Books to Movies in 2009 and beyond

So, The Spiderwick Chronicles released yesterday. Did anyone see it yet? I haven't, but I'm excited to go.

TSC got me thinking about other children's books that could be coming to the big screen in 2009 and beyond. I did some digging and here are a few of the possibilities:

Life of Pi (book by Yann Martel)
Girl of the Moment (book by Lizabeth Zindel)
Beastly (book by Alex Flinn)
Ramona (We're probably all familiar with Ramona Quimby!)
Almost Home (book by Jessica Blank)
The Alchemyst (book by Michael Scott)
The Lightning Thief (book by Rick Riordan)

Pretty exciting, huh? I adored Beastly and it would make a fantastic movie for sure.

Know of any others that I didn't mention? When I was searching, I noticed that a lot of upcoming kids movies had one glaring theme--girl power. Yep, girls are taking bigger, stronger roles and being adventurers, princesses and cowgirls. Yay for girls doing it all!

Also, I wanted to thank everyone who e-mailed me or found me through my contact page since The Writer article came out. Thanks so much for your kind words and I'm glad to have made so many new contacts over the past week because of it. :)

TGIF! What are your weekend plans? I've got to edit and update my poor, ignored contact roster. I've got a thousand sticky notes with people's names and info that haven't made it into the book. Sigh.

Big news! The Writer published my breakthrough column

Today's worthy of a double post because... I just got my March copy of The Writer and it has my Breakthrough column on page fourteen!!! Yay!! :) I've been trying to break into The Writer for five years and I'm beyond thrilled to see an article of mine in that mag.

I hope you guys check it out. :)

Freelancing to Fiction

I was on The Writer's Website yesterday and found this nice little link: http://www.writermag.com/wrt/default.aspx?c=ni&id=56

I absolutely cannot wait for the March issue of The Writer! It'll have my piece for the Breakthrough column where I wrote how writing articles led me to my book deal. In my case, it's completely true that freelancing for magazines taught me a lot about writing fiction from putting deadlines on myself, to editing to working with editors.

Have you freelanced? Did you find it helpful before you started writing a book? If you haven't, would you consider freelancing or are you sticking to fiction?