Entitlement issues...

'Look, this may not be palatable, reader, and I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this:

Ayano Yamane is not your bitch.

This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly Ayano Yamane is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now.

People are not machines. Writers and artists aren't machines.

You're complaining about Ayano Yamane doing other things than writing the volumes you want to read as if your buying the first volume in the series was a contract with her: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and Ayano Yamane for her part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the volumes for you.

No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.

It seems to me that the biggest problem with series mangas is that either readers complain that the books used to be good but that somewhere in the effort to get out a book every year the quality has fallen off, or they complain that the volumes, although maintaining quality, aren't coming out on time.

For me, I would rather read a good manga, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven't quite got the next volume in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y.

I remember hearing an upset comics editor telling a roomful of other editors about a comics artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor pointed out, repeatedly, that for the money the artist would have been paid for those weeks' work he could easily have afforded to hire someone to paint his house, and made money too. And I thought, but did not say, “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”

And sometimes, and it's as true of authors as it is of readers, you have a life. People in your world get sick or die. You fall in love, or out of love. You move house. Your aunt comes to stay. You agreed to give a talk half-way around the world five years ago, and suddenly you realise that that talk is due now. Your last book comes out and the critics vociferously hated it and now you simply don't feel like writing another. Your cat learns to levitate and the matter must be properly documented and investigated. There are deer in the apple orchard. A thunderstorm fries your hard disk and fries the backup drive as well...

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

And if you are waiting for a new book in a long ongoing series, whether from Ayano Yamane or from someone else...

Wait. Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if she paints the house, that's fine.

And reader, in the future, when you see other people complaining that Ayano Yamane has been spotted doing something other than writing the book they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: Ayano Yamane is not working for you.

Hope that helps.'

Obviously not my writing, changed the names and some words because I thought it translated well in this situation for those that don't mind a longer read ;)