Genre Hopping Crazy Lady?

"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart - Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens." ~ Carl Gustav Jung

RaShelle at A No. 2 pencil stat! asked the question, "Where do you draw your inspiration?".

In Bridge Across Forever, Richard Bach (one of my favorite authors) shares the following :

What was the question? ...Oh. Where do I get my crazy ideas? Answer: sleep-fairy, walk-fairy, shower-fairy. Book-fairy. And in these last few years, from my wife. Now when I have questions I ask her and she tells me the answer. If you haven't already, I'd suggest you want to find your soulmate, as soon as you can. Next question?

I've always loved this answer, because it's pretty much true for me, too. (The fairy part, not the soulmate part, I'm mateless at the moment.) I just have to pay attention and listen.

The title for my current wip, Churches, Chickens and ChiChi's came to me while driving, from the car fairy, one word at a time. The day the third word fell in to place, I was driving home from a seminar and by the time I reached the house, I had the premise, the main character, several of the supporting characters and much of the storyline. Thank you, car fairy!

I'm now a third of the way through the first draft of that novel, a southern women's fiction with a big smattering of romance and some rauch. As I've mentioned a time or two, I don't multitask well, so when the idea for a new novel, in a totally different genre starting niggling at me a few days ago (during meditation), I told the meditation fairy, "thank you for sharing" and wrote the idea down for later. Later being when I'm done with this first draft.

Today, while sitting for meditation, lo and behold, instead of giving me more insight on where to take my current wip, little niggle insisted on being heard and handed me the premise, the main character, several of the supporting characters and much of the storyline for Novel Two. And it's SciFi. Go figure. Thank you, meditation fairy!

Which brings me to a post by Roland Yeomans at Writing in the Crosshairs a week or so ago. He said he writes in the genres that most influenced him as a child and asked what books we had read back then and whether we find that same corollary in our own writing.

At first, I had a hard time remembering what I'd read (after all, that was a long time ago and I was an avid reader from the time I first started putting sentences together). But his question engaged my rememberer, and I realized that my reads were all over the place. I genre-hopped like crazy. If it looked interesting, I would read it, even when the subject matter was way over my head.

But I was pretty sure I had not read any southern women's fiction or 'romance' back then (though every good novel has a smattering of romance).

Now I get it. Heaven help us. I started out reading all over the place so it's not unlikely that I would write all over the place. The trick will be to have some common thread because I'm pretty sure agents and publishers frown on genre-hopping.

Does Roland's theory hold true for you in your writing? Any words of wisdom out there for a genre-hopping crazy lady?