Gayle Forman's Blog, page 11

stuck, and unstuck

William writes:

I am stuck.

I'm writing a novel.

I'm halfway in and it's fine.

I know how it ends (like the last 1/4 of the novel) and that's fine.

The problem is the gap. I'm not sure how to fill it. I don't want to repeat what I've written so far and I can't think of what else the characters will do.

Ever had this trouble?

Um, yeah.

I will admit, I didn't the first two times. My first two novels flew out of me like bullets, in part, I think because there was like zero expectation on them—both ...

i'm really tired of bad movies

It is bad enough that I am not an 18-24-year-old boy.

That's who all the movies get made for anyhow and really, I don't CARE about Transformers or any movies based on a toy or a cereal or starring Megan Fox.

And I'm not a snob either. I like a "Hollywood" movie as long as it is what my friend Sean and I dubbed a PESF—a Perfectly Executed Superficial Film. The winner of the all-time best PESF=Clueless.

And I even like kid films, which is handy because I see a lot of them these days. How To Train...

looking for twilight in all the wrong places

I probably should not make fun of the trend of breathlessly searching for THE NEXT TWILIGHT BOOK PHENOMENON as MTV.com recently did in this article. Because once upon a time, The Daily Beast touted If I Stay as "The Next Twilight?" which, although quite flattering, wasn't really apt. Though I'm not complaining; it sure did not hurt the interest and early buzz factor of the book.

But I think the MTV article gets it wrong, or mostly wrong, as does every trend chaser who goes looking for the...

one of these things is not like the other

Reason # 29,843 why I love YA.

I very belatedly came across this picture, from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association 2009 Book of the Year Awards last fall. This is the shot of the winners:

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One of these people doesn't look like the rest.

Now, I have to offer this caveat, that the NAIBA award—like the recent Indie Book Awards—is a bookseller award, and these tend to be far less hoighty-toighty and penis-centric than the very male-centric literary awards because booksellers choose t...

bea-onanza

Okay, first off, let me just say that I have no photos and am therefore officially lame. My digital camera died a few months ago and I've been using my iPhone ever since, which takes marginally crappy photos. I don't want to buy a new crappy digital camera. I want to buy a fancy expensive digital camera. But I also want to buy a house, so, no big-ticket items. Therefore, no photos, therefore, lameness. But, hey, I'm a writer, I never claimed to be a Visual Artiste. Okay, now that we've...

i'm practically on glee!

I don't know what I'm more excited about. This full-page ad in this week's Entertainment Weekly:

Or the fact that this is the cover of said issue of Entertainment Weekly:

It's not that I'm a huge Glee fan. I will be a huge Glee fan eventually, when I watch the whole season on DVD (I can't commit to a season of network). But I am a HUGE, HUGE fan of Jane Lynch, from the Christopher Guest movies (oh, the wonderfully controlling lesbian dog trainer in Best in Show) to her fantastic cameos in...

a friday five

I've never done this Friday Five thing before, but it's popular with bloggers and I've got a bunch of small tidbits and some catch up to do, so I'll steal the idea for the week.

#1 Incentive to finish up that manuscript?
I know many of you are budding YA authors and Penguin and Amazon have this very cool Breakthrough Novelist Award. Who knew? This is its third year and this year there is a prize for YA fiction! Per Amazon "The 2010 competition is open to unpublished and previously...

randomness

I have nothing of note to say right now about life or the publishing industry. I'm feeling a moment of, if not calm, then calm-ishness and gratitude. They tend to go hand in hand.

Spring is here—theoretically. In fits and starts at least. Two weeks of perfect weather that we had to pay for with a week of raw, frigid November weather (45 degrees and rainy. In May? I want a complaints hotline for the weather!) But feeling the warm sun on my skin makes me feel good, like my bones are storing up t...

mind my words?

The funny thing about blogging is that you do it, most often, sitting at your messy desk in the corner of your living room—at least that's where I do it. It's quiet. There's no one here. Except sometimes maybe there's a two-year-old watching Barney's "Let's Play School" for the zillionth time a few feet away, and yes, you know the words to all the songs about sitting in a car and buckling up and all the other helpful stuff Barney teaches, and no, I will not disparage the dinosaur because...

the blurbing game

It's so funny to think that those little quotes on the backs of books are so fraught with politics and insideriness and all kinds of ickiness. And sometimes they're not, but all too often, blurbing—as the practice of one author saying nice things about another author's book is called—is just one giant game of insider baseball. (Is there even such a thing as insider baseball or did I just make that up?)

I don't think I realized this with my first book because I had beginner's luck. I wrote You...