1. I am insanely excited over the Masterpiece Theater showing of My Family and Other Animals tonight. I hope it's as good as it could be - I always get nervous when a favorite book finds its way to the tv screen. (Gerald Durrell is my hero in case you're wondering.)

2. I finally got around to watching the Mirrormask DVD I picked up a couple of weeks ago. It was just as good as I hoped it would be and the art is really really amazing. I've been a fan of Dave McKean for ages but he competely has my heart now. It was great. (And so was the young actress playing Helena - what else has she been in?)

3. I read and enjoyed Ivy and Bean yesterday - a real sweetheart of a little girl's book. This is kind of a modern day Betsy & Tacy (I know I read that comparison somewhere on the blogosphere and wish I could give credit - sorry!), Bean is a spunky little tomboy and Ivy is more of the bookish sort. They have a fun adventure getting even with Bean's older sister and all sorts of fun chaos enuses. Sophie Blackall has some very charming illustrations on almost every page. If you have a nine year old (or so) reader in the family, they will adore this title.

4. Also finished The Fruit Bowl Project about some 8th graders in a writing class. It's a very different take on a writing assignment and for any aspiring writer it's pretty much mandatory. Sarah Durkee shows how with the same elements 48 kids can write entirely different poems, stories, essays, etc. All very original and my only quibble is that I wish she had made the book bigger and given us more fun backstory on the kids themselves (only a few are really fleshed out).

5, I had two - count them two - memoirs that had word for word conversations in them from when the writers were children (one started at the age of three!). One even had word for word confabs between the parents when they were dating. Have we not learned anything from James Frey? This drives me insane and no, I'm not going to review either one.

6. Somewhat stalled on the new dragon book - not on what I want to happen, but on how to make that happen in an intelligent and believable way. So I'm plugging away. I just printed it all out so I could rip it apart a bit and remake it in a better way. I'm working on parts now where the lead chickee is reading old journals from her family. So it's a little hard to find different voices for these guys, but I'm working on it. Nothing painful, just not moving as fast as I would like.