Urban Fantasy

[alanajoli]

Between a blog entry of amsaph yesterday and a contest and interview of mdhenry, I've come to a realization. If urban fantasy authors weren't so prolific online and so incredibly friendly to fellow bloggers, I don't think I'd even be reading the genre.

No, seriously.

YA paranormal is sort of a different beast--I've been reading contemporary fantasy in the jfic and the YA sections since I was itty, either with children getting sucked into a fantasy world or having strange things happen to them because they picked up a magic coin. It's not a far stretch from those to books about kids with paranormal abilities, and from there, books with teens whose lives are intersecting with a supernatural world all around them. YA paranormal as a whole has always had a shape--real world kids interacting with crazy paranormal stuff.

Urban fantasy, however, seems to be the heir of a couple of different venues, but a lot of the tropes are born out of the horror genre. As a kid, I never liked horror. I don't like to be scared, and I've never liked scary movies. The word "thriller" tells me I need to avoid the product. But the majority of my reading these days includes zombies and vampires and werewolves--all traditional folk creatures that have run wild in the *horror* genre, and none of which, as creatures, would have encouraged me to pull a book off the shelf as little as three years ago. But when I started following fangs_fur_fey back at the beginning of 2007 (maybe the end of 2006), not only were all of these great writers posting exciting things about using folklore, their writing processes, and just general fun stuff about their lives, they all seemed to be really cool people. And that personal connection is apparently what I needed to really start actively seeking out UF. (And of course now there are the Deadline Dames and the League of Reluctant Adults, which I'm following a little more regularly than FFF these days.)

lyster and I were talking not too long ago about internet presence driving book sales, and I'm coming to acknowledge that I'm the market share--I'm a person who definitively buys books based on my web familiarity with the writers, and I'll even wholeheartedly embrace a genre that wasn't really my thing if as a community, they're really awesome. It's an interesting way to think about what I read.

Comments

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I agree on that--I've been turned off by a few bloggers also, and I'm less inclined to read their fiction if I didn't like their blog. Some of the politicos I found quite interesting, actually, but I liked their work before and probably wouldn't have sought out their work based on their blogs. The worst scenario I had was where an author's blog pretty much bored me. She'd been recommended as a writer, but not a blogger, so I decided to check her out and see if I thought we'd gel. As it turned out, I was completely uninterested in what she was blogging about, and I still haven't bothered to pick up her fiction (which I hear is completely different from her blog).

So it definitely can cut both ways--and it's really just the UF bloggers who have struck me as people who I want to befriend and then read.

[breathingbooks.livejournal.com]

The UF crowd does seem to have a distinct personality that makes places like f_f_f so interesting and fun to watch.

Online presence for me also holds the problem of authors who trigger a negative visual reaction via excessive graphics, bad font, or something. I know online form isn't the book, but they're both in the aesthetic pot and one can trigger the memory of the other regardless of logic.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

*laugh* Luckily, LJ makes it easy enough to be inoffensive on the eyes. :) But yes, there's nothing like an unprofessional looking site to make you question whoever is hosting it (author, business, or otherwise).