"The very best time of year!"

One of my favorite things about the holidays is the time. I do my best to get whatever grading I plan to do over the break, and finish it before I go. That leaves me time to do two things: Read, and Write. I plan to spend most of the free time I have over this break doing both of those things.

I've taken a sufficient enough amount of time away, and am now ready to tackle those revisions for my WIP. At the same time, I have some reading to catch up on. Marcus Sakey's THE BLADE ITSELF, Alexandra Sokoloff's THE HARROWING, Jeffery Deaver's THE BODIES LEFT BEHIND, Lori G. Armstrong's HALLOWED GROUND, and Jason Pinter's THE MARK are sitting atop my TBR pile.

And I await Christmas time (and J.D. Rhoades, and Sean Chercover, and Toni McGee Causey, and Louise Ure, and Robert Crais, and Laura Lippman, and....) for the same reason, as I will be asking almost exclusively for books this year. Hey, any small boost I can give to the publishing biz, I plan to.

So, what are you planning to read over the break, and is your writing getting some time on the docket as well?

Originally posted October 13, 2008: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, some variation of all three???

I've recently seen a lot of different people blogging about genre. For me, this focuses on mystery/suspense/thriller. The other day, Nathan Bransford blogged about his definition of each, and it got me thinking...what would my current WIP be?

See, based on Mr. Bransford's definitions, my work would kind of cover two of the three. It's got action (has to, or it would put me to sleep, and I'm writing it!).

It also has more than one mystery. So is it a mystery, or a thriller?

Well, what would you call some of Patterson's early Alex Cross works?

What about Jeffery Deaver's stuff, like Garden of Beasts or The Sleeping Doll?

How about Crais's The Watchmen, or Zoe Sharp's Charlie Fox novels, or Brett Battles's Quinn novels, or fellow North Carolinian J.D. Rhoades's Jack Keller series?

Yes, I realize it's incredibly egotistical to bring up these names in conjunction with my own unpublished stuff, but these are the people I idolize. I think you have to look at your work and try to see it next to the top caliber authors out there. So you know what? I would call most all of these mystery/thrillers. And that's my WIP as well (unless/until an agent tells me otherwise, that is).

What about you? Does your work cross more than one genre or subgenre? Have a romantic suspense, or a mystery/sci-fi?