The perils of listening to your readers
April 23, 2013 9:00 AM Subscribe
A while ago I read an essay/article/rant online re a fantasy author / series and I'd like to read it again but google is failing me because I can't remember any specifics.
Anyway I'm fairly sure I remember that it had originally been on usenet but someone had copied it onto a website somewhere. The gist of it was the problems a writer had run into with a fantasy series. He had been interacting with this fans online and taking on board too many of their suggestions ('the X's are cool! we want more of those!') Consequentially the series was spiralling out of control because he kept adding more and more elements - especially more and more villains / big bads and it was becoming increasingly obvious that it would be very hard / next to impossible to finish the series by concluding all the mushrooming complications. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the series or the author but I think it was a High Fantasy tolkienesque type of thing (I'm pretty certain it wasn't Game of Thrones because I'm reading that now)
I hope rings some bells for someone.
Anyway I'm fairly sure I remember that it had originally been on usenet but someone had copied it onto a website somewhere. The gist of it was the problems a writer had run into with a fantasy series. He had been interacting with this fans online and taking on board too many of their suggestions ('the X's are cool! we want more of those!') Consequentially the series was spiralling out of control because he kept adding more and more elements - especially more and more villains / big bads and it was becoming increasingly obvious that it would be very hard / next to impossible to finish the series by concluding all the mushrooming complications. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the series or the author but I think it was a High Fantasy tolkienesque type of thing (I'm pretty certain it wasn't Game of Thrones because I'm reading that now)
I hope rings some bells for someone.
Probably not it, but I think Piers Anthony's Xanth novels were similar to that. The land of Xanth is based on puns, and he crowd-sourced a lot of the puns for the later books; the series is still going after 38 books. I quit reading after about 15. partly from the idea that I hate to wait for the next book to come out, and partly because IMHO they were getting ridiculous.
posted by CathyG at 12:54 PM on April 23, 2013
posted by CathyG at 12:54 PM on April 23, 2013
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posted by payoto at 9:20 AM on April 23, 2013