Latest Writing News, Headlines and Blogs from Writers Write:

Jayne Ann Krentz Enters the Blogosphere
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Jayne Ann Krentz has started a new blog called Running With Quills, which should be quite entertaining. It's actually a group blog with fellow bestselling authors Elizabeth Lowell, Stella Cameron, Suzanne Simmons. The description of their new venture explains:

Welcome to Running With Quills. We know blogs are hot. We love the whole idea of doing blogs. We view blogs as a Great Leap Forward in the world of author-reader communication. But we won't kid you, the sad truth is that none of us has the time and energy to keep our own individual blogs going. However, in a burst of absolute desperation, we have banded together in the hope that we can inspire (read: nag and harass) each other into maintaining a group blog. We shall see how it goes. Meanwhile, offered below are some glimpses into the writing life.

Tash Aw picked up the first novel award for The Harmony Silk Factory, beating Rachel Zadok amongst others. All the category winners receive 5,000 and compete for the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year title, which carries an additional 25,000 prize.

Honouring books from last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland, the latest Whitbread awards attracted a record 476 entries. A panel of judges - including writer Margaret Drabble, ITN journalist Alastair Stewart, actresses Joanna David and her daughter Emilia Fox - will decide the overall winner on 24 January.

Ali Smith's novel The Accidental follows a girl spending summer with a family in Norfolk. The Whitbread judges said: "From the outset, The Accidental stood out as a glorious work of fiction that inspired both laughter and sadness and that none of us could stop reading." Having been unsuccessfully nominated for last year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction, The Accidental beat Whitbread contenders Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown and Christopher Wilson's The Ballad of Lee Cotton.

*****

Matisse The Master by Hilary Spurling won the biography award and Cold Calls by Christopher Logue took the poetry title. Kate Thompson beat three-time Whitbread winner Geraldine McCaughrean to take the children's book award for The New Policeman.

"I saw the clips [of the movie] and thought my jaw was going to fall off my skull," Butcher said in an interview. "I'm very pleased with how well [screenwriters] Robert [Hewitt Wolfe] and Hans [Beimler] get the whole wizard detective concept, and I liked the movie script very much."

*****

Butcher said that he optioned his books to Gendel, a producer and writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now, Butcher said, "I am in regular contact with Robert Wolfe, the show's producer, who has been great about letting me suggest things here and there and about asking for my thoughts on things."

Butcher added that he plans to visit the movie set in Toronto. If the movie, a pilot, becomes a series, will Butcher write any episodes? "Not if I want to meet my book deadlines," he said. "If the show goes on and on for seasons and seasons, maybe I'll try to write an episode. But outside of that, I'll probably just focus on my job and let the screenplay writers do theirs." The Dresden Files will premiere on SCI FI in the summer of 2006.

Writers who now suddenly find themselves blogging for their characters, creating novels for them or sharing perspective on a website will eventually need to be compensated for the extra work, Cuse said.

"That is very much going to be at the forefront of all the new labor negotiations, particularly with the Writers Guild, because writers are at the center of television series production and all of these new ideas are ultimately writer-based," Cuse said. "Right now, our involvement in this is about being involved in the cutting edge of these emerging technologies and learning how it works."

Just as iTunes transformed the music industry by turning singles into a viable revenue source again, Cuse and Lindelof believe their show is at the forefront of the television revolution.

"We're exploring a new frontier here in a lot of ways," Lindelof said. "So it's best to see what it is first, as opposed to everybody walking up to the cash register and saying, pay me, and then we'll do the exploring."

"Writing fantasy isn't writing for children, but it erases the distinctions; it's inherently a crossover genre," she says. Much of fantasy writing, she adds, is "about power - just look at Tolkien. It's a means to examine what it does to the person who has it, and to others." A believer, with Shelley, that "the great instrument of moral good is the imagination", she says: "If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there's no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can't do it; babies are morally monsters - completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy." No easy task. As she once wrote in exasperation, "Sure, it's simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up."

*****

During summers on the family ranch in the Napa Valley, native American "uncles" made her aware of both the richness of their oral culture, and the bigotry they faced. They and the valley inspired Always Coming Home (1985), about post-nuclear holocaust Californians. "White is not the norm for me, or equivalent to being human, as in so much of the fantasy I read," she says. "I made a conscious choice to make most of my characters people of colour." In the Earthsea books, Ged is a dark copper-red, and his friend Vetch is black. "I've had endless battles with cover departments. Gradually the people on the books are darkening - it's taken that long."