It's become a tradition for me and my father to go to the coffee shop together on Saturday mornings so we can plan out the novels we'll (eventually) co-write or just hang out. He usually orders something simple, like a latte or an Americano or just a plain "coffee", whatever that is, or else he gets whatever's being advertised on the chalkboard in the store. I, on the other hand, have to order something unusual, something that's not on the menu and has to be custom made.
Yeah, can I get a tall toffee mocha with skim milk--let's make that iced; I know it's supposed to be a hot drink, but I want it cold--oh, and I'd like some nutmeg on that, too, please.
My dad doesn't directly comment on my elaborate order, but I know my taste in coffee strikes him as odd from the stories he tells me about the "glory days" of walking up to a counter, asking for a coffee, and being served a COFFEE, no frills attached, no bells and whistles. The first time he walked into a Starbucks, he was baffled by the never-ending stream of questions the cashier asked him about his order: "Would you like bold or mild? Whip or no whip? Extra foam? Skim, whole, half-and-half? What's it gonna be, eh, droog*?" The only question he'd been prepared to answer was, "Small, medium, or large?"
Oh, it's not called large here. It's Venti.
As time moves on, goods and services become more and more specific, constantly racing to keep up with the specificity of customers' demands. It's not just coffee. As an avid reader of genre fiction, I've seen romance novels differentiate to cater to different audiences, too.
A few years ago, I had no idea the romance genre was divisible by anything but "contemporary", "historical", and "scifi/fantasy". These days, I can find almost any identifier suffixed with "romance" slapped on the spine of a book.
Multicultural.
Menage.
Or, one of my personal favorites (now that I know such a category exists), Time-Travel Romance.
I don't know if I've spent the first half of my life too out of the loop to notice the intricate divisions in the romance genre or if books, like Starbucks coffee, have gotten more elaborate in recent years. In either case, I find it a fascinating phenomenon.
I've gotten snickers from a few friends who find it comical to see me reading a book labeled and shelved as "Time-Travel Romance", but I personally think the meticulous categorizing of fiction is a convenience and advantage to me as a customer. "Up with progress" is my personal motto, and these days in the world of consumption, progress means knowing exactly what you're getting. As a writer, I see the specificity and diversity of fiction as an indication of a love for the craft. "Down with pre-established settings and genres," says the avant-garde artist, "I want to write steampunk/pirate/political thriller/Western romance and have it marketed as such!"
I myself write what I like to call "high-octane fiction"--stories dealing with strategy wars, usually sci-fi, with a hurt-comfort romantic plot just for funzies. Sometimes I feel like I'm writing for an audience of one. The notion lingered in the back of my mind while I was writing Soulgame, the second installment in the Puppetmasters Series, but in the end, aren't all authors writing first and foremost for ourselves?
This is where coffee stops being a good metaphor for today's romance market. It doesn't take passion to mix a coffee and hand it to a guy over a counter, but a true writer doesn't write for a customer. We write for ourselves, and the beauty of it is, somewhere out there is a customer looking for the exact combination of ingredients we've thrown together.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day I can walk up to the counter at a bookstore and say, "I'm looking for a romance novel where the hero, the only human survivor of a nuclear apocalypse, gets rescued by the heroine, a guitarist from another planet whose government plans to use our destroyed terrestrial sphere for farmland, and the plot ensues from there. And it'd be cool if at least one, but preferably two, characters had the middle name 'Stephen'."
And the cashier would check the database, disappear for a moment, and return with exactly what I'm looking for.
"And could I get some extra foam on that, too? And nutmeg?"
"Of course, ma cheri. That totals up to $5.50. Thanks for your business; have a beautiful day."
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*Reference to Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.
Soul Game is the second book in a series:
Buy soon at: http://www.roguephoenixpress.com/
Peace Breakers, buy now at http://www.roguephoenixpress.com/
