It seems to me that the current publishing trend in the US is that readers want immediate excitement, and easy read. With all of the things that books are competing against that require so much less of the person, many in the book industry think that books need to follow that path to compete. I disagree. One of the things that I like most about books is that it does require something from me; I get to use my mind. I don’t think I’m alone there. I also think that those who haven’t found this love of “discovery through effort” would miss out tremendously if we switch the focus of reading to pander to them as opposed to encouraging them.
That being said, I’m still inherently lazy. I still have to fight with myself to do more, to be more. When I make choices in the evening between reading something incredible and watching something mediocre at best on TV, I still far too frequently choose TV. It’s just so much easier to sit down and not think.
So to create a book that tells a story in a way that not only competes with the TV, for example, but changes minds, helps the readers to discover more about themselves then they themselves knew was there is amazingly challenging. I often think that I took on too much by trying to write a series that tries to capture it all. I know that I can’t expect any reader to make the extra effort in reading, just because I was too lazy to write better. I may still have inadvertently done just that, not because I didn’t want to put in the extra effort, but rather just because I didn’t know any better. I could only write to the best of my ability at the time, but I’d love to learn how to do it even better.
So if in reading my book, you think of ideas of what I could do better, or parts that get bogged down or slow please to worry about sharing that with me. I’m anxious to improve.
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