Contrary to rumor, I am not old enough to remember Penny Dreadfuls or Dime Novels. I’ve heard of them, though. They must have been some of the earliest genre fiction. For the better part of my life, genre fiction pretty much meant westerns, whodunits, porn, and romance.

Now there are literally dozens of genres and subgenres. This has to do with bookstore and ebookstore shelves … but even more for us poor SOBs still trying to figure out what the hell we write.

Romance isn’t enough anymore. Fans are choosier. They demand contemporary or historical, western, regency, Viking, medieval, Tudor, even, no kidding, Pirate Romance. The list goes on and on.

Speculative fiction sounds like an oxymoron to me. Like tuna fish. What other kind of tuna is there? But it doesn’t mean all fiction … just that in a fictional universe. So vampires and zombies, wizards and witches, you’ll find your friends here. Paranormal, fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, cyberpunk, steampunk, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic. You get the idea.

Splatterpunk, femslash, ménage? Well, just guess which sex comes out on the losing end of the stick (so to speak) most of the time.

It’s a real downer to have to think about how to ‘position’ your book before you even sit down to write it. It used to be that agents and editors did that after the writer wrote. At least that’s what I’ve been told. But then, maybe that was just speculative fiction.