 So I'm wondering, had any of you tried and failed to interest an agent or a publisher in a conventional novel before you turned to genre writing? Or were you always interested in, let's start with Jessica, were you always interested in romance writing? Actually, my first six novels are not romance. They're contemporary fiction. My publisher was New American Library. So I had what I thought was a novel novel. It's about a girl who hides her pregnancy and has the baby at home. And when I began to market that, I found that because I had a protagonist that was 15, I was suddenly a young adult writer. And I thought, I just wrote a novel and it happened to have a 15-year-old in it, but no, it's a young adult. Well, it ended up being published in the mainstream. But I write fast and my former agent really represents a number of romance writers. He says, well, why don't you write a romance? And I hadn't read one since high school, so I read 100 romances one summer, very strange summer. And I realized that I could, I remembered the format and just started to do it. And I didn't do anything differently than when I write. I just wrote with a format in mind. And that's when I found that I had, once you step into the genre pool, certain things start happening to you. And it's hard to then come back out of being in a genre. At least I've found that now. So it's been very confusing actually, I think for them and for me. Okay, we'll come back to that because that's a whole topic in itself. So, Lori, how about you? Did you start by, okay, maybe I have my facts wrong on you too, but... No, you're perfectly right. I think a lot of people start writing, not realizing that they're writing in a genre. And that was the way with me. I wrote, well, the first book that we sold was A Grave Talent, and I thought of it as a novel. And of course it's about a cop, and it's about a body, and it's about an investigation. But what did I know? It was a novel. And St. Martin's Press said, no, no, this is a mystery novel. And I said, okay, it's a mystery novel. I think that a lot of us who write within a specific genre tend to inhabit that genre more because it fits what we do rather than we're trying to fit into it. And I find that is with me. I mean, you begin to get reviews that say that you're, I love this phrase, pushing the envelope. All it means is that you're writing a book, and if their definitions don't fit it, sorry. Another good question to follow up on. But Christy, how did you start? Well, I didn't really intend to write historical fiction. So I didn't start out that way myself. I had an idea for what I thought was a very small, simple novel about a woman taking a teenage girl to Venice. And during the course of developing that novel, I made the protagonist into a history PhD candidate. And I realized that I needed to figure out what she would be studying or researching and writing about. And I came across an event, a real event called the Spanish Conspiracy Against Venice. And the more I read about that, the more I grew interested in that event and in Venetian history and just decided to make the past a part of the book. So it sort of grew organically. I didn't quite set out to do it. But when I started reading the history of this place, I was really fascinated by it and simply inspired to write these scenes set in the past. And eventually it grew to be half the novel. So half the novel is set in the present day with the present day character. And the other half is set in 17th century Venice with all the characters and the events that the woman in the present day is researching. And the funny thing is though that although when I finished the book, I sort of thought of it as a mystery. The publisher who publishes it doesn't publish mysteries. So they don't call it a mystery. So therefore it can't be a mystery, right? It's funny because they have certain designations and genres. But as we're all saying, certainly with your first novel, you generally don't think about writing for a genre. Although I think it's a very good idea. And once I had sort of figured out that I was writing this type of novel, I did look at other books sort of within the genre and see what other people were doing and try to understand the best way to write historical fiction and what I liked about historical fiction. And I kept with it obviously. So here we have the three genre writers, none of which started out to write in that genre. So I find that interesting. So I have to say we're calling this panel genre writing, literary ghetto or publishing opportunity. Will we pick that word ghetto? None of the guests did. So I have to ask them about that. Do you feel that by running genre fiction your work is ghetto-wise? Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes. Because I was thinking about this question last night. And it's one that is debated endlessly on the crime blogs and the websites and in conferences and so forth is the fact that crime books are not treated seriously when it comes to reviews. Well, that in particular doesn't bother me except that if you are a writer, one of the few forms of dialogue that you have is through reviews. And if you're not getting serious reviews, if you're not getting the kinds of reviews that hit the front page of the Times Book Review rather than the one paragraph long mystery ghetto, it keeps me from having a serious dialogue about the books. Not that I think my books are terribly serious, but I do take them seriously when I write them, which is a very different thing. So it would be nice to have an honest dialogue instead of just saying, oh, here's a great mystery. So your pitch and hold right away say, okay, we know where we put this book. We don't even have to open it up. We'll just give it to the crime reviewer and she'll put it in the little roundup. Well, at least there is a crime reviewer. Yeah, that's true. I mean, romance is, I had to convince my little hometown of Arenda, the Arenda books, I love the people there, but they didn't carry. When I walked in, she said, well, go over to write it. You know, so I mean, I think romance now truly, who's buying the women's fiction is right up there in terms of what's selling in this country. Romance, it's in the billions of, but it gets absolutely, so there isn't even the crime beat or the little, there's very little space at all. In fact, some magazines, my publicist said, well, they don't even look at romance. If you send them, they won't even read the romance. So in terms of the word ghetto, if you want to use it for all that word is worth, that absolutely romance gets funneled right into there, but yet it really is holding up so much of the market right now. Book market, people go in, they go into Walmart. And I've actually seen romance readers with baskets in Barnes & Noble. Baskets, you know, I remember looking at this woman, she goes, oh, well, I read all of these in a month. And then I give them to the old folks home. So I mean, there are people buying these books. So I find it a real contradiction that here is this great market that is supporting so much, you know, traffic in books, but yet it gets no space. So clearly financial success is a negative point. It's really bad. It's beside the point. It's very bad. Of course, not for you or the publisher. Well, how about you, Christine? Historical fiction seems a little broader. I think it's a lot broader actually. It's, I think, just this year, four out of five of the authors shortlisted for the Booker were writing historical fiction. Can you remind us what the Booker is, just in case? What's that? Can you remind us what the Booker prize is? The Man Booker Prize, it's probably the most distinguished prize for literature given in, for English literature. And it's, unfortunately, American authors are not, they're not. We're not part of it because they're not a colony anymore. It's England and... The former colonies. Yeah, the former colonies. How does that... Oh, we are a former colony. Yeah, we shall eat. Yeah, so England, Canada, India, you know, just about every other English-speaking country except us, authors can qualify for this prize. And it's a very highly esteemed. So right now I would say that historical fiction had a very bad rap about 20 years ago, and where I think there was a lot of, you know, not very good historical fiction written, that it was sort of in the realm of fantasy, you know, it was sort of once upon a time historical fiction. But readers today are much more demanding than that. And people want to read about history with some real basis, in fact. So a lot of fiction, a lot of historical fiction readers love the fact that they're getting a real sense of history while they're reading something that's fun to read. And, you know, within the historical fiction genre, I think there's really top-notch literary fiction and all the way to the other end. I think you can find a very big spread. I know from my literary agent friends that it's considered easier to sell a mystery, say, or some piece of genre work than a standalone novel because if the reader's like your protagonist, let's just say in a mystery, they know that the agents know that they can probably sell the publisher another book or two or ten with those protagonists or that protagonist. So I think they like it if you come to them with a mystery. Did you find that? Did any of you find that, for example, Lori, when you were starting the first Sherlock Holmes Mary Russell novel, were you thinking, oh, boy, if this one goes, I got, you know, I can keep going? You did your agents say this would be good for me to shop the second novel with the first or the idea for the second novel with the first? Well, the first one that we sold was in the Martinelli series, the contemporary series. And the second one was the Russell and Holmes series so that we tended and have most of my career to alternate between the two and then the occasional standalone as well. So I am known as someone who, in fact, one of the publishers had decided to make a virtue out of the fact that they couldn't describe what I write by having their sales force given a flyer saying, what Laurie R. King writes next is always a mystery. Very good. That's great. But in terms of the series, when you said the Kate Martinelli series, did you sell one book with the idea for the second book or was