The Birth of Romancing The Genres

By the time you read this, Romancing the Genres group blog will be five months and one week old and just short of nine months since the idea was born.

A family tradition is to tell the 'the day you were born' story. Here is RTG's.

I began my blog, Intentions and Synchronicity in May 2010 when I took 1st Turning Point's Platform Building class and met Tam Linsey. Sarah Raplee McDermed and I were writing friends who met every couple of weeks to share ideas and support each other’s writing goals. Some of the time, SamMarie Ashe joined us. But on this one particular wintry January day, we were at the now closed Beaverton Borders coffee shop talking about our blogs and how hard it was to get something up every day or even once a week.

Delilah Marvelle’s name came up because Delilah posts once a month and both of us thought that was doable. So, how could they post once a month?

With a group of other writers!
Paper and pen in hand, ideas were noted and the foundation for Romancing The Genres was laid. Week days in the months were counted and that’s how we came up with 21 – all months have at least 21 week days in them. Next was - who to invite.

We put our heads together and expanded our original list to include various parts of the country and various genres because we wanted this blog to inform, educate and entertain both other writers and readers. Since both Sarah and Judith are ‘yet-to-be-published’ we included other writers like us as well as published authors.

And genres? Well, as you know if you’ve followed RTG, there are genres and then there are Genres. We decided that romance was the key and we wanted as many sub-genres of romance to be included as we could. However, there are not enough days in the month to cover all the sub-genres of Romance. Take Historicals for example – that would cover a whole week and still leave some out!

We focused on finding Genre-istas (Sarah coined that term) who live in various parts of the U.S. Currently Genre-istas live in Alaska, Arizona, California, Illinois, Iowa, New York, North/South Carolina, Oregon and Washington.  We have Laurie SchneblyCampbell to thank for most of our Arizona Genre-istas.

In November we are adding Bronwen Evans from New Zealand.

It’s my party and I’ll blog if I want to! Since it's easy and effortless when done once a month – I do.

© Judith Ashley, 2011. All rights reserved.