Losing Track

                My last article I mentioned that I don’t anticipate alot of authors’ new book release and there is a very good reason for that. They have lost track of the story, or the story has lost track of them. There used to be quite a few authors that is would line up to buy when their books were released but now….., not so many.

               Now please don’t get me wrong because I do understand how extremely hard it is to keep a quality series going, but when you lose track of the story quality is going to disappear along with your fans. Two author’s I will use for examples are Laurell K. Hamilton and Robert Jordan.

              Laurell K. Hamilton is the author of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. Anita used to be my bada$$ Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was the vampire slaying equivalent of Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill vol’s 1 and 2. When i started reading this series, it was all about her helping the police solve mystical cases, raising zombies asa a profession and just being all around awesome. After the ninth book though something happened, it became a running low grade porn story. How many different sex scenes do we really need to read about though before we understand that Anita is hot and all the guys wanna sleep with her? Somewhere along the way the mystery stopped being about crimes and became, who’s she gonna sleep with next? The last book of this series that I read before I finally said I’m done was somewhere between twenty to thirty chapters and only five of those chapters didn’t have anita sleeping with someone/s, they were just leading up to it. I’ll most likely read them again when it finally gets back to where it began, my friends will most likely tell me when that happens, but for now I’ll be M.I.A on this series.

               Robert Jordan is the author of the popular New York Times best-selling series The Wheel of Time. I started reading this series when I was twelve years old. At that time, the first four books in the series had already been released, and over the next eighteen years i waited for eight more. What started out as a story about three different main characters and four secondary supporting characters grew over those eight books into a story with as many as fifteen main characters and dozens of supporting charcters, while alternately writing the three main characters out of the various books for up to two sometimes three books with no appearance of the characters we liked from the beginning. This story didn’t just get bigger, it multiplied exponentially. To make things more frustrating, the last five books to be released had all the charcters standing around doing nothing. Just like in Tranformers 2 when( SPOILER ALERT!!!!) Optimus dies  and the Autobots do nothing but hurry up and wait for him to save the day. Unfortunately, Mr. Jordan passed away before finishing the Wheel of Time saga, so it’s been passed on to Brandon Sanderson ( The Hero of Ages Trilogy) to complete the last three volume in the series based on Mr. Jordan’s notes and what he’d already written. I’m sure he’s doing what he can but realistically, he’s just cutting the leaves off the bush to trim back the story to get to the heart of it.

               So what it all boils down to is these authors are at the top of my wait and see list. But, let this be a warning to us budding authors out there……… um, what was i talking about again?…………..