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I’ve written before about the fact that there’s power in naming things. However, I don’t think I have written about my angst over my novel’s genre, at least not directly. Is it a mystery since it has a mystery in it? Is it a romance because it has romantic bits? How about a romantic mystery? Does it give away the ending if it’s a ghost story but NOT speculative? It’s set in contemporary times–mostly, but are the WWII chapters enough to make it a historical mystery? Am I over-analyzing, and safest just slapping the women’s fiction label on it and calling it a day?

This is important information to know about your own book, y’all. And more important than the one book, because I want to keep writing books I love, books like I want to read, with two-tone time as an integral part of the story.

I did end up calling it women’s fiction, but I wasn’t too satisfied with that. It’s terribly non-specific. Perfectly serviceable … maybe a little vanilla.

Then I encountered the word “time-slip.” When I first saw it, a sense of excitement … picture fairy dust … sprinkled over me. I wanted to know, had to know–what’s a time-slip?

I did some Googling, stumbled across a scholarly article or thesis, of which I read only the part that directly addressed my question. And the answer is …

A time-slip is a book like mine. *fistpump!!*

This abstract sums it up nicely. In a time-slip, “the protagonist slips back in time, characters from the past reappear in the present, or both” (Tess Cosslett). Those mostly contemporary but partly historical novels that I love fit the definitely nicely.

And I can’t tell you what relief I felt knowing, at last, that my “women’s fiction” had a specific name.

Time-slip.

Wikipedia has a nice little section about it, the Historical Novel Society has a label identifying books with it, and the blog Ghosts from the Past offered a list of recommendations within the genre.

It’s a real thing!!

Sarah Jio’s books. And Kate Morton’s. The Wedding Dress by Rachel Hauck, which is amazing by the way. Maybe even The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro.

Time-slips.

*happy sigh*