Dance with the page

One of the things I like the most about my writing career is that I write a little bit of almost everything. I’m probably better known for 25 years in journalism, most of it as a full-time hard news reporter, than I am for my books, even though I’ve been published in fiction for more than 20 years.

Even in fiction, I write a little bit of everything. I started out in horror — of the Twilight Zone-creepy style — with some science fiction, drifted into romance for a bit, then back to speculative fiction. Quest fantasy, media tie-in, urban fantasy, dystopian sci-fi; I’ve tried all the things that I felt like trying.

Then I did my MFA, which encouraged me to try different styles. Creative nonfiction. Literary fiction. Screenplays. Even poetry, though it’s hardly my best form. I write essays in Patreon pretty much weekly. And I’ve continued to do journalism throughout all this experimentation.

This is one of the things I like best. It’s also one of the biggest pains in my ass. In recent months, considering pitching agents, I have found it nearly impossible to find any agents willing to represent all the different things that I write. Even now, as I am working on a contemporary literary story cycle and a collection of creative nonfiction on top of two SFFH novels, I couldn’t think of anyone interested in all the different things that interest me.

So when Sean Taylor asked us to chat about writing a series, I hardly knew how to respond. I bounce all over everything… but I also have three books in a vampire…