it always sold as a series or was it one book that became popular or was sold easily and then you followed it up with the second one at some point anyway? Generally speaking, if you have a multi-book contract, you know, they are interested in having that series for at least two of those books. The problem is that it works in the reverse as well so that if a series hasn't proved as popular, they want none of the books, even if you have an absolutely superb book, they want none of the books in that series because it hasn't proven as popular over a period of time. So, you know, it's a sort of loaded situation there. Right. It's like the problem of getting a high advance, really a high advance. You get a million dollars advance, not maybe people we know. It happens so often to us, yes. Okay, but, you know, I've heard of people like that that were, you know, it was really too big in advance for that first novel and that person never made it back. Well, I think right now we're in a whole revolution of how that's going to work out in terms of getting this. Yeah, it's happening much less often right now, not happening now, which is good. Yeah, I think it levels it out if you got more per book, less upfront. I think it makes a lot more financial sense and I think the market, the way we sell, distribute, publish books is going to be completely revolutionized in the next few years just based on e-books. But back to your question. I was, when I wrote my first romance, I had been reading those 100 romances and I realized that what romance writers like to do is to write multiple books with the same characters and one of the techniques is to have siblings or related people when you could jump into those stories and then bring the other characters along. But I wrote my first one as simply a romance but he, one of the characters happened to have two really good looking brothers. Just in case, you know, you tuck them in your pocket and you have the good looking brothers around for later. And then she, my editor offered me a three book deal assuming that I would write, use them up. And then the next one I had planned a similar thing. You had to find some cousins for the next one. Well, no, I just changed worlds. I just moved into a new world and had a new trilogy. But I think it's hard though if they don't go well. If your first book goes well and that's great for the trilogy and that's so far what's happened with mine but I think that if you have a three book deal and the first one tanks, then there's some interesting problems along if you've got that deal. What do you do? How do you bring it back? Well, what do you do? I don't know yet. I don't want to know. Okay. And this will never happen to you or any of you. But what would you do? I mean, okay, you've got the deal so they owe you the money. They pay you. That's the good news. They can't take it back. Right. So when you wrote the first book with the two handsome brothers were you and you said they're in your back pocket just in case? Was that a conscious decision? It was because I'd noticed, you know, I hadn't, I'm not a, you know, this seems very odd to say but I'm not a traditional romance reader. I've read a lot to learn how the form, you know, with mystery I learned that there's, I've read, I don't read mystery either. I don't really read a lot of genre literature which is probably weird. But I recognized there were certain things that I had to do in order to write this kind of story and that one of the things people did was collect characters to use for later in the world and that the characters could come back. And so, yeah, it was very conscious. And how about you, Kristina? This is a little, you're always a little tiny bit on an angle to the questions I'm asking the other two. But in this case, did your agent urge you to write another historical novel? Well, I got a two-book deal. I actually, can everyone hear me okay? I set out to write a book that I thought had commercial potential. I didn't set out to write the Great American Novel or even a great work of literature. I knew I was trying to write a book that was entertaining and I set it up to, so that some of the characters could go on for a sequel because I knew that that would give me a greater possibility of success. Publishers don't want what they call one-book authors. They simply, they're going to make an investment in you and so they have to know that there's at least going to be one or two follow-up books that you're going to be able to write in no matter what genre. And even if you're a literary author, this is true. People might, publishers might take more of a chance on someone on the basis of a really strong first novel that doesn't have a sequel, but they know that they're taking a risk and I think that right now publishers are pretty much risk averse. So I think it's a good question. You're asking, well, is it easier to get an agent? Is it easier to get a publishing deal if you write a genre novel? The short answer is probably yes, but things are so unsettled in the publishing industry right now that I don't know if there's any definitive answer for any of it because as soon as you say one thing, you can