All that said, I really do appreciate your thoughts on this. And I agree — people focus way too much on the idea of typecasting as negative. You’re right; it can be positive! And I’m glad people know enough about your work to typecast you. I hope they continue to react with surprise and delight when you show your range is even bigger than they thought.

Totally agree that actors and writers are different, but I’m not sure I get what you’re saying about how those differences ought to affect attitudes about being typecast.

Like, if I were an actor playing a distinctive role in a successful series, I think my reaction would be “Ohmygod, ohmygod, I’m FAMOUS! Woot!” not “Ohmygod, ohmygod, what if I become typecast as my character?” And if I should happen to write a bestselling paranormal romance, I fully expect to be bouncing off the rooftops ecstatic to have written a bestseller, not stressing about being labeled a paranormal romance writer.

And as far as landing the next acting gig/story acceptance/paycheck goes, whether a specific work by a writer is bought by a particular editor is frequently influenced by more than just the quality of that work. Name recognition, whether that writer and editor have an established publication history together, and such other factors can play a role. Likewise, whether an actor is cast for a certain part can be influenced by more than how well she does at the audition, like her star power, if she’s worked with the director/producer before, and suchlike. So one’s prior body of work is relevant in both fields.

It’s a feedback loop, of course. Folks want to read a certain type of fiction so they look for works classified as that type, and if a certain genre sells better, they-who-market try to label whatever they can as that genre in order to increase sales.

But I figure that means that even if a writer tries to please a certain audience by only writing a specific type of fiction, there’s no guarantee that some creative marketing person won’t plunk them out of that pigeonhole anyway. So why stress it at all? Writers should write what they’re driven to write. They-who-market can fret over how to categorize it.

I feel like there’s a difference between actors and writers in this respect. Discerning preferences and trends among a writers works is responding to stories they generate. Actors, on the other hand, are hired. Leonard Nimoy did’t write Spock. It may be his most striking performance, but I think it’s hard to call it central to his canon, because he doesn’t generate a canon in the same way.

I hope I’m making some sense without being offensive.

This is something I’ve been struggling with myself since my novella came out. It is pretty straight and narrow horror, but all my novel-length works are dark urban fantasy. I’ve been pretty active in the horror community this year and what have I learned? There is a very vocal group of horror readers who vehemently want paranormal romance and urban fantasy to lay off their horror critters! There are so stuck in their genre perceptions that they refuse to try anything new, even though I know that there is some really hard core, horror-forged urban fantasy out there. In fact some of it is exactly like some of the horror books out there, only from a 1st person female point of view.

I guess I need to adopt your attitude of embracing it because it means someone has read more than one piece of your work.

Personally I love variety and really enjoy seeing my favorite authors experiment with their style and subject matter.

Y’know, that sort of brings to mind a tangential subject. I’ve been asked before whether I’ve ever considered using a pen name since I write both children’s lit. and and erotic horror. I never have ’cause 1. I figure I simply didn’t have the sort of name recognition that it mattered and 2. one of my favorite authors, Tanith Lee, also writes erotic works and children’s fiction. And if she doesn’t feel the need to publish under different names to cater to her different audiences, then it’d be sort of silly for me to.

And I totally agree that being stereotyped as a person of color would and does piss me off. But my name is ambiguous enough that folks who don’t know me personally or who don’t check out my website/see my bio picture typically don’t assume that I’m Asian (or female for that matter). So I’m hoping that readers are encountering my work and forming opinions about it–and about me as a writer–based upon my work, rather than based upon my ethnicity. Hoping.