With a novel I don't do that. I just set out to find out something and each novel is therefore going to be different. The story comes before the genre. It makes its presence known and you go fishing for the right medium. Writers use anything that's out there, including the categories of other books, and if an idea requires the medium of a genre, or using part of a genre, that's just the same as deciding to set your book in Sri Lanka, because Sri Lanka's out there, too.
Categories are hard to deal with.
When The Knot was given a glowing review in the Globe and Mail . She had thought William French would do it. It's what gets people into writing, I know. I'm sure I thought that way when I started. If you don't learn quickly that you're not even remotely famous, it's terribly disappointing, because you're constantly meeting people who've never heard of you.