ROBUST discussion

I have been a New Yorker reader for many years. The nonfiction is sensational. The writing is good, the content choices are often good, and the magazine keeps me in touch with intellectual life.

BUT

New Yorker fiction is lame beyond lame. And has been for over thirty years. There are exceptions. They publish Jhumpa Lahiri and one or two other authors I like. But for the most part, New Yorker fiction has the same characteristics.

Staid, emotionally reticent, conflict-averse, smarmy, hipsterish. Seeking a particular style. Even the South Asian writers they select have this style.

Why is this?

Gordon Lish edited Raymond Carver to be this way and made him into a literary superstar. Raymond Carver was the role model for all my colleagues in two graduate writing programs, a striking fact when one considers that graduate writing in America was established by John Gardner, a master stylist nothing like that at all. Judging from the publication record of my colleagues, it wasn't a good model. And yet the New Yorker continues to uphold a standard of Lish/Carver fiction, each story lamer than the next.

Does anyone actually like this fiction? Who reads it with pleasure? Why don't they publish something with vitality, sincerity, and energy?

No, this isn't sour grapes because I can't get into The New Yorker. I long since stopped caring about that. This is a reader's complaint.

Well, I don't read short 'literary' fiction because I don't like it.

Back when I was trying to 'break in' to trade publishing I wrote some short stories and I read some of the 'IN' magazines.

All I can say is "No thank you."

Most of it appears to be - pointless and plotless.

He lit his pipe and puffed on it. "Oh, well," he said, and went back to puffing on his pipe.

***

That sort of inconclusive final line sends me up the wall, screaming in frustration that I wasted even as much time as it takes to read a short story. One of my agents wanted me to write like Raymond Carver. I replaced the agent and was much happier.

By the way, I didn't invent that cutting pastiche at the top of my post; John Braine, who hated that ineffectual, passive style as much as I do, did.

Okay, so it's not just me.

I mean I have a real love-hate thing going on with a lot of literary fiction, and there are plenty of "literary" authors I positively adore, but sometimes I just run into certain things, and I know I'm "supposed" to like/appreciate it in the sense of "that's what properly educated people like/appreciate," but instead I read it and say, "Is this nothing more than a giant literary 'Emperor's New Clothes' scenario?"

I've tried reading literary stuff. Just.cannot.do.it! Some of it borders on pain, the horrible drive nails into your brain kind. Some of it borders on WTF I just wasted my time on that. The rest...pointless. From time to time a jewel jumps out and slaps you silly but to wade through the pig swill to get to the shiny bright jewel is not what I want to be doing with free time I have to read.

I was trained in academic fiction but I didn't do well with it. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted conflict. I like nuance but I like it on top of drama, not instead. See my goodreads blog (from December) for a sample of my effort to write such material. You'll see that it has lots of stress and humor, and people expressing feelings instead of avoiding doing so. Crap, obviously. :-)

I always read New Yorker fiction when I want to feel better about myself. It's sort of the equivalent of a Ivy League educated psychoanalyst you go to for expensive therapy and you realize in the first minute that he's totally crazier than you are.

I was a practicing psychiatrist for half a day, until I discovered that the choice institute where my mentor placed me for a residency under his wing still applied electro-convulsive "therapy". The screaming of the patients disturbed my thoughts (this was back before I gave up being a sensitive poet). Before lunch I climbed into my car and drove away, and out of the profession. By 2.30 I met with the head of the Economics Department, who was looking for a star. I'm not surprised psychoanalysts become crazier than their patients. The only psychologists who do really worthwhile work are those working with the victims of evil and acts of God, and that is by definition a depressing business, the psychologist as the modern sin-eater. Those psychologists with an elevated lifestyle (they generally also call themselves something fancier than "psychologist") can be afforded mainly by housewives who would be less neurotic if they had fewer servants and more to do. Listening to them watch their navels and invent grievances can disturb a cast-iron stomach, and most psychiatrists, if those I know are any indication, became analysts because they were squeamish about the blood concomitant on practice in the rest of the medical profession. I suggested to one fellow, as a joke at a poker game (I play poker only with psychologists because they are convinced they know what I think, and are therefore easy marks), that he become the prophet of healing-through-silence. He now collects big fees in Los Angeles for making his clientele shut up for fifty minutes, no exceptions; despite this gross inconvenience they keep coming back to him because he's also a dab hand with balancing up the feelgood chemicals on which most analysts these days depend much more than on actual, old-fashioned analysis.

