The David Bowie Shift

I am not a huge fan of David Bowie’s music, but I’ve always admired his sheer chutzpah. I mean, this is a rocker who abandoned the Ziggy Stardust persona he’d created at the peak of his fame in 1973 and then created a more sophisticated persona for his Diamond Dogs tour in 1974. It was the most expensive rock tour in history at that time, featuring a towering set with a catwalk and a cherry picker that lifted Bowie high in the air, and the sets alone cost $1.3 million in today’s dollars. Then, smack in the middle of that tour, Bowie took time off and completely stripped down the set, doing a 180 degree turn as an R&B singer for the rest of the tour.

I love performers like him (Neil Young is another who comes to mind) who refuse to be put in boxes. They don’t want to spend their entire careers churning out the same style of music, and they look for variety, new vistas, new challenges all the time.

I’d like to think I’m that way myself. From the beginning of my writing career I always wanted to expand my horizons. When I did commercial work I couldn’t stand being categorized as a “medical writer” or an “automotive writer” or “a business writer”. As soon as I started to hear editors and agencies label me like that, I wanted to move on to some other kind of writing. 

It’s the same thing now that I write fiction. You may have noticed that I write romance, horror, humor, poetry, and literary stories. I’m all over the block. Currently I’m almost finished another installment of my “Rose Of Skibbereen” romance series, but after that, who knows? I might want to write a mystery novel. I know that some readers would prefer that I stick to one category, one genre, but I can’t. It would bore me to tears to do that. I didn’t get into this writing game to keep writing the same things over and over. 

So, I ask that you have patience with me, and maybe broaden your reading options a bit, and explore something I’ve written that’s out of your usual taste. If you’ve read my romances, try a horror book. Or, if you like horror, dip into one of my humor collections. After all, it’s the same guy writing all these ebooks, so you’ll probably recognize my style no matter what the content is. 

Don’t worry, I won’t shift gears in the middle of a book the way Bowie did during that 1974 tour. Well, actually, I can’t promise anything. Who knows, maybe if I do I’ll invent a new genre along the way. Anybody for a horror-humor-romance?