Owe This

One of the interesting discussions in the excellent documentary, The People vs George Lucas, considers what authors/creators owe their fans.

One author says the only thing he owes fans is to take their money.
We agree, actually. Which is why we keep writing books they like. While we're ready to shoot ourselves over the creation of World War 1990: The Battle of the Polish Plain, the readership seems pretty happy about it. Yay! Another World War Book! they seem to be saying.

[You wish-Ed]

In the film Neil Gaiman makes a great point when he says after reading one of his books, fans would like nothing better than to read another book just like it.

After all, no one ever buys The Devil and Heavy Metal.

True enough. In our own life we've amassed maybe a hundred military science fiction books. They're all pretty much the same. When we started in the 1980's these were pretty hard to find. These days if one wants an endless supply of novels about Space Marines, well that's no problem.

A William Stroock novel usually has a lot of combat sequences, but also cabinet meetings and planning sessions. We've actually gotten worried that people are sick of those scenes. Actually, some reviews of Castro's Folly complain that without a lot of bird's eye view characters, they didn't quite know what was going on.

So here we are again, writing about pilots in a briefing room getting ready to bomb something.

Don't you people get sick of this?