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Welcome!
I’m sitting
here at my desk wearing shorts and a T-shirt, with
the window open to birdsong and a ceiling fan on. In
other parts of the country it’s still pretty chilly,
but here where I live, it’s springtime.
The past few months have been
very exciting for our family. My husband and I just
returned from Hollywood where we spent several days
watching Dreamworks film HOTEL FOR DOGS, a story
that I wrote in 1971. That children’s book is over
thirty years old and has been out of print for ages,
but one of the producers remembered it as his
favorite book when he was a little boy and convinced
the other producers that it would make a great
movie. And it
will! The film will star Emma Roberts (you’ll
remember her as “Nancy Drew”), Lisa Kudrow (from
“Friends”) and Don Cheadle (who earned an Oscar
nomination for “Hotel Rwanda”). And dozens of
dogs! On this trip to visit the set, I was
introduced to the human stars and to eight "star
dogs," each of whom had two understudies who looked
just like them, plus fifty “extras” for the crown
scenes. Each dog had its personal trainer to direct
it on the set. And I even got to work as an “extra”
myself! In one of the crowd scenes, I’m right up at
the front of the crowd, being shoved aside by dog
catchers. They can’t cut me out of the film,
because I’m right in front of the camera. My moment
of glory! We’ll have
to wait to see this movie in theaters. It won’t be
released until January 2009, but by then my original
novel HOTEL FOR DOGS will have been republished,
along with a sequel that I’ve just written, titled
NEWSPAPER FOR DOGS. Keep checking this Web site for
up-dates. There soon will be a photo of me
surrounded by all those “star dogs”. They’re a lot
more adorable than I am. In the
meantime, I hope that you’ll continue to read and
enjoy my young adult suspense novels. People ask me
my personal favorites, and it’s hard to respond to
that question, because it’s like being asked, “Which
of your children is your favorite?” I created them
all, so each one is a part of me. I keep
fluctuating, but among my long time favorites are
STRANGER WITH MY FACE, SUMMER OF FEAR, LOCKED IN
TIME and THE THIRD EYE. (And, as a Gothic, DOWN A
DARK HALL.) But every reader has his or her own
taste in reading matter. Each of the novels I just
mentioned has a touch of the metaphysical, and some
readers prefer suspense novels that lack that
element. For them, I would suggest KILLING MR.
GRIFFIN, DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU and THE TWISTED
WINDOW. The main
thing is to keep reading. Not just my books, but
those by other authors as well. There are so many
wonderful books out there that you’ll miss a lot if
you don’t keep looking for new “favorite authors.”
If you tell your school librarian the type of
reading matter you enjoy, he or she will be able to
steer you to lots of books in that genre that you
might not have found on your own. Happy
Springtime! Bow- Wow!!! Lois Duncan
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Announcing a New Book: SEASONS OF THE HEART by Lois Duncan Lois Duncan is known for award-winning suspense novels. Few people know she’s led a secret second life as a poet. From early childhood, Lois chronicled events of her life in verse. At ten, she began submitting poetry to magazines, and by age thirteen she was being published with regularity. Since then, Lois has written hundreds of magazine articles and fifty books and is the recipient of the “Margaret A. Edwards” lifetime achievement award. Renowned as a novelist, she kept her poetry notebooks tucked away in a drawer “like a secret vice.” Generations of readers who grew up on “Lois Duncan” books have been urging her to write her autobiography. That task seemed formidable until she began to leaf through those notebooks. There, she found herself in every season of her life ─ Springtime (as a child); Summer (as a young mother); Autumn (at the peak of her career); Winter (as the mother of a murdered child); and finally, a Second Spring, writing humorous verse for grandchildren. Without realizing it, she wrote her autobiography as she lived it. SEASONS OF THE HEART is the story of an ordinary woman, told in an extraordinary way. It’s Lois’s dream that it will be used in classrooms to introduce young people to poetry as a relevant and meaningful addition to their lives. ................................................................. SEASONS OF THE HEART can be ordered straight from the publisher’s on-line bookstore. It also can be ordered on line from Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, but if you place an order through Amazon or B&N, your search must be for "Seasons of the Heart by Lois Duncan," (using the title and author name together). Since there are a number of books with titles containing the words "Seasons" and/or "Heart," this book can be difficult to find if you search by title or author alone. It can also be “special ordered” through local bookstores.
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