I've had people tell me my style is completely different in longhand, Connie

I've noticed hte same thing myself. In the psychic space where my writing takes place, the handwritten letters themselves form a visual image of the scene, as if I'm drawing pictures as well as writing words. It's ... closer, somehow, to what I'm seeing in my head.

Long things seem to demand a lot of handwritten time. I *can* produce on screen, thank god, but whenever there's stalling I have to go to the pen. Thankfully, the stories that appear full-formed from the brow of Zeus don't care how they're produced. They're not going anywhere.

no one has shelves anymore that simply say "fiction".

Uh, this is untrue. But your bookstore may vary.

P-C, the local biggies no longer do, except tucked away in a corner. Now it's "Best Sellers".

I am not making this up.

The largest section of fiction at my local B&N just says "fiction".

It's as large as the entire genre ghetto.

I pass it on my way to the Graphic Novels section.

Yargh. Anyone have any suggestions for getting past the "fire bad, tree pretty" writing stage? As in, my usual flow is... not. I put hands to key, or pen to page, and come up with such stirring lines as "See Dick. See Dick run. Run Dick, run! See Jane, see Jane write. See Jane frown. See Jane crumple the page up in disgust and curl up in fetal position while she weeps in frustration. See Jane offer sacrifices to the powers that be. See Jane scream. Scream, Jane scream."

Okay, I may be projecting a bit onto Jane there...

You have made Jane's torment very real, though, if that's any consolation.

because seeing the words typed out makes them actual words, and they seem too set and final,

Yes! My god, the mental furor in my head when I first printed out one of my stories. There it was. In Times New Roman. Like a real book or something. The characters had a totally different feel in my head to see their names in typeface rather than in their usual scrawl, like a signature. But in the end I realized it was the most important step, making them independent to stand on their own merits, rather than keeping them, despite their individuality, simply facets of my own psyche.

You have made Jane's torment very real, though, if that's any consolation.

Write what you know, and all that.

When I'm brainstorming an idea, I use pencil (only! never a pen!) and a notebook, and draw lines and sidebars and asterisks all over the page as I go, making a big, incomprehensible-to-anyone-but-me map.

But, like Deb, all writing of the actual piece (unless I'm shipwrecked or something, without computer access) is done right on the computer.

I loved A Handmaid's Tale. And it seems that so many people who like Atwood's other work don't, but I love Cat's Eye and Lady Oracle and Bluebeard's Egg, too. And while I might not have objected to being nominated for a prize myself, I can see where she might have thought, Hey, I win that and everyone is going to assume it's sci-fi. And it really did read as fiction to me, plain and simple, or at the most a modern fable.

Having worked in publishing, though, I know too well how marketing and sales want to be able to put something very specific on the spine. Even the book I'm writing now (or will be when I finish the novella that was due last week--gulp) is a mystery/romance hybrid that we definitely want to appeal to mystery readers, but we're NOT putting "Mystery" on the spine because we don't want to deal with the mystery buyer. (And why that is I don't know--just quoting my editor.)

Categories are good and bad, like most things. I think Alexander McCall Smith (is that right?) who wrote The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency should sue someone for categorizing his books as mysteries, because they're just not, not in the way most mystery readers expect. There are brief, amusing cases that Precious solves, but the books are about her not the cases, which are never complex enough to sustain a novel-length plot anyway.

Ack, baby's crying.

The largest section of fiction at my local B&N just says "fiction".

It's as large as the entire genre ghetto.

I'd say "mine too", but we're probably talking about the same store. And in the mini-bookstores in the malls, "fiction" is usually along the wall covering nearly half the store, while each genre gets a few of those little stand-alone island shelves in the middle of the floor.

And if you get any good ideas for getting the flow back, let me know. I'm having trouble getting the Anna characters to be people instead of little wooden puppets, now that I'm working on it for the first time since Feb. or March. I'm thinking of doing something I swore I wasn't going to do this time around, and skip ahead to the scenes I've already vividly imagined rather than writing straight through.

You have made Jane's torment very real, though, if that's any consolation.

She's right. You have. We feel her agony.

Seriously, Plei, sounds like you're doing a distancing thing, which sounds, now I look at it, an unbelievably pompous phrase. But really, I just mean a sort of internal lethargy which sets up a "if I get involved with feeling this shit that my characters are dealing with, I'm going to be reeeeeeally tired and pissed off and involved and I don't waaaaaaanna" chain. At least, that's where I tracked my distancey moments to, anyway.

The characters had a totally different feel in my head to see their names in typeface rather than in their usual scrawl, like a signature. But in the end I realized it was the most important step, making them independent to stand on their own merits, rather than keeping them, despite their individuality, simply facets of my own psyche.

Huh. I've never had that at all - I've always just felt I'm drawing them. Sketching-drawing, I mean.