Last night, after almost three hours of writing, I finished Chapter Six of Suggestive Amusements. To say it was a chore is something of an understatement; I was tired, my neck hurt, and it seems like I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. It felt like the time I had a concussion and life was just one Memento moment after another.
Now, where was I?
I’m up into early novella territory at the moment: twenty-two thousand, seven hundred twenty words over six chapters. Not a bad little word count, if I may say so. If I work out my math this gives me a final count shy of sixty-five thousand words, but I know there are a couple of chapters ahead where that count is likely to get bumped even more. If I had to make any kind of guess, I’d say this is going to end up somewhere around the seventy thousand point, which is not a bad point to be.
The more I get into the story, however, the more I wonder about the genre. I’ve finished a good scene that followed the aftermath of sex, and ended up with getting into something that, as I put it into the computer, starting making me wonder just how nuts most guys are. (No spoilers, because I’m really the daughter of River Song and I take after Mummy.) But it’s not a story where sex is a big thing–even though the story my main male character is suppose to work on is going to be a bit of erotica in its own right.
It’s also got a bit of a fantasy vibe to it–I mean, you’re watching someone who’s suppose to be a Greek goddess-like creature crashing your party and telling someone to get their ass to writing–but it’s not actually fantasy. Oh, sure: you’re going to see the muse talk with a sister muse over a cup of coffee, but it’s probably going to look more like Training Day than Fables, though I won’t rule out the swearing of the former.
It’s this lack of solid genre that sort of puzzles me. To me, I’m only telling a story. To people buying–and they will . . . they better–they want to know: is it science fiction? Is it fantasy? Is it erotica?
To me, the question becomes: is it entertaining? ’Cause if it isn’t, that means it sucks, and who wants to read this crap?
I’m of the mind that this story is going to be full-on epublishing material. Oh, sure, I can shop this around, but I’m starting to think that if I’m going to have stories that fall into categories that seem to be all over the place, I might as well throw it up into the epublishing cloud and let people have at it.
For the record: I consider this science fiction. You have a writer, you have a muse, you have a woman who’s getting friendly with said writer. And there will be some scenes of fantasy, and things that you can’t explain.
There is a place in the sun for this story. It’s right over there, as a matter of fact–
