Hollywood obviously finds children’s books a great treasure trove for movie ideas/basis of movie scripts. Let’s hope these ones are decent to great:
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs – 9.19.2009
Fantastic Mr. Fox – 11.25.2009
Where the Wild Things Are – 10.16.2009
Filed under Book Notes
Today I started the process of moving content from my old site at fairrosa.info to the wordpress blog site. I like this template but will tweak the style sheet a bit. So expect changes.
Filed under Book Notes
(I was asked to report on the event at Child_lit so I wrote a bit more about it and decided to post the report here!)
It was a lovely free event (I got there at 4:30 for the 7:00 event so I did get very good seating!) at the Teacher’s College Horace Mann Auditorium. It seats about 500 and the room (orchestra and balcony) was filled to capacity. Most of the people in the audience are Neil’s adult fans — many college/late 20s who obviously are great fans of Sandman since when he made references to Sandman characters, the entire room responded. There were, however, a dozen or so children and when he read (he read the entire first chapter — 33 pages,) those children responded very favorably — laughing at the right moments (also thanks to Neil’s skillful and dramatic reading).
I sensed that the audience got slightly restless toward the end of the chapter since there were a couple of places that we felt would have made a natural break. but the story kept going, after shifting gears. However, I imagine that if it is broken down to two readings, no one would have felt the reading was just a tad “long.”
Oh, and we were treated to a very cool, not-before-seen, Coraline trailer. It IS going to be 3D Stop Motion Animation for the whole entire deal. Let’s hope for the BEST! His Q&A section was great, talking about his China trip (one month, researching myths and legends, and breaking a finger,) his haircut,
his characters in books, whether he’ll write sequels to Neverwhere, American Gods, etc. (yes, he WOULD if he had the time — and yes, there are stories set in all these worlds.) He was asked if there is any difference in writing a “more intricate and complex” book for adults than a “less so” (grumble) book for young adults/children. He
said No. It’s all putting one word after another. And then he said that the only difference was the length it took him to write the books — one (American Gods) took longer than the other (Graveyard Book.)
He talked about how he sometimes worries about his characters coming out of his books to knock on his door and demand to know WHY he created him and made them live such miserable and dark lives. He talked about how he indeed is “their maker.” He imagines of his own “meeting the maker” moment after his unavoidable demise: “When I ask WHY ME, Why NOW? I’m afraid of hearing a booming voice from the Sky that says, ‘Because that makes a BETTER STORY.'” The audience laughed, of course. (He did the God-Booming voice very well… and my
paraphrasing is nowhere near funny as he was in person.)
I posted a link to the audio file from HarperCollins on my blog. No pictures or video from me, unfortunately. I believe that the reading will be (is planned to be) put online soonish — since he is doing ONE
CHAPTER per city on this tour until the whole book is read through. (And he also talked about audio book recording and how much he LOVES doing it even though it is really hard work.)
* Here’s the link to the Graveyard Book Reading Tour on Video.
Filed under Book Notes
Last night, a dozen or so child_lit contributors gathered at long-time list member Monica Edinger’s apartment — one floor above the festivities of a New York City “neighborhood” Halloween Party (read: in the lobby for the kids in the huge apartment building on West 111th Street.)
Philip Pullman and wife Jude were the honored guests for the night. We chatted about the “lineage” of our child_lit involvement.. from the creation of the list by Michael Joseph, who was there with Constance Vidor, his lovely partner, and Head Librarian at Friends’ Seminary. We thanked Michael for creating a space in the cyber world for us to exchange ideas and forge otherwise unlikely friendship. GraceAnne DiCandido, Kirkus reviewer and my Library School teacher, was responsible for the two reviews of His Dark Materials’ 2nd and 3rd installments. Other child_lit pals who came to help celebrate the occasion were Waller Hastings, English/Children’s Lit. professor from South Dakota, now visiting professor at Rutgers this year, Pooja Makhijani, writer at Children’s Television Workshop/Sesame Street International, Cheryl Klein, editor at Arthur Levine Books/Scholastic, John Peters, Supervising Librarian of NYPL’s Donnell children’s library, past Newbery Chair, and prolific reviewer, Uli Knoepflmacher, English Professor at Princeton University and expert on Victorian and children’s literature who just recently joined child_lit, and Kerry Mockler, 4th-year PhD student and teacher of children’s literature and baker of a host of His Dark Materials inspired butter cookies. They were incredibly yummy. My students in the sci-fi/fantasy club thanked her for this gift (the next day, while sharing the story Mimsy Were the Borogoves)!
Our dinner was 3 pizzas from, some salad, wine and champagne — but the main ingredient was the non-stop conversation around the room: all about children’s books and once in a while some weird child_lit history surfaced.
Here are just three pictures to mark the evening for me:
This is me talking to Philip. (I didn’t quite wash off all my zombie make-up from the day and had to do a little photoshop-doctoring before posting it on the Journal. Haha.)
This is the tray of cookies waiting to be revealed…
This is a picture of Kerry and Philip. We were all so pleased with this perfect ending for a perfect evening. Yeah for Kerry!
Filed under Field Reports
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