Although I've said a million times that I'm not a horror writer, I do like horror.
I've never liked the publishing world's determination to pigeonhole every writer into a genre.
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.
I don't think of gay writers. I mean if you were to say to me who are the straight writers, well, you wouldn't ask me that question. So for me to identify a little tribe of gay writers, I don't know.
I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.
Bookstores never seem to know where to put me on the shelves. But I do. I love my genre and I love those writers, so I am happy to be considered a crime writer. That's what I consider myself.
Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
