Monday Meanderings

Some marketing advice will tell you to build a brand:  a tagline, phrase, description of the type of books you write that will attract readers interested in them ... a way of saying, "If you like this element, you'll find it in all my work."  I may not be describing this well, but that isn't really the subject of this post.

I've tried to distill what my brand might be a few times, and every time, I've ended up stumped ... or with a concept that excludes a significant fraction of what I've written or want to write.  For instance, outside of brand, I've typically said that my wheelhouse is secondary world epic fantasy ... but my two novels accepted by publishers to date, Flow and Scylla and Charybdis, are contemporary fantasy and science fiction, respectively, and my current query project, Who Wants To Be A Hero? is, while in the secondary world and epic buckets, also a comedy send-up of both mythology (primarily Greco-Roman, but it ranges) and reality television.

If I can find any pattern in my choice of writing, it's in the things I don't write, though that's a relatively small list:  hard science fiction, due to comfort level; horror; gore, also due to comfort level; and unrelenting bleakness.  Beyond that, my brain seems to take, "Oh, I don't write about X" as a suggestion ...

More than that, I suppose I have a subconscious fear (perhaps not so subconscious now that I'm writing about it) that applying a brand to myself will prevent me from taking the next tangent.  I have an unruly, hyperactive brain.

Is "unruly and hyperactive" perhaps my brand?

... nah.