Yesterday I sent out an email to my Mailing List where I told everyone that I’m cutting myself in half. It’s not quite as drastic as it sounds, but I’ve created another me. Those of you who have read more than one of my stories know that I tend to be all over the place genre-wise.
I’ve never seen it as a problem, always figured readers will read the blurbs, the categories the story is listed in etc, so despite knowing it goes against all marketing advice out there, I’ve jumped between romance, horror, weird fiction, gay fiction, paranormal and so on. I’ve always kept the MC a gay man (except A Christmas Princess where the MC is a transexual kid) and somehow been thinking that the LGBT flag has been enough to keep it all together.
Lately, however, the one-star reviews including warnings to the fellow readers out there about this not being romance story have left me a bit puzzled. Most of them make me laugh, but despite me finding it comic that someone is looking for romance in horror flash fiction the rating is still there and a reader is out there feeling cheated.
I talked to my writer buddies about it, because what more can I do than write THIS IS HORROR? They suggested removing the dark and horror stories without romantic elements from my name and put them on another. I thought about it for a while and then I did, because what do I have to lose? Except for the time of keeping two names going instead of one, not much. So meet O Gränd.
O Gränd—writer of coffee break sized fiction
O Gränd is an introvert living deep in the Swedish woods. She spends most of her days staring at the computer screen and dreaming up characters. Placing her writing in a particular genre is hard, though most of her stories lean towards the dark side and they’re most often short.
She likes the challenge of telling a story in just a few pages and has had some of her works published in a Canadian flash fiction magazine.
When she isn’t caught up in her writing, she is spending time with her husband, their four kids, three cats, one dog, and a various number of fishes.
Ofelia Grand 