Atwood Warms Up Her Vocal Chords

It seems that acclaimed author Margaret Atwood is sharing more than her talent for the written word with her fans these days. She's also spreading the love through song as a contributor to the upcoming Canadian film "Score: A Hockey Musical."

Torontolife.com has the scoop:

Margaret Atwood has joined the growing list of Canadian celebrities set to appear in the upcoming movie Score: A Hockey Musical, and thank heavens, yes, she’ll be singing. This isn’t the first time Atwood has gone on film to show her love of the good ol’ hockey game—remember her celebrity tip segment from Rick Mercer’s Monday Report where she dressed up as a goalie? N0? A reminder, at [bottom].

Set for an October release, Score follows a teenage hockey star’s ascent to fame (Olivia Newton-John plays the boy’s sports-averse mom). Directed by Michael McGowan (One Week), the film is the cinematic equivalent of a Canadian tourism commercial or the Olympic closing ceremonies in Vancouver, with appearances by Nelly Furtado, George Stroumboulopoulos, Hawksley Workman, Walter Gretzky, Theo Fleury, Dave Bidini, Alex Tagliani, Eddie Shack and Dan Hill. And by appearances, we assume brief cameos during the finale. Hopefully, this ode to our national sport will fare better than the last attempt to bring the Leafs and Hockey
Night in Canada to international audiences. For one thing, Mike Myers isn’t attached to the film. Yet.

I saw this article and laughed out loud, so I just had to share it...even if it only entertains me and my dear friend Marie ;)

A New Life for Lewis Carroll

With last week's film release of "Alice in Wonderland", directed by Tim Burton and starring none other than Johnny Depp, Lewis Carroll's children's book is getting some renewed sales, according to USA Today's Book Buzz:

"Alice" is a wonder: Alice may have fallen down a rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's classic Alice in Wonderland, but she's moving up USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, landing at No. 31. Alice, and Carroll, are being helped along by Tim Burton's blockbuster "Alice in Wonderland, "which took in $116.1 million its opening weekend. The children's tale, with illustrations by John Tenniel, is a Barnes & Noble Classic and one of several editions being republished to coincide with the movie. A pop-up version made it into the top 50 in December 2003. Barnes & Noble and Borders are featuring Alice books and merchandise at the front of their stores, including tea sets at B&N and Cheshire Cat T-shirts at Borders.

The film itself has been getting mixed reviews, though what else can you expect from Tim Burton's dark and twisted talent? I'm simultaneously excited and creeped out to see this one, but will likely drag myself to the theatre in the next couple of weeks anyway.

I'm also hoping to check out the Tim Burton exhibit at the MOMA (collection closes April 26), but I must really get on that one if I'm going to make it--you have to buy tickets days in advance for the special timed exhibit!

Hilary Duff Hits the Shelves in 2010

Just when you thought pop-star Hilary Duff had fallen off the radar, Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers announces a multi-book deal with the entertainer.

The publisher's press release hit the PR newswire yesterday:

Hilary Duff, film and television star, recording artist, clothing designer, and philanthropist, has signed a world rights deal with Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers to publish her first-ever young adult fiction series, it was announced today. The first novel in the multiple-book series, entitled Elixir, publishes in hardcover in October 2010. Also part of the deal are world rights for a nonfiction title to be published in spring 2012 concerning the challenges faced by children of divorce--an issue that has touched Duff's own life.

Duff's Elixir combines the overpowering allure of a dangerous love triangle with thrilling international adventure. Clea Raymond is a talented young photojournalist who has spent her entire life in the spotlight as the daughter of a Washington politician and a renowned surgeon. Haunted by the strange appearance of a mysterious young man in her photographs, Clea travels the globe with her best friends, Rayna and Ben, in a race against time to unravel a centuries-old mystery that could unlock the key to her soulmate's true identity and the secret of her father's disappearance--and ultimately save all their lives.

