What story sounds crap-your-pants-amazing?
Is it the steampunk killer mermaid time traveller who kills Snow White and the Seven Zombies to avenge it’s/his/hers dad’s death and then they find out it was Earth all along because they hated every ape they saw from Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Zee story.
Or the one about a time traveling mermaid that comes back to stop the steampunk zombie invasion from the neighboring metaverse and in a twist ending finds out she caused it all by being the mermaid who didn’t dust… insert backstory about how shes a horror birth that resulted from a high-school football cheerleader getting back at her abusive ex by sleeping with the big bad wolf.
Or…a zombie mermaid that travels back to the 19th century to get revenge on the handsome prince of Nazi-controlled Kingdom of Manhattan who knocked her up! (Spoiler: the prince is her dad!.) Be weary, for that is the path of Suckerpunch.
I assume since we saw the waves of vampires, werewolves, faeries, zombies, and now angels, creators are jumping on the next well-known vaguely humanoid mythic creature that pop culture hasn’t grabbed onto yet, in hopes of leading the trend or ending up in the slush pile. The slush pile is the literal pile of manuscripts submitted to a magazine, 95% of which is a terrible terrible mess. The ‘slushing’ is reading through it.
A question that I commonly ask myself. What is it that I want?
Plenty. Nanotech, human-machine interfacing, space exploration, high sorcery, interplanetary diplomacy, first contact scenarios, and much, much more. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. As to the things that I’ve experienced before, it’s not that those things are “bad” or should never be written about, but rather that those topics are currently over-saturating the inboxes of many editors right now. Most of these are cyclical, and will eventually subside in popularity. The subject or setting shouldn’t be the most important part, for me it is about the story with the hope of some originality within it. Editors, agents and publishers are, for the most part, looking for what sells and if something comes into vogue, then they will publish everything they get in that genre. And though some editors are tired of these stories it has very little to do with whether or not readers are tired of them.
There’s always going to be someone telling everyone else not to write this or that. It’s nonsense. When creating content you go with what piques interest not with what’s trending. Once you bank content from all over the landscape then you worry about trends so you can give publisher what they need when they need it. A better measure of content targeting during creation (when do you pull from which part of the conceptual terrain, if that’s even really a good idea other than some sort of efficiency process refinement) is where are people generally. There’s a reason zombies, vampires, wolves, fairy tales, fables, etc. come up when they do in popular culture. Reading culture and the pressures exerted from without and within, you have a vector to target what kind of content you could focus on. Some do that already but more often we’re just writing all the time anyway based on what moves us. It writes itself.
-Dagobot
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