People ask me, fairly regularly, why I cannot just pick one genre and stay there.
The short answer: I have many feelings, and they do not all fit in the same fog-choked alley.
The longer answer involves a brief meditation on the nature of storytelling, the tyranny of genre expectations, and the fact that I once spent an entire weekend deep in a Victorian gaslight mystery while simultaneously sketching out an entirely different world in watercolor. It was one of the best weekends of my life.
Every genre is, at its core, a different lens for examining human behavior. Urban fantasy asks: what happens when the world is stranger and more dangerous than anyone admits, and you have to navigate it anyway? Gaslamp noir asks: what does it cost to want something badly enough, and what happens when the price turns out to be higher than you expected?
Magical realism asks the quieter, more unsettling question: what if the extraordinary has always been woven into the ordinary, and we have simply been too distracted to notice?
The psychology degrees help here. (They were not, as it turns out, useful for anything practical. But they were excellent preparation for writing morally complex fictional people who make catastrophically bad decisions for entirely understandable reasons.)
I am drawn to stories that live in liminal spaces, between worlds, between identities, between the life someone has and the life they are reaching for. Morwenna, my half-selkie protagonist, literally exists between two worlds. Amara Nocturne exists between life and death, bound by a curse she did not choose and a bet she cannot afford to lose.
These are the questions that keep me writing: What do people want? What will they risk to get it? What happens when they do, or do not?
I find them endlessly interesting. I suspect I always will.
One writer, perpetually caffeinated, with a dog on her lap and at least three projects open at once. Everything is fine.
Written by Lisa A. Moore