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Happy Monday to you, everyone. I’ve plenty of tasty treats to bestow on the good little boys and girls this morning. First off, the only thing that I can figure when I look at the baby versions of various Harry Potter characters by Artful Babies is that whomever the creator is they must spend a lot of time skulking about maternity wards. How else do you manage to capture that brand new ugly/cute look of newborns? Of all the characters, the Snape amuses me the most. Anyone who has ever seen a pissed off baby will recognize the look on his face. And for those of you reading this with your morning coffee, I will spare you the baby Lord Voldemort. Needless to say, be prepared to spittake. I liked my friend Marci’s suggestion that someone take the Voldemort baby and put him under a bench in a train station somewhere, though.
I love Leila Roy of bookshelves of doom, but I think I love her best when she’s taking down a bad book. Whether it’s Flowers in the Attic or her recent smackdown of John Grisham’s Theodore Boone sequel, nobody snarks like she does.
A hitherto unknown Arthur Rackham drawing has been discovered in an obscure book? Hot diggety dog! That is awfully cool to me.
New Blog Alert: Well, as I live and breathe. I hereby declare myself unobservant. Since March of this year there has been a group blog of middle grade authors called Smack Dab in the Middle. Group blogs are a perfect way for authors to blog without having to distract themselves from their real jobs. In this particular case it’s a great line-up of folks and I’ve taken a great deal of pleasure checking out some of their upcoming books.
I know you all read your Morning Notes from 100 Scope Notes without fail. Be that as it may be, how can I not link to a man who knows when to use the phrase, “This cover needs more maracas“?
Seems a bit unfair. I complained some time ago about the fact that Kadir Nelson somehow managed to be able to write AND illustrate his books with aplomb. Hey, Kadir! Save some talent for the rest of us! Now I feel the same way knowing that not only did illustrator Leo Lionni make some of the greatest picture books of the 20th century, he could sculpt as well.
9 Comments on Fusenews: More cowbell/maracas, last added: 7/28/2011
I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who draws in church. Perhpas there is artistic hope for me yet!
Meghan said, on 7/25/2011 6:34:00 AM
Thank you for the link to obscure children’s books. I am a big fan of the musical Cats and I really enjoy TS Eliot’s work but I never knew they were at all connected! Can’t wait to order that book from Amazon!
Erika said, on 7/25/2011 8:18:00 AM
But…but…Harry didn’t get the scar until he was a toddler! (Then again, Tonks probably wasn’t born w/ purple hair…)
We really do need a graphic novel award, and pronto. Lunch Lady has swept the 3rd/4th grade category in the Children’s Choice Book Awards for the last few years. We see kids every day who check out nothing but comics. I almost think an award would give the form a little more credibility with teachers and librarians (and parents), which would be nice – I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain to a parent that it isn’t a “waste” for Johnny to read Tsubasa or Rapunzel’s Revenge or whatever. Maybe we can commission some graphic artist to create an appealing, pleading short comic that we can send to the powers-that-be to try to goad them into creating the Art Spiegelman Award, or the Hayao Miyazaki Medal, or the Hugo (named after young Mr. Cabret), or something like that. Matt Pheland or Brian Selznick, do either of you dudes have any time to spare on such a project? =)
Mary Ann Scheuer said, on 7/25/2011 11:22:00 PM
Absolutely – wouldn’t it be great to have an ALA award for graphic novels!?!? Smile was one of the top circulating books in our elementary school library (yes, teen was a bit of an odd category), and we were thrilled to find out it won the Eisner Award. Hooray! Odd about Tiny Titans – seems very TV cartoon inspired/derivative. All of the other nominees seemed to have much better substance: Walker Bean, Amelia Rules, Amelia Earhart.
What did you think about The Return of the Dapper Men? Have you seen it? Beautiful, but wondering about the audience.
mhg said, on 7/26/2011 6:31:00 AM
At first glance I was hoping for a new pic of the Lily Bird. Glad I took a second glance.
Elizabeth Bird said, on 7/26/2011 6:42:00 AM
Yeah. Though she might rival him in terms of follicles.
Jonathan Auxier said, on 7/27/2011 8:50:00 PM
For months I’ve been procrastinating on a post about obscure books by adult authors … I was foolishly trying to read each book before I wrote the darn thing. Have to say that a part of me is relieved that Brainpickings let me off the hook!
I was very excited to read that Dutton is set to publish a series for kids! I have always loved his work and to see a children’s series is triple exciting!
