Today we have more 2k8 authors dreaming about that glamorous red carpet Hollywood premier. First, Teri Brown, author of, Read My Lips, dreams about the stars for her book.

Teri: I think the movie’s already playing in my mind and I have very definite ideas about who’s playing which character. For Serena, the main character, who is also deaf, I can see Keisha Castle-Hughes bringing a great deal of strength and sensitivity to the role.




Hayden Panettiere is perfect for Patrice, the self-involved leader of the sorority. She has the right combination of sassiness and self assertiveness.



For Miller, my dark intelligent hero, I would have to choose, Milo Ventimiglia from his Gilmore Girls days, because… yum.

Barrie Summy, author of, I So Don’t Do Mysteries, has kept her movie dreams a family affair.

Barrie: My kids are lined up at the kitchen counter, munching on their afternoon snack. I mention the Class of 2k8’s upcoming blog on movie roles for our books.

Child #4 (Daughter, aged 7 years) has the most suggestions. Even more than me, so we’re letting her run the show. (pun intended)

First off, she’d like a starring role. As in the starring role. She does have the shoes for it.




So, Child #4 will play Sherry Baldwin, 13 year-old reluctant detective.

Our diva is willing to work with Mylie Cyris of Hannah Montana fame. If Mylie agrees to a more minor role and puts on a little weight. Presumably, makeup can manufacture a face full of freckles. So, Mylie Cyrus for Junie the Best Friend.

Next up is Drake Bell of Drake & Josh who will play Josh Morton, Sherry’s boyfriend.



Child #4 vaguely remembers Lindsey Lohan from Freaky Friday and awards her the part of Amber, older bossy cousin with a driver’s license. And while we’re doing the Freaky Friday thing, let’s snag Jamie Lee Curtis for the stepmother aka The Ruler.

Now, (drum roll and bright lights, please), we’re thrilled to intro to the silver screen the extremely talented, extremely fun, extremely persuasive Mr. Cameron Williams. This guy is so good he can easily handle all the adult male roles: a mean ostrich farmer, a heavily-accented French chef, a cute zoo security guard, and a dorky dad. Go Mr. Williams! (You know you want to see who this guy is. Go ahead and click.) CLICK HERE.

P.S. No matter how much Child #4 wheedles and whines and stamps her cute little high-heeled feet, there is no room for Sponge Bob in the movie I So Don’t Do Mysteries!

If My Book Were a Movie...

Most writers dream of that big movie deal, even given the warnings from other writers that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Unless you are Stephen King, you don’t get to write the script yourself, you don’t get a say in who plays your characters and you don’t get to watch it being filmed.

But that doesn’t stop us from dreaming! All this week, 2k8 authors are going to be telling you who they would want to play their characters if their book were a movie. First up, is Nancy Viau, author of Samantha Hanson Has Rocks In Her Head.

Nancy: Oooh, this if fun, but I don’t watch enough movies to be good at this! (Well, I do, actually; I just don’t remember the actors’ names…*runs off to do online research because it’s a fun time-waster*)

For my main character, Samantha, I like Miranda Cosgrove from Drake and Josh, but she’s a bit older than my main character. Can I ask for a great make-up artist that will make her look much younger? And Abigail Breslin, the star of Little Miss Sunshine, would also “rock” as my little scientist. She’d have to dye her lovely hair brown, though. Or, how about Marlene Lawston? She was on Flight Plan. She has a mischievous smile that I love!

Abigail! Miranda!

For Sam’s sister, Jen, I like Kay Panabaker. I just remember her from Summerland and think she could pull off the bossy big sister act. When she auditions, she’d have to give me major attitude. Not quite Paris Hilton attitude, but close. And speaking of attitude… let Ellen Page (star of Juno) audition while we’re at it. She’s such a rising star!

And for the mom, give me Eva Mendes, or Debra Messing, maybe. I want an actor who looks like she would work for a greeting card company writing birthday verse. And she needs to be quirky and obsessive enough to bake and serve birthday cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner just to keep her in the birthday mood. Ha!

OK, director (don’t even ask me who this would be), let’s get this show on the road! ACTION!

Next, Terri Clark, author of Sleepless, dishes on who could play her characters if her book was a movie.

Terri: I always do a character sheet for my books and one of my favorite things to do is troll magazines and the web for pics that best represent my characters. Therefore this is an easy and totally fun question for me to answer.

My heroine, Trinity Michaels, is a teen version of Evanesence's Amy Lee. I love her dark beauty.

My hero, Dan Devlin, is none other than Kyle XY's Matt Dallas. (I adore that show and Matt! Look at those eyes.)

And my uber-creepy villain, Rafe Stevens, is portrayed by Peter Firth's serial killer character in White Angel. (Doesn't he look scary?)

(We agree!)

