The Fine Art of the Weird Western

I never really expected to write a weird western, right up until I decided to write a vampire story. I didn't want my vampires to be the beautiful elite sexpots that half of everyone was writing these days, and I didn't want them to be anything approaching love interests, like 90% of everyone was writing.

The obvious solution, of course, was to take them out of modern times and write a historical(ish) vampire story.

Then came the hard part: figuring out how to write a weird western.

Writing a weird western doesn't have to be hard. It can be complicated, mind you, because you have historical stuff blended with decidedly non-historical stuff, but if you keep a few elements in mind, you should be on the right track.

The Setting

This is one of two major things that makes a weird western what it is. The area of North America west of the Mississippi was one hell of a place. Nobody setting out to settle there had the least idea what to expect, and they often encountered lots of scary stuff, ranging from the wildlife to the natives to fellow settlers to outlaws who just wanted to kill you and take you stuff because they could. Because it was a great big expanse of unknowns, it lent itself well to ghost stories and legends and tall tales and all sorts of cool stuff.

Of course, if you want to do this properly, you need to do your research. There are lots of nonfiction books floating around that will give you a fair idea of what sorts of things were going on at that time and place, and reading any mainstream western novel will give you a pretty good snapshot of what life was like back then--wild, dangerous, thrilling, and everyone able to kill you. Not everyone was a gunslinger, but pretty much everyone able to walk knew how to use a gun.

Then again, your standard iron won't do much against a vampire, but that's there the horror bits come in.

The Critters

Take a look at the folklore of the day, and you'll find some pretty crazy stories in fairly short order. Shapeshifters, ghosts, boogeymen, vengeful undead of all shades, and that's just what the settlers cooked up. Native American folklore has even crazier stuff, with nature spirits and shapeshifting animals and things that we might call demons that will just eat your face if you don't handle them correctly or just stay the hell out of their territory. Vampires can be found in Native American lore (called Children of Jumlin, not apotamkin, which is a completely different critter), as can serviceable werewolves (not all of which are considered malevolent) and any number of things that roam around in the spirit world.

The Magic

The weird west genre always has some form of magical or supernatural element to it. This distinguishes it from its spiritual cousin, cattle punk, which tends to have science fiction elements like anachronistic tech levels. How you handle the magic and supernatural stuff depends largely on what rules you want to have apply to it. Is this something that anyone can learn (in which case your tale will swiftly become a monster-killing romp), or can only a few people use it, like shamans or whatever other Wild West wizards you want to have roaming around? Does it work well with technology, or not?

Basically, the magic goes hand-in-hand with your critters, because most wild west heroes are going to have to use something unusual to kill your beasties. Emptying a revolver into a vampire is just going to tickle him, but if you have a priest or holy man bless your gun, that's likely to get his attention a lot faster (making the guy with the blessed gun his next target, but that's how it goes). In Sheep's Clothing, my half-skinwalker protagonist Wolf was laid low and nearly killed with a silver dagger, because he's basically a werewolf from a different culture, and that's how werewolves roll.

 Lots of evil critters in folklore are repelled or harmed by good old-fashioned religious items, but that might largely depend on which banes you use on which critters. A Native American beastie might laugh at a brandished crucifix, for example, while a European monster might cheerfully set a Native American totem on fire. A significant chunk of your story might be a Muggle protagonist learning how these things work from a more experienced teacher, just in time for him to unleash hell on the supernatural threat in spades at the climax.

In Conclusion

A weird western, by its very nature, requires the writer to combine a lot of different elements that don't always go together. How much work you put into it and how you combine the different bits will determine what kind of weird western you have when you finish. The only real requirement is that you have a great time writing it, so that your enthusiasm shows in the final product.

And one more thing...

