Noir and Urban Fantasy
Awhile back, I joined a fiction community at livejournal.com called Prose Challenge. The community's "blurb" is
This is a community for those of you that enjoy creative writing. Every one - two weeks a new challenge will be posted. As an example, we might give you a title, an opening sentence, a picture, or something completely different. It is then up to you to write a story of up to 5000 words that links to the prompt we gave you. You do not have to enter every single challenge, it's up to you which ones you feel like doing.
and while I can't come up with something for every challenge, I usually try. It's a good community, and the prompts help keep me inspired to write, and I enjoy the practice of having to actually finish pieces every week; endings are much harder to practice than beginnings, after all.
I bring this up because this week's (week 33!) challenge is to write a film noir piece that takes place in an unusual location. While I often describe myself as an urban fantasy reader primarily, the truth is that my absolute favorite niche of the sci-fi/fantasy genre is what I like to call "noir fantasy." The Dresden Files (beginning with STORM FRONT) by Jim Butcher are a good example of this, as are Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. books (beginning with SWEET SILVER BLUES), the Cal Leandros (NIGHTLIFE) books by Rob Thurman, The Vampire Files (BLOODLIST) by P.N. Elrod, and the Nightside (WELCOME TO THE NIGHTSIDE) books by Simon R. Green.