Tomorrow, more 2k8 authors will dish on who they dream of doing their movie!

Where Jody's Ideas Erupt

Before we start on Jody today, we have some awesome newsy items to announce. Darcy Patterson, teacher, writer and reader extraordinaire, has begun a year-long series on us, the Class of 2k8! (We heart us some Darcy!) She begins, appropriately enough, with Jody Feldman! Also featured last Friday in Book Muncher, was a great review of Bewitching Season by our own Marissa Doyle.

MORE JODY!

Remember, yesterday Jody told you about:
1. Her habit of studying, reading and writing with background noise;
2. Her first experience at sleep-away camp; and,
3.The reason she strives for strong endings.

Which two were true and which was the lie?

Truth is, Jody turned down her chance to go to sleep-away camp because, at that time, she was more afraid of walking in without a friend than the thought of finding a snake in her cabin.

Today is the last day of Jody Feldman’s debut party. It’s been a wonderful week and 2k8 wishes her book, The Gollywhopper Games enormous success. We leave you with a clear image of where Jody does her writing.

Jody: I don’t work at Starbuck’s ... strong coffee smells give me a headache. I have been known, on rare occasions to pick myself up and write while I eat at St. Louis Bread Co. (which most of you know as Panera). Most of my writing, however, happens at home.

It would be easiest to say that all my writing gets done here, at my desk (my brand new computer!). Then this blog would be over and you could go about your business. And I could live a neat, orderly life. But I just can’t turn off the idea machine. And I need to pay immediate attention to those voices which often appear out of nowhere.



So backs of envelopes and old Post-Its are popular in my car. (Yes, I wait until the light turns red.)

On many occasions, I’ve written on the bottom of Kleenex or Puffs boxes when I’m in bed.

This is my editing spot. The old, green, comfy couch in the den.

And here, at the side of my house, I wrote huge chunks of The Gollywhopper Games on a pad of paper much like this. Or maybe it was earlier sheets of this pad. I don’t remember, and I’m sad to say I didn’t save them.

Where do work? Where do you write? Where do ideas erupt for you?

Two Truths and One Lie...

Trust Jody Feldman, (2k8’s queen of puzzles,) to give us a game for today’s blog! Can anyone figure out which is the truth and which is the lie?

1. From my first homework assignment through my last college project, I could not study if it was quiet. I would read with the radio on or answer social studies questions in front of the TV. If you had asked me what song had just played or what show had just aired, I couldn’t have told you unless I had happened to take a break at that time. If a band had marched through with cymbals crashing near my ears, I may have looked up, but I would have continued with the science text or with my math problems. However, if two people were in the room carrying on even the quietest of conversations, I couldn’t concentrate. Today, I don’t need noise when I write or revise, but I often listen to music or have the TV playing in the next room. Some things never change, though. If another person is in my house, not even talking to anyone, it’s hard for me to put two words together.

2. When I was 10 years old, I went to the same sleep-away summer camp that my 11-year-old cousin was attending. It might have been great except for the fact that she was signed up for the two-week session and I was only allowed to go for one week. When I got there, my worst fears were confirmed. Not only was I in a different cabin, she’d made all sorts of friends without me. Don’t get me wrong, she did her 11-year-old best to include me, but while I was trying to keep up, the other girls in my own cabin were forming friendships. Now, one week isn’t a lot of time unless you’re a shy, homesick kid who doesn’t know how to jump right in. Thank goodness there are snakes in wooded areas. (Snakes, she said? Yeah, snakes.) The second morning there, I bounded out of bed at the sound of an ear-piercing shriek before I even knew I was awake. One of my cabin mates had gone to the bathroom, and when she came back inside, she’d let a little green snake slither in. It was just a garter snake, and I’d seen many in our yard at home. With all the other girls huddled in the top bunks, I picked the snake up right behind its head, carried it down the path (the other girls were now following me), and I let it loose near the boys’ village. As the newfound hero and resident snake police, well, let’s just call this a happily ever after.

3. All writers know that endings are hard. I discovered that early in 7th grade. We were to turn in a piece of writing that told something about ourselves and our lives. As a girl who’d been blessed with a white-picket-fence existence, who was little traveled and who had no extraordinary experiences that would lend ink to two full pages (wide-lined paper, hand written), I turned to the most exciting thing in my life right then – our pumpkin vines. My brothers and I had saved seeds from the last year’s jack-o-lantern. Late in the winter we’d planted the seeds indoors and when the threat of frost was gone, we’d transplanted the seedlings to a small plot of garden in our backyard. Pumpkin plants don’t understand the confines of a garden. They proceeded to conquer the yard with their spiraling vines and occasional orange flowers. For my assignment, I wrote that story in great detail and ended by explaining that the vines produced two large pumpkins and four small ones. I was just glad to turn in the paper and be done with it, as lame as it felt. The teacher, however, was quite enthralled by my description, but she minced no words in describing her disappointment by the abrupt and weak ending. That’s how the story ended, though. What else did she want? I’ll never know. I didn’t ask. It was that innocent paper, however, that made me keenly aware of endings in books and movies and stories of all kinds. And it’s what drives me, this day, to strive for strong endings, ones that won’t disappoint that teacher.

