Love In The Time Of Magic

A word of warning: the first book of Tales of MU introduced some rather “mature” themes which continue to develop throughout the second book, especially being that the second book is… in many ways… a love story. A very unconventional love story, but a love story nonetheless.

Some readers become concerned about midway through this book that the series, having now included implicit-verging-on-explicit sexual scenes, must necessarily be “nothing but porn” and wonder what happened to the plot and character development.

To these people, I must say that I’ve never subscribed to the viewpoint that sex is the opposite of story, and that if a scene includes sex, nothing of consequence can possibly be happening in it.

Nevertheless, no matter how much I disagree with it, I know this viewpoint exists… so, if you find yourself thinking that the adult themes are overwhelming the parts of the story you’re more interested in, I suggest either of two courses of action:

One, read on. Whatever the story looks like at any given moment is simply a snapshot… MU is not written to be put on a bookstore shelf and so does not need to be overly concerned with genres and labels. Just because the protagonist is preoccupied for the moment with her personal life doesn’t mean her school work or the racial politics or any other part of the world around her has disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Like the saying goes, “If you don’t like the weather… wait.”

Or, two, if you absolutely find you cannot stomach the story… stop reading it. I suppose this should be able to go without saying, but for some reason, it doesn’t, and quite often when somebody reaches the point where they finally realize they can’t take it any more, they feel the need to leave an angry or snippy message… often being so arrogant as to tell me that I’m wasting my potential by including content they don’t like.

I honestly don’t mind if one person or another doesn’t read my work. I want it to reach the widest possible audience for itself, but I’m not going to alter the story to suit anybody’s tastes or to attract a wider audience.

That would be pandering, in a way that merely including the odd sexual or fetish scene does not.

I hope I haven’t scared anybody off… but I don’t want anybody to say I pulled a bait-and-switch on them.