Switch-Hitter

Great treat today, everyone! The lovely and talented Eileen Carr has stopped by for a glass of wine and a guest blog about switch hitting! (Ooo... sounds kinda dirty... Unless it's about sports.) **Maureen pulls her mind out of the gutter.**

Actually, it's about switching between genres, something of particular interest to me right now, so I was thrilled when Eileen suggested the topic.

Eileen Carr is the alter ego of the equally fabulous Eileen Rendahl, whose DO ME, DO MY ROOTS, is one of my favorite books of recent memory. I cannot wait to see what she's done in her "Carr" incarnation (cool pun). (At least I held back from typing inCARRnation...) This book sounds fabulous and it's at the very top of my TBR pile. **Maureen hangs head in shame for not having read it before Eileen stopped by for a drink...**

Take it away, Eileen!

Switch-Hitter
by Eileen Carr

I am not known for my long attention span. Nor am I known for my ability to stay focused on one thing for any length of time. I tend to get caught up in something, become completely absorbed and then get distracted by something shiny outside the window. I don’t have a favorite color because I like ALL of them. Preferably all together all at once. I can’t quite grasp the concept of clashing.

Reading has been one of the few things I have been dedicated to since I can remember. That said, I rarely stick to reading just one genre. I love romance, mystery, spy stories, thrillers, literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy, to name a few. I even enjoy the occasional non-fiction title. There’s an old John Denver (don’t judge me!) song where he says he’d no sooner love just one kind of woman than drink just one kind of wine. I feel just like that about books.

Now, lucky me, I get to indulge in writing more than one kind of book, too. After writing four chick lit novels as Eileen Rendahl, my debut romantic suspense, HOLD BACK THE DARK, was released by Pocket Books on February 24 under the pen name Eileen Carr and my debut urban fantasy, DON’T KILL THE MESSENGER will be released by The Berkley Publishing Group in April of 2010.

Writing in different genres has definitely made me stretch some new writing muscles. For instance, that plotting muscle got quite the work out writing HOLD BACK THE DARK. It was sore for days. It hadn’t been completely unused, but it certainly didn’t have to work quite so hard when I was writing chick lit books. I’m working on DON’T KILL THE MESSENGER right now and my world building muscle hurts so much I can barely walk sometimes. Setting is always important to me and I used it extensively in my chick lit novels to strengthen the message I was trying to convey, but nothing like the burn I got writing about Chinese vampires living under the streets of Old Sacramento.

It’s always exciting for me to try new things and to get to new places in my writing. The part of this that really rocks, however, is the cross-pollination. I can see how what I learned about pacing and plotting while writing HOLD BACK THE DARK is making DON’T KILL THE MESSENGER a better book and the world-building I’ve done working on DON’T KILL THE MESSENGER is definitely having an impact on the richness of the setting in the romantic suspense proposal I’m working on now as well.

I may never be the kind of person who can focus on one thing long enough to be an expert, but I think there might well be an advantage to my dilletante-ish ways, too. Have you tried genre jumping? Do you think it helped your writing?