Words and Worlds...
This is a place for wild stories, for characters with
long teeth and sharp claws, for adventures in the forgotten corners of the
forest where nature still plays a prominent part in the telling of tales.
Spiders spin in the treetops, catching the morning dew and turning it into
diamonds. A rabbit thumps danger, diving for her burrow as a troop of
armor-clad mountain gorillas march past. There might be magic here. There
may even be spaceships.
There will definitely be animals.
⥈
If you know me and my work, then you're aware of my somewhat
aberrant relationship with genre. Some might say I flit from one to the other.
In fact, I would say that and have said it often enough that I
began to believe it. Throughout all my early series, I struggled with defining
my niche, something many an expert advice columnist insisted I needed to do,
and I failed spectacularly again and again.
Sometimes advice is right, and sometimes it's only mostly right.
What I found, in a sudden rush of epiphany (closely related to just bumming around on the internet), was that all my stories did have a common thread. It just wasn't genre. Did it have to be genre? Damned if I knew, but it turned out there was a whole group of writers, and readers, who didn't think so.
Looking back at my favorite books and stories, this picture clarified even more. Write what you love, they said. But I loved science fiction, and romance, and fantasy, and sometimes something totally off in left field that had nothing at all to do with any of the above.
Yet every last one of those favorite stories were
animal-centric. Every. One.
And when I looked again at my own body of work, I found that
same thread weaving through it. This time, it looked less like an aberration
and more like something intentional. Subconscious, certainly, but very
consistent.
So, if you like animal characters, animal sidekicks, furry aliens,
shape shifters or familiars, you've come to the right place.
"I'm Frances, and I write animal stories."
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