choosing what to write

I am itching to write a fantasy novel.

As regular readers know, before I began Chroniker City, my steampunk project, I had only ever written fantasy. It’s my bread and butter. I love wizards, spells, dragons, lost princes, spirits, dark lords, and so on. Now that I am roughly 60% of the way finished with Chroniker City, I can’t help but think about my next project. Originally, I had planned to write Chroniker City and its sequels before working on anything else, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

The book I finished before starting Chroniker City was a fantasy heavily inspired by Indian mythology. I loved that book, heart and soul. I still love that book. There are nights where I lay awake, not thinking of the scene I’ll write tomorrow or the characters in my steampunk world, but of scenes I wrote over a year ago, characters that live in a world of magic and adventure. The fantasy novel is calling me back in demanding ways, and it’s taking every bit of willpower I have not to open up the document and commence working on it.

I am a committed person. I believe in finishing the things that I start, and by golly, I’ll finish Chroniker City before I work on anything else. But you better believe that as soon as I send my first draft off to beta readers, I’m diving back into the fantasy novel. I’ll tackle that conglomeration of words and turn that sucker into a trilogy of awesome, one book at a time. It may end up that I work on a book for the fantasy series, and then turn around and work on a book for the steampunk series. It doesn’t matter, really, as long as I’m writing, and I’m writing stories that I love.

I do love Chroniker City in all its steampunk, automaton, brass awesome, but my heart pumps magic, not blood—contrary to popular belief. I need to write about witches and demons and magical artifacts. It would seem that I’m bored of gears, schematics, and Victorian age science, but that’s not true in the slightest. I could never be bored of steampunk. Steampunk speaks to my mind and lets me be a clockwork geek—which I so totally am.

But fantasy speaks to my heart and drives me to believe in the things beyond reality. In a fantasy world, I can believe in dragons, gods, unicorns, and magic. I can do things, see things that I will never truly experience in my life. I battle dark lords, ride magic carpets through the sky, fall in love with kings, and swim with mermaids. For me, there’s nothing more satisfying than creating that sort of world and living in it for a time.

While I love Chroniker City, it will never hold that sort of power over me. It will be another world, with gears instead of magic, and I will enjoy my time spent there. But the worlds of wizards, quests, and happily ever afters will always call me back.

What about you? Do you write more than one genre? Are there certain stories that speak to you louder than others?