I’ve been genre hopping. In the historical past, I wrote and sold four regency romances. My editor, Ruth Cavin, taught me a lot about editing. I was happy working with her, and I foolishly assumed that situation would continue. However, as everyone knows, Ruth gave up editing regencies, moved to St. Martin’s, and began editing excellent mysteries.
I was downcast. especially since the new regency editor appeared to want me to write in business English of the American variety. I used STET a lot on the last book and began to think about mysteries.
I liked them. I read a lot of them, the British ones particularly, and I really liked working with Ruth, so I decided to write a mystery. She rejected it (correctly, I now see), so I wrote another, and that one she bought, though I think she continued to regard me as a strayed romance writer. So here I am, ten books later, a mystery writer with two series. I’m not the first fiction writer to jump from one genre to another, but the shift is fairly uncommon, or was when I did it.
Meanwhile I sold the e-book rights of the regencies to Judith B. Glad at Uncial Press, and she’s also in the process of reissuing my first mystery series. From time to time, she hinted that another regency, a new one, would be welcome. I finally took her up on it, promising a novella in time for Black Friday.
The Young Pretender started short but wound up long for a novella. Judith is going to vend it as a short novel, bless her. I had several sessions of writer’s bloc when I was working on the regency, but I finished it in August and am happy with it. Among other pleasures, writing it gave me an excuse to reread the poems of Robert Burns. Perhaps the greatest pleasure, though, was to move from the focus on death and destruction that’s necessary even in cozy mysteries to a more light-hearted venue. It was nice not to have to wallow in grue.
On the other hand, I came to a greater appreciation of the mystery plot structure. I like to think of all my books as character-driven, but without action and suspense a mystery is dead in the water. Since regencies are terribly chaste as romances go, the need for drastic action isn’t great. Apart from two dinner parties and a row across a lake in a rainstorm, the most intense action in The Young Pretender comes when the heroine learns how to build a fire in the fireplace. To my surprise, I discovered I missed writing shootouts, hostage crises, and high speed chases.
I also missed the security of the prescribed mystery plot structure. All novels are puzzles in the broadest sense, but the tropes of the murder mystery supply the writer with most of the plot, right from the beginning. With a regency, since graphic sex is out of the question, I had to keep groping around for something my people could do before the final clinch. They talked a lot. In two dialects.
Well, I’ve had my vacation. I’m back looking at corpses and suspecting innocent bystanders of Evil. It feels good to do that, especially in American English of the twenty-first century Pacific Northwest kind.
sheilasimonson 