Penguin Young Readers Group in the U.S. and Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K. announced today that they will be publishing bestselling author John Grisham’s first series of books for children. The middle-grade series will focus on 13-year-old Theodore Boone, a legal whiz kid. In the first book, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, Theo gets caught up in a high-profile murder trial in his town. It’s scheduled to be released by Dutton Children’s Books on May 25, and on June 10 by Hodder in the U.K. The second book, as yet untitled, is scheduled for release in 2011.
Penguin bought the series yesterday in a two-book deal with Grisham’s longtime agent, David Gernert of the Gernert Company. Don Weisberg, president of Penguin Young Readers Group, and Julie Strauss-Gabel, associate publisher at Dutton, acquired North American hardcover and paperback rights to the series, and Strauss-Gabel will edit the two books. Oliver Johnson, publisher at Hodder & Stoughton, will edit Grisham in the U.K.
“Since children’s books is a completely different area of publishing than adult, and since John had never experienced any publishing in the children’s area, we went out and spoke to a very, very small number of people we felt were particularly good at children’s books,” said Gernert, adding that Random House, Grisham’s adult publisher, was in the mix. “We tried to figure out who had the vision for launching Theo that most matched John’s, and it ended up being Penguin and Don Weisberg.”
Both Johnson and Weisberg have previous connections to Grisham, though neither Penguin nor Hodder publish his adult books. Johnson was Grisham’s longtime editor at Random House U.K. before moving to Hodder, and Weisberg oversaw sales for Grisham’s books when he was head of the sales department at Random House U.S. “I’ve worked with John for many years,” Weisberg said in an interview. “What makes John Grisham so successful as an adult writer just lends itself to the middle-grade format and age group. The pace, the intelligence, the way he respects his audience, it’s just terrific.”
According to Weisberg, publicity plans for the series are “still being discussed. Our marketing plans and promotional plans will be very aggressive, obviously. Details to come. We’re in the planning stages.” Gernert said that his agency is just beginning to look into selling the series into foreign territories. Grisham has more than 250 million books in print worldwide, and his books have been published in 29 languages.
The jig is up. There is no secret handshake. No magic formula. No deus ex machina for writers.
Aghast?
I was. Next thing you know, they'll be telling us there is no Santa Claus. Yeesh.
Leaving the big red guy out of it for a moment, I have to admit, when I started out writing, I was certain there was a secret formula. All I had to do was figure it out and the bestsellers would flow from my pen. I mean, honestly, it wasn't the craziest idea I've ever had (there have been crazier, like the time I decided I could prove girls are every bit as good as guys and jumped from a bridge into a river after a guy. Don't ask.) So what was it for writing? Writing for exactly two hours each day? Or writing nonstop, foregoing sleep, until I'd birthed my idea? Or if that wasn't working out, how about writing standing up, like Hemingway. Or drunk?
I will shamefacedly admit, I've tried all of these "formulas" out and then some. None of them worked. So finally, I resigned myself to the fact that I'm not clever enough to decode the secret handshake and will have to plug along writing as best I can.
It wasn't until I read Stephen King's On Writing a few weeks back (after four picture books and a middle grade novel, hundreds of school visits, and I don't know how many conference speeches) that I had my "Eureka!" moment. There is no secret formula to writing.
Not, at least, in the way I was thinking. I mean, the big secret is, to write. That's it. Everything else is fluff.
What King showed in his book was enlightening for me, or maybe I really had finally hit that "clever enough" to understand it point. His journey to authorhood, i.e. the early years of his life and what prompted him to want to write, couldn't be more different than mine, or thousands of other writers. It's eclectic, unique, what makes Stephen King, Stephen King and not Stacy Nyikos. His candid, tell all approach to describing his life as a writer made that clearer than anything I'd ever read before.
The thing that separated him from thousands of other writers is stubbornness. He plugged away at writing, day after day, year after year, rejection after rejection, until he had honed his skills - his, not Charles Dickens's or John Grisham's or anybody else's - to the point that he had mastered them.
And then he kept writing.
The best piece of advice he ever got in all those years of struggling and writing was a line scrawled at the bottom of a rejection letter from an unknown editor: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.
I probably achieve utter absurdity with my new Strange Horizons column, "A Story About Plot", wherein, like an awkward and amateur trapeze artist who has decided the key to success is to not believe in gravity, I try to link John Grisham, Nora Roberts, Aristotle, Shklovsky, and Peter Straub. The whole thing is, I expect, more a sign of my inevitable insanity than anything else.
2 Comments on Plot, Plot, Plot, last added: 9/28/2009
I'm not sure I get your distinction between storyline and plot. We are always able to draw arbitrary semantic distinctions, but they may be distinctions without a difference. Whatever you want to call it, there are so many more "things happening" in a bestseller by Grisham, Connelly, John Twelve Hawks, Dan Brown, what have you, than in a more "literary" book. If you count "things happening" as "things happening in the narrator's head" too, then Marcel Proust may be seen as tightly plotted.