(I should talk. I take 11 different chemicals each day just to stay alive, never mind sane.)

"...the screaming of the patients..."

Sheesh.

Bedlam.

I should take my own advice: never use more words than will precisely describe the thing. Thanks, Christopher.

Heather,

I appreciate your thoughtful comments. I saw that happen in grad school a lot. I didn't change much, so they dissed me. It is amazing how much talent I see in the indie ranks. Without eBooks most of us would never have had an audience...

The point of a "club" -- in Heather's evocative description -- where everyone subscribes to the same outlook and practises the same style is

1) that it saves thinking for yourself, which is an advantage to a certain class of person, mainly those with a low invention quotient,

and

2) that it's weathervane to whose writing you should support and promote (other members of the club), and whose you should be scathing about (anyone outside the charmed circle of insiders), and it even gives you standard words and phrases of condemnation if you aren't up to inventing your own invective.

Those are huge advantages for the insecure and the unoriginal. It's expensive in emotional wear and tear being an individualist, and being original and inventive isn't the easiest route, even in the arts, which are supposed to be about creativity.

It has bewildered me, over the years since I left graduate school with two degrees in creative writing, how few of my classmates have gone on to accomplish anything as writers. A lot have gone into editing, which is certainly honorable, and into which field I was not able to break when I so attempted in the early 2000s. (My bad.) Some have become magazine writers, but of functional prose, rather than inventive. Honorable, again, but not what we all went to school supposedly wishing to do. Some have remained in academe, which I must say, in all fairness, I tried to do, but was not able to accomplish, as the lack of "Professor" in front of my name indicates, as does the absence of "tenured" or even "tenure-track" from all past accounts of my university teaching. Most of my classmates have just vanished from the world of letters altogether.

I have nothing but respect for my one-year-senior colleague Cathy Day, who is now working as a professor in her native Indiana and whose facebook posts I sometimes adorn with my always-disregarded remarks. Cathy was the winner one year of the Playboy College Fiction Contest, deservedly so, and her book of connected short stories "The Circus in Winter" is super. I was involved in the workshopping of the title story, by the way. It has since been made into a musical. I would speak of being damn proud of Cathy, had she not a bearing suggesting that I am politely tolerated only, that I am not to be eagerly engaged. But I mention her here only because she is the exception. I can't think of anyone else I knew in graduate school who still writes fiction for publication. I would like to know. I would like to support any such colleagues I come across -- but to me it is abundantly clear that getting a degree in creative writing is a path only to a non-creative career. The fact that I still write and publish is not related to, but in spite of, my academic training. I set myself on the path in high school. Grad school really interfered with it.

Literary fiction is, indeed, a clubhouse. Recently reading and reviewing Salman Rushdie's autobiography Joseph Anton: A Memoir, I got even more reinforcement for the idea. Rushdie is a brilliant writer, of course, but he is also in a group of those who honor and congratulate each other with regularity, and who get more money and accolades than they do readership.

I had more to say, but I have run out of time to write it. L8r.

The problem with creative writing as it is taught is almost wholly that it is taught by those who failed to produce any worthwhile creative writing. They protect their self-images by pretending to be horrified by anything written for money. I'd make their pay conditional upon each of their students as a graduation exercise selling a piece of writing (it needn't be fiction) for money. That, by the way, is not new idea; the great Adam Smith suggested that the pay of college dons be made conditional on the provable quality of their instruction to students, and his own pay as a lecturer was determined by the number of students he attracted.

Allen Wier, who was my "mentor" for one term at University of Alabama, told me in an office meeting "You go and write genre fiction and make a lot of money, and I'll go on writing fiction that is well-reviewed that nobody reads." I may have erred slightly in my report of his wording. Anyway, this reflects the attitude you speak of, Andre. Allen Wier has only published one book from the time I met him (1993) till the present.

I don't teach college anymore, but I would not have had any trouble getting students according to the Smith methods. When I was at Metropolitan College, some students had me 2, 3, or 4 times. The irony is that I was probably less expert at content than my colleagues but better at engaging students and making them care.

I shared one of my workshop stories on my blog last December. I acknowledge that is it an apprentice piece, but I leave it to you (comments welcome) to decide whether it shows that I did or did not have a handle on how to write short fiction. http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...

