As it is not popular, more and more writers go without boundaries. Here at least. I’ve come across fellow craftsmen, who find it insulting if someone brings up that they would do better if they would add similar ingredients to their pot of plot which would give some familiarities to search them by. It “castrates” their creativity, they say, and write on genre-less books, not realizing that the editors will still try to fit it in some shelf next to genre books. One even compared it with paint-by-number picture.
Indeed, when writing inside genre, you are creating work by certain standards so the reader can get exactly what they wanted from the book. I would be very happy if it was indeed like painting by numbers, but I fear it’s more like Jan van Eyck oil painting, including grinding your own paints.
