My editor keeps telling me that I have to remember to be very specific with my genre. She says that if I write outside my genre then the audience will become confused and give up on my story. I say that's bullshit and she says no it's not and then proceeds to give me a bunch of recommendations. Read Stephen King she says, or Ian Rankin. She even tells me to take a look at the oeuvre of Louis fucking L'Amour! I tell her that theres no way that I'm looking into Louis L'Amour's oeuvre because seriously that's the grossest thing that anybody has ever said to me, but I take her point and I get back to the writing and I try to be more specific. A couple of weeks later she asks me if I've got my genre figured out and I tell her that I do. She pauses for a minute after I tell her about it and then she says, "'rock and roll death wish drug binge party' is not an actual genre." I look back at her without blinking just long enough to realize that she is serious and I say, "fine. It's not a genre." She seems satisfied by that, relieved even that I've relented on this detail, and a quiet moment passes between us, a moment that contains such an absence of sound, so perfectly derelict of even the smallest noise, that the spirit of dead John Cage reaches across fathomless time and space to merely touch that pure silence whose rare energy might replenish a starving planet's inhabitants of the creative fuel needed to stave off the cold death grip of entropic decay that has befallen them had I not, just as the spirit of dead John Cage sought to breach our temporal solitude to siphon that energy for use by those desperate aliens, shattered the silence by slapping my hands against my thighs quite suddenly, startling my poor editor, and sending dead John Cage's spirit recoiling across the cosmos like a punctured balloon. "But!" I said, "rock and roll death wish drug binge party" is a core theme." "Yes, Buster," she replied. "Please, just finish the fucking story."