Can you guess which one is the lie? And while you're waiting for the truth to be revealed in tomorrow's blog you can read more about Jody here.

Interview With a Game Master

Today we get to know Jody Feldman, our resident puzzle expert, better.

2k8: Can you tell us how the book came about? How did you begin writing it?

After that day when I was inspired by the 5th grader, reality struck. How do you go about writing a book that might, if you’re lucky and talented, stand the slightest chance of satisfying a reader firmly attached to the crown jewel of Dahl-dom? First step, start thinking about what made that book so special. Knowing I didn’t want to waste a million words listing those qualities when I could have been using other words to write my own book, I turned to a more relevant question. What passions did I have in me to write the best book I could possibly write? Cookies popped into mind. Pizza. Doughnuts. It was past lunch time.

I have been a subscriber to Games Magazine (games, as in crossword puzzles, brainteasers, etc.) since its inaugural issue. I’d love to say that at the moment when I was trying to figure out what to write about, the mailman delivered the latest edition, but it probably didn’t happen that way. At some point though, I remembered my love for word games and puzzles and brainteasers. I remembered looking through seasonal toy catalogues and getting all giddy at the possibilities within those pages. There was my passion. That was the next step in my inspiration.

(Wow! Can you imagine how fun the travel games with this woman would be?)

2k8: And how did it find a publisher? Give us the real dirt!

The honest and true dirt will date me. Make me face up to the fact that I am not 25 years old (even though there are still days when I *know* I must still be younger than the athletes in the NFL). Stalling. Stalling. Okay. I wrote the first words of The Gollywhopper Games (words that don’t exist in the story anymore) in 1989, longhand. I’d scribble a few chapters then type them up on my IBM Selectric with no memory chip. It did have one of those interchangeable erase cartridges, though.

I first submitted the manuscript on December 29, 1989. If you do the math, factoring in all those days it took to type a couple more tweaked versions, you’ll realize I didn’t let enough time go by between the moment I finished the first draft and the day I sent it out into the world. I was young. Very young. And there were no Internet communities to teach me how to become a real writer; that is, how to be patient, throw the story into a drawer, pull it back out after several months then start tearing it apart and rebuilding it again. And because I didn’t have that, I had no one to put me in my place. I fully expected a publisher to love the book, buy it and send me to easy street for the rest of my life. Hah! Naive or what?

What happened between 1989 and 2006 when I got The Call involved many hard lessons, a lot more writing, and at least two dozen Gollywhopper rejections. But I’d say it was at the SCBWI-LA Conference in 2002 where my real road to publication began. Several months before, in a moment of what-the-heck-am-I-going-to-submit-for-critique, I did an eeny, meeny, miny, moe and pulled The Gollywhopper Games from the depths of the drawer, that manuscript having been shoved deeper and deeper by about 15 subsequent novels. (Yes, I have drawer-loads of novels, many of which will forever be titled Homework.) I spruced up the first several chapters and sent it in. I was assigned the very wonderful critiquer and editor-in-chief Bonnie Bader who loved it and might have bought it except for the fact that it didn’t fit into the Grosset & Dunlap series personality.

It was at that same conference I met the woman who, four month later, was to become my agent. But even with an agent, it took three rewrites over three years to find the right house for the book. Would I have wanted it to happen sooner? Of course. But working it and waiting also brought me to my editorial, art and marketing team at Greenwillow and HarperCollins. And I can’t say enough about them.

2k8: Did anything surprise you or catch you off guard when you were writing your book?

With a degree and a background in advertising, I was well trained to be succinct, to use a minimum of words to create a maximum impact. Guess what? I was trained to write picture books. And I did. I wrote dozens of picture books (languishing in a drawer) because how could someone like me string together 50,000 words for a novel? In reality, it wasn’t the number of words that scared me. How did anyone find the ideas to generate that many words?

So when I got the idea for The Gollywhopper Games, I had no clue whether I could write a work of any length. I started, though. I wrote a first chapter and second. I jotted down ideas as they began flowing. I wrote a third chapter then a fourth. Before I could be scared again, I had a stack of manuscript pages more than an inch thick.

Even now, especially when I’m about 7,000 words into a new book, I have doubts whether I can find the ideas and the words to create something compelling enough to finish. And each time I write the last sentence, I’m surprised that I did.

2k8: Imagine you have an offer from your dream press to publish your dream book, no matter how insane or unmarketable it might be (though of course it might not be). What story do you want to write next/someday and why?

