There is a great question for this month but before I get into that I'd better cover my insecurity. Of course I'm dealing with recent difficult news - thanks for all the well wishes on that - but a longstanding nemesis has also reared its ugly head again: technical issues. Yes, my beleaguered laptop has decided it doesn't want to go further than the startup screen and so I've resorted to borrowing my stepdaughter's machine again for work purposes. This may mean I don't get around to visiting as many of you as I would like over the next little while, so I must ask you to bear with me. I do plan to keep writing.
On that note, let's get on to this month's question: What do you love about the genre you write in must often?
This is definitely an excellent question because it allows us to wax lyrical about the genres we're passionate about. That said, I never set out to write any particular genre. You start out with an idea and then it tends to fall into the nearest available bracket - or you could just invent one - but I've been trending towards speculative fiction lately. That's kind of a broad umbrella term too, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, horror, you name it - so it's nice to have plenty of scope!
But what I love most about this kind of writing is the potential it offers for your imagination. You can create entirely new worlds, filled with fantastic people and races - you're not bound by the restrictions or rules that exist with an Earth-based setting. Research is very important to a real-world setting, and as a former journalist I should probably embrace that, but maybe it's that painstaking attention to detail that gets drilled in that made me run from it. I wouldn't rule out a work that's "closer to home" - I've written plenty of short stories set on Earth (a present day version), that is - but at the moment I'm loving my explorations of distant realities.
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