Here's a tiny progress update on my goal of selling 1000 copies of Sheep's Clothing:

7 / 1000 (0.70%)

Paranormal Romance vs. Sci-Fi Romance

When I first decided I was going to write (and finish) a novel, the first idea that came to mind was a sci-fi romance called Heart of Steel. That was fine as far as it went, until the time came to do a little genre research, whereupon I found the relative handful of sci-fi romance titles were tossed into the same section as paranormal romance. That struck me as odd, since sci-fi and paranormal are only similar in that they're both spec fiction. Aside from that, they're worlds apart. Now, I know that the people in charge of cataloging the romance subgenres are going to keep using the terms interchangeably while sci-fi romance is even nichier than paranormal romance, but I thought I'd try to distinguish the two.

First, let's talk about setting. Paranormal romances tend to be set in roughly the modern day, plus or minus twenty years or so. They're usually like "our" Earth, except for the presence of the paranormal stuff, which may or may not protect itself with a conspiracy to keep normal folks from discovering (and freaking out over) it. This offers the reader a fairly comfortable frame of reference, and allows for the possibility of an everyman or everywoman lead. Sci-fi romance can be set anywhere from 100 years ago (in the case of steampunk) to several hundred years in the future (for nearly everything else). It also doesn't have to be set on Earth, let alone "our" Earth--I've seen titles set on alien planets as often as a futuristic Earth that might be a mind-boggling dystopia, a post-apocalyptic hell, or a wondrous speculation of miracles yet to come.

Now let's talk about the critters. Paranormal romances tend more towards magical or supernatural creatures, including but not limited to vampires, spellcasters, ghosts, demons, angels, and shapeshifters. Any one of these may be a love interest (vampires seem to be popular these days), and they can be either gender. Sci-fi romances can have aliens (usually humanoid), cyborgs, robots(!), and any number of metahumans with superpowers not otherwise covered under the paranormal umbrella. Again, any one of these can be the love interest in your story (yes, even the robots), but while they can be either gender, there seems to be a slight preference for males, regardless of the gender of the other lead.

Finally, let's talk about the heroes. Paranormal romances tend towards intuitive heroes who aren't afraid to resort to physical combat to get the job done. They use their street-smarts, or instincts, or gut feelings to get out of a scrape. Conversely, sci-fi romances tend to have intellectual heroes who prefer to think their way out of a scrape. They might or might not be able to build a death ray out of some aluminum foil and a car battery, but they're more likely to try to make a plan rather than punch, kick, or bite (depending on preference) their way through obstacles. This is not to say that all PNR heroes are brutish beasts (even if other members of their species are) or that SFR heroes are all emotionless robots (even if they literally are). Even a steampunk artificer might know how to throw a solid punch in a pinch, but if he has time and the death ray option is open, well, he's going to build himself a freaking death ray.

Now, I know that there's going to be some overlap between SFR and PNR stories, especially if the author takes the science fantasy route or the Magic Is Sufficiently Advanced Technology route, but these are the distinctions I've seen. Unfortunately, the fact that there aren't separate categories for each means that someone looking for one or the other might have to hunt around in Romance or Science Fiction to get your speculative romance on, regardless of which type you prefer. Fortunately, with the increase of self-published authors, I imagine that both of these categories may increase in size, meaning that the cataloging people in bookstores (online and physical) may eventually separate the two properly. In the meantime, though, happy hunting.

Obscure Genres, Explained

As you browse the fiction categories of Amazon, you probably notice that a lot of the stuff has been sorted into neat categories: Horror, science fiction, romance, mainstream, whatever. Then there are those that people might not be familiar with, genres who are an actual thing, but might be a subset of one of the big categories or (gasp) a mix of two or more. You might have heard about these and wondered what the hell they're all about, because otherwise they're intermixed with the Big Categories and otherwise really damn hard to search for. Here is my humble attempt to explain them to you.

