Why I was Surprised to Write Urban Fantasy (And Shouldn't Have Been!)

I always thought I'd write horror novels. They're what I've read for most of my life. King, Barker, Poe, Lovecraft ... they were the ones I read and idolized. My first two fiction publications were horror -- The Visit involves a young woman being taken over by something dark, sinister, and hungry; Starlet's Web is a ghost story ... with a couple of twists.

So how did I end up writing UF? A few things conspired to get me there. A key one is that a lot of the things we called "horror" when I was growing up are now more likely to fall under the UF umbrella. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts ... they used to be horror by default. When I look at the two stories I mentioned above, I can see that they actually fit under either genre. So one thing was a shift in how we define certain types of things.

Then, there's my involvement in fantasy & science fiction conventions. After going to writing panels there, I found myself thinking about things like world building. One night, I was idly thinking, "If I were to build a world, what would it be like? What would be unique about it?" I had an image flash through my mind, and it became the opening chapters of Through the Veil. As I frantically typed it into my laptop, I kept thinking to myself, "What's unique about this world?" I knew music was important and that Dedra was a musician, but I didn't have much beyond that. As I thought about her studying the Oolosian skyline, trying to place herself in time, I thought, "What if music is visible?" And voila, I had my something unique.

While the Veil series has fantastical elements to it, they're not supernatural. That really floored me. Since when are my stories not about the supernatural?

It took a simple question in a Facebook writing group to make me really understand where the Veil series came from. The question? "What were your earliest writing influences?"

I started making a list. One of the first books I remember adoring was called The Fairy Doll. A few years later, it was A Wrinkle in Time, and then The Green Kingdom. All fantasy. I realized then that not only were many of the books I loved fantasy, but especially fantasy involving travel between dimensions or far-distant places.

Then I started looking at later influences. Yes, I read a lot of books classified as horror, but my favorites among them -- such as Stephen King's The Stand, The Talisman, and The Dark Tower series -- could all fall under fantasy or urban fantasy as well as horror. Other books I loved as an adult included The Mists of Avalon (fantasy), Vanishing Point (UF), Harry Potter, Dune, and The Lord of the Rings. In the year prior to coming up with the idea for Through the Veil, I'd discovered two series that really grabbed me: Masters of the Elements (fantasy) and the Kara Gillian series (UF), as well as A Song of Ice and Fire.

So I realized I wasn't as much of a horror girl as I'd thought. Yes, I do see myself writing some horror down the road, but I'm expecting most of it to straddle that line between horror and UF. (At least, all of the ideas currently floating around my head do.)

I hope you'll come with me as I explore it all.

Books Mentioned in This Post

The Fairy Doll, by Rumer Godden

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle

The Green Kingdom, by Rachael Maddux

The Stand, by Stephen King

The Talisman, by Stephen King

The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King

The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner

The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling

The Dune series, by Frank Herbert