 Misty Massey
read all posts by Misty MasseyI give up. I’ve twice started a post, and run into snags along the way. One was all about romance in my fiction (kinda like peppermint in my chocolate!) but I realized it was becoming a rant and I needed to cool down and look at it with calmer eyes. The other one wanted to be funny but it’s just…not. Funny is hard, and not-funny that wishes it was funny is pathetic. I thought about writing a post sharing goofy things library patrons have said to me in the last two weeks (and believe me, some of the comments will make you weep for the future of the human race) but then I worried that one of my library coworkers might drop in and decide it was time for my job to be handled by someone who didn’t post things on the internet (There are people who don’t live [...]
Continue reading I Give Up
Misty Massey
read all posts by Misty MasseyOnce upon a time, the genre standards were very clearly defined. Mystery meant the discovery of a dead body and the subsequent investigation to find the killer. Romance was a beautiful young woman meeting a handsome man she at first hates, and only comes to love after 200-odd pages of tribulation. Westerns were cowboys on the lonesome prairie, with the obligatory gunfight. Horror terrified the reader and only in the last pages let the hero win. Thrillers were exciting tales of kidnappings, heists or political intrigue. Erotic fiction was….well, you get the idea.
Fantasy and science fiction had, and to an extent still have, their own conventions. But somewhere along the way, writers got bored with sticking to the rule books, and started playing with the standards, borrowing plot devices of other genres and weaving them into the mix to make their own work a little different. These used to [...]
Continue reading Genres Part Five – Crossovers
Misty Massey
read all posts by Misty MasseyWhen I was in my early teens, I somehow discovered romance novels. I don’t recall now how I made this discovery, I just know that for a while, I read Harlequins and Barbara Cartland stories like other people take deep breaths. Falling in love, according to those books, was a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and even if things looked dark now, all would be happy in the end. After a year or two of saccharine smoochies, I moved on to the big chihuahua-killers by Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers, which taught me that love was combat, and that it would be the man I despised on sight who’d eventually win my heart. Not long after that, I found my way to the modern gothic novels of writers like Phyllis Whitney and Victoria Holt. It wouldn’t be the man I’d fight with, but the [...]
Continue reading You Got Your Romance In My Fantasy!
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How To Write Magical Words
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