn’t really a genre, but rather a catch-all category that just means the book isn’t science fiction, western, thriller, mystery, horror, etc. I think I may be a general fiction author, which means I may be able to find some success and a following by writing a variety of types of stories. That appeals to me because it leaves me a lot of freedom to write whatever type of story I want to develop into a novel without concerning myself with fitting it into a certain category. Whatever books I publish might have elements of thriller, mystery, crime or who knows. I’d like to think my novels will fit into the category of books people want to read because it pulls them into a story and keeps them turning the pages to find out what happens next.
So now that I’ve written this introspective look at my writing I think I need to cut this short and get back to writing something that a literary agent finds worthy of representing for publication. If you are browsing through some books in the future and you see my name as the author, you’ll have to look it over a bit to see if it might be an action adventure story or a mystery or a thriller, or just a damn exciting sounding story that you can’t wait to get into. Who knows, it may even be a novel about a catawampus kerfuffle or some other sort of cockamamie hogswallop.
BRAIN MATTER FROM BRIAN
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