So often I feel like what genre you prefer to write speaks to what problems you like to confront, lean into, or work around in your writing. What do you enjoy wrestling with?

For me coming from a genre-based heavily horror-inclined perspective, I really enjoy thinking about and challenging the reader's ideas around monstrosity and the monstrous: I.e., what is the monster, & why is it there? who finds the monster terrifying, & how do they deal with it?

This is a central "problem" which isn't really a problem at all. But it is a genre tenet that you can't escape. Even if the monster isn't specifially a cryptid or ghoul, the fact of horror is that it deals in the other, the strange, and the seemingly unnatural.

I find that, when authors try and branch out to genres that are new to them and the effort falls flat, it's because they don't enjoy the central question. To write good horror, you have to be real fucking excited about monstrosity, & who sees the monstrosity as such.

Or they try and play around the central question, or try and redirect to a different question instead of actually dealing with the central conflict. It can give rise to the feeling of being cheated, or of a book being disingenuous in its premise.

This is distinctly different from efforts to actively invert genre tropes from a marginalized perspective, or to satirize some of these same questions to the audience's benefit (both are still wrestling with the central question of the genre, but intentionally answering it slant)