Bring on the Movie Adaptations

Summer is only eight days old, and I'm already back from my big family vacation. My sister got married in Southern California last weekend, so I took a break from my novels' fantasy worlds to visit Orange County's Fantasylands. Now I'm back to my own version of reality—and back to squeezing in work time between hanging out with my kids for the summer.

One of my goals for the season was to make sure I read Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret before the movie comes out this fall. The book initially looked daunting because of its enormous size, but I didn't realize hundreds of gorgeously hand-drawn illustrations accompany the novel. Not only did I sit down and rapidly devour Hugo's story of movie magic and automatons, but I immediately afterward read it out loud to my six-year-old son. Now we're ready for November's movie adaptation (which stars Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, and Chloe Moretz).  I can't wait!

Continuing with the tradition of seeing movies after we've read the books, my eleven-year-old and I will be heading to the last [sniff] Harry Potter film in July, and my husband and I will need to check out the movie version of Kathryn Stockett's The Help.  My husband tends to read whatever I read, so we've formed our own mini book club that includes theater field trips, although he didn't get as geekily excited as I did when I discovered that the movie poster for The Help matches the colors of the book's cover:

So, when I'm not juggling kids and book revisions this summer, I'll be ducking into theaters and contemplating the age-old question: Can a movie be as good as the book on which it's based?

Happy reading, and happy movie watching.

Vacationing from the Blogosphere

My school-year work days without kids in the house are seriously numbered, so I'm spending my remaining weeks before summer vacation writing during every spare moment I can. What I'm working on is extremely exciting, and I hope to be able to share more about it eventually.  Yet there's a clock ticking away my time to get it done. I love my kids to bits, but school-day writing time is so precious and beautiful.

In other words, I won't be blogging much here or at Suburban Vampire until at least July. I hope everyone is doing well and writer friends are able to throw themselves into their own writing projects. 

More later...

I Finished the Rough Draft!!

So, I was just over on Twitter, checking to see when I started writing my current work-in-progress. Here's what I found:

I'm happy to announce that I finished the rough draft tonight, just five and a half weeks after I wrote that first tweet about the book on March 17!

I have never, NEVER in my entire life written a book in such a short amount of time. How in the world did I do it?  Here's what's changed compared to past manuscripts:

1. Both my kids are now in school full time. This factor alone has made a huge difference in my workday. My son skipped ahead from kindergarten to first grade in January, so suddenly I found myself with longer blocks of writing time than I've ever experienced. (He's loving first grade, by the way—and he's tall for his age, so there's no need to envision a scared little six-year-old.)

2. This is the shortest book I've ever written. It currently stands at just over 47,000 words, which is somewhat on the small side, even for young adult fiction.  I'm guessing it will bulk up a little when I go through and edit, but it's a story that doesn't need to be overly long.  As I said in a recent tweet, my manuscript that's currently out with publishers feels like my big-budget movie, while this work-in-progress in my little indie drama.  It could easily be scored to an acoustic guitar.

3. The story is a contemporary tale, set in areas right around where I currently live.  Typically, I write historical fiction, which obviously requires a great deal of research.  Or else I set my books in places where I formerly lived, which requires double-checking info to make sure I've gotten things like street names and tree varieties straight.  This time around I made it pretty easy on myself.  If I needed to feel some inspiration for my setting, all I had to do was walk my dog.

Now I need to revise, polish, and edit before sending the book out to my wonderful critique partners.  But the skeleton has been created.  I can't wait to share more about it.