point to an example of something that's just the opposite. But I do think there's a trend for publishers to offer authors a two or three-book deal simply because they need the product to come out to do the follow-up because that's the only way that they recoup their initial investment. To answer the question, yeah, I got a two-book deal to write the sequel to the first book and now I have another two-book contract in which I'm writing a historical novel that takes place entirely in the past and then the fourth book will actually be the third in the original series. I know Jessica is working on a contemporary novel now and Lori has written a futuristic novel, with all those novels I told you she wrote. I didn't mention that one. Caliphias? I think some people might believe that it's easier to write genre fiction because there are conventions in each genre that can help the writer imagine her plot and characters. For example, mystery. They usually need a dead body and finding the killer would be part of the plot. In a romance novel, you need to have a love story and historical novels are embedded in a time and place in the past, of course, that the author can research. That might be considered making things easier for you because you've got some starting points right away. Jessica, are you finding it harder to work on this new novel? No, because it's really... I started writing contemporary. Like I said, I was just writing a novel. I wasn't trying to write the great American novel. I was trying to write a novel. But I think that all literature, all forms of literature, all genres have conventions that you have to follow. I don't know if you remember this ad for independent movies that was out. It was Bambi walking on a little plane and also something falls and kills Bambi and said independent movies. It's a literary fiction. There's certain things you don't do. You don't describe your characters completely or you don't have a happy ending. And if you do, you end up... Oh, you're writing a romance. All genre... I started as a poet. I've written short stories. I've written contemporary novels. I've written romance. My latest romance trilogy is set out in space. It's science fiction. I've had a blast writing in every different thing you can and every single thing you write. There's certain things you know you need to do or not do because the reader is expecting certain things. So in my romance, I go off in some dream sequence like Virginia Woolf. I'm going to be in trouble because no one will want that. And so I think that if you study whatever you're writing, or you just write what you want to write, it becomes what it is. Then you have to know what it is in order to try to sell it to an agent or an editor. And I think that's the interesting part when I thought I had written my novel and people said, oh, this is a young adult novel. I said, really? How interesting. So I guess that's my answer to that. I don't know if I answered it. So Lori has written a futuristic novel, as I said. So I don't know if you'd consider that being in another genre or not. But did you find a part of it? Well, they're all fiction. Yeah, I think that you need to, if you're going to write within a genre, whether it's science fiction or crime or romance, you have to understand the forms before you decide which of those forms you're going to take or not. I mean, I find it fascinating to look at, over the last few years, various capital L literary writers have gone slumming into the crime genre. Can you give us some examples? No, I'm not going to give you any examples. I think we all can think of them. In general, even when the writer clearly has a great deal of affection for what they think a crime novel looks like, when you actually look at the story they've written, they're only using a certain degree of the format. I mean, in a crime novel and especially in a classic mystery novel, the plot is a very large part of what's going on. And someone who is trained in literary writing, especially if they have gone and done a degree in creative writing, plot really doesn't do it for them. They don't believe in plot. And it's tough for someone who doesn't believe in plot to really immerse themselves in a form that is plot. I mean, my books are more about character than plot, but even then I pay close attention to the details and what's going on and how it works out. But it's very interesting how the number of literary writers who decide, well, this should be fun. I'll really enjoy this and I'll see what I can do and stretch myself and go into writing crime. What they're writing just doesn't quite do it. It's a nice novel, but it's not a crime novel. You haven't found anybody that succeeded in crossing over that way, in your opinion? Yeah, I think a number of them do it successfully, but they're not actually crime novels and I think that they're always aware that they're not. Atkinson's now got several in what, if she had started out, would have been put much more closely into the format of a mystery series. I mean, the novels are not a direct sequence of people, but they're related enough to make a series out of them. But the woman is not primarily a crime