Pat here:
I’m writing this in the week prior to Thanksgiving so I may enjoy next week with my family. Given all the uproar and hysteria in the romance world this week, I’m expecting to return to an industry in complete disarray. Or perhaps over the next ten days, all publishing will decide to pull up roots and move to Nashville. Or everything will have settled back to normal. So I’ll refrain from commenting upon the gossip flying about and wait to see the results.
But I will use the lesson of Change for today’s ramble. The world changes every day. We can’t stop it or we would stagnate and all life would die. If people didn’t change, they’d never learn lessons, never grow, and from my perspective, if nothing changed, the future would look mighty bleak because this world is far from perfect. Admittedly, a lot of change happening quickly can be terrifying, but technology has a habit of creating change, for better or worse, so we may as well get used to it.
Instead, I almost ended up heaving the book in the fire because the protagonist never changed. Never. Ever. She lived in a state of complete denial for three hundred wretched pages. She wasn’t that wonderful a person to start with, but I’m ready to accept flawed characters who grow and change and take their lessons gracefully. But this one never had an opportunity because she never asked questions. How can you have a mystery without asking questions? It’s insane! Is it possible to walk through life
Have you ever looked forward to a book and suffered immense disappointment? Go ahead, rant away. I just did. Can you enlighten us and tell why you were disappointed?
And I would relate this to the uproar about vanity press and self-publishing that’s currently searing the internet, but I’m a little afraid the subject is too immense to tackle. How will we find good books in the future if everyone publishes everything on their own? Scary change.