So many "literary" works have little to no plot. Updike's RABBIT, RUN has verbose description of the narrator endlessly driving for what, over 100 pages? Same with David Gates' JERNIGAN. Elizabeth Hand's GENERATION LOSS has the narrator's decades-long sex and drug lifestyle summarized in the first few pages before it hits a brick wall of endless description of taking a trip to some small Northeastern island. The difference between these kinds of books is so obvious and THERE.
It’s a full hour, but there’s lots in here you’ll be interested in. I particularly liked hearing a fellow ex-lawyer talk about whether he’d ever want to go back in a courtroom (solidarity, bro!), and also liked hearing what he does with his money (hint: there’s a lot of good to be done [...]
3 Comments on John Grisham on writing, leaving law, and what to do with all the money, last added: 2/8/2009
It’s been awhile since I read any Grisham(got tired of the “soapbox fiction” he was putting out for awhile but totally respect the guy for owning up to that)but this talk makes me reconsider checking him out again.
Thanks,Robin,for putting this video up. Oh,and if anyone would like to win a free set of books this weekend(not Grisham,I’m afraid-I’m giving away Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty the werewolf series),just leave a comment on my blog. Shameless promotion brought to you by Ovaltine(a crummy commercial?!)
robin said, on 2/1/2009 10:13:00 AM
Lady T, sounds like a great giveaway! Hope everyone goes over there and enters.
Patrick - proud member of the zombie hierarchy said, on 2/7/2009 10:06:00 PM
The Pelican Brief was one of the books that made me want to be a writer, but made me think that I could never be.
Really enjoyed the interview. Inspirational, especially when he explains that he doesn’t do character development because that isn’t his skill. Knowing your skill is important!
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever
Ivy an Bean: No News is Good News
Steps and Stones: An Anh’s Anger Story
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Penguin Young Readers Group in the U.S. and Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K. announced today that they will be publishing bestselling author John Grisham’s first series of books for children. The middle-grade series will focus on 13-year-old Theodore Boone, a legal whiz kid. In the first book, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, Theo gets caught up in a high-profile murder trial in his town. It’s scheduled to be released by Dutton Children’s Books on May 25, and on June 10 by Hodder in the U.K. The second book, as yet untitled, is scheduled for release in 2011.
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I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who draws in church. Perhpas there is artistic hope for me yet!
Thank you for the link to obscure children’s books. I am a big fan of the musical Cats and I really enjoy TS Eliot’s work but I never knew they were at all connected! Can’t wait to order that book from Amazon!
But…but…Harry didn’t get the scar until he was a toddler! (Then again, Tonks probably wasn’t born w/ purple hair…)
If you didn’t know Lionni’s sculptures, I wonder if you are aware of his wonderful book “Parallel Botany”: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40423298@N08/5391823304/in/set-72157625788774441/
We really do need a graphic novel award, and pronto. Lunch Lady has swept the 3rd/4th grade category in the Children’s Choice Book Awards for the last few years. We see kids every day who check out nothing but comics. I almost think an award would give the form a little more credibility with teachers and librarians (and parents), which would be nice – I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain to a parent that it isn’t a “waste” for Johnny to read Tsubasa or Rapunzel’s Revenge or whatever. Maybe we can commission some graphic artist to create an appealing, pleading short comic that we can send to the powers-that-be to try to goad them into creating the Art Spiegelman Award, or the Hayao Miyazaki Medal, or the Hugo (named after young Mr. Cabret), or something like that. Matt Pheland or Brian Selznick, do either of you dudes have any time to spare on such a project? =)
Absolutely – wouldn’t it be great to have an ALA award for graphic novels!?!? Smile was one of the top circulating books in our elementary school library (yes, teen was a bit of an odd category), and we were thrilled to find out it won the Eisner Award. Hooray! Odd about Tiny Titans – seems very TV cartoon inspired/derivative. All of the other nominees seemed to have much better substance: Walker Bean, Amelia Rules, Amelia Earhart.
What did you think about The Return of the Dapper Men? Have you seen it? Beautiful, but wondering about the audience.
At first glance I was hoping for a new pic of the Lily Bird. Glad I took a second glance.
Yeah. Though she might rival him in terms of follicles.
For months I’ve been procrastinating on a post about obscure books by adult authors … I was foolishly trying to read each book before I wrote the darn thing. Have to say that a part of me is relieved that Brainpickings let me off the hook!