novelist and her editor is not treating her as a crime novelist. I mean, if she had my editor, those would be very different books. They wouldn't be better books. They'd be very different. Did you read Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice? I couldn't manage that one. I tried it, but it was a different book. It had a crime and a body, or parts of a body, or some parts of a body. And I haven't quite gotten through it, but I was thinking, this is very interesting. What is he doing here? I'm not sure how it all ends up yet, but I'm getting there. They're very fun. I mean, they're really enjoyable books. Michael Shabin's, the one set in Alaska, the Yiddish Policeman's Union. I mean, that is a sort of cross between a literary book and a police procedural and a thriller. And it's a lovely book in itself, but it's not a mystery. It's not a crime novel. Although I think he was actually aiming for a crime novel. And he's a great promoter of genre fiction. Yes, he is. He doesn't. He's not a snob about it. And I guess he does not believe in these categories, as you're saying. Sometimes it's just, when you write your book, if it's your first book, you don't have a name as a certain kind of writer. Okay, well, you know what? You thought it was this, but it's really young adult. You thought it was that, but it's really a mystery. Yeah, the genres exist for sales. I mean, that's why books are put into categories. It's the stores are set up by category so that people can find books. Publishers publish books by category so that they can sell books by category to the stores. And so it's really a label that is put on in order to market a book. But you, as an author, you need to understand what those labels are and what they encompass. And if you're interested in writing a book, you kind of have to figure out where your book would fit, let's say, in a bookstore. Where would your book be sold? Is it going to be sold in just a general fiction or is it going to be sold in detective fiction or murder mystery? It really helps to understand that what you're doing before you try to go to an agent or publisher. And I think that something that certainly I never realized in the beginning was those labels are put on almost instantly. I mean, your very first step into the publishing world is a label that you will live with your career. And I mean, for that reason alone, I'm very grateful that my first book was the contemporary series. It was the Martinelli one. Rather than this rather whimsical Russell and Sherlock Holmes thing. Because for one thing, the Russell and Holmes would never have been nominated for an Edgar Award, which is a serious award in the crime genre. And it also meant that people who saw that come out as my second book thought of me as someone who did different things rather than, oh yes, she's that woman who writes the Sherlock Holmes books and she also does other things. So I'm very grateful that the Russell book wasn't the first one sold. The Beekeepers Apprentice didn't sell first because I would have been constantly, you know, I mean, here it is what, 16, 17 years later, 19 books. And I would still have been saying, yeah, I do stuff other than Mary Russell, you know. There are so many categories of romance that's absolutely astounding. And within the romance categories is contemporary and paranormal and urban fan, you know, they just, it goes on and on. And some of those categories are looked upon more highly than others. And you know, erotica kind of gets marginalized and people look down on, and paranormal with all the vampires was being looked down on and then True Blood came out on HBO and now everyone's rewriting the vampire romance. So it is, you're labeled. And it's not necessarily, it's for the marketing purposes really. So the buyer, it's right on the spine. What are you buying? Now in romance, do you come across the same debate of pseudonyms? Oh, absolutely. So, if you're writing something different, it's good to have a pseudonym so that you're not confused. You don't want the writers confused. I've been told this. No, readers get, and this one woman from Georgia wrote me a very angry letter between my sixth, after my seventh novel, which was a romance, and she said, I am waiting for the real Jessica Barksdale and Klein books to come back. You know, she picked up when you believed my first romance and was horrified actually that I had done something else. And this notion of being someone else can be very useful because then you can hide from whatever aspersions come your way from writing in this new genre. I was thinking that it's kind of a, there's a good plus as well as a minus of being in this so-called ghetto and one of the pluses in a way is that you have a group of readers who like that category of fiction and they're kind of there for you in a way that's a great compliment to you that your reader was so upset. She didn't write until she was mad. Oh, they never do. Are you kidding? I worked on magazines for years and years. You know, those letters are always complaining. Hardly ever saying, love that article. Like, you got that piece wrong. Or they would say, oh, what have you done to our