George Lucas, you can just stop writing

Sneaky little Irishman. While I've been waiting patiently for five years, Roddy Doyle secretly releases his follow up to one of my fave books, A Star Called Henry, and doesn't have the decency to pick up the telephone and tell me. Sheesh. This book, Oh, Play That Thing, is the second in a planned trilogy, and continues on from when thirteen year old Irish rebel, Henry Smart, moves to America. It's not very often that I look forward to a book like I do a film or album, so it was all the more distressing to find that it's been out for four months. (The first book was released during that literary period when all things impoverished and Irish were quite the rage. Doyle's book just happened to be much cooler than the aforelinked.)

It got me thinking about other authors who've been dragging their heels lately:

Discounting his forays into kids lit and mini-mystery, Michael Chabon has yet to up the ante from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Umberto Eco needs to put out another novel matching the calibre of his early works. (Though, I suspect this delay has more to do with his Italian translator trying to create words to match Eco's inventions.)

Oh, and Charles Dickens. This lazy bum needs to give this whole "I'm dead" act a rest and finish up his Edwin Drood tale. It's not like we watch the first 100 minutes of The Usual Suspects and then just stop the DVD, now do we?

Then there is the short story I couldn't finish in my grade 11 creative writing class, and surreptitiously added "End of Part One" for a coda. Shall the haunting mystery of The Train Car ever be solved? God, I hope not. That was some awful, adolescent writing I wrote.