Daily Archives: Monday, June 30, 2008

Review

Review | The Gypsy Morph by Terry Brooks

By Aidan Moher June 30th, 2008
The Gypsy Morph by Terry Brooks

The Gypsy Morph

Author – Terry Brooks

Hardcover
Pages: 416 pages
Publisher: Del Rey
Release Date: August 26, 2008
ISBN-10: 0345484142
ISBN-13: 978-0345484147

For the sake of full transparency, I would just like my readers to know that I am a moderator at the Official Terry Brooks forum, but that this fact had no impact on the opinions found in the review below.

Terry Brooks is one of my favourite authors. For this reason, I feel it’s important to hold him to a high standard, a higher standard, perhaps, than other writers. I was disappointed in his previous trilogy, The High Druid of Shannara, and wasn’t afraid to express this disappointment – the writing was too lean, too manufactured. Brooks had the formula for writing that type of story down pat and it felt so.

All of my concerns, however, were washed away by the next two novels Brooks produced, Armageddon’s Children and The Elves of Cintra. These novels, the first and second novels in The Genesis of Shannara trilogy, acted as a bridge between Brooks’ ultra-successful Shannara series and his under-the-radar-but-totally-amazing Word and Void trilogy, an Urban Fantasy. The staid and by-the-numbers approach found in The High Druid of Shannara was suddenly replaced by a visceral, imaginative take on a post-apocalytpic Earth with humans struggling for survival amongst a world of mutants and demons. Reading the first volumes in The Genesis of Shannara trilogy brought back memories of what drew me to Brooks in the first place.

Then along came The Gypsy Morph, the final volume in the trilogy, and something was lost. That’s not to say The Gypsy Morph isn’t a decent book, it’s still one of the best efforts Brooks has put out in the last several years, but it just isn’t on the level of its two predecessors. So what’s the problem?
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News

An Aside | David B. Coe on Writing Pace

By Aidan Moher June 30th, 2008

David B. Coe, author of The LonTobyn Chronicle and the Winds of the Forelands series, has an interesting post on writing and finding your own pace.

I go about my work differently. I hunker down. I plod along. I use any other metaphor I can think of for writing slowly and steadily. Last week I wrote a total of 9,000 words — thirty-six pages. The week before that I wrote about 8,500 words. The week before that about the same. This week I’ll lose a day to the holiday weekend, but I should wind up with 7,000 words or so. It’s not a lot. But it’s enough to get me a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty manuscript pages a month. And that means that I can write my 140,000 word novel in less than half a year.

…

Writing a book is a huge undertaking. It’s hard enough to get to the finish line while meeting your goals and sticking to a schedule. But if you begin and end every day of writing feeling that you’re hopelessly behind, that you’re failing to do what you set out to do, that daunting task can become impossible. Be good to yourself. Enjoy the work. Find your pace, accept it as your own, embrace it. And then stick to it. You might not get the book done as quickly as you’d like, or as quickly as some pros do, but you’ll get it done. And really, that’s the most important thing.

It’s short and to the point, but certainly worth taking a look at for everyone out there who, like me, are aspiring writers. The whole thing can be found HERE.