Letters from Jones Dairy Elementary School Part II

Time has been getting away from me lately, and my scanner has been playing up, foiling attempts to transfer illustrations from paper to screen. But I finally got there.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that, in March last year, 5th Grade students from Brian Clopper's class in North Carolina wrote lots of letters and drew brilliant pictures of the characters from Island of Fog. I posted everything here.

Well, ditto this year, with a new class. I'm now proud to present...

    Letters from Jones Dairy Elementary School Part II

Thanks every-so-muchly, Brian, for continuing to support my books! I hope you and your class have enough time to get through the other two books before the summer break. :-)

Many of the students asked about a movie of the book: Is there going to be one? If so, can I be in it? Unfortunately I have no control whatsoever on this subject unless I fund a movie myself, and sure, I could probably scrape up a couple thousand of dollars if I was serious about it -- but that would pay for a second camera and a plate of sandwiches and not much else. It's just not going to happen unless an actual movie producer takes an interest.

In the last few months I've had some excitement on the movie front via my agent, Whitt Brantley at WMBT Literary, Film & Television, but nothing has come of it so there's really nothing much to talk about here. For a couple of weeks it seemed like my books were being talked about by a few Big Important Types, and I had stars in my eyes... but everything fizzled out. This happens from time to time, so I've learned to keep a lid on it and not give up my day job just yet.

And speaking of stars in my eyes, I'm guessing some of you have heard of a certain 11-year-old girl named Jackie Evancho, who has an amazing singing voice and came second in last year's America's Got Talent TV show? It turns out that she read and enjoyed Island of Fog a while back, and as a result I had the opportunity to send her signed copies of all three. Her slightly older brother, Jacob, also liked the book; he's the one I mentioned in a previous post. Jackie and Jacob's mom, Lisa, was still reading it last I heard, while their dad, Mike, said he'd get me a picture of Jackie and Jacob together with the book. Jackie is incredibly famous for someone her age, with over 40,000 Facebook fans. I have nearly 90 fans on my own Facebook page, so I have a way to go yet. (If you look, you'll see that both Mike Evancho and Jacob Evancho are fans of Island of Fog, which is nice.)

One of these days I'm hoping to get an email from Steven Spielberg saying, "Hey, read your book and want to make a movie. Interested?" I'll probably reply something like, "Mmm, yeah, I guess."