I read that story. The dying fall of the ending is a dead giveaway of the wrong sort of literary influences. Personally, I'd rather have your direct style, and material, in the School of the Ages, than suburban observation, however "sensitive". The School of the Ages material is clever and interesting as a concept, and compelling once peopled with characters. It has a vitality that doesn't depend on "style".

That is a new perspective. I think my classmates and professor felt the story wasn't literary enough, that the characters were too broad and clowned too much. Thank you, Andre, your perspective is valuable, and I appreciate your kind words about School of the Ages.

Referencing Beerbohm "Thank hevvn we hav no Enoch Soameses amung us to-dai!'"

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnL...

Andre Jute wrote: I was a practicing psychiatrist for half a day, until I discovered that the choice institute where my mentor placed me for a residency under his wing still applied electro-convulsive "therapy". The screaming of the patients disturbed my thoughts (this was back before I gave up being a sensitive poet)

Do thoughts never cry,
over a day of hope,
can't true evil die,
can't we ever cope?

It's no sin to weep,
nor laugh, nor swoon,
in darkness we keep,
unto our very doom.


I just wrote that off the top of my head, as an experiment. If it was ever published in the New Yorker, I'd be interested to know if the suicide rate would triple or not, right after the copy releases.

-----

Ignore me, people. I'm writing a very nasty villain right now, and I needed to get into character for his lines. ^_^

Evil? There was no evil in the paradise inside my head. Then I grew up.

It happens to the best of us, Andre.

Growing up that is.

I still feel the sting, myself.

I prefer villains. There, I said it.

Growing up's for the birds. I'm still thinking about what my day job is going to be when I grow up.

I've on my third career in two years.

Claudine wrote: "I prefer villains."

Villains are intrinsically more interesting. Good guys start of with the disadvantage that they can't do half the things real people would do because readers are hypocritical. They don't want their heroes to be too human.

J.A. wrote: "I've on my third career in two years."

Flexibility is everything. I'm looking forward to being The Geriatric Gymnast.

Please sign the petition to the Olympic Committee to let me in.

That should be The Dementia Squad Andre. You forgot to link us.

I need a book where the villain and the hero do things that people would do in real life. Mostly though, villains all seem to be very PC and heroes don't go all vigilante. If there is a book out there where the villain is truly evil, without conscience (apart from the Sierra/Philpin collaboration and just where is she these days?) then I haven't been able to find one. I'm really just looking for a book with a good meaty story where the villain is truly despicable and the hero becomes his nemesis in order to rid the world of him or her.

Well, there's the scene in the last of the series where Hannibal Lecter feeds Clarice the bad FBI agent's brain, lightly fried, once over, while he still lives, if not for long. And then she runs away to Rio with him to live happily ever after. But by then the Hannibal franchise had become a parody of itself. I laughed aloud a lot while I read that book.

On the other hand, I finished the book.

I only ever liked Silence of the Lambs. I kept seeing Ray Liotta in my mind and it didn't help reading the book. It was a total waste of space, when an author of such a good calibre takes his masterpiece villain and totally neuters him.

Ouch!

Harris didn't only create the master serial killer, he invented (or reinvented in modern form) the whole genre. But serial killers are so bizarre, to start with, that recycling them *inevitably* leads to farce. The earlier Cornwell books were excellent, but by the time she started resurrecting serial killers for the third time, only the undiscriminating readers of brand names were still there for her.

Check out Matt's article about villains.
http://www.writersfunzone.com/blog/20...

Very topical to the conversation at hand.

In the case of serial killers, there is a certain range of characteristics that they possess, not all the same, but from a certain range. Reading a few books about serial killers should be sufficient for you to grasp how to construct one as a character. Start with -- psychopathic or sociopathic or psychotic (delusional). Colin Wilson wrote some good books about serial killers, and the first book on profiling was by Lawrence (Laurence?) Ressler, I think.

Andre Jute wrote: "Check out Matt's article about villains.
http://www.writersfunzone.com/blog/20..."

That was well written indeed, and as J.A. implied, very on topic.

Beginning with Defenders of Valinthia, I tried very hard to supply a variety of villains. I started the book out with the main villain first, rather than the heroes.

Then the heroes on the planet in question for invasion needed to team up with the villains of their world. My favorite among them, Raphael, who is a Necromancer in love with one of the Heroes, Ariella. His choices were as human as possible, yet his actions were truly evil.

