An update on the health and safety of my paperbacks: although my parents claim that I need to look into planes, trains, and automobiles to ship my books to NYC after Christmas, my woman on the inside reports that her mother “is NOT going to drive that car [the car that effectively owns the storage unit, or engendered it, anyway] in the salt and snow in December!” So…a reprieve?
One thing (the only thing? Ha) I managed in my purge was not feeling that I absolutely had to keep all of an author’s books if I kept one (or most) of that author’s books. Some authors are polymaths and can do comedy as well as they do tragedy (Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Ann M. Martin), but that doesn’t mean every outing is a success. I think the ONLY Ann M. Martin book I tossed was Ma and Pa Dracula, which, well, no one can do it all.
There were an inordinate number of books about unicorns and dragons. I remember liking fantasy, but…not really of that specific genre. Bruce Coville still makes up a significant portion of all of the books, but I got rid of his “Monster Stories” and “Vampire Stories,” “Ghost Stories,” etc, which, as an adult, look to me more like excuses to publish all of his friends’ work than solid collections. I’ll stand behind the My Teacher is an Alien series, as well as Aliens Ate My Homework, and most especially Goblins in the Castle. Bruce Coville has written more than 100 books. 100! I understand that books for children and even YA novels are shorter and so almost by definition take less time to write, but still…
Coville, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Ann M. Martin – these are extraordinarily prolific people. Granted, Ann M. Martin didn’t write the entirety of the Babysitters Club series and all of its offshoots herself (one doesn’t just produce multiple books every single month, especially without a spleen!), but she must have had some oversight. All of the BSC books cohere very well in spite of new characters, more outlandishly fabricated situations, etc. Compared to something like, well, the Boxcar Children after book #19 (#17? I think it was 19) – that became markedly different (and abysmal) after Gertrude Chandler Warner died.
One other small gripe: if at all possible, please don’t write a fantastic book in 1994 and then not write the sequel until 1999. The person who desperately wanted to read the sequel will have aged out of your series.