magazine? And this is what I was thinking about. You're doing the real Jessica because she fell in love with your book so there's a passion there. And so if I was thinking about this also with the crime page reviews is that that helps you in one sense because the readers of crime fiction will know where to turn to look and there'll always be six books there for them and probably your books get reviewed pretty regularly there if not on the front page. So, you know, in that sense, you kind of are ahead of a lot of contemporary or more general novelists, I would think. Well, certainly, as you say, because a lot of people who are fans of crime, you know, know how to access the reviews and how to hear about it and there's a very strong crime-reading community online and in person. But I think that that's probably why making a living as a crime writer is probably easier than making a living as a mainstream writer. I mean, it's very difficult to get published successfully, you know, numerically as a mainstream writer if you don't have something, you know, some kind of a hook that you're, you know, you're the president's daughter or yourself. So there's no doubt that, you know, writing in genre has compensations monetarily. Kristi, do you think you'll ever feel drawn to write something said wholly in the present? Absolutely. Yeah. In spite of what we've been saying. You know, I don't know yet if that's going to be a problem. I mean, I think I'm going to do the next two books, which are essentially going to be classified as historical fiction, and then we'll see. But I hope that that won't be a limitation. It may be, but I don't think so. I don't think, because I think because there's a lot more, there's sort of a lot more interaction between literary fiction and historical fiction right now that it's more of a, it's not such a big barrier. But I'm not sure, you know, it'll depend. I think there are so many changes going on in the publishing industry that it's really hard to know exactly what the future holds for any of us. Yeah, it's interesting times that way. One other related question to that is just about being a writer, a lonely writer. I've heard the word writer defined as someone who can sit alone in a room for a year. So in that regard, thinking about the lonely life of the writer, I wondered if maybe a genre writer's life possibly was a little less lonely, because that's a particular writing in a particular field with fans and aficionados of that field. And conventions and seminars and maybe writing workshops and things that, and maybe online things also that kind of keep you a little more out there in the world than stuck alone in that room for a year. Am I right, Ron? The romance readers are amazing. They blog, they ask me to come guest blog. They do contests. They are... I mean, I didn't have this experience with my first... Well, maybe the internet wasn't quite in gear as it is now, but really amazing and their conventions. I've never been to this convention, but I've heard tell of the Romantic Times convention. And they have the cover contests with the guys come out, and weird ass ignations and elevators and such. But I think that it is a very strong community and they're really devoted to the genre. Despite my Georgian woman and her letter, I mean, certainly fans, if you can call that the fan page on Facebook kind of drives me crazy, that whole idea. The people who like your work, I've found the romance community much more vocal. Yeah, I think they seem to be very involved with the authors. Yes, they want the content field. Yeah, I think this is one of those months that I wish that there was a little less activity going on for this particular writer because I have something on every month, every weekend this month. Are you traveling? Yeah, on Tuesday I go to Indianapolis where we have Bauchacon, which is the big mystery conference, which, by the way, will be here in San Francisco next year. And I will be the guest of honor, so it's going to be a lot of fun. Ah, do you know which month? It'll be just about this time of year. It's always the middle of October. And, you know, so you go to these things and there's 1500 to 2000 readers and writers and editors and agents who come together four or five days and talk mystery books. So you probably can meet more people who know what you do for a living than you'll ever meet in your entire life. Yeah, but it does tend to get a little hectic after a while and you think, I'm not supposed to sit and write? Isn't that what I'm supposed to do? I think it really helps to be able to spend time alone. There's no doubt about it. If you're going to write a novel, you simply have to be able to, you know, shut yourself off from whatever distractions or people or anything. Unfortunately, in my world, which is not romance or mystery exactly because I wasn't called a mystery writer and so I'm sort of neither fish nor fell. I don't seem to have those legions of people, you know, who are supportive. Although I do know there is a very big group of readers for historical fiction. I just don't think they're quite as organized. I think romance writers organized because there is this lack