alanajoli | Industry editorial that made me giggle

Publishers Weekly does a free newsletter on Children's Publishing once a week, which I love reading. It's got a free comic at the end of it about children's publishing, which is good, and reviews and other actually newsworthy industry stuff. They've featured pictures of Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry sharing a big black bra (reference to their Peter Pan series).

This week, they posted a short article from Michael Stearns, editorial director and foreign acquisitions manager for Harper Collins Children's Books, in their "What I'm Working On" section, and it made me giggle, so I thought I'd repost. (The editors very kindly gave me permission.) So, here it is (complete with link here if you want to read the whole newsletter):

At the moment, I'm putting the final polish on Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant (April 2007), which I am sort of unreasonable about. When the manuscript first came in, I took it home and read it overnight, pausing in my reading only to call up friends so that I could read passages aloud to them, cackling all the while. This was annoying, as you can imagine. Six months later, I still call people up to read them selections from the book. As you might expect, I have far fewer friends who will put up with this behavior from me anymore.

Why do I go on at such length? Well, Skulduggery Pleasant is my kind of hero: ace detective, snappy dresser, razor-tongued wit, crackerjack sorcerer, and walking, talking, fire-throwing skeleton. Did I mention that? Right. The lead character is a skeleton. (His physical resemblance to me is purely coincidental.) He has come back from the grave to fight evil—he's just that swell of a guy—and he teams up with a highly unusual 12-year-old girl named Stephanie. As the two fend off hit men, monsters of all sorts, and other nasty surprises, they form the most memorable duo ever to grace the page (think Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant—if Cary Grant were a skeleton and Hepburn were 12, and—well, you get the idea).

I grew up on fantasy stories, adventure tales and screwball comedies, and at last I've found a book that manages to be all of these things at once.

PW Children's Bookshelf, November 2, 2006.

Edit Blast those tricky tags! One missing end quotation mark and half a post was deleted. Thanks to