I forgot I started this blog...

I know, sad but true. I am also not the sort of person who normally rants a whole hell of a lot in general. It's been two years since I wrote anything on this blog, and shockingly somehow it has accumulated 118 page views. What?! I am not sure how that happened. Still writing, still editing, still wondering if I am out of my ever-loving mind, that will never change. What I've really noticed over the past two years is that there are a lot of people more than willing to take your money while providing you with questionable services. You have people who claim they have the magic bullet, just follow these easy directions and you will have a novel that will get published/sell and so on. I call bullshit on all those people. The sheer number of self-help writing books that exist is staggering. The number of them who all say the same basic thing is also rather funny, I’ve run across a handful of actually useful books on the writing craft, but that is what happens with how-to books. Everyone thinks their way is the silver bullet to publishing, or sales, or whatever. I think the most interesting concept I’ve run across recently, is the writing for genre concept where an author simply finds a genre/specific niche market and even if it isn’t their market, picks apart what sells in that market, and then creates their own novels to sell that market. It’s actually the same advice traditional publishers give. If you want to write for us, read a bunch of what we publish and try to produce something similar. I am not advocating plagiarism of any sort but instead acknowledging that readers predictably want to read the same kind of stories repeatedly. The funny thing is that readers do. That’s why there are so many common plot devices that you see used in just about every novel that falls into a specific category. Romance novels – boy meets girl, boy loses the girl, the girl realizes she loves the boy, the boy realizes he’s an idiot, happily ever after. I write romance, I find this formula and all of the others in romance kind of annoying, and hard to write. I write paranormals because, I enjoy complicated characters, but I don’t always want the same old basic human complications. That being said, I do sometimes find myself wondering if what I really write is fantasy with more than a touch of romance because romance novels are supposed to be about the struggles a couple face to get there happily ever after. My characters get there happily ever after, but not all their struggles are self-created, but they are also not over the top the world is going to end issues that you find in some romance novels.

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