Cook Partners

Brevity Is the New Black

In 140 characters: Japanese novels now have US competition. Salon discusses Twitter fiction, “a happy lesson in old-fashioned technique.” 

Stories About Darkness and Light

CNN interviews Ted Dekker, a bestselling author who grew up in Indonesia as the child of missionary parents:

"I grew up in one of the darkest places in the world you can imagine, in [the] jungle, with cannibals. I know we have certain images in our mind when we talk about cannibals, but we're talking about animism, heavy spiritualism, tremendous amounts of fear," Dekker tells CNN.

... "I grew up in this environment, and it affected the way I viewed light and darkness. My parents brought into that very dark [and] ominous setting hope, light, penicillin, hygiene. The culture changed dramatically, not as a result of Christianity -- at least not upfront -- but as a result of them bringing into a very dark place hope and light. My stories reflect that paradigm shift."

[He adds] "There's also a large group of people who find my presentation of the darkness a little too much."

How the Web Is Changing Writing

Both fiction and academic writing are being transformed by the Web and the ubiquity of new technologies. From The New York Times:

Conspiring with a distant lover? Try texting. Lost in the woods/wilderness/Ionic Sea? Use GPS. Case of mistaken identity? Facebook!

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. 

The article laments the way that today's connectivity is constraining writers, and even considers how the Bible would have changed if devices such as cell phones had been available in Old Testament times.

Meanwhile, Cleveland's Plain Dealer reports,

Publishers are starting to leave out footnotes and photographs in scholarly books and urging researchers to supplement their texts by posting these on the Web. Academics are shifting their research topics to better suit the cyberspace environment.

Read more here.

Surprising Friendship: Stephen King and Jerry Jenkins

The cover story for the May/June issue of Writer's Digest, "Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins: An Epic Conversation on Writing," details

... an unlikely friendship between the King of Horror Stephen King and the King of Inspirational Fiction Jerry B. Jenkins, best known for the Left Behind Series [and owner of the Christian Writers' Guild]. But it was a mutual friend in need that brought these two powerhouses of fiction together more than five years ago.

See more here.

Christianization of Science Fiction

Consider this, from the City Journal:

There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed.

Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the plot of The Matrix or Superman Returns. For reasons that have as much to do with global politics as with our cultural moment, some of this generation’s most successful sci-fi and fantasy movie franchises follow an essentially Christian plotline.

Recognition for Cook

On Saturday, March 21, the 2009 Christy Award nominees were announced at the Christian Book Expo in Dallas.  Publisher David C Cook received three nominations across two categories from the award dedicated to recognizing excellence in Christian fiction by contemporary authors.  The winners of The Christy Award will be announced at the International Christian Retail Show in Denver, CO, in July.

David C Cook received Christy Award nominations for three of its novels: Zora and Nicky: A Novel in Black and White, by Claudia Mair Burney; Blue Hole Back Home, by Joy Jordan-Lake; and Safe at Home, by Richard Doster.

For Whom Do We Write?

From the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists Web site:

For whom do we write?  And before you answer that you write for yourself, and that you'd write even if you knew you could never sell anything, think long and hard about whether that's really true. It's my knee-jerk response; it's certainly the answer I want to give and want to believe. The truth is a bit more complicated.

Read the rest of the article here.

New Tolkien Title To Come

Have you searched for old manuscripts that might be publishable today?  What riches might be stuck in some dusty drawer? We raise the question upon seeing this item in The Bookseller:

 HarperCollins is to publish a new book by the late Lord of the Rings author J R R Tolkien. [Though Tolkien died 35 years ago at 81,] The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, edited and introduced by Tolkien’s son Christopher, will be published in hardback in May 2009.

The previously unpublished work was written while Tolkien was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University during the 1920s and '30s, before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Even The Author of The Shack Had To Be Pushed By His Editor

William P. Young's The Shack, has been "the #1 New York Times bestseller 36 weeks running, with 6 million in print," as advertised by Windblown Media, the publishing company founded by Young's pastor friends Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings to publish his work after it had been rejected by many Christian publishing houses. The process of bringing the novel to light wasn't easy, however. At Your Writer's Group, Mick Silva interviews Wayne Jacobsen, the publisher:

Paul (Young), Brad (Cummings) and I worked for about 16 months bringing out the more dramatic elements, the essence of the story, and cutting back on some of the more theologically loaded or simply curious elements. Through the restructuring, we wanted to be as faithful to Paul’s original idea as possible ...

I felt he had a great book here and Paul wasn’t motivated to do the rewrites we thought needed to be done. At one point the three of us and Bobby Downes of Downes Brothers Entertainment sat down to storyboard the movie and suggest changes in the book. Even with that, Paul wanted me to help. Eventually I felt a nudge from the Spirit to do so and rewrote a chapter to show him what I was talking about. Then I did another, and then Brad got involved and it started to grab him, so we kept going ... I was using Paul’s words and working to keep it his vision. I’d never done that as an editor ...

Vote on Novel's Ending

Tyndale House author Randy Singer is asking for feedback to end his upcoming novel, The Justice Game. The legal thriller tackles the topic of gun ownership and use in the United States. A YouTube video, like a movie trailer, sets the scene for the book. At the conclusion of the video, Singer explains why he took this approach, and invites people to vote on what the jury's verdict should be. See the video and cast your vote here. And, consider how your authors can invite their readers to participate in their creative work. How can you foster readers' interest and involvement in your writers' upcoming titles?