The forum comments that didn’t get into Oh, Great . . .

 

 

Yesterday was a black hole, by the way*, but I’m better today.  I think.

EMoon

Oh, yes, the “Are you published?” after you’ve said that’s what you do. Even after you say how many novels you’ve written (since occasionally that comes first) and you know perfectly well that no one (I think no one in history but I could be wrong) writes over 20 novels just for the heck of it. It’s work. It takes time. It takes time away from other things in life that a writer might want to do. I wrote one monster . . .when I wasn’t published, but chances are very, very high that if the thing had not been published, I would now be much better at knitting, singing, gardening, riding, and the house wouldn’t look like it does…and it would have been my only novel. . . . .(Of course I’d have gone mad. Madder than I am. But I don’t think I’d have sat down to write just about a book a year without deadlines and checks. Also, we’d now be very broke.)

Yes.  And that’s the other thing:  if you can’t earn a living by writing, then trust funds and/or wealthy spouses aside, you’re going to have to earn it some other way.  Now earning a living is a major time suck.  It’s just that if you’re doing it for love, you can manage to ignore the forty cents/shilling thruppenny per hour you’re ultimately getting paid, so long as you can keep eating.

Hoonerd

Not being a blog follower when PEG came out, but still having visited the website enough to know that sequels were definitely not the hell goddess’ thing, I came to the end of the book . . . I tried my hardest to reason with myself . . . if this was where the story ended, then this is the story that needed to be told and I should look inside it to find the meaning, and I came up with all these beautiful ideas about friendship and perseverance and had completed the grief process up to acceptance… Then discovered the sequel tantalizers online.

::falls down laughing::  Sorry.  It’s friendly laughter.  Still . . . ::falls down laughing some more::

There certainly could be a story about how Sylvi and Ebon, Marked for Life by Their Tragic Separation, went on to do Great Things Alone.  That’s just not the one I’m writing.

Er, this Peg II crashing to a halt business is a little frightening. I’m glad it was past tense and I feel like I’ve heard positive things about it lately? Hmmm.

PEG II crashed and burned because I was refusing to recognise that it needed to be two books.  Two more books, making a [YAAAAAAARRRGGH] trilogy.  So the pacing, the story arc, the way everything fit together, was totally bodged and gleepy in the original PEG II.  This was scaring me quite a lot, as you may imagine.  I still don’t know whether it was just I had my head down so far I couldn’t see the forest for the trees or if I really was suffering a total mental block about the idea of a [twitch] trilogy [twitch].  Anyway.  By the time I finally figured it out, or let myself figure it out, I had the morale of club moss or a dead octopus or something. I could not face starting over from the beginning right away. Meanwhile—remember that benchmark about eating?—I had to keep eating.  So I wrote SHADOWS.

I admit PEG II and I are still not the best of friends.  There’s an awful lot of I Have Been Here Before, But Not in a Good Way.  But we’re getting there.

Nat

I really like the family dynamics in your work- I get rather sick and tired of lowly orphan/foundling hero/heroines- is that just fantasy writer quick hand of being able to send them off questing without too many obstacles??? I think I’m going to do a short story on the peeved mother who gets left behind on the farm who suddenly has to do all the chores and swears at that mysterious old stranger who has gotten little Timmy all excited about saving the world.

Thank you.  Yes.  I agree.  Orphans are fine, but there are a lot of families out there.**  And families are interesting.  I’ve been thinking about that story about the left-behind mum too.  And the other three children, the herd of goats and the ill-tempered pony.   And the cabbages.  And the mortgage payments.  Feel free to write it first.  All good stories can be retold indefinitely.

As an avid fantasy reader one thing that bugs me IS sequels that are done just for sequels sake. Singletons are lovely.

Singletons are different.  They feel different, they read differently, they hold together differently.  It’s not just that they’re perforce shorter, although that’s the obvious thing.  It would be a gigantic pity if The Serial Mind totally took over.  But I want to put in a word of defense of writers writing less-than-great sequels.  Some of them . . . are just writing less-than-great sequels.  It happens.  But some of them have been told that either they’re writing a series or that there’s a rumour that Wal-Mart is hiring.  Remember the need to keep eating.  I’m lucky:  I’ve been around a long time as a writer of singletons and most people are mostly used to it.  I’ve been haunted by sequels all my working life but when I wrote SWORD and HERO while series were desirable they weren’t yet a stick that your public and your publisher beat you with.***

…. I think I’ll stick to quilt pattern designs. Hmmm. A pegasus would look great.

