Twilight sequel script found in trash

It was a blunder worthy of CSIS. In 1999, Canada’s spy agency had egg on its face after top-secret documents were stolen off the back seat of a parked car while the car’s owner attended a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game. Then, in 2008, top-secret counter-terrorist documents were discovered in a trash can in downtown Ottawa. Now, in what has to be an equivalent threat to national security (this time in the U.S.), the top-secret script for New Moon, the film sequel to last year’s Twilight adaptation, along with a treatment for the third film in the series, were left in a trash can outside of a St. Louis hotel, where they were summarily discovered by salon owner Casey Ray.

Okay, maybe it’s not as serious as a CSIS security breach (Twilight fanatics are welcome to disagree), but one has to wonder who thought it would be a good idea to dispose of the hottest property in Hollywood by dumping it in a public trash bin.

Fortunately for the sanctity of the film series, Ray ignored her initial impulse to sell the scripts to a tabloid and instead returned them to Summit Entertainment, the production company for the movies. For her honesty, Ray has been invited to attend the premieres of both films.

This is not the first time a Stephenie Meyer property has been inadvertently leaked. Fans may remember the incident last year, in which a partial manuscript for a novel called Midnight Sun was released online, prompting the author to cancel plans to publish the book. The 12-chapter draft was later posted on Meyer’s website.

Sara Gruen’s big payday

The New York Times has an article about author Sara Gruen, who scored a $5-million advance from new Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau for her next two books. That’s because her most recent novel, Water for Elephants, published by the small firm Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, has been a runaway success over the past year. That book sold nearly 250,000 copies in hardcover and has already sold close to that in trade paper, the Times reports.

Gruen’s first book for Spiegel & Grau, Ape House, is about bonobo monkeys appearing in a reality TV show. That sounds like a grabber to Quillblog, but some are questioning the wisdom of that $5-million cheque:

Following up on an unforeseen success — particularly after receiving a news-making advance — is often tricky. Charles Frazier, whose debut novel, Cold Mountain, was a runaway best seller, left Grove/Atlantic for an $8 million advance from Random House for his second novel. Although that book, Thirteen Moons, spent 10 weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list and sold 242,000 copies in hardcover, according to BookScan, it is considered a publishing disappointment because it did not sell nearly enough to recover the advance.

What goes unmentioned in the Times article is that Gruen, a former technical writer who lives in Illinois, is actually a Canadian expat. She moved to the U.S. in 1999. Water for Elephants was published in Canada by HarperCollins Canada. (The Q&Q review of the book is here.)

Miniature books get maximature exhibition

The Grolier Club in New York is currently hosting an exhibition of miniature books. The collection of teeny tiny tomes numbers in the hundreds, with three inches being the top trim size. Included in the collection are, according to the Grolier’s website:

• A 40-volume set of Shakespeare’s works, two inches high and easily readable.
• John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in miniature.
• The first book on contraception, originally published as a miniature, and responsible for a 19th century decline in the British birthrate.
• The Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, first printed in book form as a miniature.
• A minature book that flew to the moon and returned.
• A book from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s substantial miniature book collection.
• The world’s two smallest books, each less than one millimeter tall.

Wow, a miniature book that flew to the moon and returned – that is impressive. And why would they print the first book on contraception in miniature form? To fit in a wallet?

David Bezmozgis on Leonard Michaels

Over at Nextbook, David Bezmozgis writes a lengthy tribute to the late American author Leonard Michaels, a writer who not only served as a formative influence on Bezmozgis, but eventually become a mentor, friend, and confidante.

I should say at this point that though I was a dedicated reader and entertained writerly ambitions, I knew next to nothing about the practical realities of publishing. I paid no attention to and couldn’t distinguish between the various publishing houses and knew nothing about their relative merits or reputations. I knew nothing about the arcana of lists, deals, rights, advances, tours, covers, print runs, or anything else. All books looked the same to me. They all participated equally in the wondrous, enviable state of being published. A more savvy reader, noting the poor availability of Michaels’s books, might have deduced from this something about the state of Michaels’s career, but this never occurred to me. I thought that anybody who wrote as well as he did had to be a great success, on par with Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or any other writer deserving of serious consideration. That his books were almost completely out of print I perceived only as matter of personal inconvenience to me, not anything that would be of consequence to Michaels himself. After all, he had written the books and they had been published. They existed. I imagined that anything beyond that was trivial.

Also at Nextbook is “Honeymoon,” a short story by Michaels that Bezmozgis once wrote a screenplay for, which is what began the relationship between the two writers. (The movie was never made – it’s about a young bride who falls for her mambo-dancing waiter at a Catskills resort. “Many were of the opinion that Dirty Dancing had exhausted the subject,” Bezmozgis writes.)

One giant leap for Google Books

The New Yorker has a story by Jeffrey Toobin on Google’s staggeringly ambitious and hugely contentious Google Books project, in which the company intends to digitize and make fully searchable more than 30 million books over the next decade. (Toobin quotes the Google vice-president in charge of the project who describes the undertaking as Google’s “moon shot.” The lengthy article details the legal challenges some publishers are making to Google Books, and the possible dangers inherent in a possible cash settlement on Google’s part.

The article is as interesting for the information on the project and on the murky history of U.S. copyright law as it is for the glimpses into Google corporate life: pajama days (which most employees rightly spurn), free food 24 hours a day, and a 10,000-strong workforce, to which 50 people are apparently added every week.

Fan fiction’s imagined afterlives

On The Independent this week: a fan fiction sampler, with missing scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Great Gatsby, and more — all imagined, written, and posted by fans. “Delve into the world of fanfiction.net, and you will find thousands upon thousands of these wonderfully pointless pastiches, often in multiple chapters, all devoted to the imaginative afterlife of a work of fiction, however obscure,” reads the article. Ever wonder what Titania and Oberon would have talked about on their honeymoon? One fan fiction writer did, and concocted the following: “Oberon got up and took his drink and lobster bib. ‘Would you like the tail? It’s the best part.’ ‘Oh no, I’m allergic to seafood. You should know that! We’ve been married on and off for centuries now.’”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The Independent

Berton’s got the munchies

It’s probably safe to say that few readers of august CanLit legend Pierre Berton have ever imagined him giggling away while watching The Wizard of Oz and simultaneously listening to Dark Side of the Moon. But that mental image might arise after reading this Toronto Star piece about the author’s pot habit. “I enjoy the odd joint but I never go overboard,” Berton tells Star reporter Christopher Hutsul. “I smoke about once a month to help me relax.”

Related links:
Toronto Star piece on Pierre Berton and the demon weed