Potter fanfic-er gets her own deal

The debut novel from a Chilean writer who shot to fame after writing her own "fanfic" version of JK Rowling's Harry Potter stories has been released.

La Septima M - The Seventh M - is the first of three books that 23-year-old Chilean journalism student Francisca Solar was contracted to write by publishers Random House, following the online success of her unofficial sixth Harry Potter story, Harry Potter and the Decline of the High Elves.

More from BBC News.

Costa winners

Among the winners of the Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Awards) announced yesterday was Stef Penney, as Nigel Reynolds reports in The Telegraph.

The most surprising story thrown up by the awards is that of 37-year-old Stef Penney, a film writer, whose debut novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, won this year's first novel award. A story of mystery, love and murder in a remote snow-bound settlement in northern Canada in the 1860s, it was praised by judges for its description of a deep winter landcsape.

But Penney, who lives in East London, disclosed today that she had never visited Canada. Because she had suffered from agoraphobia for 15 years, she had a fear of travelling and built up her picture of the country by reading the first-hand accounts of settlers, trappers, explorers and men of the Hudson Bay Company, in the reading room at the British Library.

She said: "I didn't like public transport and to begin with I had to go by car to the British Library. But parking was so expensive that I was forced to overcome my fear of travelling by bus."

The book was turned down by "quite a lot" of publishers, she said before it was picked up by the small house, Quercus. She said of her win today: "It's really hard to believe - it's extraordinary."

An end to the longest literary feud?

One of the world's iciest literary feuds, sealed with a punch-up in a cinema 30 years ago, is thawing as Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Marquez and Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa prepare to publish together.

More from Giles Tremless in The Guardian.

Docudrama rates

All of the Guild's major TV agreements are likely to be renegotiated this year and one subject certain the be discussed is the rates paid for the drama element of docudrama. On the Guild's website, J.C. Wilsher and Isabelle Grey set out the arguments for drama in docudrama to be included in the minimum terms agreements.

Writers of TV drama should be getting TV drama rates and terms, whether they are commissioned by a drama or a factual department. Of course there may be ‘discounts’ from the full original drama rate – the dramatised sequences may only be a portion of the programme’s running time; storyline and underlying source or research material may have been provided.

Guillermo del Toro interview

Denis Faye talks to Guillermo del Toro for the Writers Guild of America, west.

You often give your characters comprehensive biographies before you even start writing. How comprehensive?

I like to know where they're coming from, what the story is with their parents, with their wife, with their children, why they were raised in a certain way. But with some movies I do it and some movies I don't. In Devil's Backbone, I did very extensive biographies. In Hellboy, I did very extensive biographies. In this one I didn't. I really knew who I was using as model for each character. I knew the person very well. I knew who I was targeting, and I just used that base to write them. I mean, I don't know any fascist Captains [like Captain Vidal], but I know people who have the same sociopath impulses as he does.

Sobol Award cancelled

The Sobol Award, a controversial new literary contest that offered agentless writers a $100,000 first prize and a contract with Simon & Schuster for the top three winners, has been canceled.

Officials acknowledged that the prize's entry fee and other contractual requirements had deterred would-be participants.

"No further manuscript submissions will be accepted," award organizers announced Monday on the Sobol Web site (http://www.sobolaward.com). "All writers who have submitted manuscripts will receive a full refund of their entry fee ($85) and our copies of the manuscripts will be destroyed and deleted from our system."

More from Hillel Italie for Associated Press.

The Trial Of Tony Blair

In the dock: Robert Lindsay as Tony Blair

The Trial Of Tony Blair, written by Alistair Beaton, will be the latest current affairs based drama to hit our TV screens when it appears on More 4 on Monday. There are interviews with Beaton and executive producer David Aukin in The Telegraph and Media Guardian (free registration required).

"The drama focuses on Blair's psychic disintegration because he can't silence his conscience over what happened in Iraq. It's based on the assumption that Blair is a man with some remaining decency and conscience and that the death of people in Iraq must haunt him," says Beaton. Indeed, the film's first scene finds Blair at confession (did I mention that he's recently, and to Cherie's delight, become a Catholic?), telling the priest: "I feel as though I have sins to confess. Mortal sins."