I don’t think my idea is insane. I don’t think it’s unmarketable. I do believe it’s too expensive. I would love to write a truly interactive book – a sit-down or lie-in-bed book with paper pages – that has mini computer screens embedded throughout so readers can actually play along with any type of games or puzzles I may choose to incorporate into future stories. Just imagine what else you could do with that combination of comfort and technology.

2k8: What question won't most people know to ask you? What is your answer?

Writers understand this question, but most others wouldn’t know to ask it. In fact, when you tell friends and family you’re writing a book or you’ve had a book accepted for publication, they see the glitz and the glamour. They have you booked on Oprah. They call you the next JK Rowling. They want to bask in the shadow of your stardom.

Here’s the question they don’t know they should be asking. It’s also a question all writers should ask of themselves. If you understand that it may take years to write a marketable book; and if you understand this is a lonely profession with a limited amount of support for your individual project; and if you understand there’s only a remote possibility that you’ll sell it; and if do sell it, you’ll probably sign for a modest advance, one that may take you years to earn out if you earn out at all; and if you understand that your chosen profession will put you up for severe criticism from national publications; then why in the world are you doing this?

My answer: I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t.

Thanks Jody!

Inspiration for The Gollywhopper Games

Many writers can pinpoint the exact moment they had the idea for their book. Today, Jody tells us her inspiration for the Gollywhopper Games.


I may not have written The Gollywhopper Games if it hadn’t been for a bit of serendipity and especially if it hadn’t been for an unsatisfied 5th grade boy.

I was volunteering in the elementary school library, checking in books and minding my own business ...

Okay, not really minding my own business. As a budding author, I was keenly aware of which books interested the students. I often watched the same books move around classrooms like a hot rumor.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had been very popular with the 5S classroom that year. Some kids had yet to discover the old version of the movie and the new one was year from being in production. So the first experience they had with the story was directly from the Roald Dahl book.

The young man who returned it that day approached the librarian. The conversation went something like this:

5th Grader: I loved that book. Can you help me find another one like it?
Librarian (moves to the shelves and looks): There’s a sequel called Charlie and the Glass Elevator but it must be checked out. How about one of these. (Librarian pulls out The BFG, Hatchet, and Half Magic.)
5th Grader: They’re not the same.
Teacher (moves forward and speaks in his patented non-library voice): What’s the problem?
5th Grader: I want another book like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Teacher: There are no other books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but there are other books I guarantee you’ll like. (Teacher leads 5th grader to other shelves and shows him titles I can’t see.)
5th Grader: (keeps shaking his head)
Teacher: But the guy in here ...
5th Grader: (shakes head)

And the scene continued until the end of the period. I wish I could report which book the 5th grader eventually checked out. The fact is, I was too energized by this scene to pay attention. It had led to a decision on my part. I’d played around with picture books and with early readers, afraid to tackle longer works. But someone had to write a story for that 5th grader, and that someone was going to be me.

Now check out the book trailer!



We can't wait to read it and I'm sure fifth grade kids everywhere feel the same way!

Jody Feldman Plays Games!

The Class of 2k8 is delighted to introduce this week’s debut author, Jody Feldman. Jody’s book, The Gollywhopper Games is now available and we simply cannot be prouder.

First, meet Jody:


Jody always found writing to be a chore. Hard. Boring. But at some point between the day she entered the University of Missouri as a psychology major and the day she graduated from their Journalism School, she’d turned into a writer.

During her advertising career she’s written about shoes, movies, fluid fertilizer, books, sewing machines, beer, leather cleaner, street banners, rodeos ... even words for a giant fortune cookie. She’s worked in a department store, a factory, a pre-school and spent one day training to sell products door to door but decided she’d rather eat a door.

Jody might have liked to become a treasure hunter, a codebreaker, a movie director, an artist and an inventor. But the most exciting part about writing is, she can explore all those occupations and adventures with the characters in her books.

Jody Feldman lives and plays with her family in St. Louis, Missouri.

Next, check out Jodi’s fabulous book, The Gollywhopper Games:



Gil Goodson's future happiness depends on winning Golly Toy and Game Company's ultimate competition. If Gil wins, his dad has promised the family can move out of Orchard Heights -- away from all the gossip, the false friends, and bad press that has plagued the Goodsons ever since The Incident.

Gil has been studying for months. He thinks he knows everything about Golly's history and merchandise. But does he know enough to answer the trivia? Solve the puzzles? Complete the stunts? Will it be more than all the other kids know? Gil's formidable opponents have their own special talents. He must be quicker and smarter than all of them.

The ride of Gil's life is about to begin.


Thanks for celebrating the release of Jody’s book with us. Don’t forget we are celebrating The Gollywhopper Games all week, so stop back by to give our latest debut author some love.

Let the Games Begin!