It was an offer author Mark Winegardner could not refuse when he was asked to finish off the saga of America’s most powerful fictional crime family, the Corleone clan, and let them rest in peace.
…Winegardner has just released the final novel in the series, “The Godfather’s Revenge,” which moves the family onto its biggest stage of all — the intersection of organised crime and national politics.
Full article, Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters
After putting in years of research into books, like his latest The Last Mughal, he’s a little touchy about the slightly condescending tag ‘popular historian’.
“I bristle at the term ‘popular history’. I think the central issue of how good or not a work of history is, how important, how scholarly a work of history, does not depend on the style in which it’s written. Whether it’s enclosed in a cocoon of post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-colonial, foucaultian, post-saidian jargon but the quality of its primary research,” says Dalrymple.
While the author prefers the term ‘narrative historian’, what seems to be the flip side of being a best-selling author, is that he is largely disowned by the country’s academic historians.
get the full story and see video from CNN-IBN
Q: When did you start to really focus on your writing?
A: “About seven year ago but I didn’t tell people. In Hollywood writing a book is like a step down and for five years I literally fell off the face of the planet while I worked on this book. People were surprised that I was not producing any more movies and would ask me what I was doing. I’d just tell people I was working on lots of different films and that satisfied them. I didn’t want questions about writing a book because as a first time author I could not take that pressure.
It took me about two years just to sort out the logic, the rules of this world. I needed to understand how the pieces would fit together before I could write the narrative. But this really has now become my real love.”
Q: What is the appeal of writing for the young teen market?
A: “Eleven and 12 year olds don’t come into the room with their arms crossed waiting to be entertained. They are interested and get involved. When I speak to schools I will say I’m about to make my book into a movie and do they know anyone who might be interested in playing in the main roles? Hands shoot up and I get them up on stage, reading out of the book and playing the characters.”
Read the full interview at Yahoo News here.
Best-selling author Adriana Trigiani proves over and over again that there’s no place like home. The New York-based writer hails from the southwest Virginia town of Big Stone Gap, the setting for a trilogy of novels featuring Ave Maria Machesney. Trigiani has completed the fourth installment of her heroine’s journey, appropriately called “Home to Big Stone Gap.â€
read an excerpt from the novel and full story here
NEW YORK, Oct 31 (Reuters Life!) - Frank Beddor, best known for producing the comedy film “There’s Something about Mary,” began writing seven years ago — and says there’s no looking back.
His debut novel, “The Looking Glass Wars,” claims to tell the truth about Alice in Wonderland, or Princess Alyss, who fled with bodyguard Hatter Madigan to the real world after her mother, the queen, was overthrown by her older sister Redd. Alyss is later sucked back into Wonderland.
Read more here
Matthew Skelton, author of bestselling children’s book Endymion Spring, discusses his life, career and experience writing the novel.
Having his first novel plucked from an agent’s slush pile and commissioned as a movie let Matthew Skelton make the leap from a failed academic who once couch surfed across Europe to an adored author on a book tour that puts him up in posh hotels.
Yet more than creature comforts, Skelton says the success of “Endymion Spring,” a history-fueled fantasy that has been described as a “The Da Vinci Code” for children, has allowed him to escape the Ivory Tower and accept himself as a dreamer who relates best to adolescents.
“They don’t just read books — they live inside them,” Skelton, 35, says of the young readers whose enthusiasm for fiction made “Endymion Spring” a best seller the week it was published in August.
Link to the Yahoo News story.
Source: Toledo Blade
Either Mercedes Lackey is a good teacher or she had a keen audience last night. Not long into her talk about how one becomes a published writer, the audience of about 175 was finishing her sentences with her mantra: “Glue your derriere to the chair and write.â€
Lackey, who has published 70 books, offered several tidbits, such as send a completed book (not the commonly recommended three chapters and an outline), to an editor; do not hire an agent to promote your work (because you can do it better yourself), and be nice to your editor and publisher.
“Don’t make your editor’s life miserable. It’s already miserable: they live in New York.â€
(more…)
NEW YORK, Oct 24 (Reuters Life!) - Anthony Horowitz has been writing children’s books for 26 years but his teenage secret agent, Alex Rider, carved out a new path for him — action movies, and he thinks it’s awesome.Horowitz has written six adventure stories about Rider, a 14-year-old British schoolboy who battles villains as a secret agent, since the first in the series, “Stormbreaker,” became a best seller in 2000.
The year “Stormbreaker” was turned into feature film with London-based Horowitz, 50, writing the screenplay.
Horowitz is currently writing “Snakehead,” his seventh Alex Rider book, along with a screenplay for the next film. (more…)
