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:
