Can't you write any faster than that?

I don't like to make generalizations, but... oh, who am I kidding, I make generalizations all the time. Most of us do. It's one of the ways that we little individual people manage and make sense of the vastness of the world. We have to make some big generalizations just to organize things enough to think about them. So I'm about to make one.

Readers (people who love to read the same way they love oxygen) are some of the most selfish people in the world.

What do I base that on? My feelings that my favorite writers are taking too much time for silly, unimportant things, like

• family
• vacations
• being sick
• jobs that aren't writing
• anthing that isn't sitting their ass down at a computer/typewriter/yellow legal pad and knocking out another book for me to enjoy

I've talked to reader friends who bemoan the amount of time that that dude is taking to crank out the tomes that make up the Game of Thrones. What is his name? George R.R. Martin, that's the one! Apparently he thinks one enormous book ever five-seven years is fine. His fans would prefer one book every year or two, I am sure.

Two of my favorite authors, Laurie J. Marks and Laurie Kirstein, have not had anything new out in years. Selfish writerly cows! They feel like they are entitled to their LIVES, when I am sitting here, waiting with bated breath for the next gems to fall from their pens.

I know there are always other people writing, but I really love my old favorites and want to find out what is going to happen to THEIR characters.

While recuperating, I've been reading S.M. Stirling's Emberverse novels. The series started out extremely strong with Dies The Fire. I've enjoyed all the others too, but the fantasy aspect of the final three has been  starting to grate. When your main hero has a magic sword that lets him speak all languages, pull all sorts of magic facts out of the air, etc. it gets annoying. I'm still going to keep reading because I love the characters and the worldbuilding is excellent and I really want to know what is going to happen to everyone, but urgh, that stupid sword...