Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’ve always been fond of understatement, and I’m known a certain laconic insouciance, so I was impressed by the spokesperson of the Massachusetts State Police, who recently, in reference to an axe that fell off a truck on I-95 and lodged in someone’s windshield, that it “could have been worse”.  Now, the phrase “it could have been worse” is sort of pointless when you stop to think of it because yes, there is always some way to make any situation, no matter how disastrous, slightly worse.

But to say that a situation that started with an axe flying through a windshield and ended with a passenger being a bit shaken up might have gone more badly is going the extra mile.  I mean, what if two axes had lodged in that poor person’s windshield?  Imagine how shaken the passenger would have been.  And that’s just off the top of my head.  I could probably come up with a few other ways things could have ended up worse, given a few minutes.

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.

Young writer earns six figures with erotic One Direction fanfic

Hot on the heels of Subway’s cross-promotion comes another great Hunger Games tie-in.  Personally, I had a great idea for a Theme park based on the movie Westworld, and it sounds like this may be the time to make it happen.

So what the heck, your turn.  And you know, there are worse things to spend your money on.  And you obviously need to get to at least the $35 level, so when people come over and see your fridge you can be all like “Oh, yeah, my buddy Levar sent that to me.  Perhaps you recall Geordi La Forge?”

H.R. Giger died yesterday, and it seems appropriate to link to a set of pictures from the famous artist’s garden.  It’s about what you’d expect, I guess.  Reminds me of my visit to Boris Valejo’s Pennsylvania compound.  Some of us can’t get out to Switzerland so easily, and have to make do, you know.

I read an interesting interview not long ago with Emma Donoghue and two of her editors – one from the US and one from Canada.  The considerations one has with trying to reconcile the comments of various people who don’t necessarily agree with one another is an intriguing thing.  But the thing that struck me was when Emma discussed her third (UK) editor, and how she’ll assign less weight to a problem only one of the three mentions.  In particular, she mentioned that one of her three editors had figured out who the murderer was early in Frog Music, and this was too high of a percentage.

Now, look.  You’ve only got three editors, which sort of gives you a whopping two degrees of freedom in this statistical analysis you’re performing.  Not something you really want to make decisions based on.  But worse than that, you can’t go around shouting “Thirty-three percent!” when you’ve got exactly one sample falling into that category.  One slight tip in the other direction and you’d think zero percent of your editors had guessed the murder, and where would that put you?  What if you decided the ideal number of people who figured it out was ten percent?  How would you ever know how close you were?  This is why all writers need a solid education in mathematics and statistics.

Also, I had a similar problem myself not long ago, and I thought 33% was about right.

So this post is by way of being a test for myself.  Back with the old blog, I wrote a series of posts on libraries, and despite a great deal of temptation, I managed to avoid calling down vast amounts of web traffic with the particular kinds of pictures of librarians that are quite popular, and are legion on the internet, settling instead of staid and educational photos.

I resolved to avoid library posts altogether after the last one, lest I give in and trade massive page hits for the integrity which you, my reader, have come to expect.  But not long ago, a study on “Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport” was done in the UK, and now that I’m here in a new blog, I thought perhaps I could give it another go.  After all, it combines two of my favorite things: libraries and quantifying stuff.

It will come as no surprise that visiting libraries is a great path to happiness, worth almost 1,400 pounds/year/person (happiness and libraries – you see how well I resist temptation?)  Libraries are worth more happiness value to the typical person than taking in a bunch of art or playing sports, in fact. Not only does this tell us that readers are not only smarter than most people, but happier, it also lets us know what should be first on the chopping block when public resources are scarce.  Sorry, museums and stadiums.