Says Duff, "I've always loved the escape of a great book, especially one that features a strong, inspiring female character you feel you really understand, someone who could be you, but living a more fascinating life. I'm hoping Elixir will be that kind of book--a novel that will transport readers and open new worlds for them."

Read the complete press release HERE

Following in the footsteps of L.A. Candy author and reality star Lauren Conrad, Duff will now add "author" to her list of accolades. Whether her novels will be as big a success as Conrad's, however, remains to be seen.

And I'll admit it--I'm kind of excited to find out. I like Hilary Duff.

There, I said it.

I'm sure I'll own up to more of my Hilary Duff vice when the book comes out, as I know now, I want to review it. ;-) But for now, that's all you get.

The YA Bandwagon is Getting a Lil Crowded

With the success of books like Harry Potter, Twilight, The Book Thief, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, we all know that the YA market is exploding.

And, of course, crossover potential has multiplied, and now everyone wants in. Susan Carpenter of The LA Times has some interesting things to say about the recent genre developments:

It used to be that the only adults who read young

adult literature were those who had a vested interest -- teachers or librarians or parents who either needed or wanted to keep an eye on developing readers' tastes.

But increasingly, adults are reading YA books with no ulterior motives. Attracted by well-written, fast-paced and engaging stories that span the gamut of genres and

subjects, such readers have mainstreamed a niche long derided as just for kids.

Thanks to huge crossover hits like Stephenie Meyer's bloodsucking "Twilight" saga, Suzanne Collins' fight-to-the-death "The Hunger Games" trilogy, Rick Riordan's "The Lightning Thief" and Markus Zusak's Nazi-era "The Book Thief," YA is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak publishing market. Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children's/young adult hardcovers wer

e up 30.7%.

"Even as the recession has dipped publishing in general, young adult has held strong," said David Levithan, editorial director and vice president of Scholastic, publisher of "The Hunger Games," as well as of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, the series largely credited with jump-starting this juggernaut of a trend.

"You go on the subway and see 40-year-old stockbrokers reading 'Twilight,' " said Levithan, himself a YA author. "That wouldn't have happened five years ago."

Read the rest of the article HERE

Anyone who knows me is aware that I'm kind of a YA freak. I love it. I could read YA forever and be perfectly content. And while I've been obsessed since it was actually age-appropriate, I must admit I'm fearing the current state of YA a little bit.

It's true that the YA market is one of the strongest markets in the industry right now. It's growing in subject, audience, and style. Yes, it's a fabulous thing. But I feel like so many adult authors are just jumping on the bandwagon. They don't have a YA vision. They take an adult idea--often on that didn't sell for adults--and just adapt it for the kiddies. Everyone wants to write YA because it's what's selling. And frankly, that's just depressing.

What makes YA so wonderful is the power it can give a reader, the comfort, the reminiscence, the life lessons. The books you read as a child and as a young adult shape who you become. Or at least that's what I believe. They teach you how to live and sometimes how not to live. But when everyone and their mother is writing YA, it's so powerful anymore. The more the market is flooded with YA-converted authors, the more sub-par YA there is on the shelves. There's something so special about a good YA novel, and I'l admit that I'm scared that quality is going to start to fade.

Writing Tips from Some of the Best

More than one of my friends sent me a link to an article on Guardian.co.uk this week about the rules to writing fiction. The article includes numerous tips from well-known authors like Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Elmore Leonard.

It's interesting how varied their advice is! I've gotta say, Atwood's is my fave:

Margaret Atwood

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

See more tips from other authors HERE

Attack of the Mash-Ups!

It all started with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Then came Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Now, there are a whole slew of similar paranormal mash-ups coming down the pipeline.

USA Today posted an article earlier this morning to their website about the recent phenomenon:

It has been a year since Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was unleashed upon the unsuspecting masses.

Rather than running for their lives, readers ran to bookstores, making the quirky collaboration between Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith a huge hit, with more than 1 million copies in print.

With the surprising success of that first literary mashup from Quirk Books, there has been no stanching the flow of bloody titles featuring classic literary icons doing battle with B-movie demons.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters followed Zombies last year. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, a prequel by Steve Hockensmith, will walk among us starting March 24.

In Sherri Browning Erwin's Jane Slayre (Gallery Books), hitting stores April 13, Charlotte Brontë's plain Jane Eyre is an indomitable zombie killer.

We've seen gimmicky titles like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (Coscom Entertainment) and Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter (Eos) jump on the bandwagon.

But is the trend threatening to jump the shark, as well?

"There are so many classics to explore and so many ways people are approaching mashups. I think it has a long way to go before it exhausts itself," says Slayre author Erwin.

Zombies has had the best showing on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, rising to No. 24. Sea Monsters, with a very respectable 375,000 copies in print, peaked at No. 100. But Queen Victoria and Zombie Jim failed to make the list's top 400.

"We're having discussions on how far we can push this formula," Quirk publisher Jason Rekulak says. "What I don't want to do is something like The Scarlet Letter and Dinosaurs, where you just take a classic because it's a classic and add an element because it's an element."

Read the rest of the article HERE

It's tough to argue though that they aren't already doing just what Rekulak fears. I haven't read any of these mash-ups yet myself, but the concept seems clear enough to me. An author takes a classic novel, adds a paranormal element, and spins the story so that it works on a brand new level.

While creative and certainly entertaining, I think that "[taking] a classic because it's a classic and [adding] an element because it's an element" is exactly what these books do. It's the whole point, isn't it? They're taking something old and making it new again.

I won't deny that the idea is a clever and exciting one. When Pride and Prejudice and Zombies hit the shelves, I was horrified, but also strangely compelled. It was such a unique take on classic literature that I couldn't help but admire the person who came up with the idea. But now, the market is being flooded with similar mash-ups. They come up at editorial meetings all over New York every week, but don't really have a leg to stand on most of the time.

So, how long can a trend like this last? Zombies was such a hit because it was such a new and different concept. Now, the novelty has worn off. Or it will by the end of the year with all the upcoming publications scheduled.

What then? While, yes, there are more classics out there and more ways to "zombie them up," it's going to get old real quick. Readers are going to get sick of books that take someone else's idea and change it, rather than come up with something totally fresh.

Do you read mash-ups? Tell us what you think!

"The Lightning Thief" is no "Harry Potter"

This weekend I dragged my sick butt (I had an upper respiratory infection, hence my lack of posting) to the movie theatre. My friend and I had both agreed to read Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan and then go to see the movie together. So that's exactly what we did.

I hadn't heard great things about the film so my expectations weren't very high. I also didn't love the book as much as many people I know did, so I wasn't as invested in the film as I would've been if it were a Harry Potter flick. I liked the book quite a bit, don't get me wrong. It was a fun, quick read with a great premise and a lot of fun characters. I just didn't feel that the writing or character development was up to snuff with the Harry Potter series, which anyone whose read them both will inevitably compare to Percy Jackson.

The film, however, was amusing at best. I was laughing out loud at moments that were not intended to be funny (though there were some genuinely humorous parts!), the graphics were a little ridiculous, and the characters were flat.

The plot was also massively altered. I'm not usually super bothered by that kind of thing when a movie is intended as a standalone rather than a serie. I'm a firm believer in an adaptation being just that, a person's vision of someone else's original idea. Besides, it's not as important to maintain all the elements that come into play later in the series if you aren't planning to make a movie out of those later books. This seemed to be the case to me with Percy Jackson's film debut. While I'm sure the producers of "The Lightning Thief" would love to have a hit on their hands, I think deep down they knew that this wasn't going to be the Harry Potter of the new decade.

They did, however, make some interesting plot changes, though I'll admit it was much more interesting as Riordan wrote it. I still love the premise though--Greek mythology come to life in a modern world. Mythology has always intrigued me, so I just adore the idea. For that reason, I was able to somewhat enjoy the movie, though on a very pure entertainment level. I think I would've liked it better had I not read the book, though.

