Ha ha!
I suppose you thought I'd gone for good, didn't you? Don't try and deny it. You thought I'd been struck by an incurable bout of apathy, or that I'd succumbed to apricot withdrawal symptoms and snuffed it. Luckily for me, nothing of the sort has happened. Suffice it to say that, for some time, I have been engaged with other matters such as schoolwork, exams and the like.
But this is beside the point. So far beside the point that you can barely see it. So far beside that if it were any further beside, it would reach the end of the universe and start coming back, in which case it wouldn't be further beside, so in fact it can't be any further beside, if you see what I mean, which you probably don't, because I know I don't. So, in any case, it's irrelevant, insignificant and unimportant. What is relevant, significant and important, however, is that I haven't yet written anything that isn't either self-referential or gibberish, so I'd best get on and write something interesting.
[Brief pause as Jake tries to think of something interesting.]
Well, there was the 'debate' over whether serious authors ever write series of books. It all kicked off when my mother put forward the suggestion that writing a series of books was largely the domain of the children's author. Us being the sort of family that we are, this was immediately contested. My dad and I reeled off a number of writers, most of them sci-fi authors and all of them male:
Terry Pratchett!
Frank Herbert!
Arthur C. Clarke!
P. G. Wodehouse!
Ok, so P. G. Wodehouse wasn't a sci-fi author, and strictly speaking Terry Pratchett is a fantasy author, and to be honest the Discworld series can be read in pretty much any order you like and it still makes sense, but you get the gist of it.
This led mum to conclude that the only adult authors who wrote books in series of any sort were men, and, let's face it, slightly unusual ones at that.
Not so. A little hunting in the bookcase revealed Anne of Green Gables, the first of a series of books written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the first of a series by Alexander McCall Smith who, although a man, isn't really that strange. And as for the Harry Potter series...
Conclusion? There's nothing wrong with writing books in series, although it helps if you like technology. Or fairies. Or possibly both.
