In How To Write Page-Turning Scenes, Holly Lisle tells the story of a writer who lived SF. He decided to write a fantasy-comedy, just because he thought he could sell it. And sell it he did. And then he sold another one, and then again and again and again… ten titles. Except it made him miserable.

As Holly tells the story, “he hated the book, hated the readers for being so stupid that they liked that crap (his words, not mine), hated the fact that fantasy comedy was the thing that had done well for him, because he hated fantasy, he hated comedy, and he’d just done it because Robert Asprin and Piers Anthony were at the time raking in the dough with fantasy comedies… When I talked to him at a con one year, he was one miserable dude. He’s doing work-for-hire now.”

I’ve never forgotten that story.

Holly has filled Page-Turning Scenes with excellent advice about how to, uh, write page-turning scenes. Ironic, that in the midst of it all, this sidebar story has glued itself to my memory.

Then today, R.A. Evans told his story, with a flip-side theme: