SlushPile.net

  In spite of my glee the other day at the news that Lionsgate has optioned the rights to Larry Brown’s novel, The Rabbit Factory, I find it’s usually best to remain cautious about Hollywood’s interaction with the book world. So many books and stories are optioned, but never actually made into a film. And [...]

Read the full story

  Running a blog like this one, I generally know about books long before they actually hit bookstore shelves. I read about the deal being signed, then publicists inform me of release dates, I see the galleys, and so forth. It’s a perk, and a necessity, of operating a website like this. However, there are rare [...]

Read the full story

  This is a few days old but I don’t know how I previously missed it since Daniel Woodrell is one of my favorites. But, some lucky reporter from The Independent got to travel to the Ozarks to interview Woodrell. Man, I can still remember the exact moment that I saw Give Us a Kiss in the [...]

Read the full story

I was too ill to go into work today, but here’s a bit of news that has absolutely, totally, completely brightened my day. The Book Standard is reporting that the late Larry Brown’s final novel, The Rabbit Factory, has been optioned by Lionsgate. And if the thought of a Larry Brown movie wasn’t exciting enough, the [...]

Read the full story

…before they hatch. Last week, I mentioned a report that Eva Longoria signed a deal to write an “erotic novel.” However, much to the chagrin of would-be ghostwriters, US Weekly stepped in to set the record straight. The magazine quotes a Longoria rep as saying “There is no book deal and there never has been.” [...]

Read the full story

I guess if it works for all those CSI shows, then maybe writers should try it… The always useful Publishers Marketplace reported that Jamie Michaels sold a book entitled Kiss My Book to Delacorte recently. It’s the “story of a teen writing sensation who gets caught plagiarizing her debut novel, but finds redemption and romance when [...]

Read the full story

I was a striker for the very first youth soccer team ever in my little rural Kentucky town. Although clearly, I wasn’t very good since we didn’t score a single goal until the final game of the season. The next year, I played on the very first soccer team fielded by my high school. I [...]

Read the full story

My Internet service has been down for the past day-and-a-half. I’m posting this from a Treo, which is a great gadget for staying in touch, but not so great for posting items to a blog. So I’m going to have to hold off on some of the items I had prepared. I’ll post some over [...]

Read the full story

The Baltimore Sun interviews B. Brandon Barker, a writer based in Northern Virginia who built a website that “the extremes an aspiring author will go to these days in hopes of getting into print.”

Read the full story

Bankrate has an interesting interview with best-seller Harlan Coben. Seems the thriller author is naturally frugal and is just now being able to enjoy the money he’s made. “I had very lean years at the beginning,” Coben says. “My first Myron Bolitar book, I got an advance of $5,000 on. I was just happy to be [...]

Read the full story

The investigation into the murder of reclusive author Allen Chappelow continues to get more and more strange. Now, we learn that his body might have “lain beneath a mountain of debris in his ramshackle mansion for weeks before being discovered by police.” It’s a very sad and bizarre tale.

Read the full story

  I’ve been meaning to mention this wonderful post about Lee K. Abbott over at the Emerging Writers Network. During a time of year when we typically hear about this celebrity tell-all or that detective thriller as being the must-read books for summer, Abbott’s All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories provides a quality alternative for the [...]

Read the full story