Stop that snickering, you in the back row.

In the years when I was consuming containerloads of genre fiction, a question kept niggling in the back of my mind: why were none of the stories from here? After all, as much as any other part of the world, we have the stuff of fiction all around us: crises, crimes, desperate idealists, people falling in and out of love.

Why does anyone write? Writing is work, sometimes wrenchingly hard work, and a huge time sink. But on some level, all of us who write believe that what we have to say means something. Even if we think it’s trivial fluff, even if we intend it to be trivial fluff, meaning sneaks in incognito. There’s no escaping it; telling stories about our world is how we make meaning out of it.

Everything any of us does: what norms we embrace or rebel against, how we find our sense of purpose, what we think a relationship should be; is all constrained and shaped by the culture of the society around us, the accumulated total of meaning other people have made. Even if I don’t want to affirm it, I have to acknowledge it. I have to engage with it, if I want my experience and the meaning I’ve made from it to be included.

It felt like being pregnant with a book, so I wrote the book I had to write. When I encounter advice like ‘make sure you research the marketability of your chosen genre before you invest a lot of time in writing,’ it feels like I’ve picked up a radio broadcast from Neptune. I sought technique from wherever I could find it, (here, here and here) but I’ll make my own damn genre, even if I’m such a rare bird that I have to start my very own aviary.

And I think it’s going to be quadruplets.