A Far Out Fantastic Site

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. October is the month of Halloween and so when I saw the optional question for the month I knew it was perfect timing. At least for me whose one of two favourite genres is horror. The other is science fiction. So, the question of the month is What do you consider the best characteristics of your favorite genre? I’m going to divert a little in my answer to this question in that, as I’ve already named them, I have two favourite genres and there’s one characteristic that I like best about both of them: the monster character.  Of course, science fiction stories do not always have to have monsters in them, but a lot of them do and among these many have overlapped with horror. Not even horror stories have to have monsters in them, but mor...

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com For the last 10 years, mainstream readers have been taking both speculative and other types of genre fiction seriously. But they’ve also been more accepting of mixed genre fiction. The reasons for that may be many, including the popularity of mixed genre movies and TV shows such as Twilight and The Vampire Diaries both of which are romance and horror (better known as paranormal romance) and themselves originating as book series. One reason for it is that writers want to create original stories but this has become hard to do within a single genre. Author JeffSummers says , “It’s getting harder and harder to find something surprising in the usual convention of genres. But [by] mixing genres together . . . every now and then you get something explosive and beautiful.” For the last decade, we’ve seen a lot of science fiction mixing with fantasy and horror mixing with epic fantasy. But the latest trend has been the mixing of horror fiction and crime ...