Thursday, December 15, 2016

Book Talk: What Comes to Mind When You Think of Urban Drama



URBAN DRAMA


Are you an avid reader who enjoys combing through a variety of fiction book genres?  If so, what comes to your mind when you hear the words urban drama?  Perhaps you get an image of families arguing, fussing, fighting and putting their business in the street.  Maybe you envision street thugs having beef over drugs and territory.  Or maybe you picture some of the hot steamy romance books that I’ve found a lot of under the book category of “urban” fiction.  In fact, I can’t help but notice how a large number of novels in Amazon’s urban category (both in the books and the Kindle Store section) focus on black romances usually gone bad.

I hope this doesn’t sound like a generalization on my part because I’m not saying this as a complaint or as a negative in any way, just a personal observation.  I think the reason I’ve been able to make this particular observation is because I was purposely looking for books that don’t focus on this particular aspect of urban drama.  While I know that romance stories sell big time, even the gritty ones, I also know that urban drama can center around other issues besides romantic entanglements and the rough gangland street life.

My new title Skipping Childhood:  A Novel is an urban novel and falls into the African American fiction category, among other things.  Some Amazon category listings make it hard to pinpoint where exactly to place your book title.  For instance, Skipping Childhood is a coming of age story that has some suspense elements, as I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts.  But because of the story line, my form of suspense is not as dramatic as a scene that you might find in one of the more typical urban books.  My romance and sex related scenes are not the highlights of the book.    

This is by no way to suggest that my new novel:  Skipping Childhood:  A Novel (From Abused Foster Child to Adolescent Serial Killer) doesn’t have a romantic angle because it does.  In fact, my main character and her “Romeo” have a very strong bond that spans throughout the book, but their romance is not the driving element of the story.  I guess urban drama is no different from any other drama, regardless of a person’s background, because the reality is:  Drama is life, and life is drama, urban or otherwise.

Check out a copy of:

http://amzn.to/2giOLmx