I am struggling to pick a genre for my writing. My current genres include Historical Biblical Fiction, Semi-fictional Travelogue, Political Suspense Fiction and Science Fiction. My current work is in Musical Fiction.

“Backstreets” is written in the genre of Musical Fiction. It is a collection of short stories and flash fiction based on the lyrics by some of my favorite artists and is currently in review, re-re-re-editing, then final write and re-re-re-re-re editing, yet I will still miss some errors.

I read numerous articles on writers’ websites providing advice on how to choose a genre. Many of them suggest writing where the money is, unless you are independently wealthy and are just writing for fun. I am not independently wealth but do write mostly for fun.

One of the sites , Quora, answers questions from its readers, and one typical question is, “How many books are sold by authors who self publish?” The typical answer is, “Very few.” Another is, “How much money will a self publish author make?” and the answer is “Expect to make less than $100 a year.” Well, I guess I am a pretty successful self published author. It’s a good thing I enjoy writing.

The best advice I saw was to, “write what you love, write what you enjoy reading.” With that in mind I am considering a sequel to “The Star Alliance” where the new “bad” character is the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Mike MacDonald, a.k.a. “The Turtle.” He may be owned by an Eastern European crime syndicate, or some other nefarious organization. I don’t know, yet.

I am also considering a second book of music lyrics “backstories.” While editing the current stories I kept finding other songs that would make great stories. For instance, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Tom Waits’ “Last Leaf on the Tree.” Of course, I am always willing to consider other suggestions.

Well, I think that is settled for now. Travelogue us covered in my travel blog, ghoststhatsellmemories.com and Historical Fiction is just too darn hard. While I do a lot of research in the Science Fiction genre to make some specifics accurate, realistic and relativistic, doing historical research is way more tedious and time consuming, and just not as much fun.

Thanks for listening. It was a big help.