Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Just imagine for a moment that a book you've written has not only become a wildly popular book, but also been optioned for a movie and it's the most hotly anticipated movie of the season. You know, I have a really good imagination, but even I can't believe that. By the end of next week how many people will not have seen The Hunger Games? Now, I'm an English teacher, so anything that gets kids to crack a book, even those awful Twilight books, I'm a fan. Honestly, I would prefer that they like a well written book with a strong character and a beautifully detailed world. And that's what The Hunger Games have. It's not a cheerful book. It's not a beautiful utopian world. It's brutal, cold and cruel with a main character who is not always the most admirable person, but she's the right person. It's complicated with twisted political intrigues that kept me guessing and I'm not bragging when I say that I can usually see what's coming in m...

I realized today that a lot of my favorite authors are dead--or really, really old! David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Aspirin--some of them I didn't even know were gone, like David Eddings, but in the grand scheme of things I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised. It does make me start to think, though. If you look in the genre section of the bookstore (provided that you can actually find a bookstore anymore) there are the same names over and over again. Have been the same names for years and years. I'm always amazed not only at those established authors' productivity, but also the fact that the big publishers could never find all that much new blood. There are some new names out there now, but I've veered away from science fiction and fantasy over the years. There weren't any risks being taken for the longest time in that genre. If there were new names the stories were a lot of the same old, same old. I started reading more young adult lit. There were...