Alexandra Sharp's Blog

I'd like to write a post about what I've learned since my novel pubbed last September -- the good, the bad, the delightful -- but first I'd like to write about why I wrote the book at all.

(Or maybe I should have written something like that ... six months ago? Cool cool, more fodder for the "what I've learned post.")

I only recently read the term "genrebent"; or maybe I'd heard it forever ago and it only recently stuck. But since forever I've been a bit allergic to the idea of sticking to one genre.

Not because I don't like genre! In fact, I love it, all of it, except for psychological horror and books about kids whose parents are going through messy divorces. Or where the dog dies at the end.

More than loving genre, though, I love the cracks in the design, when one moment burst through the narrative and catches you by surprise. Because even when things are really, truly, undeniably shitty, someone always cracks a joke. And even when things are going so fantastically well you think your chest will burst like John Hurt's, there are days or moments when you realize just how unutterably sad life can be.

I love to bake, and once read an instruction to add salt to a recipe if you don't think it's sweet enough. Not sugar. Salt.

Isn't it perfect!??

There's also romance novels. Reading romance novels, while boob-deep in raising my first baby, was a wonderful introduction to how varied and, yes, deep, mixing genres could be. I fell in love with books by Courtney Milan. They were smart and sexy and full of interesting characters doing interesting things in ways that actual real humans would do them. More sexily, of course, but still. Romance novels felt like a secret I'd finally figured out; like there was all this beautiful humanism happening in books and I was only just finding it, hidden in the genre aisles where the "sad man walking on a beach" literary fiction people wouldn't notice.

For the first time felt like I was reading the kind of books that I really, truly, maybe, could write.

With fewer sex scenes and more magic. More intrigue and wild settings and set not in the 19th century but during some odd mash-up of the 19th and the mid-20th. It seemed that once I started mixing and baking up a novel I couldn't stop mixing up every single element of it. (Perhaps too much -- but that's for another blog post.)

There was also, of course, the 2016 election.

The night after, spent sleepless and sweaty, I was gripped by how badly I, personally, myself, had fucked up. Why hadn't I done more??? Clearly I could have done more. Clearly we all could have, but it felt shallow and irresponsible and, frankly, not helpful not to lay the blame squarely on my own shoulders. What could I do now?

And I began to think about a character who would have felt a similar sense of personal failure, and a similar sense of responsibility. A similar sense of inadequacy, who was yet gripped by a determination to claw her way into something better for the world she loved.

All this mashed together in my mind over many sleepless nights and bathroom breaks and long commutes and getting laid off and flying cross-country and baking cookies ... a little bit of romance, a little bit of genre-bending, a little bit of liberal soul-crushing and soul-searching. A tale as old as time.

That's a working title, obviously.

But the important part is "working"; as in, I'm working on the sequel to WITCHES OF WHEREWITHAL. It's going to feature expanded POVs (new characters! the same characters, now speaking for themselves!), backstory that fills in the gaps between Wherewithal's founding and our main story, and (I hope!) a lot of answers to lingering questions from Book 1.

With some new questions asked, of course ;-)

Now if only the world would settle down and my kiddos would sit still for 20 minutes so I could get some writing done...