Louder and weirder.

A couple of things came into conjunction today, like planets in the astronomy of my own personal heavens. One was the arrival of the SFBC catalogue and the other was an extremely unwelcome epiphany about two unfinished stories of mine, which my backbrain now insists go together. They don't. Trust me on this. But the backbrain says they do.

Now, mostly these two things wouldn't have anything to do with each other, but the SFBC catalogue brought into sharp relief one of the reasons I didn't want this epiphany.

Brace yourselves. I'm about to start talking about genre¹ again.

( This got long and passionate. )

The truest thing in the world about genre theory is that it believes the rules are only there in order to be broken. And I guess what has hit me today from several different angles is that there are rules in this genre that are masquerading as givens. The givens are the page, the words, the blood and breath and bone with which you tell the story. Everything else that tries to tell you it goes without saying should be smacked upside the head and forced to say it anyway.

Because we might all find out that it's wrong.
---
¹Quickly, because I don't want to get tangled in this discussion for the umpteen hundredth time: when I say "genre," I do not mean "marketing category." Also, when I say "genre," I'm talking about a DESCRIPTIVE rather than a PRESCRIPTIVE system. Genre theory, in its best moods, is not about saying "This is how things should be." It just says, "This is how things are. And aren't they cool?" Okay? Okay.

²Say it with me: 90% of everything is crap.

³And Hegelian synthesis gives you Dorothy Sayers.

⁴Well, I'm in the middle of.