If you had asked me in high school or college… what sort of stories I would write, I would have said fantasy or sci-fi without missing a beat. I had an early, very healthy dose of Stephen King, but I got twice as much Tolkien, Eddings, Jordan, Wolfe, and Tad Williams; later, Frank Herbert, William Gibson, David Brin, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle and Dan Simmons (for Hyperion…not to be missed – Carrion Comfort, and well, pretty much everything he’s ever written, they are all tops). Also, before anyone throws stones, I read plenty of our founding forefathers, Bradbury and Asimov and all the rest!. A lot of my early writing involved swords or lasers, sometimes both, and I still read occasionally in both genres. However, since I really returned to writing “full time”, I’ve stayed away from those areas.
The easy answer? With George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie riding around the fantasy realm, I’m not sure I have better a horse. In similar vein, Richard Morgan, Hugh Howey, Iain Banks and James Corey all have staked out claims in the sort of “space” I might have once worked in. Have my tastes really changed? Have I?
Make no mistake, writing fantasy or sci-fi or horror is no easier than any other genres – maybe now more than ever the appetite, and expectations, for these “genre” books has never been higher. I have dozens of half-written, nearly plotted, almost complete fantasy cycles, and probably an equal amount of “homage to Neuromancer, but I promise kind-of-different” sci-fi epics. Yet, when I sit down to lay out my writing schedule for the next year and a half (yep, I’m that guy), none of those sorts of stories make the top three (I try to plan out three books in advance; doesn’t mean the batting order won’t change, but I tend to research and plot on the next book while I’m writing the current one). For whatever reason, that’s not where my voice is at the moment, and maybe that’s a good thing – that I’m listening to that voice, and writing what it whispers.
Still…my current WIP is set in the Texas bad lands, and it might be awesome if my protagonist Deputy Chris Cherry carried a laser…
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