Saturday 1 December 2012

BB writer? Could be worse!

I don't like labels.  I don't like labels for me, for other people or for books.  But things and people do get labelled.  I am technically a baby boomer.   What does that mean?  Absolutely nothing - I think it was probably coined by  (and is definitely used by) people who want to sell products to those of a certain age.

A couple of years ago I had an idea for a story.  It just popped into my head.  How it happened was that my husband and I were watching television one evening,  I popped into the kitchen to finish preparing our evening meal and when I came out with it a few minutes later he wasn't there.  In our case it was pretty innocuous - he had nipped upstairs to fetch some new candles.  I thought, What if there weren't stairs? What if a woman did exactly what I had done and when she came out her husband had disappeared and she never saw him again.   Next day in the bath all the characters jumped into my head, fully formed, and I started writing.  That became my first novel, Pieces of a Puzzle.

Well, once once the bug bites!  I have now completed four novels and my fifth is well under way.  The trouble I was to discover is that books get labelled.  I thought my genre was women's fiction, although I freely confess I had never heard or at any rate never noticed the term until I started wrting novels.  (I have actually written all my life - poetry, articles etc but never before a novel).  Then I found there were labels within labels.  Four of my five books have as a main character a woman in her fifties, although there are lots of flashbacks.  This would appear to put me in a subgenre.  The very worst I have heard is matron lit.  Ughh!  The mind boggles!   I do not want to be a writer of matron lit!  Today I heard of Baby Boomer novels.   So that's what I am, a BB writer.   Still limiting, as all labels are but better than matron lit!

Why do I need a label?  Well, I have been trying to promote my kindle free days on a variety of websites.  Everyone else is plugging young adult fantasy featuring magic, sword fighting, warring kingdoms and possibly vampires.  Small wonder my success has been undistinguished.  Yet I know there are thousands of people out there who want to read about ordinary people, doing ordinary and sometimes extraordinary things. 

So now what?  I am looking for websites or facebook groups for baby boomers where I can exchange ideas and books with others.  Do you see what's happened?  I am using labels already! 

Till next time:)

www.amazon.com/author/jennygill

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