Monthly Archives: July 2014

When I first heard that an Amazon employee had crashed an unmanned aerial vehicle in the Space Needle, I thought to myself “Well, Bezos has finally done it now.”   Year after year of losing money?  That’s a mark of pride for Seattle-based businesses.  Annoying indie authors by not giving them much money for Kindle Unlimited?  Well, where else are their most loyal partisans going to go now?  But but jove, people are a bit twitchy about drones getting up to mischief these days.  And he could hardly have picked a more beloved civic monument to ram.  This isn’t the Saint Louis arch or something.

But now it sounds like he simply buzzed the observation deck, maybe without running into anything.  So that’s all right, then.

I see MTV is moving forward with a Shannara TV series.  I’d feel bad for old Terry Brooks, sort of riding George Martin’s coattails on the whole “make a TV series out of a fantasy novel series” thing.  They both started writing around the same time, but Brooks published the first book in his big ol’ fantasy series way before Martin.  I bet ol’ Terry gets quite a ribbing at the writer barbeques.

But at least the MTV series is starting with Book 2, Elfstones of Shannara.  Because let’s face it, if they’d done a Sword of Shannara movie, he would have looked even more coat-tailish, since it would have been a acene-by-scene remake of a movie someone else made not long ago.

On the other hand, the Shannara series currently consists of like twenty or thirty books, so there is little risk of George Martin-esque issues of outrunning the books.  I think Brooks may occasionally write another Shannara book by accident, actually.  Sure, they may run together a bit by book three, from what I recall, but that’s what script doctors are for.

We’ve all seen plenty of advice, as writers, plenty of lists of things to do, or avoid.  Personally, I’ve been hesitant to recommend most of them, but finally I’ve found one source of inspiration that I think anyone would find handy.