breakout session four: optioning your book for film

I don't know whether this is actually Breakout Session 4 or not. I have lost track.

Look at all the free shit I give you.

Well, kind of free.

I realize that a while back I started talking about the movie option for The Marbury Lens, and then I got sidetracked.

That happens.

I know a lot of people don't really know what it means when a book gets optioned for film, but here's the simplified version:

It is like selling your child to your next-door neighbor for a year or two.

If you are okay with selling your child to your next-door neighbor for a year or two, then you have to be willing to shrug off certain things -- like blood curdling pleas for help in the middle of the night, bad hygiene, and poor fashion choices, like Crocs or hairstyles evocative of Kim Jong Il.

Hmmm... is next-door supposed to be hyphenated?

How about blood curdling?

This is why we have copy editors.

Copy editors are like invisible angels that poop frosted raspberry cupcakes from the heavens.

Did I just hear a scream?

No matter.

I'll just crank up the Andrea Bocelli.

[If you knew me, you would laugh at that. I would rather die than crank up Andrea Bocelli. I do not like to get screamed at in Italian. It creeps me out.]

You can get a haircut when you come home. Now quit complaining.

There is a script.

I have it.

If you have read The Marbury Lens, then you know it is a huge story, with stories inside stories that go back as far as the late 1800s.

I realize that the only possible way you could make that child into a 100-minute movie is by rearranging some of the furniture in the playground.

Do playgrounds have furniture?

This is precisely why my childhood wasn't very fun.

Go outside and play on the coffee table, Drew... Or we'll sell you to the creepy man next door for a few years.

I am not complaining.

Don't get me wrong.

I am explaining, in my usual whimsy-infused manner.

I write books, not movies.

I watched a movie the other night with my family.

This is the truth.

As I sat there watching it (the part I did not sleep through), I thought the following quietly to myself:

If I wanted to write a movie like this, I would have to have a portion of my brain surgically removed, blended with margarine and candy corn, heated to a boil, and then injected back into my skull.

That did not sound like a good idea.

Listen: I am pretty much okay with anything anyone wants to do in movieland once I sign the paper.

It just has to be that way.

I write books.

But I do believe two things:

I believe The Marbury Lens will be a very good movie.

I also believe I would like a cupcake.

---

ingrid's bakery

I blog a lot.

It is practice.

But my philosophy is this: blogging is not writing.

Blogging is not-writing.

When people use language to communicate (whether written or spoken), there are actually two things going on: The words and the thoughts behind the words.

The words are like clothing; the thought is the nude form beneath.

Sometimes the clothing is so... um... form-fitting, that the thought and the outer layer -- the word -- are indistinguishable.

This is real concrete writing.

It can be bad writing at the wrong times, and it can uppercut you in the guts at others.

You have no idea what I am thinking about when I type these words.

Hint: Among other things, I am thinking about keystrokes. I am a bad typist who grew up using manual typewriters and carbon paper.

When I say carbon paper, I am thinking about sex.

My first typewriter was a Smith-Corona that came in its own black vinyl suitcase. Half of the ribbon was red.

I was thinking (not while typing) about practice and how it works.

To be a good pole-vaulter, you have to practice.

I have never pole-vaulted in my life.

Pole-vaulters do not only pole-vault all day long. If they want to be good, they do other things.

This is why standardization in education is going to destroy humanity and result in a massive economic/social/class catastrophe.

You can never practice at being creative if your path in life is reduced, without possible deviation, to the following:

( ) A.

( ) B.

( ) C.

( ) D.

Creativity solves problems.

The world has a lot of problems.

Like, what to do with all the carbon paper we did not use up in the 1980s.

Two years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts about why I hate YA.

People got mad at me.

They said, If you hate YA, why do you write it?

I do not write YA. That is just the clothing that you see. You need to call it something, so you call it YA.

I have published 4 novels. My 5th, 6th, and 7th are already on the calendar for publication at Macmillan and Simon and Schuster.

I never wrote a single one of those novels as YA.

I don't think I really know what YA is.

But I do know I hate it.

