#IWSG July 2025: Genre Exploration

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds! Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the July 2 posting of the IWSG are Rebecca Douglass, Natalie Aguirre, Cathrina Constantine, and Louise Barbour!

The following link will allow you to peruse everyone in the Blog Hop.

Link | IWSG Blog Hop Participants 

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July 2 question - Is there a genre you haven't tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?

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Hello, friends!

Welp, we've made it halfway through 2025. It's been a relatively quiet summer so far. We usually go to a lot of Cons, but we're going to a concert in a couple of weeks and skipped out on the summer Cons. I had some FOMO but we've got a lot of things coming up starting with DragonCon at the end of August, so we'll get our fill of Cons soon enough.

I pretty much took June off from writing, not gonna lie. My agent sent out another round of submissions for my holiday romance. I was supposed to start the rewrite on my sports romance. I did not. I read bits and pieces of some craft books, and I read two ARCs and part of a beta read I need to have done by August. I told myself I'd start work on SportsWIP on July 1, but I volunteered to read/judge another book for a contest this week. I think I was subconsciously putting off getting started on my edits by volunteering to do that. I do need to get started on these edits this month if I want this book to go on sub in the fall.

I did get some more good news this month though!

Last month, I reported that The Tinsel Twist is a finalist in the Stiletto Contest for the Unpublished Romantic Suspense Category.

Link || Contemporary Romance Writer's Stiletto Contest

The winner won't be announced until the CRW virtual conference at the end of July.

I also found out that the sports romance, A Bid on Love, became a finalist in two contests. The Passionate Ink Passionate Plume contest in the Virgin (aka unpublished) category for steamy romance was the first one. That winner presentation actually happened last weekend. I did not win in my category, but it was still great to be a finalist.

Then, I found out on June 22nd that A Bid on Love is also a finalist in the Georgia Romance Writers Prepublished Maggie Award for Excellence in the contemporary romance category!

Both of those acknowledgements were really nice, and the finalist judge for the Maggie award is from Harlequin, which is super cool. I've decided to attend the Moonlight & Magnolias romance conference in September that the Georgia Romance Writers host so I can go to the award banquet, but beyond that, spend a few days with other romance authors and hopefully network and learn some new things.

While I didn't get any writing done, I suppose I did have some cool writing related things happen. Hopefully next month I'll get to report that I finished my sports romance rewrite and sent it off to some beta readers. Being on submission has made me a little meh about writing so honestly the contest announcements have given me a little burst of motivation.

July Question

Today's question asks: - Is there a genre you haven't tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?

So, I pretty much write whatever I want, which is probably part of my problem because I don't dive deep into one genre and get it all figured out to write a great genre-specific book. I just follow my muse to whatever genre is giving me life at the time. I will say I've stuck with contemporary romance longer than any other genre so far, and if you include the ghostwritten books, have written four full-length contemporary romance novels, which is almost more than the rest of my varied manuscripts combined. I have a serious itch to get back to something speculative though.

Let's do a little run down of my drafts to see if there's a genre that pops up I haven't thought of yet that I'd like to write.

If you want to count the book I wrote in middle school The Science Fiction (Isn't Always Fiction) then I maybe started my writing journey with science fiction. I suppose I wouldn't mind trying my hand at a real sci-fi novel one day, but I have technically checked this box.

Fantasy has been a long standing favorite of mine in both high/epic fantasy and urban fantasy. I've written both. I have a completed manuscript Phoenix Rising that I wanted to rewrite this year but haven't gotten around to yet. It's urban fantasy, or maybe more contemporary fantasy... rural fantasy? It's not so much "urban" in setting but has other elements of urban fantasy. I also have a few unfinished but started manuscripts in high fantasy. One was my high school musings based on some online roleplaying I did in the Yahoo! Ayenee chatrooms at much too young of an age. The other will likely be my longtime passion project and is a second world fantasy loosely inspired by the video game Bloodborne with eldritch beasts and parallel worlds.

Thrillers are probably some of my favorite types of media to consume. Especially anything in the spy thriller genre like Mission Impossible or Atomic Blonde or Nikita, followed closely by police or similar shows like Law & Order and The Blacklist and more recently Reacher and Tracker. In 2012 I finished my first manuscript as an adult which is squarely a spy thriller with international intrigue and undercover operations and high tech gear and cartels and potential crooked government officials involved. Over the years I've been considering how I want to rewrite this. If I want to keep it as a contemporary spy thriller or if I want to rewrite it as like a soft scifi or futuristic or second world type thriller so I can bend the rules and not have to worry about real CIA procedures and plausibility in our world today. Then I can have even cooler tech gear.

I've recently been getting more into horror and exploring all the different facets of it because it's pretty expansive as a genre. It's not all slashers and serial killers. There's so much more to horror. So if anything, I think I'd like to write some more horror. I currently have a short horror story I've been shopping around to lit mags and another one I started but haven't finished. I think I'd mostly write short for horror, maybe not even novella length. I'm not sure I could build the suspense and fear long enough for something Stephen King sized, but would prefer to explore shorter, fast-paced horror writing. Or something that kind of treads the line of horror and thriller with psychological thrillers.

If there's anything I haven't written at all, but one day would like to, I think it would be memoir. I'm not entirely sure I have a story to tell, but some of my friends have told me I should write one, so maybe I do. It's not something I would explore anytime soon, and I'm not even sure where to begin, but maybe I do have something to tell in a memoir.

So really I guess I just write what I'm in the mood to write. I don't ever really sit down and say "I think I'll try my hand at a comedy today" and the set out to write that. I know a lot of people have their favorite genres. They're romance readers or they've read every King book ever or every spy thriller to grace the shelves of B&N but haven't read outside that genre much and stick to writing the same way. My writing is like my media consumption. I'll read and watch just about anything. Sure, I gravitate toward certain styles more and might choose one over the other if given the choice, but I don't stick to it with any sort of loyalty. I'm more drawn into the characters and their motivations and stories no matter what genre-decoration they're wrapped up in, if that makes sense.

I know it's important as a professional to have a backlist in a certain genre to get repeat readers, but I certainly won't be a John Grisham or James Patterson or other author that has almost all the books be similar and formulaic, or episodic even. I just can't do that. I get bored too easily. Even with writing contemporary romance my brain wants to wander off into a fantasy world or starts following other threads. I definitely can't see myself following a series for longer than a trilogy before I want to write other things. I've thought about trying my hand at that long-running series that's like episodes in a TV show with the same characters, but I know as a reader/viewer I've eventually lost interest when it felt like the writers (either in the books or in the show) start grasping at straws for material or do wild things to get out of corners they wrote themselves into, so I don't want to end up like that as a writer. I'd prefer to write standalones and explore multiple genres.

Thanks for stopping by!

Let me know in the comments how your June was and what you're working on or your thoughts on this month's question.

Looking forward to traversing the blog hop.

Be sure to see my links for other places to keep up with me online and sign-up for my newsletter! I promise I won't spam you. I don't even have an onboarding auto-welcome post set up yet, but I am working on getting that going sometime before the end of the year.

For now,

Rosie J.

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