Byzantium’s Shores quotes John Scalzi on the subject of impatient fans. Well, not merely impatient fans but actively, angrily impatient fans.

I suppose it’s unnecessary to say that our modern way of life makes people impatient. We are used to being able to go to the store or get online and buy anything we want when we want it and to have to wait more than a week for anything is an intolerable inconvenience or even injustice. But it seems highly bizarre to me that there are people who expect writers to crank out stories with the speed and consistency of a modern automated factory.

Maybe I just don’t understand. I’ve never been really hooked on a series. I’ve started a few and I’m almost always disappointed with the later books. Three seems to be the perfect number but sometimes a series will start sucking as early as the second book. I am wary of continuing series. I wasn’t very interested in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War books but the fact that he’s not planning to write any more actually makes them more attractive to me. That and the fact that they are each standalone books, something I wasn’t aware of before. (I haven’t been paying attention.)

Standalone books that just happen to be set in the same universe and have some of the same characters are something else and not what I’m talking about. I was about to say, if you can’t finish a story in one book make the book thicker, but I have read several trilogies that I greatly enjoyed and it made sense for them to be trilogies instead of having it all crammed into one book.

Anyway, this is drifting off topic. What it comes down to is this: Some people need to get a life and realize that other people, even writers, also have lives. Read something else for crying out loud!