A potpourri, inspired by the comments

First, let me say I'm pleased and gratified that I'm getting comments to some of my posts. I'm also pleased and gratified that I'm getting requests for links! Keep it up folks! I'm always interested in your responses, even if I don't necessarily agree with every one of them. Blogs, IMO, should be "interactive". And I intend mine to be. Of course, they are also very much expressions of the blogger's pesonal opinion and taste. And that's the way it should be, too.

One of the comments, from a published author, dealt with the frustrations of dealing with agents who want you to write a "certain" way, or publishers who want you to write certain kinds of books, because those will sell better. I haven't gotten that far, as I'm currently still furiously working on Book 2 of my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals. I can certainly understand a publisher or agent wanting to shepherd the next "Harry Potter" into existence. Book publishing has become, for better or worse, very much of a "bottom line" industry. But not everybody can write another Harry Potter. In part, this is because there is only one of J.K. Rowling, and in part, because each writer,naturally, writes differently, and processes their writing experiences differently. If someone tries to write another Harry Potter, they may write a very good story, but it will not be the same. And there is no guarantee that it will sell gazillions of books. Publishers know this, but there is too much of a tendency to treat a very real process as purely "entertainment", and forget that, while everyone with half a brain is creative, not everybody is creative with words. And even among those who are creative with words, not everybody has the same creative process, or is willing to do certain kinds of creating.

I know of some authors, who have more or less found themselves "unpublishable" for a while, simply because what they find most interesting to write about, doesn't sell well enough. Some of these authors have tried to move into other types of writing, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But I think that, while there's a hard reality out there, it diminishes us all to be treated as "saleable" or "unsaleable" depending on what the current fashion is. After all, ten years from now, how many people will still be reading The Da Vinci Code? Not that it matters, when Dan Brown himself is probably laughing all the way to the bank. And even he wasn't writing The Da Vinci Code to begin with; he wrote, if my memory serves me, a couple of "men's adventures". They sold respectably, but not like The Da Vinci Code. Which is often what happens, even with "best selling" authors. But that's another story. For another blog.
Anne G