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Saturday, November 12, 2011

On Genre

I've always liked to read both Science Fiction and Fantasy. And as a younger author, I tended to switch back and forth between the two.

A few years back, however, I stopped dabbling in Fantasy and have predominantly worked on Science Fiction, particularly the Space Opera and Military Sci-Fi sub-genres. I just liked the idea of writing massive space epics that spanned hundreds of light years.

But recently, I've started to go back to the Fantasy genre. It started when my younger brother was over and he mentioned that he had this idea for a story set in a Fantasy world. He's a song writer, though, so he passed the basics of the idea on to me. I wrote up a basic 2 page idea and have it on file ready to go when I have a chance.

The seed was planted.

I started to develop a new world, which I have named "Zaria" though that is likely to change, and have been working on that world more recently. I had started it as a gunpowder era world, think the late 1700s to early 1800s. I wanted to use some historical situations as a baseline.

Then one day I decided to add elves, and magic was close behind. I realized that my world didn't really fit into any current sub-genres. It's not quite Steampunk, as I've decided to leave steam power out for now (I may start to introduce it much later in the development of this world). But it's definitely not High Fantasy.

I spent a couple of days trying to decide how to adjust this world to more easily fit into an established sub-genre and then I realized that I didn't need to. Sub-genres have to start somewhere, so maybe this will be the start of one.

Special Shoutout to: @cultauthor for helping me decide to just go where the story takes me

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