Getting off to See the Wizard

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Dorothy rolling in the hay with the Scarecrow? C’mon, we all know they wanted to get naked together. That’s just one of the bizarre, fanfic couplings that Fleshbot has , um, uncovered on LiveJournal.

"D-Dorothy?"

Dorothy looked quickly over her shoulder, but her
own movement against her hand caused to moan loudly again as her eyes
met the Scarecrow’s.

Without a conversation, or her needing to persuade him, he came over between her thighs and kissed her thoroughly.

Dorothy
was surprised to feel his cloth mouth feeling rather erotic on her
mouth, making her even more wet than she was before he walked in.

She grinded her hips against his straw structure, and even that felt right.

She looked up at him with frustrated eyes, "I want you inside me."

“I Don’t Think We’re in Los Angeles anymore, Toto.”

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The New York  Times reports that fat is sexy is Mauritania, where women force feed themselves to put on pounds.

A 2001 government survey of 68,000 women found that one in five between ages 15 and 49 had been deliberately overfed. And nearly 70 percent – and even more among teenagers – said they did not regret it.

[…]Other cultures prize corpulent women. But Mauritania may be unique in the lengths it has gone to achieve its vision of female beauty. For decades, the Mauritanian version of a Western teenager’s crash diet was a crash feeding program, designed to create girls obese enough to display family wealth and epitomize the Mauritanian ideal.

Centuries-old poems glorify women immobilized by fat, moving so slowly they seemed to stand still, unable to hoist themselves onto camels without the aid of men’s willing hands…

Belated Congratulations

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…to Michael  Daniels, one of the students in my "Introduction to TV Writing" class at UCLA Extension, who has landed a job as a staff writer on the CW series ONE TREE HILL. I’m not surprised at all. The goal of the class (a course which is also taught by writer/producers like Matt Witten and William Rabkin)  is for the students to complete a beat sheet that they can use to write their TV episodic spec script. But Michael grasped the concepts so quickly, and his first draft beat sheet was so good, that I told him to set aside the class assignments and just go right to script. Writing a script isn’t part of the class, but I thought if he did anything else he’d be wasting his time and money. His script was terrific…and at the end of the session, I advised him to stop taking classes…he was already as good as any professional TV writer I knew. It was time for him to get his work out there in the marketplace. Within a few weeks, his spec script landed an agent at a top agency and he was being sent out on pitches. He didn’t land any freelance gigs…instead, he got right on staff. That accomplishment alone should tell you how good this guy is. I have no doubt that Michael will rise quickly through the ranks and will be running his own show in the not-too-distant future. I just hope he remembers to thank me when he wins his Emmy…

Civilization

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Monkandtwoassist
I found an Internet cafe in  Fontainebleau, so I can finally connect to the outside world. My novel MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS comes out on Monday, but I have already started receiving emails from people who bought the book as early as last Thursday. I look forward to hearing your comments about it!

This is the first book I’ve written that I  haven’t been around to see published…so  if you want to send me pictures of the book on display at a store near you, I would appreciate it. That way,  I can vicariously enjoy the feeling of publication. I will post some of the photos here.

bois-le-roi

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Greetings from the tiny village of bois-le-roi france, where i am visiting my mother in law. She has no internet acess or even a computer, so I am attempting this post with my blackberry (thank god there is cellular coverage here or I’d be cut off from the outside world). FAST TRACK wrapped on Sunday (the day was spent  on second unit and insert work). The wrap party went into the wee hours of Monday morning and then I hit the road to France with my family. We stopped in Heidelburg, Nuremburg, and Strasbourg among other places along the way. It was nice, but I was exhausted. I have been sleeping a lot the last few days (about 10 hours a night!) and going on long walks, thinking about the next monk book. I am trying to relax a bit but it is taking some effort. I am eager to get in the editing room..but I have to wait for the director’s cut first. I haven’t read a book in ages, so once the monk outline is done, that’s next on my to-do list.

Mr. Monk and the Rave Review

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The Monk superfans at the Monk Fun Page have given MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS  a rave review. They say, in part:

Since  we’re now on the fourth novel you  might expect the plots and characters              to begin to blur a little, but the opposite is true. Each book is delightfully unique. Maybe it’s just me, but I see more depth and substance in
this novel than in the first three, which were all solidly entertaining  in their own right. The exploration of the two relationships between Monk and his assistants is fascinating.  The novel touches on the similarities, the differences, the humor and the  evolution of both relationships. Great stuff.

Book Burning

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I’ve been so caught up doing  my movie, that I have fallen way behind on everything…and missed  my brother Tod’s Jewcy column in late May on the Kansas City bookstore that burned it’s entire stock of books as, the store owner  says, a "a funeral pyre for thought in America today" and as "a wakeup call to all who value books and ideas." My brother wrote:

If [the bookstore owners] don’t see the hypocrisy in their actions, perhaps they need only to look down the road a few miles at the Blue Valley School District, where debates raged over appropriate titles being offered to students, prompting the formation of the PABBIS-like ClassKC.org (Citizen for Literary Standards in Schools), a group with their own stringent ideas about literacy. If burning 20,000 books for the cause of literacy is an act of art, how does that art change if the belief system of the group changes? I have no doubt that [the bookstore owners] love books, just as I have no doubt that many of the parents who comprise ClassKC.org love books (or at least the Book), and thus I wonder: If the action is the same, does it matter what the cause is?  If ClassKC.org hosted a book burning in the name of literacy awareness in the schools of Blue Valley, too, the same books would burn.

The bigger question is… what the hell is going on in Kansas City?

Potter’s Literary Eco-system

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The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about the "the whole literary eco-system spawned by the series" and briefly touched on the fan fiction.

At least a dozen new or updated Harry Potter-related titles will likely
be published this year, according to Cambridge Information Group Inc.’s
R.R. Bowker. These aren’t the kind of faux Potter fantasy tales that
are posted on the Web, though there are plenty of those. (One site,
harrypotterfanfiction.com, says it holds more than 34,000 stories and
receives in excess of 40 million hits a month.)

[…] There are limits. Copyright law will prevent other authors from
offering new titles using Ms. Rowling’s characters and settings unless
they’re obvious parodies. “Boundaries exist,” says David S. Korzenik, a
publishing attorney with the firm Miller Korzenik Sommers LLP.
“Characters can be copyrighted, and settings can be protected,” he
says. “But if you are doing a parody you can go forward with the
understanding that the parody won’t be book eight or nine of the series
but rather is trying to deliver something very different or
transformative.”

Most authors don’t challenge amateur authors who write tales about
favorite characters as long as it’s not commercially distributed, he
says. While it’s technically a copyright infringement, “fan fiction” is
usually perceived as a way for fans to enjoy themselves while creating
further interest in the original work. “Nobody views it as a
substitute,” says Mr. Korzenik. Guidebooks and predictions of future
events are protected as well, as long as authors don’t borrow too
heavily from Ms. Rowling’s work.