Then I focused the theme on the consequences of good teaming up with evil in Rulers of Valinthia, where the Blue Demon, an intersteller mercenary made into a Wight by Raphael, became the root argument for villains who are intense about their goals.

Then I explored a new type of villain in Heroes of Valinthia, where the Zarg Empire practices deception and evil tendencies as a way of life. A whole culture that's based on being villains, while pretending to befriend others.

Changelings are the only race of people who refuse to call evil what it is, and tend to refer to their preferences over chaos versus order. They love to cause chaos, and thus they support the villains far more often than the heroes, but every once and awhile, a crazy changeling helps one of the heroes out of a jam, because it would be fun.

Apologies for the synopsis there, but I've always found it more fun to write about the villains than the heroes. Even my upcoming release, Darya Rising, is about two female outlaws trying their best to survive.

I think villains are more interesting, not just because of the freedom they have versus their heroic counterparts. It's about their psychology. What makes them tick. I feel that every writer on Robust would make an excellent villain, if we were disposed towards being evil on a full time basis. How else would we create them? Remember, writers pull their villains from their own id, with life experiences backing up our creativity. Without our personal touch of evil, our books would be boring to the extreme. ^_^

Andre Jute wrote: "Ouch!

Harris didn't only create the master serial killer, he invented (or reinvented in modern form) the whole genre. But serial killers are so bizarre, to start with, that recycling them *inevitably* leads to farce. The earlier Cornwell books were excellent, but by the time she started resurrecting serial killers for the third time, only the undiscriminating readers of brand names were still there for her...."

Yes her earlier books were more readable than later ones. As a reader, there seem to be far more successful writers in her genre that are pushing out books to make a quick buck and are compromising on their series integrity. It's like a successful tv or movie franchise. There are only so many times you can drag your hero or villain out for public consumption before you have to either kill the series or kill the villain or hero and start fresh. In essence they are pushing out pulp fiction rather than keeping to their original formula.

Cornwell had some specialized knowledge about the workings of the pathologist's office that she got from record-keeping for it. It was stunning stuff that would've taken anyone else a couple of years to research. The copycats don't have that, and are generally of too poor a quality even to know they should research it, never mind how.

The problem with serial killers as fiction is that the writer essentially creates a small village, even if set in a larger mindscape. Once the inhabitants of the village have been killed off, especially the serial killer, she has to start bringing them back if she wants a series, and that's where the whole thing gets derailed and becomes farcical. Ever wonder what the Monty Pythons would have done with a serial killer? Fiction writers do that, and worse, several times a year.

Cornwell tried to branch out in police procedurals, but they were embarrassingly clumsy, and revealed her as a cop groupie, which I found off-putting. She had the one trick, linked to her special knowledge, and the character she created who was probably what she would have wanted to be. But we've seen her trick long ago. She should have stopped then, but I don't suppose her publishers were more worried about protecting her reputation than their profits. (In one of Cornwell's books the word "fastroping" appeared so many times, I eventually threw the books against the wall. I would have fired the editor who passed that on the nod out of hand.) Some writers can renew and reinvent themselves, some are one-trick ponies, and their good early books are like a bucket of cold water down the back of the neck, an oeuvre to be proud of, but very few know when to stop. Thomas Harris has done well not to spew out a gush of lesser books, though he too walked pretty close to the edge of farce in the last of the Hannibal Lecter books.

Yes he certainly did. Writers like James Patterson, Tom Clancy and a few others are all walking the same path. Great storylines in their earlier books but just chugging along the money train and of course bowing under pressure from their agents. I've also noticed that there seems to be a disturbing trend where the well known author has a guest writer on a series now. James Patterson has done it and a few others.

I do suppose writing a series about a serial killer is very limiting which is why I like the Dexter books. His job as blood spatter analyst and his hobby (killing only those who truly deserve it) has kept the storyline flowing very well. There are always bad people that need killing.

Stephen King did the villain/hero very well in the beginning. Now though I find it ho hum. Dean Koontz too was a great horror writer but has since let it all slide.

Not sure about Clancy, but James Patterson is most certainly not "bowing under pressure from his agent." He's always been a hyper-commercial writer, and in many interviews he's spoken of his pride in helping alter marketing of books in the US. Much of his interest and legacy seems to be more about altering the business side of publishing. I read one interview of him where he seemed to care more about how he'd altered book marketing than his actual writing.