I never even heard of YA until I thought about publishing my first novel, and a good friend said, Oh, that's YA. 

And I was, like, Yay?

Yay for me.

Now I know what I write.

I have found the bridge between the clothing and the body.

Thank God.

I can live.

I do not read YA.

Is that an offensive shock? I mean, I read some books that people call YA, but I only read them because they are good. Not because they are YA.

And... um... to be honest, almost nothing that people call YA will get me past page five.

Sorry.

I am practicing.

Look: If you want to be a writer of any category or genre and that's all you read, you will never be a good writer.

Sorry, but that is the truth.

If you want to be a writer and you never read, um... you should quit now.

---

eden five needs you

I frequently get lost.

Oh.

NOW I remember why I started off on yesterday's post about writing after a pitch, as opposed to pitching after a write.

Because series writers have to do that.

It was not too long ago when I was finally able to talk about Passenger, which is my forthcoming novel, a sequel to The Marbury Lens.

When I made the announcement, my friend, the affable Michael Grant, said something like this:

Welcome to series hell, buddy.

Um.

No.

This is it.

Isn't it?

I absolutely never intended to write another book about Jack, Conner, and Marbury. It just happened.

Like poop or something.

I could not help it.

There will be nothing more on the subject of Marbury and Jack and Conner and the rest of them after this.

At least, I think so.

But then again, being a middle child, I have very poor impulse control.

I have a spastic impulse sphincter.

Anyway, the reason that I was thinking about series books is something that is purely personal and anecdotal on my part, so it may very likely be as wrong as discussing poop on a blog for two consecutive days, but it is this:

It seems that more and more young readers (and I am talking primarily about older teens), and YA librarians are looking for new reads which are not part of series.

I don't know. Maybe it's just the kids I hang around with.

That sounds creepy, doesn't it?

So, yesterday, I stumbled onto this website -- a nice looking website, by the way -- run by a business that produces generic-type covers for self-pubbed/indie/e-books. I'd really like to share the site, but I would probably get a bag of flaming poop on my doorstep.

The covers are very well-done.

In fact, they look like just about every cover out there nowadays.

You know what I mean.

I hope.

In fact, I started to laugh until I cried thinking up titles to their "Paranormal" collection.

Do this:

Look at the latest Paranormal/Romance/YA book cover.

Pick any one you'd like, and open it in another tab, right alongside this post.

Do it.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Okay.

Are you looking at the cover?

Good, my friends.

Good.

Now say aloud the following:

I just took an upper-decker in your toilet.

Sorry.

I am a bad person.

You might have to look upper-decker up in the urban dictionary, or something.

A two-day streak of nonstop poop references.

Why do YA Dysto/Para/Rom covers have to be so lame and generic?

Whatever happened to the days when publishers made covers like this:

Seriously.

Now here is an author who probably started with a title.

And a cover.

"Stand back! I've got a clarinet, and I'm not afraid to use it!"

Seriously.

And... Satan? Who knew Satan played tambourine?

Grimacing.

And I'm not sure, but maybe "lesbian" meant something different in the 1950s than "lesbian" means today.

I also like this cover:

Um.

Uh.

On second thought, "It hurts when I poop!" is also a very funny thing to say aloud when you look at the current slew of covers for Dysto/Para/Rom YA, too.

I believe I am now finished talking about poop.

Who knows?

---

the pulse-o-matic

Last year, in 2011, I sold three books for publication.

Nothing ever seems really good enough for me, but then again I was a middle child.

This year, I will sell some books, too.

I only mention that because the books I sold last year are already written.

Finished.

That's why I can put quotes from them on my website.

I've said it before: I don't see how writers can pitch an idea about something they intend to write, but haven't yet written.

I mean... I would give it a shot, but the pressure must be pure hell.

It would be like pooping on command.

With an audience.

"You! Poop now!"

Even if I had a gun to my head, I don't think I could break routine.

Am I finished talking about pooping?

Yes. Yes, I am.

---

searching for her invisible silo

I did it.

The bio is finished.

It is vague and thin-shelled, because it does not tell about all these other things I have done in my life and where I went to school and stuff like that. I am not going to put it here, and it is not on my website, either, because I do not like that kind of stuff.

I have been restless.

I am not a good person when I am restless.

I am about ready to begin something new, but it isn't there yet. I know when things are there, and this is not.

There.

So, out of restlessness and my intense avoidance toward completing such tasks as taking author photos and crafting vague, thin-shelled bios which make me sound neither heroic nor accomplished by any stretch of the imagination, I decided to re-read through the last beast of a novel I'd finished writing this past October.

I still think it is good.

But I found about four typos in it.

Typos make me insane.

How can typos remain invisible through so many sessions of reading, rewriting, and editing?

Typos are like ghosts.

Here is one that made me want to break something: I typed od in a sentence where I had intended to type of.

How the hell can you do that and not even see the little bastard for months?

I hate typos.

Sure, you think, I am finished writing... now I will just do a quick read-through for spelling errors. And you read a few hundred pages a day and a misspelled, two-letter preposition camouflages itself amongst multisyllabic vessels of presumed significance.

And then I cringe, what if THEY think I really am an idiot who uses words like "od"?

This is what happens when I don't have enough to do.

---

the dragon parade

The ordeal is over.

I am not talking about 2011, which was not really the terrible year all the newspapers I've been looking at have claimed it to be.

I am talking about the author photo mission.

Now all I have to do is make up that damned biography and I'll be off the hook.

When my first book, Ghost Medicine, came out, I was greatly relieved that there would be no author photo on the dust jacket. But I also did not want any biographical info on it, either.

I believe I actually suggested something like this:

Andrew Smith is the guy who wrote this book.

For some reason, that suggestion did not fly with the higher-ups.

Oh well.

We took the author photos inside some old abandoned clubhouse buildings near the lake where I live. Over the years, kids have converted these old shacks into sex dens or something. I think they look cool, but then again, I like the art that can be found in destruction.

In fact, a very important scene in my book Winger, which is coming out early next year from Simon and Schuster, takes place inside a building very much like the one in our photographs.

Just so you know what it looks like there.

About one mile from my house, if you follow footpaths through the hills (there are no roads here), there is also a small family graveyard, where we took some of the pictures.

They just don't let people bury family members on their property these days.

Well... I mean, you know... if you do bury your family members in your yard, nowadays you usually don't let people know about it. It's got to impact resale value and shit like that.

Anyway, in the graveyard, the most recent headstone (there are only five of them) is dated 1933. You can't help but wonder how tough it must have been to bury a family member on your own property during the Great Depression.

Three of the graves are for children. One of them -- a kid named Eddie -- died in 1919.

On New Year's Eve, when we took the photos, I had a dream about Eddie. Actually, I have been thinking about that kid for two nights in a row now. I am probably going to go back to the grave today, but I am a little creeped out about it.

I know Eddie's there. I guess that's a weird thing to say, but... he is.

Eddie is a cool name for a kid from 1919. Not Edward. Eddie.

In 1860, the population of the planet Earth was about 1.3 billion. I mention that because one of the people in the graveyard was born in 1860. I think it was Eddie's grandfather.

In the 1860s, people sometimes named their kid Phineas.

P.T. Barnum's first name was Phineas.

P.T. Barnum was alive in 1860.

He is falsely credited with devising the calculus that There is a sucker born every minute.

If I extract out the math, given the world's current population, there is now a sucker being born about every 14 seconds.

That is real progress, and it makes me want to breed.

I hear kids frequently moan about how boring their lives are.

I think, as I sit here at the beginning of 2012, that boredom and discouragement piled up invisibly as we invented more and more shit to entertain ourselves -- like iPods and Xboxes and smart phones -- shit like that, which really build isolating technological igloos around human beings.

It's too late for a lot of kids. They will never dig their way out of all that isolation and boredom and discouragement.

I know. Not very cheerful.

I bet the kids who lived by Eddie, on the side of a lake where people raised cattle and horses and grew cherries in 1919 never complained about being bored.

Anyway, here are two pictures we took on New Year's Eve. The Black and White photo was taken in the graveyard.

 

---

mind the gap, jack.