The "Lit"s

• Chick Lit: Let's start with one of the lighter ones. Chick lit is a relatively modern genre focusing on modern womanhood, generally through a filter of humor. It typically features a female protagonist whose womanhood is the central focus of the plot. In other words, a chick flick in book form. 
• Examples: Bridget Jones' Diary, The Devil Wears Prada.
• Misery Lit: And of course, way over at the other end of the idealism/cynicism scale is Misery Lit. This is supposedly biographical literature focusing on the protagonist overcoming trauma or abuse of many different kinds, to offer a literary catharsis for others who has suffered abuse. This genre has been rife with hoaxes (believed and confirmed alike), but regardless, if you can read one of these books without losing your faith in humanity, you have no soul. 
• Examples: A Child Called It.
• Boomer Lit: Boomer lit focuses on protagonists from the baby boomer generation. It typically explores all the elements of an aging population, but is also prepared to challenge the stereotypes that go along with it.
• Examples: The Hot Flash Club.

The "Punk"s

• Bio Punk: Bio Punk mixes organic technology and genetic engineering with the science of an earlier time. This was actually fairly popular in early science fiction as the smart guys were learning how the human body worked, and it's carried through to modern works as well
• Examples: Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau
• Cattle Punk: Cattle Punk is to the Western what Steampunk (below) is to the Victorian setting. Imagine a Western novel with robotic horses, rayguns, and a gunslinger with a mechanical eye, and you've got a fair idea of what Cattle Punk is all about.
• Examples: Wild Wild West (movie)
• Clock Punk: Clock Punk is old-school Steam Punk. Yes, I know Steam Punk is old-school already, but this is even older-school--like pre-Industrial Revolution. Replace steam power with clockwork, applied to the same general results. Imagine the sort of crazy shit that Leonardo da Vinci might be up to if he had the ability, and you've got Clock Punk
• Examples: Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
• Cyber Punk: This is the big one that launched a dozen sub-genres. Cyber Punk added the grittiness of the underclasses to what had previously been the shiny, chromey futurism of contemporary science fiction. In Cyber Punk you have underground hackers railing against The Man with the aid of cybernetic implants that let them do neat things like mentally interface with a computer.
• Examples: Half of everything by William Gibson.
• Diesel Punk: With the dawning of the Twentieth Century came the Industrial Revolution (yay!), mass manufacturing (yay!), and a little thing called World War One (boo!). Diesel punk does funky things with internal combustion engines and electricity, making for an interesting sort of Zeerust (that is, things that would be futuristic if they weren't set in the past).
• Examples: Bio Shock, Captain America: The First Avenger
• Steam Punk: This is the big one: Steam-powered gizmos in a Victorian setting. Imagine if steam, not electricity, were the medium to catapult humanity into a new age of technology, producing wonders like automata and other man-made servants of that type, alongside terrors like advanced war machines running roughshod over a world that isn't ready to counter them. Steam Punk covers not only literature, but film, music, comic books, and a fashion subculture, and strangely side-steps all the unpleasant issues of Victorian morality and gender roles
• Examples: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Other Stuff

• Weird Western: Where Cattle Punk is a science fiction take on the Western Genre, the Weird Western is more fantasy or horror. The frontier of that era was paved with ghost stories and legends, both from the settlers and the Native Americans, and the Weird Western works on the conceit that some of them are real.
• Examples: Desperadoes, From Dusk Till Dawn, Sheep's Clothing
• Bizarro Fiction: Hoo boy. Bizarro fiction is one of those genres where either you get it, or you don't. And the trouble with getting it is finding it half the time. Bizarro fiction typically takes place in a dreamlike parallel world where bizarre stuff is commonplace, and it works on its own logic that generally only makes sense if you just sit back and roll with it. Imagine if a novel dropped acid. The fun part is searching for these books, because some of the titles are downright profane.
• Examples: Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland, The Baby Jesus Butt Plug, The Ass Goblins of Auchwitz (... Told ya.)

Now, this is by no means a comprehensive list of the more obscure genres out there, but hopefully it will offer some help in figuring out what the hell is meant by these terms. I may make another post of this sort if my readers need help figuring out other subgenres.