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I pre-ordered HP 7. Got and email that it was sent Tues. night at 10:55 pm. I DID NOT GET IT TODAY!!!!!!!!! I am sooo ticked. Now I have to wait till Monday. Grr...

Saw HP 5 today. HP 5, the book, was my least favorite. HP 5, the movie, is also my least favorite. Boring. Too slow. And, yes, HP is getting cuter, but, IMO, he's worked out too much. I actually found it a bit distracting to his character. Mostly, there's so much in the books, that the movie seems fluff in comparison. Maybe I'm just PO'd that I didn't get my book.

Not a spoiler, because I predict everyone is right! Yeah, this book is going to be twice as thick as HP 5 because she's kindly included all the possible endings for her readers. If you think HP will die, go to pg. so and so...

Everybody wins.  Ha!

I've been practicing. I won't say where. But it's where no one else can hear me. Which is bad, because I'm the only one at home and really shouldn't have to hide more than that...

I was practicing my pitch. You know the one. When you finally get the agent call. And they ask, "What else have you written?"
Ummm, uhhh, well, there's this one about, you know, the girl, who has a crush, and then her friend dies, and snivel, whimper, sigh.

Boring.

It's like writing that $*%&*#&%^ synopsis. Details, details, details. Bore 'em with all the sundry details. But at least, on paper, I can cut, and revise, and try it over and over till I'm happy.

So, anyone else thinking about keeping their summaries next to the phone, ready for "the call?"


And another thing. Serious question this time. If you are writing a mg novel with a magical element, is it important for the reader to know where it came from? Nothing else is out of the ordinary. Just that one object that creates havoc. Thoughts, anyone?

I'm collecting some 'useless information' for a WIP and found some interesting facts about some famous creators. I thought it would be fun to share just a few.

* When Beethoven was a child, he made such a poor impression on his music teachers that he was pronounced hopeless as a composer.

* Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water over his head.

* Mozart wrote the nursery rhyme "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" at the age of five.

* Leonardo da Vinci spent twelve years painting the Mona Lisa's lips.

*During his entire life, van Gogh only sold one painting, Red Vineyard at Aries.

* The name for Oz in The Wizard of Oz was thought up when the author, L. Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N and O-Z, hence Oz.

* During his entire lifetime. Herman Melville's timeless classic of the sea, Moby Dick, only sold fifty copies.

* Guiness World Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from public libraries.

* Virginia Woolf wrote all her books standing up.

* Tom Sawyer was the first novel written on a typewriter.

* Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, smoked forty cigars a day for the last years of his life. He was born in 1835 when Halley's Comet appeared. He died in 1910 when Halley's Comet returned.

* Shakespeare spelled his own name several different ways.

* Ernest Vincent Wright wrote the fifty-thousand word novel Gatsby without any word containing "e". (Ok..this is hard for me to believe.)

* Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."

* Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey decimal category.

* Hans Christian Anderson was word-blind. He never learned to spell correctly, and his publishers always found errors in his manuscripts.

* Charles Dickens never finished his schooling. He was also an insomniac, who believed his best chance of sleeping was in the center of a bed facing directly north.

All of these useless bits of information have been gathered, pretty much verbatim, from the book titled The Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham & The Useless Information Society.