More Stats for the Stats God

Surprise, it's me again!

I was doing some thinking about the genres I typically write, and I realized something. My spreadsheet of story stats (which includes things like Point of View used, number of deaths, times "fuck" is used, etc.) does not include one seemingly obvious aspect: genre.

So I've set about correcting that, only to find it's harder than I thought. Is a ghost story paranormal, supernatural, or horror? What about a weird, unearthly carnival? Or a seemingly normal object that does a weird thing?

Some of them are straightforward. There's a definite Sci-Fi. There's a superhero story. There's an Urban Fantasy.

But then there are all these that are in a fairly normal world, but then there's One Weird Thing. A character is accidentally immortal. Someone takes a shortcut that shouldn't exist. There's a portal to some other place. Someone's in a time loop. What are those?

Actually, in one story, all those things happen. What is that?

I think most of these things fall somewhere in the intersection of fantasy and horror, with perhaps a touch of sci-fi. But I can never figure out which specific subgenre is the right one. Sure, I could just call it "fantasy" but that feels inadequate. It's like calling crème brûlée  "pudding." It might be close, but it doesn't really describe it.

For some of these stories, I just resorted to looking up similar books, movies, whatever, and seeing what genre they were listed as. The one in which all the weird things happen, I had always labelled as Weird Fiction (it's a real genre, I swear). I don't know if it technically falls into that, according to experts, or whatever, but I'm still calling it that. Nothing else seems quite right. It's just… weird.

All of this was really to see if I could say, "I write [genre A] and [genre B]," like if I could narrow it down like that. I've ended up with about a dozen different genres, so no, I don't think I can narrow it down like that. At best, I think I could say, "I write speculative fiction," which is a fairly vague description, but does cover about 90% of my projects.

This is the data, as it stands right now:

I might change things around. I'm still a little iffy on the difference between supernatural and paranormal. Also, you might notice that Paranormal Mystery gets to be its own separate genre. Why? Because I can, that's why.

Does this mean a return to regular blog posts? Maybe. I wouldn't bet on it, but maybe. We'll see how it goes.