This is why I need polls...

I totally would make a poll, but since I don't feel like shelling out the money to livejournal or letting them put ads up on my journal, that's shot.

But the f-list had some interesting links to debates about urban fantasy and what counts as urban fantasy (particularly, Harry Potter).

I would like to come down on the side of Harry Potter *not* counting as urban fantasy. Not because it doesn't have the right elements, but because it's playing in the YA field, not the urban fantasy field.

YA is it's own genre, with it's own rules, regulations, traditions, and environment. It operates on different principles than Urban Fantasy.

Harry Potter shares *some* characteristics with Urban Fantasy. It's pure YA.

I don't think genre is just a matter of scenery or certain elements. You can stick a vampire anywhere you like, it doesn't make what you write urban fantasy. Dracula is all about teh_vampyrez. It's not Urban Fantasy.

I think genre is a matter of tone and convention. It's about who your peers are, it's about who you see on the shelf when you look right and look left in a bookstore.

And on the shelf, you don't see Emma Bull or Charles de Lint or Laurell K. Hamilton when you look around Harry Potter. You see YA lit. You see Bridge to Terebithia and Artemis Fowl. You see The Golden Compass.

A lot of people who are nuts about Harry Potter wouldn't know Emma Bull from Emma Peel of the Avengers.

So, no. Harry Potter doesn't get to join the UF Club. Not for any lack of literary merit, but because you don't ask badminton players to go to Wimbledon. Two different sports, kapeesh?

She's a man, baby.

The Gender Genie is a thing where you plug in some text and it guesses the gender of the author based on an algorithm or what not.

So I plugged in some exerpts from my novel and some other recent pieces lying around. I got a straight row of "This Author Is Male".

Then, experimentally, I went and plugged in pieces from, like, five years ago. Strongly female.

Apparently I turned into a man around 2003. That's a little bit funny. I'm not sure what it means that as I've evolved as a writer that I've become a "male" writer. Huh. I also wonder if I'll loop around in a year or two and go back to being a "female" writer.

I wonder if there are any guys out there who have evolved into becoming "female" writers.

Still, it's fun.