His "guest authors" after all, just amount to him handing an outline to someone and then checking the chapters.

Given his background and several comments he's made, it's very obvious that he was not by his greedy agents or whatever, but a businessman who happens to like writing and was decent enough at the writing and the business of it to basically capture both an agency and his publishers to a certain extent.

There's nothing stopping James Patterson from sitting down and doing something different. Based on statements from his publishers and agent, he could probably force them to let him write Amy Tan fanfic if he just shrugged at them and frowned.

Note, I don't particularly hold it against him that he's commercial. Everyone writes for their own combination of reasons, after all.

I just think that all these "franchise" writers know exactly what they are doing, and given Patterson's business savvy, I wouldn't be surprised if he's the one who suggested the idea to begin with to his publisher and agent.

All these "franchise"* sorts are invariably people who have been in the business in a while and are very successful. After all, they wouldn't be able to franchise it out otherwise. This means they have the power relationships to do what they want.

Of course, this is different than say, James Frey, who basically got a lot of fame with a made-up memoir, and then more subsequent fame when the falsehood of his memoir was exposed, and leveraged that into creating his own book packaging company that relies heavily on his infamous name on the front and then finding some MFA who is desperate and who is then given awful contract provisions. These projects are designed to be media tie-ins (the paint-by-numbers YA sci-fi project "I Am Number 4" was one of his).

It's publishing as a business in the most cynical form. Even Alloy Entertainment (which is huge in the young teen YA market and responsible for a number of fairly popular projects that end up in TV series form), which relies on a similar model at least is generating projects without the easy push of the famous/infamous name.

*Excluding actual write-for-hire franchise stuff

In fantasy, I've seen a few variations, related mostly to the complexity and continuity of series and the lengths of a few series:

A) The son/daughter of a prominent fantasy writer continues writing books in their setting
B) Older author dying before his long-running series is finished, and so another non-related author is brought in to finish

Yes, Anne McCaffrey springs to mind. Her son Todd has continued the Pern books. Brandon Sanderson finished the last Robert Jordan book and then of course we come back to Frank Herbert's son who has bastardized his father's legacy (I'm a huge fan of the first 6 books but the ones written by his son and another author are horrific and totally negate the very real universe Frank built up).

With Patterson, I read some of his earlier works but when he started collaborating with other authors, I stopped reading as they seemed different, felt different but that is a personal preference.

Clancy started out with a great character (Jack Ryan) but then 20 years later he brought the son of his character on board and continued the same storyline he'd employed with the first character. It felt like a betrayal of sorts from a reader point of view.

That's interesting about Patterson, I didn't know that. I'd heard of Frey's writing of the Lorien books. It might just be my circle of friends who read similar genres. Very few of us like the way Patterson seems to have "caved" for lack of a better word. Someone commented along the lines of it might be because he has too much going on and has therefore had to bring in guest authors which lowered the integrity of the books. Most of the reading crowd I keep in touch with felt that way and don't like that many authors seem to be on the same path.

I read the last Jordan book. Sanderson will never live up to Robert Jordan's reputation but he did an outstanding job finishing the book.

Patterson was creative director of JWT, a large advertising agency in New York. He knows everything there is to know about writing for a market, soap-buyers, book-buyers, whatever. I'm not surprised by either his attitude or his business model; it fits. I liked his early Alex Cross books.

It's not difficult to know more about publishing than people who work in publishing. When I became a novelist after a career in advertising, agents and editors expressed surprise that I should know more about their business than they did. But only a fool travels in a strange country without a map, and advertising creativity, when it works, is solidly based in hard knowledge, often on tables of statistics. Those who reach the top in advertising, a business which eats its children, have long since formed working from knowledge into an impermeable habit.

I was rather shocked when I first started researching the business of publishing how little actual market research was performed outside of certain notable companies (e.g., Harlequin).

While I understand that books aren't widgets, the tendency of publishers to blindly follow the last successful trend, leading to tsunamis of a particular subgenre, do tend to indicate they are far more invested in chasing the filthy lucre than they seem to want to admit.

I have no problem with that. It just seems like if you've decided, at the corporate level or publishing house level that X% of your efforts are going to be commercial, wouldn't it make more sense to be a bit more quantitative and efficient about how go about acquiring the filthy lucre to begin with?

Whatever makes you think, Jeremy, that publishers are rational marketers? Even the current crop of jumped-up accountants appear deliberately to reject rationality in their lemming-rush after the latest trend, which never proves as profitable for the the johnny's come latelies as for the creators of the trend.