of support in terms of reviews and it really felt to me that they were banding together in order to support the writers and there is this movement, I think, in the romance community to see romance as a feminist statement, meaning taking female sexuality out of what was once something slightly forbidden to write about and push it into, and it's still there, this wave, and they're very strongly organized and support each other. So historical fiction for me is sort of a staple of what I grew up reading and it was never, I've been told at a convention, I gave my romance, I was at the BEA signing at the Romance Writers of America booth and a man came up and took one of my books and said, do you have a bag? You know, he wanted to hide it because it was very sexy. So I think that there hasn't been a stigma, I don't think as much against romance certainly has had more of that against it. Well, I'll ask you one last question and then open it up. How would you like us to view your work? Sitting on your shelf. Oh, okay. How about in our hands open? I think any writer just wants you to take seriously what they're trying to do within the pages. With someone who's writing in the crime genre you want recognition that you're playing the game fairly. But the joy of writing in crime is that you can spread out in so many directions. I mean, you can go romantic, you can go historical, you can go very hard edged noir, you can go really punk. And so long as you're playing the game of the plot itself, the crime, fair, you know, the rest of it is just the joy of exploration. Christy? In regards to how I would prefer people to view my work. You know, it's funny because really I think what we're all saying is that we don't really put the labels on the books, other people do. So I don't really care if people see it, especially my books are half historical fiction and half sets in the present day. So they really are a kind of genre-busting book. So I would be very happy if people called it a mystery historical fiction or contemporary fiction. I think it works on all those levels. And I don't really mind. I say I don't mind what they call it as long as they read it. I think it's coming to the book without preconceived ideas. I wonder how many people have actually picked up a romance novel in recent years and actually read one without thinking, oh, this is schlock or I can get it at right aid. So this idea of just picking it up and seeing, reading it kind of with an open mind as opposed to predetermining what the content of the book is before you even try it. And I think I've learned a lot. That one summer where I read 100 romances, I learned that just as with any genre, with literary fiction or poetry or whatever you have, there's some beautiful stuff and there's stuff that really sucks. And a lot of different levels of writing get published in every genre. Things that you don't want to read because you don't like the writing regardless of what the genre is. So there was a reason why that phrase you can't tell a book by its cover came up, right? I'd like to open this up for questions now. If you'd like to ask a question, I think you'd better go to the microphone so we can all hear you or else. You can repeat it if you could. Okay, hold it. That's a lot to repeat. So I'm just going to... Next person's got to go to the microphone. The question to all of you and particularly Lori is have you ever mourned the loss of a character in your own book, right? In her reading life. Oh, in another book, in another author's work. Yeah, I think that anytime you're fond of a character, even if it's someone who had good excuse to stop writing them and that is they died, you resent it. You know, why did Dorothy Sayers not have another half a dozen of them in the back that she just sort of kept there. But at the same time, I'd love to post that Neil Gaiman did on his blog a while back where someone was just complaining about George Martin and how he hadn't written something that he thought he ought to have written. And he wrote back and he said, George Martin is not your bitch. And I thought, right, good thing to remember. I have to remember that these people, they're writing what they're writing and if it's not what I was hoping to read, it's okay next time around. Anybody else? There's someone in the back. Okay, could the person in the back find the microphone, please? Okay. Thank you for being here, by the way, in your time. I was wondering, you guys were talking about venturing into new genres and maybe being accepted not being accepted. And I was wondering about name changing, like how that might, like do you find that maybe if you change your name and just, I mean, I don't know if you guys do that or if you've experimented with that, but it might be like an easier way to break into a new genre. My publisher asked me about it, my new Kensington when I started writing romance and I was thinking, do I have to get a Social Security number for that person? And how do I go out on tour? And do I need a new website? And so I ended up not doing it. But I'm in a situation right now where I actually have another book that is actually truly YA that now it looks like it