By this time we know why we should never live with one of the great fictional stereotypes: it’ll never end well. But publishing is changing, and the genre mash-up has already gained some ground. So what happens when genres collide? What would happen if a hard-nosed Cop from a Crime Novel shared a house with a hapless Chick-Lit Heroine?
You love the cops in crime novels. So careworn, and yet mysterious. They have money, and yet never spend it on themselves. Granted, being married to one is just asking for trouble. But you could just share a house with one, right? That would be exciting, and spice up your humdrum existence no end!
Let’s take a look, and see if you might want to think this through a little more…
What really happens at a book festival? Is it true they’re like music festivals for adults? And when it comes to fiction, why does crime always pay? Answers to these questions, along with others nobody ever bothered asking, within a click.
If Colm Toibín’s Brooklyn had been written by a woman, would it have been a smash hit? Would anyone have cared one whit for a story about a young woman and her domestic struggles, if that young woman had been created and written by another woman? No. They wouldn’t.
I know. How uncouth! How belligerent, sanctimonious, and other words of more than 1 syllable! Book genres have become a bit of a joke really, as I was saying in my last post regarding the nonsense categorisation of “Women’s Fiction”. Here’s another literary joke for you: ************************************************ Q. What’s the difference between Literary Fiction and Romance? A. So’s your face. ************************************************ Isn’t that…
Stuck for a title for that crime novel you’re working on? Or perhaps you have no intentions whatsoever of writing a book, but find yourself preoccupied almost hourly with schemes and plans for murder, mayhem and wildly inventive violence. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a title to go along with your plotting? (Oho! You…
In this post (and, following some suspicious yoghurt, this one) I pretended to have a look at what was going to happen in 2014, but now I’d like to do it for real. What fads and fashions will we see in genre fiction in 2014? Will fantasy lose its dystopian and grimy-fingered grip on the bestseller market? And that age-old question –…
Tara Sparling writes 