True Blood: Why it Works

After writing a one page synopsis of my novel today - drawing together all of the ideas I'd scribbled out over the last month - I was a little disappointed. What the story had boiled down to was too simple; I'd wanted simple but this seemed boarder line boring.

So I asked myself 'How is my story different? Am I excited to write it? Is it something I'd find unique and interesting enough to pick up in Waterstones and purchase? - like a book I saw in the store today titled The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson!

The answer was sadly, no.

So I looked to what is working for the Sookie Stackhouse Series author Charlaine Harris. Her novels have been turned into the highly successful HBO series True Blood. I asked myself how what she is doing is different - vampires are everywhere so how does she make the Sookie series work?

It's vampire meets mind-reader who in each season finds herself in the middle of a murder / missing person investigation and while trying to solve the mystery runs into a host of other supernatural creatures! At the same time there is a heavy romance element. So really Harris has woven three genres together - mystery, romance and horror - to create this success!

Now, to find a new angle or subplot or to create a genre-hybrid!