Writer Wednesday: Genre-Hopping

If you look over at my Work In Progress widget on the sidebar, you'll notice that I now have an untitled novel on there. It's currently at 5,000 words. And yes, it's the urban fantasy book I talked about yesterday.(Maybe you thought I was working on two books at once? Uh...well. Wait until next week.)A lot of people aren't comfortable with hopping between genres, but I think that fear mostly comes from publishing considerations. Yes, if you've built up (or are hoping to build up) an audience writing, say, gay erotica, then it might not make sense to take a year out of your schedule to work on an urban fantasy novel that your current fanbase might not have any interest in. You might be perfectly capable of writing that urban fantasy novel, but finding a wide readership is another issue entirely.I'd like to make an argument in favor of writing in different genres, from both a creative and a business viewpoint. The most obvious reason to write in multiple genres is if your interests are simply too wide to be contained within one. I'm obviously interested in writing gay erotica or else I wouldn't have written close to 60,000 words of it, but I've also always been fascinated by things like vampire mythology. Sure, you can combine the two, and plenty of people do so to great effect, but the particular 'vampire story' I wanted to tell wasn't suited to that genre. Therefore, genre-hopping.(Oh, and it helps if you can finish a novel in significantly less time than a year, since it means you won't be diverting that much time from your 'main' genre.)Creative freedom is all well and good, you  might be saying, but what about the business end of things? And of course, when people talk about 'business', they mean 'money'. Let's not kid ourselves here!Well, I'm of the opinion that diversifying your writing is a perfectly viable strategy for trying to make money out of it. (And look at that, I used a bussinessy word like 'diversifying'.) No matter how good your work is, there's no guarantee that you'll make a splash in a particular genre. Why not give yourself a shot at 'making it' in two different genres?The one thing I can't imagine doing is writing in a genre I have no interest in purely in the hopes of making money. Trend-chasing never works, or so I've been told, and I'd imagine that genre-chasing must be even more of a fool's errand.