This is a fun thing to say while shaking your head at the rampant stupidity of…well…someone else. One likes to think that you will never have the occasion to say, “What was I thinking?” with such mystification (though anyone who was a teenager in the 80s likely says that when perusing their high school yearbook). But today, I’m wondering if this is what everyone will be saying, some day in the future, about romance writers circa 2013.

I say this after hearing and reading about the dominant theme at the 2013 RWA National Conference, which seems to be, “write more, publish more, and then when you’re done with that, write another one.” One month is the optimal time to wait between new releases. Two months, max. Keep the machine pumping. Publish everywhere you can. If you can’t crank out a novel every month, publish a novella. Can’t produce five books a year? Wait to publish until you have a big backlist, then push them out every couple of months (where you go from there, I’m not sure, unless you’ve been writing a solid decade and have enough titles to last you for a few years).

Now I’ve been a romance reader for almost thirty years. I’ve read and loved a lot of books. But even just a few years ago, no one expected their favorite author to give them something new every two months. You got a book a year from your favorite author, and you were a happy camper. Today, expectations have changed. We get one book in a series and we want the next. Immediately. We tweet/Facebook/email our favorite authors and tell them we want more. Authors feel the pressure from fans, editors, and peers to publish more more more. Classes in “fast drafting” are everywhere. Check Twitter at any given moment and I guarantee there’s an author out there cranking out 1,000 words an hour on a 1k1hr challenge.

Seriously, people, what the hell are we thinking?

I know. You’re feeding your family. You’re pleasing the fans. You’re struggling to make a living. This is what the audience wants. This is what readers demand. It’s exciting. You love to write. I get that. I do.

But really? I mean, really? Can we step back and take a little gut check here? Does anyone really believe that the quality of a book written in a month is anything comparable to the book written over six months? Does any author really think they can push out ten books a year FOR TEN YEARS and keep each one of them creative, fresh, and different?

I’m not saying I’m not falling prey to this epic “quantity is everything” push. I wrote a book in the month of July, and honestly, it was fun. I enjoyed forcing my brain to work all day long and going with the flow of the story instead of endlessly rethinking and revising as I went. And I’m not sure that story completely sucks, either (at least, my darling critique partner says it doesn’t, and that’s good enough for me). But I’m lucky enough to have a day job to go back to in the fall that will exercise another part of my brain and give the romantic trope/sex scene/plot point/witty dialog/big black moment/happily ever after part of my brain a rest. I can’t imagine doing that every month, or every two months, for the rest of my writing career.

I know some Harlequin authors have been working like this for many years. But as an industry trend, I think this five-books-a-year thing is new. And I think in ten years, when we look back on the books we’ve been churning out like magazine articles, we’re going to regret it. I just don’t believe quality is going to keep pace with quantity, and even worse, I think as authors we are going to burn ourselves out at a record pace.

I see this as a sort of grand experiment. How many books can a romance author write in a year before she is plum out of new words? Before she uses the exact same phrase to describe an orgasm that she’s used in five previous books? Before she realizes that this hero is saying/doing/thinking the same things the last hero did?

I hope we don’t get there. I hope we realize how crazy this is before we’ve exhausted ourselves and our creative juices.

Before we end up disappointing our readers by giving them less than what they deserve.