Not a whole lot of news on this front, just some reviews:
kimmie66 Aaron Alexovitch
In this latest Minx offering, Telly is a 23
rd century girl who (like most people) spends all of her time in the lairs—themed virtual reality environments. When she receives a suicide note from her best friend, Telly is devastated, but confused. Telly wouldn’t put it past Kimmie to fake the whole thing as a prank, plus there is the little problem of the fact that Telly has no idea what Kimmie’s real name is or where she lives or anything about her life outside the liars.
Exploring a life lived entirely on the virtual realm, Alexovitch explores the thin line between reality and virtual reality and asks what is real and what isn’t. Although the ending contains a slight message to “stop and smell the un-virtualized roses,” this is one of the strongest titles of the Minx line.
First Kiss (Then Tell): A Collection of True Lip-Locked Moments ed. Cylin Busby
This is a cute collection of short vignettes about first kisses. The range and caliber of young adult authors included is impressive (Jon Scieszka, Shannon (and Dean!) Hale, Nikki Grimes, Naomi Shihab Nye and Scott Westerfield--just to name a few.) The stories range from hilarious to heart-breaking, heart-stopping to disgusting. The anthology contains quotations from movie stars as well as kissing trivia interspersed with the stories, poems and comics.
Overall, it’s a very enjoyable, sweet read that puts the pain, romance, and laughter back into kissing, without the pressure of going further. A sure-hit for the chick-lit crowd.
Things -- particularly things to do with movies -- happen oddly, when they happen, and they never happen in the way you expect.
For example, back in 1996 Michael Reaves was working doing adventure cartoon serials at Dreamworks Animation. He started talking to me about an idea for something that could be a potential animated story, and we began talking about what we'd want to see animated and why, and that became an idea about a boy who finds himself in the middle of a war between two equally powerful forces, who joins a super-team consisting of versions of himself from different alternate realities to try and maintain the consmic balance.
We pitched it to executives, first at Dreamworks and then elsewhere, and watched them get increasingly confused and grumpy.
Somewhere in the winter of 1998 or 1999, Michael came up to my place, and we wrote it as a novel, pretty much as a Heinlein juvenile, because the treatments we did simply confused people and we were sure that if they read the novel they'd understand.
And then we discovered the novel seemed to confuse them too, and we sighed and we put it away and got on with our lives.
Last year, Michael reminded me of the book, and we took it out, dusted it off, sent it out to publishers and were happy when Harper Childrens wanted to publish it. They commissioned a lovely cover for it by James Jean.
The early reviews were very positive. Film and TV people started contacting my agent about it. And now, a decade later, I'm delighted and slightly bemused to report that it's just been optioned by Dreamworks Animation, who want to make it into a movie...
There's a moral there somewhere, you know, but I have no idea what it is.
