How a Midwest Teacher Went From Posting Scary Stories on Reddit to a Film Deal for His Debut Novel
uk.sports.yahoo.com – Wednesday June 28, 2023
Jimmy Juliano’s debut novel, “Dead Eleven,” has an unusual backstory.
The book, out Tuesday, is a spooky tale of a remote island where inhabitants are obsessed with ’90s nostalgia, which earned a coveted jacket blurb from “Goosebumps” guru R. L. Stine and already has a film development deal with A+E Studios. But Juliano is the first to admit that his path into publishing and Hollywood “feels like a back door into the industry.”
Juliano, an educator who works at Lake Forest High School in suburban Chicago, first made a name for himself as u/Red_Grin, a Reddit user posting scary stories to the NoSleep subreddit. The community, with over 17 million members, is “a place for redditors to share their scary personal experiences” — and while the stories (probably) aren’t real, “treat everything as though it is a true recount of events.”
Creative writing: stretching your imaginative powers
silversurfers.com – Friday June 23, 2023
Most children make up stories when they are young but as real life begins to take over, these creative powers are often left to dwindle.
While some people continue writing and making up stories throughout their lives, others tend to stop when they reach a certain age.
However, there are many benefits associated with creative writing and it’s a hobby that’s well worth re-exploring as an adult.
Put your imagination to work by finding out how it feels to make up stories, write poetry, pen your memoirs or simply experiment on the page.
Taking poetry off the page
thebookseller.com – Tuesday June 20, 2023
Are you a lover of visual poetry and just don’t know it yet? From childhood encounters with Lewis Carroll’s "The Mouse’s Tale" through to the influence of the concrete poetry movement on design (would the Yves Saint-Laurent logo have been invented without the inventions of the Brazilian concrete poets of the 1950s? – I doubt it), visual poetry is in the air all around us. More than that, it’s also increasingly incorporated into architecture and printed on buildings, and with a new exhibition called "Poetry & Architecture" just opened at Hay Castle, there’s no better time for publishers to embrace this genre-shattering form.
Soviet-style groupthink means only one thing: terrible books
telegraph.co.uk – Tuesday June 20, 2023
In 1957, the manuscript of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and handed to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The book was hailed as a masterpiece, and in 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, an honour that he initially accepted, but then, under pressure from the Soviet literary establishment, renounced.
Is Doctor Zhivago still a masterpiece? If excellence in art is the ability to channel brilliance of imagination into equally brilliant language, then Pasternak stands as one of the indisputable pillars of Russian literature.
But the definition of excellence is changing. Julie Finch, the chief executive of the Hay literary festival, observed that, “Youth audiences don’t really care for something that was published 20 years ago, they care about what’s popular now.”
Alongside popularity, a host of other qualities are now required. The self-appointed cultural commissars of our own time are just as vigilant as the state apparatchiks of the former Soviet Writers’ Union, and their verdict can be equally fatal to a writer’s work.
Cormac McCarthy Had a Remarkable Literary Career. It Could Never Happen Now.
nytimes.com – Tuesday June 20, 2023
Cormac McCarthy, who died last week at 89, had a famously unusual career. His first five novels, published over two decades, earned him considerable critical respect but were commercial failures. At one time, all of his books, including his 1985 masterpiece, “Blood Meridian,” fell out of print.
Then something remarkable happened. In 1992, after a career spent eking out a living, Mr. McCarthy had a hit. “All the Pretty Horses,” which won the National Book Award and was adapted by Hollywood, set him squarely on a path to literary stardom and an outsize reputation as one of the greatest novelists of his time.
This improbable trajectory — writer toils for decades in obscurity before finding international renown — is the stuff of legend. But it did not occur by accident or happenstance. Mr. McCarthy’s career was made possible by a tectonic shift that was happening in the publishing industry as it moved from the boutique model of the early 20th century to an era of conglomeration. If the first part of his career was illustrative of publishing’s old model, the second half was made possible by a new approach. With his famed reclusiveness and idiosyncratic prose style, Mr. McCarthy might seem like an obdurate anachronism. But his career arc reveals that he was serendipitously of his time.
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