What other publisher comes to you for a strategizing session for your upcoming book bearing a delicious homemade beans-and-rice lunch? Laura and I sit around my dining room table with bowls and spoons, paper and pens, a stack of one sheets for my book, a newly-minted advance reader copy. I have a list of things to talk about but we're mostly free-wheeling our conversation, bouncing back and forth with thoughts and ideas.
We do the math, me counting aloud on my fingers, and find that we're less than six months out from publication. That time frame seems both really long and really short.
Laura's telling me one of the things we want to research is mystery reviewers and bloggers. I point my spoon at her and say science fiction too, and she nods. My book is a genre-bender: literary fiction, mystery, sci-fi. The sci-fi part feels less conspicuous because the trappings of the novel are so soaked in noir and old-time detective fiction—but what are time loops if not sci-fi? It's funny, though, how time loops are science fiction and not fantasy. Time loops trace their roots back to time machine stories, and that is straight-up science fiction. But often time loop scenarios are allowed to exist with no explanation as to why the phenomenon is happening, whether through something sciencey or magical. The time loops just... happen. My book Who Killed One the Gun? pretty much falls into that category. There's a why-do-you-think-this-is-happening discussion in one scene, with one character posing a theory, but that theory is just a theory, and it, too, falls into a nebulous place between science and magic. Which... when you get deep down into it, doesn't all of science turn into magic?
That all sounds pretty poetic in my brain, but when I try to describe the way the genres of mystery and science fiction live in my book, I find it's hard to put it into words.
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