While my feelings for the film were lukewarm, my friend T.S. over at Must Love Books had a much stronger reaction. He's written a very interesting piece (that does contain spoilers, so be forewarned!) about why he didn't like the adaptation:

Anyone who knows me fairly well knows that I am a huge fan of the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. I’ve often proclaimed that my love for this series is up there with my love for Harry Potter. So needless to say, I was pretty excited to see the movie adaptation of The Lightning Thief, especially since it was directed by the man behind the first two Harry Potter movies, Chris Columbus. I was also nervous---movies adapted from books rarely live up to their source material and barring most (but not all) of the Harry Potter movies, a few Neil Gaiman movies and Spiderwick, I’ve felt let down by recent book-movies. So I went in with a cautious but open heart and found myself completely let down. Here’s a list of reasons why (Caution: this list contains SPOILERS for both the movie and the book series):

*No Ares (the Cabin or the God) – one of the fun parts of the Percy books is that he encounters each and every Olympian god throughout the series and they’re “modernized.” The scenes with Percy and Ares were intense and exciting and it’s one of the first times Percy encounters one of the gods (aside from Mr. D). His absence was greatly noted and replacing him with Persephone (more to come on her) did nothing to improve the story. I was also annoyed that there was no Clarisse or Ares Cabin. While I get that the producers probably thought they were too reminiscent of Draco/Slytherin and wanted to steer clear of HP similarities, if they had thought ahead to the rest of the series, Clarisse and Ares Cabin play an important role later on, and Clarisse’s pride and stubbornness set up one of the most emotional moments (for me) in the final book. I was also annoyed that Annabeth became the stand-in for Clarisse (see my next point).

*Annabeth was all wrong - I know this is a superficial detail, but my first complaint is that Annabeth is BLONDE. It bothers me that (Buffy aside) we rarely get to see the blonde girl kicking ass and taking names. They’re always the pretty ones while the brunettes are the tough ones. That aside, I also didn’t like the changes her character was given. Book-Annabeth would NOT attack Percy that violently (in the name of training) and almost kill him. Setting her up as the violent warrior woman and then having her flip-flop to become his ally for her own selfish purposes did not make me like her as either a romantic foil OR a Hermione-esque “smart, female friend” for Percy. Again, they may have been trying to avoid HP similarities but they went a bit too far. Part of the fun of The Lightning Thief is that it has the HP skeleton (which JK Rowling didn’t invent, by the way) with its own unique and interesting story, mythology, and character development.

*The way race was handled – I had a BIG problem with Rosario Dawson playing Persephone. Not only was I annoyed that her character (a MAJOR deus ex machine) had replaced Ares, but she was clearly supposed to be the exotic, spicy goddess/wife and they didn’t even try to make her seem Greek. At one point my friend Zoraida, a Latina woman, leans over to me and says, “Why is Persephone Puerto Rican?” I have no idea. She’s supposed to be a GREEK goddess. If they wanted to have diversity in the cast, they had a great opportunity with the demi-god camp-dwellers (since they’re half Greek god and half-any race known to the human species). But they missed that opportunity by only focusing on the main demi-gods (another thing that took away from the greatness of the books – I loved all of the briefly mentioned side characters, just as I did in HP). I was actually really glad they cast a black actor to play Grover, since, ya know, he’s a satyr and they’re nature spirits. He could be any race. But I was extremely disappointed that they then went and changed Grover’s character to make him a stereotype of a black teen. Grover is a nervous, awkward, odd little goat-man and instead they turned him into a “playa” who was often distracted by hotties and speaks like he grew up in “the hood.” There was even one scene where the camera watches Percy and Grover walk up some stairs and you can clearly see Percy’s pants at a normal level and Grover’s are sagging, which doesn’t even make sense since Grover’s pants are supposed to conceal his GOAT LEGS! It just made me sad that they felt they had to completely change the character into a black stereotype rather than keeping the integrity of the character and casting him black. I found it insulting to people of all ethnicities.

Read the rest of T.S.'s fantastic and thorough review HERE