The Roaring Woman

When I'm clicking through blogs and links I try not to limit myself to just the mystery genre though most of the links here are for mystery writers. What I've found is that by reading about other genres I can find new ways of looking at the mystery genre.

Marie Brennan's essay "First Girl Ever" over at the SFnovelists site is a perfect example. http://www.sfnovelists.com/2010/03/16/first-girl-ever/ Ms. Brennan is talking about fantasy in her essay and girls who had to dress as boys to become the knight who slayed the dragon. The interesting thing is her take on the girls who came after that special "first" and how they were treated.

So, how does this relate to the mystery genre? I was thinking about female PI's. How Kinsey Milhone and VI Warshawski were basically girls dressed up in boy's clothing. Of how the girls coming up in the genre now are even more ferocious and lethal or go to the extreme of being so girly that you want to barf. Writers in our genre seem to be afraid to let the women be feminine while still being able to take care of themselves. There doesn't seem to be a happy medium, though Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone does walk that line of perfect balance, at least for me. Of course the flip side of this, as always, is the women as victims and how much degradation you can force on them before they break. But that's another conversation.

Another interesting post I found was about using short stories as a step-up to becoming a novelist. Jim Hines did a survey and found some interesting results with the comments adding more interesting points to the discussion. http://www.jimchines.com/2010/03/novel-survey-results-part-i/ While Mr. Hines' essay is sci-fi/fantasy based, the myth that writing shorts is a must-do to break into the novel market is just as true for the mystery genre. Me, I just write shorts because I love the form and the freedom.

Serenity J. Banks, editor of DF-underground http://www.df-underground.com ,left a comment on a post from last month. The submission guidelines page url has changed http://www.df-underground.com/submissions-underground_subm/ This is a new market that was just starting up when I first posted the link. They've gone live with some shorts, so go have a read and see if you've got something that might be a fit for this paying dark fiction market.