Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 0
Total Queries: 35
Rejections: 11
Scenes Mapped: 11
Total Scenes: 348
It was a good writing day. Finished off Arc 2 which went way faster than expected and got halfway through Arc 3. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, though. It’s going to be a busy day.
Filling the Well
Bloodwitch: 43%
The Raven Boys: 90%
Guide to Literary Agents 2019: 89/332
Good reading day too. I got to focus a bit more than expected and I saw the fruits of that effort. I’m a happy man.
Polishing the Well
This is basically going to be my answer for the next few days. I’ll let you know on the other side.
Well Chat
Bend and Blend
What comes after literary fiction? That which cannot be defined, of course!
A big thing in literature right now is genre bending and what I’m going to call genre blending. This is when you defy the tropes of a genre or combine elements of various genres to make something unique and new-feeling. I say new-feeling because I ascribe to the mentality that there is nothing new under the sun. Every story being told is a take on an existing story of one form or another. If you look hard enough, you’ll find it.
That’s where bending and blending come in. You wanna make something new that’s all yours? Start monkeying around with what you know about a genre. Take fantasy for instance. A big trope in fantasy is the ignorant farmboy who is chosen by destiny to save the world from the evil dark one. Take that and flip it on its head. Write a story about a misunderstood hero who is making decisions based on what he thinks is best for the world but he keeps getting tripped up by clueless fools who think they know better. Or you blend with other genres and the ignorant farmboy is a lovestruck city girl. Or the evil dark one is pretty in pink and sweet as pie as she sets the world aflame (see Queen Whatevra Wa’nabi from The Lego Movie 2). Or the hero has to actually destroy one world to save another.
See, when you start trying to buck the age-old traditions, some unique stuff can pop up. That’s what genre-bending is all about. You defy convention to write the story that’s true to you. Nothing wrong with convention, of course. There’s TONS of tropes in my first novel; I’m just taking my take on them.
So where does the blending come in? That’s when you start experimenting with mixing genres together to make something cool. Fantasy mystery. Romantic suspense. Sci-fi crime investigation. Space opera western. It looks like I’m just creating a word salad by throwing genre titles together, but these are all real things. And those are only two mixed together. What happens when you mix three? Romantic fae western…IN SPACE! Again, some unique stuff can come out of not staying in a box.
And that’s the moral of this entire series: boxes were made to be broken. Cross the line. Break the mold. Make something that speaks to you, something you wish you could read right now. Categorization helps us find what we like, but recreating the categories by bleeding them together is a beautiful thing. After all, it isn’t called Art without reason.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG