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Last year when Wish You Weren’t came out, I was happy with the cover and hopeful that it represented the story well. I still love the cover, but I also started to realize that the static image implied a “quiet” type of story. If you’ve read Wish You Weren’t, you know that’s not the case. […]

Tyra Banks has "written" a "novel" that will come out in September. Judging by the chapter posted on bn.com, it's bad, bad, BAD. Maybe she really did write it herself

So bad it was hard to figure out what to post.

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Tookie turned and nearly jumped out of her skin. Standing next to her was Theophilus Lovelaces. His eyes glistened in the LaDorno sun. He was seeing her, actually seeing her. His eyes focused right on hers. His words were meant for her. Tookie tried to smile, but she had a feeling her mouth made more of a grimace.

"You're not participating?" Theophilus asked, gesturing to the crowd.

Tookie opened her mouth but couldn't speak. She was dying to say, Really? Me? Have you lost your mind? But instead a cross between a yelp, a sneeze, and a burp came out.
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See for yourself here.

Lisa Rinna and I both attended the same high school in the small town of Medford, Oregon. [How small? When I graduated there were about 18,000 people living there. Not I think it's about 50k]. She was four years behind me, and since our high schools were broken into schools for 9/10 and for 11/12 grades, I never knew her.

Her claims to fame are: being on Days of Our Lives, on Melrose Place, and marrying Harry Hamlin. More recently it's been for making some unfortunate choices in trying to maintain a youthful appearance.



A few weeks ago, she was on Celebrity Apprentice, where two teams were tasked with creating books for kids. The teams came up with some fairly tired themes: Lisa's team picked shyness and Meatloaf's team picked bullying. It sounds like there was a lot of infighting as the books were developed.

At the end of the night, Lisa was sent home - but not before The Donald complimented her on her lip reduction surgery.

Read more here.

I guess Marshall Cavendish is actually going to publish the other book...

No. It's not me.

In fact, my Monday in the writing cave was not uninterrupted. I think the evil gods of writing must have read my post and decided to blow that dream to smithereens. I got a bit done, but between the phone, the doorbell and my own frazzled lack of focus, it didn't add up to much. Next time I'm leaving the house.

PW announced that Disney has signed Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr.to write a baseball series.  

Ripken, bless him, may be the next Matt Christopher, Phil Bildner, Mike Lupica, authors who write (Christopher died in 1997) engrossing stories, using sports as a frame. 

I hope his series is a success.  Still, how do you know it is a celebrity author book?  

“Connor is a character that I was able to help develop with Kevin based on my experiences as a kid who struggled with his emotions. I hope that the kids reading it find it to be fun and take away a few lessons from it.”

Call me cynical, but the news reported by the BBC that Little Britain star David Walliams is set to publish a children's book doesn't exactly overwhelm me. I mean, when he is quoted as saying, "I hope the story will be funny and thought-provoking," all I can think is, 'doesn't he already know if it is or not?' Perhaps he was misquoted.

This is not even the first brush between children's literature and the Little Britain world; Matt Lucas, the other half of the LB team, stared as Toad of Toad Hall in a decidedly odd live action version of The Wind in the Willows, which I caught on Masterpiece Theatre last year. I think it was one of those projects which must have looked good on paper. I know it looked good when I read the program description on the TV Guide. Watching it, however, was a different matter.

Reading Meg Cabot's blog today, I learned that Food Network royalty and my favorite chef person, Giada de Laurentiis, is expecting her first child. You may recall Entling no. 1 experiences obtaining a signed cookbook for her mother.

Now Giada is a bona fide celebrity. There has to be a children's book in her future. I predict a Giada Cooks with Kids cookbook sometime soon.
Hey, Emeril has several!

Why War is Never a Good Idea
by Alice Walker

HarperCollins

Today is International Peace Day (and, incidentally, the Eve of Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day), and this poem about war drops like jagged pieces of glass into your conscience, intensely sharp but, in the right light, shining and beautiful.

Set aside the word "never" in the title. You could make a good case for many wars in history, but we're not concerned with polemics here. Walker makes a character out of War; watchful and insidious, unconcerned and toxic:

Though War is Old
It has not
Become wise
It will not hesitate
To destroy
Things that
Do not
Belong to it
Things very
Much older
Than itself.

Vitale's art drives the point home, literally. Turn the page on a lovely Asian panorama and the paper becomes wrapped around a filthy wheel with its rusting hubcap. Vibrantly hued renderings of azure skies, sun-dappled fields and teeming jungles channel Henri Rousseau or perhaps Paul Gauguin with their fondness for the primitive, in this case symbolizing the pristine. Brace for these pastoral scenes erupting with smears of toxic-looking goo, rusting nails, or cracked enamel. The effect is both jarring and yet sublime; it's hard not to admire the artistry even in what's meant to be the ugliest pages.

A few references chafe: Walker mentions War seeing oil and gas in the earth, though in the entire history of human conflict, only a tiny number involved those commodities. She pulls it all off in the end, however, by admonishing the reader about War's contagious effects on us all.

Is this the best way to teach kids about war? I have no idea. My friends and I are all agreed that we'd like to put off teaching our children about the Holocaust for as long as possible, and there are no mentions of Iraq at our dinner table, nor even much about Israel and Palestine.

What you decide to teach a young child about war is, of course, entirely up to you. Walker and Vitale are merely giving you one approach, which, if it doesn't prompt nightmares, should at least inspire numerous questions.

Rating: *\*\*\

Author: Madonna
Illustrator: Jeffrey Fulvimari

4 snooty fashionista teens shun a young classmate because she is too pretty. They make wild assumptions about her based on her looks but (with the help of a particularly bitchy fairy) the 4 girls soon come to see the error of their ways. They learn that pretty girls can have it hard too. (Roll credits and cue the uplifting Kelly Clarkson song!)

The lesson here is an old one: Do not judge a book by its cover. The fact that parents would even consider buying a children's book from an author who once dressed like this:



shows that people are capable of looking past a book's cover... unless, of course, the book is Madonna's Sex which cost a gazillion dollars and came wrapped in a cellophane package. That made it significantly harder to look past the cover, especially if you were under 18 and broke when it came out.

Forward Progress? Note: It is interesting that that book caused such a firestorm of controversy when it first came out in 1994... because by today's standards, the images are actually rather quaint. You'll see more sex in any mainstream grocery store magazine and even today's Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues are more provocative and show more skin.

And the Abercrombie & Fitch website is downright dirty. Seriously, do not click on the site's A&F New Faces link unless you are over 18. (Here is the link. Warning: Kids, Look away. Adults, Do not watch while at work. I didn't want to link to it, but had to because it is so completely ridiculous. When did pornography become mainstream?)

There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about celebrities writing children’s articles.

Here’s one article.

I really liked this quote from the article: "Jane Yolen, a prize-winning children's book author, contends that "celebrity children's books eat up all the available oxygen ... I have over 250 books out, have won a great number of awards within the field, have been given four honorary doctorates for my body of work, but have never been on 'Oprah' or spoken to Katie Couric or gotten a $100,000 advance for my work.

"I am not complaining. I do very well by the ordinary parameters of the field. But I have been thinking about getting out my pointy bra and brushing up on my singing and dancing because there's no good pop music out there. And because -- you know -- if it's celebrity they want ..”

And here’s another article about the same subject. And a snarky (and funny) blog post by someone who studied celebrity’s books. [Full disclosure: I would guess that many celebrity children’s books are ghosted.]





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Tina Louise trained as an actor at the Actors Studio and the Neighborhood Playhouse. After success on Broadway, she went to Hollywood and played in a variety of films. She is best known for her comic turn as the stranded movie star Ginger in the TV series Gilligan's Island. She volunteers for Learning Leaders, a childhood-literacy advocate group in New York City, where she lives.

One of my listservs was buzzing this afternoon with the news that Jenna Bush's YA book has been accepted for publication by HarperCollins. She wasn't exactly being embraced by the kidlit world, to put it mildly.

I was going to pass on discussing the situation because it's the kind of thing everyone is already talking about, anyway. Plus, it's not a discussion to which I have a lot to offer. What was I going to say? That I find ganging up on a new writer distasteful? Wait until the book comes out and, if it's as bad as so many believe it will be, dump on it then when it's justified?

Yeah, I'm something of a wet blanket on this particular subject. So I was going to let the whole thing pass.

But, then, Kelly at Big A, little a threw down the gauntlet. "Gail, you know I adore you, but defend this one," she said.

Actually, I just wanted to repeat that line about someone adoring me.

Okay. There are, as I see it, two issues here.

One is that Jenna Bush hasn't paid her dues and got a book deal before reaching peri-menopause. She got this book deal because of who she is. Well, you know what? This happens. Over the years it has happened a lot. And not just to celebrities and not just to presidents' kids. People get book deals because they know somebody or their professor knows somebody or they went to the right school or they had the right idea at the right time or they were really good looking and charming and the marketing people at their publisher's home office thought they could sell books. Or, worse yet, they'd had something horrible happen to them and someone thought that would sell.

It's a fact--a fact that really doesn't have anything to do with me. I can't change it. I can only do my own work. I just cannot get fired up with animosity toward these people.

Now, I know there are those who will say, "But she's getting $300,000! Thirty real unpublished writers could each get $10,000 advances with that money!"

That argument has been used about "big-name" adult writers for a couple of decades. I guess the fact that it has made it's way to kidlit is a tribute to the fact that money is now being made here. But here's the counter-argument: Those who defend the big advances for so-called big books claim that those big sellers actually fund smaller, newer writers. Your Stephen Kings, Patricia Cornwells, Daniel Handlers, and J.K. Rowlings keep their publishers afloat and provide them with the wherewithall to make offers to authors who aren't going to become bestsellers.

Honestly, I don't know which of the above arguments is true. And I also doubt that Jenna's nonfiction book is going to pull in big bucks and make it possible for a bunch of Gails to get contracts. But, nonetheless, there are two sides to the argument.

The second issue? Jenna is quoted as saying, "she 'very, very modestly' hopes her book will have some of the influence of two books about girls caught up in the Holocaust: Lois Lowry's novel Number the Stars and Anne Frank's The Diary of Anne Frank." And, really, it isn't very, very modest of her to voice that hope.

Come on. She's what? Twenty-three years old? Twenty-four? She mentioned two books she presumably admires. Is she immodest or is she naive?

By the way, I thought Number the Stars was a run-of-the-mill World War II story. Personally, I question Jenna's judgment in holding it up as a model for herself. I'd like to have seen her show a little more depth.

I feel really bizarre coming out all sunshine and rainbows over celebrity authors. (Not that Jenna Bush is actually a celebrity. She's famous for being someone's daughter, not for being famous.) It doesn't seem like me, does it? I'm the wicked witch of the northeast who is hypercritical about so much that she reads.

But here's the thing--it's the work that's important to me, not the worker. I have to see the result, then I'll decide whether or not I'm going to start bitching. And you know the chances are that I will bitch.

Did I go on too long about this? Blame Kelly! I hope she still adores me.

It's well-known among children's authors that everybody and their grandmother think they can write children's books. Children's books must be easier to write because they're for less-fluent readers, kids with smaller vocabularies, an unsophisticated audience--right?

Children's writers know that the truth is different--that writing for children is a tough job because children are less patient about trying to see whether the story will improve. Kids want a good story from start to finish. So the stories must be trim, sleek and fine-tuned.

Children's editors generally are a radical bunch who believe that our children deserve only the very best. So the good and even the very good don't make the grade.

And there are a lot of people writing juvenile fiction, so there's a very competitive market. The end result is top-notch quality. From picture books to young adult (YA), juvenile literature is a pleasure to read.

But then there are "celebrity" authors. People who are celebrities first and who decide, hey, why not, I think I'll write a book. And of course, they write for children because they make the mistake of thinking it's easier than writing for adults. And publishing houses snap them up because they've already got a "platform" for selling their books.

We saw Madonna's picture books (about the English Roses) have a brief spurt of publicity and sales and then quickly fade from sight, although she's still publishing more of them. I reviewed her first book for the Marianas Variety (about January 2004, I think). It wasn't as bad as I had feared, but it wasn't good.

There have been others: Paul McCartney, Julie Andrews, Kylie Minogue, Gloria Estefan and Whoopi Goldberg, to name a few. None of these celebrities are playing to their strengths when they write for children.

The one notable exception is Jamie Lee Curtis, who has several baby board books out that have a nice rhythm and rhyme, a sense of story and are good, or possibly very good.

But now we can look forward to another celebrity's book-a YA by Jenna Bush, just sold to a publishing house, according to Publishers Marketplace (requires log-in, so I can't link you to that article). Here's some pre-sale discussion: JennaShopsABook

Beverage Alert: Here's a glimpse (well, parody): Jenna'sTakeOnLife One can only hope Jenna's novel is this well-written! (sigh)

MotherReader is championing Bloggers Against Celebrity Authors (BACA). Not, an author who has become a celebrity because of being an awesome writer; no, rather, those celebrities who write books; and 9 out of 10 times,* it's a book for children. Actually, it's usually a picture book for children.

Of course, there is some quibbling over how those celebrity authors are identified. I love Mandy by Julie Andrews so would not include her; others champion Jamie Lee Curtis (who I personally adore as an actress, but feel her books are way too message driven for my taste; still, she has respect for children's literature, so I won't argue Curtis's omission from BACA.)

Interestingly enough, as I was wondering the criteria for a "celebrity author," I saw a post at Miss Snark that emphasized the point that in order to be a good writer, you need to be a reader: "Read. Read. And when you're done, read some more. Read what you're interested in writing for now, but also read other things too. Then read some more of what you're interested in. Don't even write. Just read." This advise is found on almost every author website, in almost every book about writing and getting published. It's part of the "prep" work needed as a writer, to make an effort to know what is out there, to read a variety, to become aware of things such as the ALSC notables lists. To just rely on the rememberings of books read in childhood; nope, not good enough. To just rely on the books you find at Target; nope, not good enough.

I would think that what the celebrity does for a living** requires preparation, whether it's singing, sports, acting. And that the good ones do what is necessary to be "best" at that particular art. So why, when it comes to books, do they act as if nothing is required except to sit down at the laptop and start typing? Or is acting and singing and baseball really that easy, that they think other things are, also?

Reading, in my humble opinion, is at the heart of why celebrities are not, for the most part, good writers. Now, I'm not saying that they are illiterate; I'm not saying that they don't read at all; but I doubt that many of them read, read, and then read some more. I doubt they treat writing a children's book the same way they treat their "real" profession.

If a celebrity author does do those things -- read, read, and read some more -- then it'll be obvious. Because the book will be good. And I'll read it and review it; not because it's a celebrity author, but because it's a book by an author who happens to be a celebrity.

Some additional notes to celebrity authors who want to be judged as authors, rather than championed as celebrities:

--Books aren't about teaching lessons. They are about good stories. In that way books are just like the movies and TV shows you make and the songs that you sing.

--It is a universal truth that you could read the phone book to your own children and they will love it; it's the attention, the being read to, the belief that they are in the story that the kids love. It's not a thumbs up to the actual story. Testing out your book on your own children doesn't count.

-- Books need to be universal. Yes, the story just for your child is sweet; a wonderful family memory; leave it at that. Why the need to share this tender moment between parent and child by publishing it? Especially because other readers will know it's not for them.

--Write about what you know.

-- Study. Find out what it is that makes good writing work.

--Take the same risks you take in your "real life" job. If you're willing to be naked (either emotionally or for real) on film, why not be willing to be naked on the page by being honest in your writing?

--Join a writing group or take a class where you can get real feedback. No, your hired assistants telling you the book is perfect don't count.

--Get an awesome editor. Trust the editor. Listen to the editor. Revise.

--Publish under a different name. Writing is one area where people can remain anonymous, at least for a short time period. Let your work live or die on it's own.

Any one else have any guidelines on how to turn a celebrity into an author?

* I am perhaps being overly generous; perhaps 99 out of a 100 is more accurate. Especially when we exclude memoirs; books written with a ghostwriter; and books that are related to the reasons why they are a celebrity.

** Paris Hilton is the exception.

I tried to respond to MotherReader's post on Bloggers Against Celebrity Authors, couldn't get the response to load, and then lost the whole thing. Life has become so difficult--and slow--since I moved over to the New Blogger that I decided that responding here would be more energy effecient. I know I can get this thing to work. (She says now, anyway.)

MotherReader says in her post "...for every book deal these celebrities strike, that’s less of the kid-lit pie for another author trying to get a break." I don't know that that's the case. An author trying to break into publishing would never, ever get the kind of deals celebrity authors of children's books gets. Established children's authors don't get those kinds of deals. Only someone like, say, J.K. Rowling gets those kinds of deals and that's because she's a celebrity author.

The kind of publicity celebrity authors get doesn't take away from our publicity, either, because we'd never be offered that kind of publicity. The Today Show is never going to call most of us. That's not a complaint, it's the way things are.

Celebrity authors don't cut into our pie. They have their own pie.

Do celebrity authors write a lot of crap? Very possibly. But go into any bookstore or library. Sad to say, celebrity authors do not have a corner on the crap market by a longshot.

Are celebrity authors exploiting the children's market, which has become much desirable in recent years? Maybe. But what about authors of adult literature who move into the children's market? Aren't they exploiting it, too? Should we unite against people like Joyce Carol Oates, also?

If you don't want to go nuts in the book business, you have to accept that it is a business that maintains itself by sales of books. Some authors are going to sell more books than others. Lots of times that has nothing to do with the quality of the books. Lots of times it has to do with the public and what it wants to buy. Sometimes the public wants to buy books written by someone whose name it recognizes, who has accomplished something it likes in some other field. The public has the right to do that.

You can't move the river, folks. Getting upset about celebrity authors is like getting upset because it's hot in the summer or cold in the winter. What's more, most celebrity authors don't last much longer than the seasons. Which, actually, makes them like many real authors.

You know, we may have our differences. You may like one book, and I may hate another, but there's something out there that brings all children's literature lovers together. A unified disgust, as it were, with celebrity authors. Oh sure, each of us has that one celebrity we don't mind reading all that much. Maybe you've a weakness for The Fonz or don't mind it when Julie Edwards Andrews picks up a pen.

Oh! And SPEAKING of Ms. Andrews (tangent time) I would like to thank my dear friend Marci for pointing out to me that the NYC children's bookstore Books of Wonder was hosting Child Magazine's 6th Annual Best Children's Book Awards. Unfortunately, I got Marci's message too late and never had a chance to see Ms. Andrews alive and in the flesh. Doggone it.

Back to reality here. As I was saying, we all forgive one celebrity author or another, but after a while you just can't hold back your rage. As such MotherReader has granted us a boon. She's created BACA (Bloggers Against Celebrity Authors). One wonders what the benefits of being a card-carrying member might be. I'm hoping it might run along the lines of being given full authority to someday see an offender at a cocktail party and get to whack them into blissful unconsciousness with the travesty of a book they've created. Or is that a bit much?

I once polled the child_lit listserv to see what celebrity book was the best of the lot. My favorite answer was the person who said that Fred Gwynne (the dad from the Munsters) did marvelous work. Yay, Gwynne! I'll make him my own personal favorite celebrity author.

And who will it be this time?

Scott Baio.