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film rights...

It's true. We recently optioned film rights for Singletini!

How exciting is that? I heart Jenny Bent. She's such a rockstar. Here's hoping it makes a splash on the big screen some day. (Fingers crossed.)

And my latest project is cruising right along. I can't wait to deliver it. I'm still a few months out, but soon, soon...

;)

pickles!

I just took a break from writing this morning and look at what I stumbled upon.

A cute Scandinavian DIY site called...

I'm kind of obsessed. They posted this Whirly Lampshade (very Random by Bertjan) that I really want to make this weekend. Directions are posted on their site. How cool is this thing?

Wish me luck. (I might need it.)

Me + Crafty = BIG mess.

dear jane.

Have you met Jane Aldridge?


She's the 18-year old blogger who's taking the fashion world by storm. I first heard about her a few years ago when I was over at Gap Inc. A hip girl I worked with told me to check out her blog, which was just taking off at the time. It was smart, charming...addicting. I was hooked.

Over the past few years, Aldridge has pretty much gone super-star. In fact, Teen Vogue just did a piece about her in their January issue. She's guest-designing a trench coat for Gryphon.

How awesome is that? Love this girl. If you haven't checked out her blog yet, do. It's called Sea of Shoes. And it's kind of addicting.

i call red!

Wow. Have you guys seen these yet?

Crayon rings!

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

They're spendy ($50 for 8), but so quirky and fun. I know what's going on my birthday list this year...

In other news, I've been working on the newest book a ton and it's going really well. (Yay!) Couldn't be more excited about it. More on that soon. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

the baby-sitter is back!

It's true.

Scholastic Inc. is bringing back The Baby-Sitters Club.

And releasing a prequel.

How exciting! I mean, what girl didn't LOVE this series when she was growing up? I was obsessed.

I hope little girls enjoy the series as much as our generation did.

happy, happy...

New Year!

Hope you all are off to a wonderful beginning.

I started my day with a trip to the gym, a cup of coffee while I wrote out my resolutions.* And now my head is down for an afternoon of writing. (Fun.)

Just wanted to pop in and say hello. Here's to big smiles and big dreams in 2010!

Love,
Amanda

*Resolution #9: Write faster. ;)

the new chick lit...

Here's a great article from Publishers Weekly that recently caught my eye.

I sort of love it. And hate it.

On one side: I couldn't agree more. Life is dark and complicated. Things don't always work out. And Prince Charming is far from realistic. But, but, but...

On the other side: I do love a happy ending.

I can't help it.

Is that so wrong?

(Why do I always feel so guilty admitting that?)

It's why I read books. It's why I go to the movies. I'm a dreamer, I guess. A hopeless romantic. I want the happy ending. I want to see the girl get the guy. (Or the girl get the girl/guy get the guy/whatever your preference.)

Honestly, who doesn't want to see people happy and in love? I'm not saying that love defines happiness. No, no. Not even close. But, well, does it really have to be the worst thing in the world? That's all I'm saying.

But see what you think...

Women's Lit: Chick Lit Gets An Update

Enjoy!

THE INTERN

I love, love THE INTERN.

If you want an inside look at publishing, check her out. She's hilarious. Her Hives of Apocalypse post is too funny.

Picture neon green, sequined flight suit with goggles. And a boyfriend in a bear costume. Enough said.

1001

Oh, how I love a good list.

Check this out:

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

Ahh! So behind, so behind...

for the love of the ;

I just stumbled upon this article in The New York Times about the semicolon.

Love it. Brilliant. Had to share...

CELEBRATING THE SEMICOLON IN A MOST UNLIKELY LOCATION

By SAM ROBERTS
February 18, 2008

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.

But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.

In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.

“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.

One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)

But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction.

Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”

Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”

Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”

The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.”

New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and other facial expressions.

The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.

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