Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay
When people ask me in what genre I write, it's a challenge to give an answer all parties can agree on. If I say ghosts or immortal souls, most would assume it's horror. But it's not, because none of my stories are intended to scare anybody.
When I say it's about the paranormal, they assume it's fantasy about otherworldly creatures that could also lead to romance. Which it's not either, because I don’t ask my readers to suspend their disbelief to that degree. If anything, I try hard to keep my stories conceivably real. That is, real to the extent that most of my supernatural fiction is woven around factual events that people I personally know have experienced—not while in any delirious or delusional state—but while going about their normal, responsible, erudite lives.
Most of the time, I simply say I write science fiction and leave it at that. (Though in bookstores, I straddle the fence between science fiction and fantasy.) And I do devour a lot of scientific literature to write my stories. The non-fiction titles on my bookshelves and in my e-reader far outnumber the fiction.
I had an epiphany from something one of the early readers of my chapters had said. Noting the amount of science I put into my stories, he'd suggested classifying them as hard science fiction. Initially, I balked at the idea, until other reviewers piped in and agreed.
Hard science fiction about the supernatural? Wondering if that already existed, I went and checked inside Amazon. I looked through its categories to see if there was such a thing as a science fiction sub-category for ghosts, but the topic of ghosts only fell under fantasy.
So, I asked myself…
What do you get when you combine science with psychic phenomena and phantoms?
That was when I knew what to call my genre. And I’m quite happy for having finally found my niche. I hope you’d come join me in my cozy corner, sit and savor the stories I look forward to sharing. It took me a while to get here, but now I’ve finally figured out what exactly it is I’m doing.