A pegasus would look great.  But if it’s a McKinley pegasus remember they are NOT horses with wings.

LHurst

Thank you for the glimpses into your mind and life that you provide in the blog. I’ve become a compulsive blog reader in the last year or two. It’s not only what you write but the way you write that draws me irresistibly. Thank you! 

You’re very welcome and thank you.  And I want to say out here on the blog that generally speaking I try not to copy and paste the really nice compliments because it makes me look like such a prat.  But I read them with ENORMOUS PLEASURE.  Just sayin’.

Alanna

We shall make t-shirts that say “FRELL YOUR FRELLING SEQUEL” and wear them around.

I’m beginning to think I should officially look into the t-shirt thing as an author who needs to keep eating while she [re]writes her next [frelling] novel.  There’s also the footnote t-shirt.  Maybe there should be a PEGASI ARE NOT HORSES WITH WINGS t-shirt too.

Sixpence

What I love is books that continue around the edges of them. They are so much more ‘real’ than books where the author finishes everything off.

YES.  EXACTLY.  As a reader I way prefer books where it’s not all tied up with a big shiny ribbon at the end.  The big-shiny-ribbon conclusion tends to kill it dead, for me, and send retroactive gangrenous ripples back through the book that I had perhaps been enjoying—or at least successfully suspending my disbelief for—till then.

Shalea

. . . I sometimes approach sequels with an attitude of “oh, so these poor characters — don’t they just get to live, well, not happily-ever-after necessarily, but out of the spotlight maybe? With no more than what the rest of us typically have to deal with, at least?” Whereas if they’ve landed in a sequel again it’s because something Very Exciting has happened.

Snork.  As a fairly dedicated stay-at-home myself†, who relishes her hot baths, pillows and blankets, and mains-electric reading lights,  as well as a writer (mostly) of singletons, I like your attitude.

Maddyfox

. . . why, a good 60% of the time is the next sentence out of someone’s mouth Oh, are you published?

AND this one…

Oh, I’ve always wanted to write – everyone tells me I should write a book about (blah blah blah) …

 SOOOOO, my question is always: Do you like to read? To which, invariably, the reply from alleged aspiring writer is: ohhhh noooo – I hate to read!

‘Invariably’?  You poor thing.  You need to find a better class of pub/gym/chat room/alternate reality to hang out in.  The aspirers who talk to me usually do love to read—and seem to think this means they’ll be natural writers.  Cough.  Cough.  And it’s a beginning, of course—it’s even a good beginning, being a reader:  it’s just not enough.††

* * *

* What a good thing it was already a Saturday!  Or I might have been forced to hang a KES ep out of order!

** Harry has a brother!  Okay, she’s an orphan, but she has a BROTHER!  Also, I was younger then, and it was harder to keep account of too many important characters.  Trying to hold everyone straight in HERO was a steep learning curve.  If someone had told me then I was on track to write a book with PEG’s cast of characters I might be a manager of graveyard-shift supermarket shelf restockers by now.^

^ This is the Mysterious Disappearing Footnote from the other night, for anyone who was confused by the forum exchange about it.

*** There’s a similar sort of defense to be made about orphan protagonists.  I’m sure there are some out there that were created orphans for no better reason than that the author wanted to get on with the story . . . but that’s not actually a bad reason either.  What starts to get on my nerves is if there’s a huge doodah about the protagonist’s orphaned or otherwise tragedified state when it isn’t, as I-the-cranky-reader sees it, earned.

† Bell ringing is VERY EXCITING!  I rang a HARVEST FESTIVAL today!

†† And the awful truth is that there are a few good writers out there who are not great readers.  I Will Name No Names, but I know a few of them.  Arrrrgh.  It’s like the comforting truth that it takes time to write really well.  No.  Wrong.  It takes some of us a very long time to write anything worth reading.  Not all of us.  Arrrrrgh.  On the whole I’m willing to leave the non-readers in peace because I pity them for what they’re missing.  THE FAST WRITERS I WANT SHIPPED TO ANOTHER GALAXY.  NOW.