Hi everyone! I’m TA Moore and you’ll be seeing me on the 11^th of the month here at Love Bytes. Delighted to be here!

If you’re really interested in TA Moore there’s some odds and ends about me on my website: www.nevertobetold.co.uk. The cliffnotes version, though, is that my short story ‘Blind Eye of the Sun’ is in the Torquere Press anthology Eternally Dark (out October 22) and they will also be publishing my novella Labyrinth of Stone in the New Year. It is my first publication in the romance genre and I’m really excited to see them up for sale! I’m also obsessed with pugs, have one tattoo and think adding ‘in space!’ to anything makes it significantly cooler.

In fact that’s what I did with ‘Blind Eye of the Sun’. Torquere’s brief was to write about blind vampires, I added ‘in space!’ and the result was at least 40% cooler. There are people who don’t like that sort of cross-pollination of concept, but what do they know? For me this sort of crossing the streams is what genre is all about. It’s the stork and cabbage patch story for genres!

When it works well you get new sub-genres, or even entirely new genres. Look at Urban Fantasy, nobody thought that when Fantasy and Detective fiction hooked up at the office Christmas party it would go anywhere. Yet here we are, coming down with first person narratives about vampires and bigfeet (bigfoots?) trying to make it in the big city through pluck, determination and the ability to supplement their diet of ramen with the occasional steak of person.

I snark because I love, by the way. Urban Fantasy is one of my favourite genres. I cut my teeth on Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde series, and there was a time you’d have thought that Emma Bull paid me to shill War of the Oaks to people.

Then there’s Paranormal Romance. It has been said that it and Urban Fantasy are basically the same, just with more focus on relationships, but I don’t think that’s true. Or at least, it didn’t start out that way.

If you look at a lot – actually, I will go out on a limb and say most – of the early Urban Fantasy novels they focused on elves and mages. There was the occasional vampire (Diana Tregarde hooked up with one!), but the focus was much more the myth than the monster. Paranormal Fantasy focused on the things that went bam chicka wow wow in the night: vampires, werewolves, demons.

It’s not only the speculative narratives either. Early detective fiction drew heavily on the Western, thrillers and horror share some DNA and a lot of medical thrillers wouldn’t take much to dip into dystopian territory.

So if you are a reader, seriously taking a genre leap of faith can be so much fun. I love seeing how authors blend the worlds and the insta-mythology they whip up to explain everything. As for writers, don’t be scared to add your version of ‘in space!’ to whatever you’re writing. Don’t do it willy nilly though. With Torquere I was veering off the hard line of the prompt, but I was still within the company’s wheelhouse. With somewhere like Hard Case Crime, on the otherhand, I’d probably be on a hiding to nothing with ‘in space!’.

I also have a golden trio of rules for how to make a cross-pollinated universe/mythology work.

1: Work out how it happened.

In ‘Blind Eye of the Sun’ I went with the secret history approach, where vampires had existed throughout human history but maintained their separation from that history. It is basically the same ‘vampires…are REAL!’ approach that Bram Stoker took with Dracula, just happening in a speculative future instead of in Victorian London. There are other options though.There’s infinite universes and infinite variety (otherwise known as Heinlein’s Number of the Beast) approach, with incursions from worlds where populated by creatures instead of humans. The evolution of psionic abilities that mimic some elements of vampirism, such as draining life force from people or being able to override their will. Even man-made vampires, vat-grown for the populace’s entertainment.

Any and all of these could work well, just remember rule two.

2: Update your Bible

Remember the rules of our world. This is always important, obviously, but when you are blending worlds you can’t depend on even the old, tried and true rules of the genre. Vampires might not be obsessive about counting seeds, elves might be aliens and Underhill a dimensionally shifted space ship or eldritch, Lovecraftian horrors causing a traffic jam during rush hour could be a weekly occurrence. All those detours from the usual rules (and where you adhere to expected behaviours) need to be marked down and remembered.

3: What genre is on top?

No two genres are created equal in your blended world. One of them has to take the lead, their paradigm taking precedence. That doesn’t mean you have to subsume the other world, it just means that you have to adapt it. In ‘Blind Eye of the Sun’ my vampires are monsters, but their abilities are primarily physical rather than mystical. They have longer lives and enhanced senses, but there’s no shapeshifting into a dozen bats or dark magic. It would have been equally easy to go the other way, to make the magic dominant and human technology a frail shield against the eldritch horror. It’s up to you, but it pays to make the decision early. It would be hard going to make the traditional, sleeping in his grave dirt, being vaguely sexist with his coterie of ‘brides’ work in hard SF setting.

There you go: TA Moore’s rules for crossing the streams. They are more of a checklist really – have you done this yet? Rules just sounds more assertive….in space!

See you in November!