Personally, i'm grateful that publishing isn't a rational business. For years I got away with , and was richly rewarded for, every so often writing a book that I just wanted to write, that everyone "knew" there was no market for, like Iditarod, which everyone "knew" had no market, which today is a constant (small) bestseller.

I should probably point out that my description of advertising creativity as a rational activity holds true only at the very top of advertising. Lower down one has the boutiques, whose business is in vacuo creativity. They win a lot of prizes but sell no goods.

Claudine wrote: "I read the last Jordan book. Sanderson will never live up to Robert Jordan's reputation but he did an outstanding job finishing the book. "
Yes, RJ has created a close to rabid fanbase, but I think Sanderson is developing into a pretty good author all on his own. I liked the Mistborn series, with a not-so-standard magical system. And if his sequel to Way of Kings is just as good, I think he'll gain a lot of fans.

Another example of an author-legacy is the late David Gemmell and his wife Stella. She finished his series on Troy, and now has published her own novel.

Ja, I agree that Sanderson has a huge fan base. I read the Mistborn series too but after the first 2 books was disappointed by the third. Alloy of Law, a standalone followup set 300 years after the trilogy ended, was equally as disappointing for me. He filled Jordan's shoes well enough, but his own career isn't quite there yet. And Stella Gemmell's own novel, while I haven't read it, is something I have on a TBR pile on my kindle. I read the Troy series and found her contribution seamless.

I do however just want to add that the Wheel of Time series needs to die! Please someone kill it off! :D

Kill it off? To the best of my knowledge, it's done as of the Memory of Light (came out in January). I mean the ending was about as decisive as you get for that sort of thing, and there's been no buzz on doing side stories or any of that sort of thing.

Like J.A. said, I think the Wheel of Time has stopped turning for good. Sanderson is also too busy with several other projects, so I'm not worried he'll try to milk it. And I wonder whether Jordan's wife (who is also his editor) would let such a thing happen.

I agree on the third book of Mistborn, although I actually liked Alloy of Law.

And Stella Gemmell's novel is also on my TBR list.

J.A. wrote: "Kill it off? To the best of my knowledge, it's done as of the Memory of Light (came out in January). I mean the ending was about as decisive as you get for that sort of thing, and there's been no b..."

I hope so, I really do. My sci-fi geek friends have been saying that he should have stopped at least after the first 6 or so books. We have bets going to see if anymore come out. I do think MOL is the last one. Well I hope so :D

I read somewhere that Jordan's wife was adamant that Sanderson finish the last book and that was that, the end.

Dave if you get to Stella Gemmell's book in the near future post a review. I doubt I'm going to get to it any time this century.

I read like five books, stopped, and then read more after playing in an online Wheel of Time role-playing game. Then I hit like book 9 or 10, I forget, and it was 700 pages of filler. Nothing really substantial happened. So then I got mad and quit.

I'm the worst geek in the world. I've quit most of the popular series about half-way through.

Funny story about Jordan. So, he approached Tom Doherty, I believe, about doing an "epic trilogy." Tom says something to the effect, "I know you like to go long, so let's plan on six books."

Ha.

LOL! I'm a fantasy freak more than straight sci fi although I read anything really. I've tried to read WOT. I read the first few, took a break of a few years then found I couldn't remember the books I had read so had to start again. I then got bored and have tried to go back to it but without a lot of success. A lot of the later books seemed to be fluff more than good story.

J.A. wrote: "I'm the worst geek in the world. I've quit most of the popular series about half-way through. "

The positive way to look at it is that you were overtaken by good taste.

I hear what Claudine says about series. Characters really need goals of their own that the reader too can believe in and root for. Just a milieu, a world, a situation, however well drawn, is not enough.

Claudine, I think our TBR pile is about the same size. But maybe I'll pick it up within the next 3 months or so.

Andre Jute wrote: "I hear what Claudine says about series. Characters really need goals of their own that the reader too can believe in and root for. Just a milieu, a world, a situation, however well drawn, is not enough. "
It is more than a goal; it is character development. A series gives more time to develop characters but at the same time carries the risk that after some development, the characters become stagnant. That was my biggest issue with Robert Jordan. And although character development is one of his main strengths, I get the feeling that even GRR Martin is having similar trouble with some of his characters.