Okay, here’s the thing about genre: I don’t know where I fit.
The first novel I ever wrote . . . (well, let’s be honest, it was the first novel I tried to write) was a terrible science fiction story about a civil war between the Earth and the moon. It was amazingly awful and it clocked in at just over 50,000 words.
I’d written it for a class and my professor gave me a kind and much understated critique: “It needs work.”
Boy did it ever. I think there was only a single scene in the entire novel where she’d penned “This is good.” Everything else was a blood bath of editing marks and suggestions.
Still, though, I was undeterred. I had the overconfidence of youth and I was sure that my genius would eventually be recognized. (Did I mention that during the writing of that novel I had decided that dialogue was overrated and that the reader would spend most of their time in the characters’ minds and the majority of my novel would be told through story action? I don’t think I can accurately describe what a train wreck this was.)