Single Comment

'I never buy books by writers who write huge amounts -- you can not write huge amounts and write the best.'
	Most 20th and 21st century published novelists have written far more than ever hit the bookshops, so you probably underestimate how much they've written. Even if you discount rewites - and in the age of wordprocessing an author may easily write and delete more than twice as much in a book as even goes out to publishers or agents - there are all the books that only ever get rejected. In earlier times there was a saying that a good author writes for the fire as well as the publisher. A novel that never gets a 'This book has potential if you edit it' might get a 'You have potential but not with this subject matter' either because the storyline is too complex or they have tried a difficult niche genre and will do better in general fiction. Even in nonfiction a writer might decide that somethging on which he has been working for years has no academic value. Darwin was quite prepared to burn the manuscript of Origin of Species had he grown to disbelieve in evolution, and a parallel work presenting the opposite view may well have passed through the fireplaces of Down House. If anything it is the writers who are indulged because they have friends in high places, and never have to write much that gets rejected, who never get to hone their style and write the best.
	That is traditional publishing - there is the writer to write, the agent to filter, the publisher to filter further, and finally the reader to read. On these pages it is pretty much straight from writer to reader. Even before post-your-own pages, the editors were all too busy with day jobs to be able to read through and make scholarly recommendations. Not once did I get an e-mail back saying 'We canot possibly post this as it has no merit'. Even I'm a Wazir... only got the title's distatesful origins removed. All the criticism is out in the open. Therefore it falls to those who create the variants to judge whether a game isn't worth keeping based on comment - or lack of it - and that is what I am doing.