Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and other famous writers narrate the funny pages.

Some NaNoWriMo tips from Mark Sample: Use foreshadowing to hint what’s to come. E.g., have the vampire say “I want to suck your blood” before he sucks blood. And: Add tension by making the gender of your narrator indeterminate. This works for race too. And age. And number of nipples.

Another (more serious) NaNo tip: write slowly.

The Millions thinks the recent film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are made a better trailer than it did a feature film.

Is Stephen King the most underrated novelist of our time?

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“Who’s on first?” “This is it.” “Uh, what?” An imagined conversation in line for the new Michael Jackson movie.

“Demand whether something even EXISTS anymore. This trick works equally well for concepts (i.e., patriotism) and objects (i.e., peanuts).” This and more tips from a schmoozer’s guide to literary gatherings.

OMGZ Twilight Barbie! Bella and Edward! As Barbies! Insert joke here about plastic genitalia/chastity/etc.

When novelists sober up.

I thought this article was about well-rounded heroines in fiction, as in a well-rounded personality. But, no, they’re talking about a well-rounded body. And they’re calling it “chunk lit.”

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How do you turn a ten sentence book into a 94 minute movie?

So, at this point I’m sure that many of you have checked out Spike Jonzes’ Where The Wild Things Are. While this film has certainly polarized audiences, I hope that at least one thing we can all agree on is that adapting a ten-sentence book into a feature length film would be incredibly hard. And while I think that the team of David Eggers and Spike Jones ultimately did a good job in preserving the feel of the original Where the Wild Things Are, their movie got me thinking about the challenges implicit in turning unconventional books into successful films. Here are, in my mind, some successful adaptations of incredibly challenging source material:

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