I just received feedback from my lovely agent regarding a new manuscript I’m working on. Everything I’ve written or considered writing has had some sort of speculative fiction element to it. Whether characters are living on another planet or one’s a ghost or a shape shifter, I’ve always had a bit of “otherness” in my stories.

But not for this one.

This story is a historical piece based on a local murder from back in the day. I got caught up in the idea after one of the locals was giving us some information about a cemetery. Being a writer, I immediately started to wonder about the woman who was killed and why. Now, I have no idea what the facts might be, but my brain has managed to fill in its own version.

So I’m working on a proposal for an Alaska historical murder mystery. No space ships. No ghosts. No weird things living in the woods. Just…people who have human motivations and abilities. And few flush toilets.

It’s a bit disconcerting to be out of my normal mode, but exciting too. I’ve fallen in love with our local history and with the era I’m focused on. People who came up to Canada then here for the gold rushes of the late 19th century were tough, and the women were often tougher. My story is set a bit later, but there will be connections to that earlier time.

It’s going well so far, and I love my heroine, Charlotte. She’s a journalist for a women’s magazine who likes the bigger stories (like the Suffragette movement and the Volstead Act, for which she is for and against, respectively ; ). She’s in Alaska visiting her brother, the town doctor, and writing a series of articles about life on the wild frontier. She’s also trying to escape some things in her recent past. Throw in a dead prostitute who was hiding something and a handsome lawman, and we have a story.

Will my change in genre fly? I hope so.

When’s the last time you changed things up in your world? How’d it go?