The slow birth of Lilies

Lilies, which begins on BBC One on Friday, spent almost a decade in development - as the series creator Heidi Thomas tells Paul Hoggart in The Times.

"The series is really a mosaic of oral history," says Thomas, and proceeds to itemise the origin of the colourful details with which the script is stuffed. Dadda’s hostility to his daughters’ priest, for instance: "My grandmother was Catholic and my grandfather was Protestant. When the priest called round every Friday, he would make him stand on newspaper just to show he didn’t approve of him being in the house. One of his daughters married a Catholic and he was just referred to as ‘the Fenian’. It was only when a cousin took up genealogy that we found out what the poor man’s name was."

Catherine Tyldesley, Daniel Rigby, Brian McCardie, Leanne Rowe and Kerrie Hayes in Lilies, created by Heidi Thomas, written by Heidi Thomas, Kate Gartside and Jonathan Harvey. (Photo: Matt Squire for BBC/World Productions)

Second productions

In The Guardian, Mark Ravenhill reflects on the difficulty of getting a second domestic production for a new play.

This absence of second productions is in some ways a good thing. It reflects the confidence of theatres outside London - and of arts organisations in general. Recent research, carried out by the TV channel Artsworld, found that London was only the ninth best city in the country for the arts, with Newcastle top. A few decades ago, theatres would have looked to see what were this year's hits in the capital, then dutifully produced them - but not now. Theatres in Liverpool, Southampton, Plymouth, Manchester or Birmingham have their own commissions and produce their own premieres. Every week sees a slew of new plays appearing across the country, often sparsely reviewed in the national press.

We have now created a situation in which there is a demand for hundreds of premieres across the country every year, often in studio theatres. But there is no promise of subsequent productions. Writers - realising there is very small financial reward for this, and small audiences - are soon lost to television and film.

Books by committee

Working Partners, a company that uses teams of editors and writers to create series fiction for children, is moving into the grown-ups market, reports Brandon Robshaw in The Independent.

Like it or not, this appears to be the future of commercial fiction. It's linked with the growing professionalism of writing, a trend that has seen degree courses in creative writing mushrooming in universities all over the country, with the Open University joining in last year.What is wrong with giving the reading public what it wants? Working Partners isn't perverting or corrupting public taste, but providing well-crafted, popular commercial fiction.

Do non-American writers have to join the WGA?

On his Artful Writer blog, Craig Mazin advises non-American writers who are working in the USA.

Kimberly Lofstrom Johnson: Curve

Woman-in-jeopardy thrillers have long been a popular staple of cinema. The terror the audience experiences while watching a vulnerable woman suffer through a horrible situation — "Wait Until Dark," "Alien," "High Tension," Emma Thompson in "Junior" — provides just the kind of visceral (and often perverse) pleasure we want from the movies.

Since these suspenseful films are almost uniformly written by men, though, the scenarios tend to play out as fantasies of either the malicious male subconscious or a romanticized version of a besieged woman's fortitude under extreme duress. Screenwriter Kimberly Lofstrom Johnson hopes to challenge this convention with her recent addition to the genre, "Curve." Her script doesn't veer from the genre's essential plot elements but lurches through a stripped-down narrative invested with both a specifically feminine mind-set and a harrowing, if unintended, subtext.

More from Jay A. Fernandez in The LA Times.

Agency prize for MA students

Students on City University's MA in Creative Writing (Novels) course are being offered the chance to win £1,500 and representation from the Christopher Little Literary Agency (CLLA) in a new competition.

CLLA are best known for picking up JK Rowling's work after it had been turned down by several other publishers and agents. So they probably have £1,500 to spare.

With the growth in creative writing MAs, could this be the first of many tie-ups with agencys or producers?

Drama Association of Wales - One Act Playwriting Competition

The Drama Association of Wales have launched their One Act Playwriting Competition 2007. The competition aims to encourage the writing of plays for amateur theatre in English and Welsh.

For 2007, they are seeking plays in three categories; an Open Section, plays suitable for performance by a cast of 16-25 year olds, and the best play in the Welsh language. In addition to cash awards, prize-winning plays will be published. Previous prizewinners have been published and performed as a result of promotion through their New Writing Scheme.

The deadline is 31 January 2007.

More details are available from the BBC Writersroom.

Boxing as art

In The Guardian, Marcel Berlins reflects on why boxing should have inspired so many great novels.

But why boxing? For one thing, a one-versus-one struggle lends itself perfectly to a good-versus-evil theme. It is the ultimate elemental sport, not dependent on artificial appendages like balls, rackets or bats, nor on the help of team-mates. Physical suffering is integral: it is the only sport specifically aimed at inflicting and receiving pain (which is perhaps why you "play" cricket, tennis, football etc but you do not play boxing). In social terms, boxing is the sport that allowed the uneducated poor, the shabby immigrant and the racially discriminated against to rise, not just to the top of their sport, but of their society and nation. And within boxers and the boxing milieu you find most of the emotions and tensions that make stirring literature.

Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby, screenplay by Paul Haggis from stories by F.X. Toole, directed by Clint Eastwood.

ITV2 wants new comedy

ITV2 is launching a £10 million push into comedy and calling for scripted pieces, sitcoms and sketch shows, reports Liz Thomas in The Stage.

Zai Bennett, controller of ITV2, told The Stage: “I want comedy that is right for our viewers - the 16-24 demographic. I want to change people’s perception about what the channel offers. We have done that in part with imported hits such as Entourage and The Office: An American Workplace but we do need original comedy. Right now we are keen to look at scripts, try things out and get more things into development.”

ITV2 has been a quiet success as part of the Freeview platform but has mainly run imported programming and spin-offs from ITV1 reality and talent shows.

Guilt-free pleasures

It's nonsense to applaud acts such as Borat and Little Britain for being 'non-PC', says Stewart Lee in The Guardian.

There's a vast difference between the casual, inadvertent offence prevalent in my childhood and the choices made today by performers and writers of my generation, operating in a post-PC world, where they are aware of the power and meaning of the taboos they choose to break.

Screenwriter Sylvester Stallone

For the Writers Guild of America, west, Dylan Callaghan talks to screenwriter Sylvester Stallone about his new film, Rocky Balboa. He stars in it as well, apparently.

I've read that you like to write fast, so you write fast but you're a big rewriter?

Unbelievable. You have no idea.

Well give me an idea. How many drafts did you do with this film?

I would say like 20. I love to rewrite, I really do. What happens is I'll start just working a scene, and I'll touch up that dialogue and add a little situation here and then it grows. I also ask myself, “If there was no dialogue, what could I do to make this scene more interesting?” An example is the scene where Rocky goes to the graveyard. How do I say he goes there a lot? I don't want him saying, “You know, I go to this graveyard every day.” So I gave him a wooden folding chair that he puts back up in a tree when he leaves. That says that he lives in the graveyard.

Sylvester Stallone in Rocky Balboa, a film that he also wrote and directed.

Philippa Pearce obituaries

Children's author Philippa Pearce, whose books include Tom's Midnight's Garden, has died at the age of 86. The Guardian has an obituary by Stephanie Nettell.

To the end, and not only in her fiction, she had an innate wisdom and generous spirit that reached out to life: only last summer she enthralled a west Norfolk primary school ("she had them just where she wanted them", marvelled the teacher) while herself eager to learn about the local carrstone - dark brown sandstone containing grains of iron. She had been visiting the Seven Stories children's book centre in Newcastle when she became ill. She was a star, from that era nostalgically called the golden age of children's literature, whose reputation blazed beyond the passing fads of reviewers or children: to John Rowe Townsend, himself a major influence in children literature, "she was the most brilliant of us all".

There are also obituaries in The Telegraph, The Independent, and The Times.

The Espresso: printing on demand

A machine that electronically stores 2.5 million books that can then be printed and bound in less than seven minutes is to be launched early next year. It prints in any language and has an upper limit of 550 pages. The 'Espresso' will be launched first in several US libraries. The company behind the project - On Demand Books - predicts that, within five years, it will be able to reproduce every book ever published.

More from Rowan Walker in The Observer.