What did you blog about today?

I loved Scrubs. Although I haven't seen it for a long time, I did think that should've stopped it once JD left. (Same for Michael Scott in the Office too.)

American comedies are very, very good and I'm currently binge watching My Name Is Earl.
 
Juliana, I watched quite a lot of Scrubs (not all of it, the UK has an ancient tradition of randomly changing the times, network, or just dropping long-running US TV shows...).

Big Peat, whilst it can be tricky to get the balance right, I think a TV show or film just needs to decide if it's serious or comedy, and then leaven that with either dashes of humour or moments of gravity (Scrubs and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were both good at the latter). Star Wars got that spot on with the original trilogy.
 
The Big Peat said:
Little bunch of blog posts here

What Do Readers Want
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That's interesting. When I write horror, for example, I'm told things should end badly for the main character (not those words, but that's the sentiment), because that's what readers of horror want. I'm not a fan of genre expectations like this and will generally plough my own furrow. As a reader, I also don't want to know whether it's going to be a happy/sad/indifferent ending. I remember one magazine stating what sort of endings their stories have, and that completely put me off reading the magazine.
 
AlexH said:
That's interesting. When I write horror, for example, I'm told things should end badly for the main character (not those words, but that's the sentiment), because that's what readers of horror want. I'm not a fan of genre expectations like this and will generally plough my own furrow. As a reader, I also don't want to know whether it's going to be a happy/sad/indifferent ending. I remember one magazine stating what sort of endings their stories have, and that completely put me off reading the magazine.
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I'd offer the immediate caveat that I was thinking more in terms of standard writing advice, not genre expectations, which may be a trickier thing to dodge (particularly in terms of agents/publishers).

But I think even there maybe there's a division between what readers want and what its said they want. I remember some posts by Mouse on the Romance genre and how, despite its notorious straitjackets, there was still a market for people pushing the genre forwards. And I think that goes for every genre.
 
"There are a lot of writers who I really enjoy and, truth be told, their early books tend, for me, to be the ones I love most."

One of the problems with creative endeavour is when commercial success strikes. I know of vanishingly few examples of commercial success coinciding with subsequent artistic progression. (Gene Wolfe comes to mind.) Much as I'd like to have more readers etc, I spend quite a lot of time wondering if I'm better off not selling bucket-loads of books...
 
Stephen Palmer said:
"There are a lot of writers who I really enjoy and, truth be told, their early books tend, for me, to be the ones I love most."

One of the problems with creative endeavour is when commercial success strikes. I know of vanishingly few examples of commercial success coinciding with subsequent artistic progression. (Gene Wolfe comes to mind.) Much as I'd like to have more readers etc, I spend quite a lot of time wondering if I'm better off not selling bucket-loads of books...
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It could well be that need for commercial success. I certainly think a lot of pressure must come on successful writers to keep progressing, to do something that the 'fans' will like. It certainly makes me happy to keep the day job and not worry so much about book sales - and then I can write what I like
 
I'm pushing around ideas for why this is and one of the ideas that keeps echoing loudest is the idea that even most writers only really have one book in them, and that the most commercially successful are those who are naturally happiest to stretch that book over seven/write the same book seven times.

Not sure this is entirely true. But it feels partially true.
 
The Big Peat said:
I'm pushing around ideas for why this is and one of the ideas that keeps echoing loudest is the idea that even most writers only really have one book in them, and that the most commercially successful are those who are naturally happiest to stretch that book over seven/write the same book seven times.

Not sure this is entirely true. But it feels partially true.
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Oh, you old cynic. :D
I don't agree with you, actually - my books are all too different to feel like any of them is The One. But we might all have a finite number of really good books. :D
 
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