might be heading there and I am definitely going to be somebody else. So call me in a year. And I'll tell you how I do. I think it's a very strange thing, but other romance writers, it's very well known. When they write as, I wish I could, my brain isn't working, but when they write as, let's say Anne Smith, it's contemporary romance. When they write as Doris Small, it's paranormal romance. And it's, even though the audience knows there's one woman, those two people are acknowledged as separate, separate people in a sense of writing separate things. But I do think it's a very strange, bifurcated way of being in terms of when you go out on tour, who are you? I have a friend who only writes one kind of fiction and she, I think she's actually embarrassed by writing contemporary fiction. She writes, she wants to write the great American novel and has decided to be only herself when she writes the great American novels. So she has a pseudonym for these three wonderful contemporary novels. And she does want to be known as that person when she goes out in the world and when I call her by her real name, she gets mad. And I tell her, I think she's like lost her damn mind. Well, I think that it's very helpful to have pseudonyms for, for example, one of them that's been around for a long time is Ruth Rendell. Ruth Rendell, when she's writing, her police procedures is Ruth Rendell and when she's writing her psychological suspense books is Barbara Vine. So that you're very clear, I mean everybody knows that she's both people. When you see a Barbara Vine novel, you know you're not picking up a police procedural. There's also an economic consideration in this because the way the publishing industry works is that the big boys dominate. And when I wanted to publish a science fiction novel, the futuristic novel a few years ago, I had insisted that it be published under the name Laurie R. King. It would undoubtedly, because it's not one of the mysteries, it would have had a slight dip in sales numbers. And that dip in sales numbers would have been fine, except the next book that came along, the big boys would have ordered based on that book, the last book a few years ago when Martin Cruise Smith published Rose, lovely, lovely book, historical book, not set in Russia, not about Arkady Renko. He had a lot of problems because the numbers for the book, not being an Arkady Renko book, knocked him a degree down and it took him two or three books to recover his numbers because of Rose. And that's a real pity. You cannot say to, you know, Barnes and Noble or Costco or any of these, look at the numbers from the last one in this series or whatever, their computers look at the last book with your name on it. So if you're not doing a pseudonym and you are doing a book that you know will not have as good of sales, you're taking a risk with the next three books down the row. I mean, it's unfortunate, but that's how. Right, or even if you don't know it. You think it would do better if he had published it under a pseudonym? It might have done, yeah. I mean, if he'd published it as Martin Smith instead. Be a clean slate. Any more questions? Thanks for coming. I just finished a book and it's a young adult book. And I was trying to write within a genre but it does have a dream sequence and it does have lots of sort of adultish asides and I was trying in a lot of ways to not write in a genre but also write in a genre because to me when I read a genre book and Dorothy Sayers and Naomi are my two favorite authors of all time, to me it's literature, it's not just a genre. And what's exciting to me within a genre is when someone plays with the genre a little bit, usually, you know, when it feels like it pushes the boundaries a little bit as you read. The envelope. Yeah, and that's what I wanted to do and I don't know if I did or not but does that make it harder to sell if you play with it as you go? Or is that just a writing question? I think that's such a subjective view that it's kind of hard to answer that question because a lot of it's just going to come down to how do people respond to your manuscript? Are they taken in by it? Do they like it? Does it move them? All of those questions are probably more important than did you write something that just fits in the genre? I would say you have to write what your heart wants to write. If the publishing world wants it, it will redefine the genre. If it doesn't want it, you can take a look at it and see if you badly want to publish that particular book, how can I reshape this book to make it do what the industry thinks it should do? But if you look at the truly extraordinary books that have come out in the last 50 years, most of those have had a difficult time getting published because they aren't what everyone else is doing. The number of refusals that people have had who are best-seller all the way now, it's because you have to find someone in the publishing world who recognizes the quality of writing behind the book and not just the fact that it isn't the form that they're expecting. Good advice. I think I'm going to need to wrap up so the next panel can come in. I want to thank you all. Yep. Thank you guys.