I was going to try to write a fairly scholarly, objective blog post about some of the interesting and highly entertaining fiction and film that comes out of pairing horror with other genres. I could think of plenty of movies - for instance, several horror and comedy titles sprang promptly to mind ("Shaun of the Dead" being a prime example of comedy with horror, and the '99 version of "The House on Haunted Hill" being a prime example of horror with comedy), but I couldn't think of any comedic horror novels off the top of my head.

So then I tried to think of other pairings and again could only think of movies. I own a fair bit of horror on DVD, but browsing my shelves just wasn't helping me. "Event Horizon," no aha! moment . . . "28 Days Later," nope, nothing's coming to me . . . "Pitch Black," nada . . . (though you're probably seeing the theme already). So I turned to my nerdy bookshelves and leafed through some of my home reference books for background and inspiration. I began with the entry for HORROR in "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" by John Clute and Peter Nichols. For some reason it still took several pages of reading for the ball to drop: Hey, wait a minute . . .

You say you don’t like historical fiction? You say descriptions of technical nautical details bore you silly? You say if you wanted to read a novel with turn-of-the-19th-century dialogue you’d read Jane Austen?

Fie, I say. And possibly pshaw. I'm here to tell you why you should consider reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, and in order to keep myself from going on ad nauseum, I'm going to do it in list form.

What many of us don't know is that failure to create a clear dividing line between stage one (sitting down and getting the thing written) and stage two (refining and polishing) is a sure-fire way to prevent stage one from ever happening. Just as many of us underestimate the need for reasonably objective, thorough editing, and we tend to skimp on stage two in favor of a sort of blind hope that the good stuff makes up for the bad.

The truth is that both stages are vital, but if you want to stay sane and be productive as a writer, you need to start thinking of them as almost completely separate processes.

There are many challenges unique to nonfiction writing – walking the line between a tone that’s credibly serious and one that’s overly dry, organizing and arranging your material so it makes sense and reads well, making reference to real people without getting sued or alienating everyone you know – but one many writers overlook is the need for documentation.

by Jane Ryder

Sub-genres of any kind can be difficult to nail down, but in the genres of fantasy and science fiction it’s not easy to even get them to hold still.

The principle reason for this is that these two genres are often collectively called “speculative fiction” because they deal with the question “What if . . . ?”