Weekly news bits, including: Muppets, moors, Muggles, and a new kind of mafia

I can finally start the countdown and plan for withdrawal afterwards: A release date has been set for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. July will be here before we know it!

I am beyond thrilled for the Jane Eyre movie adaptation from Focus Features coming out this March. Jane will be played by Mia Wasikowska, the actress from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right. Stormy menfolk and moody moors. Sigh.

Another kids movie coming out this month is the second Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules. In my opinion, Rodrick has entirely too much hair to look like his cartoon alter ego, but who's counting?

There's going to be another Muppet movie?! How did I not know this? I hear it will involve the reunion of separated Muppets, including finding Fozzie performing at a casino! It will be released November 23rd. Thanks to Katie at Out of the Box for mentioning it on her Muppet comics post.


The YA Mafia: a coterie of writers so influential and prolific it has its own twitter hashtag. But wait: Holly Black revealed last week that it does not exist, and in fact, could not exist. For a play by play across the blogs, YA Highway has the best wrap-up I've found yet, (and as a sidenote, some of the best mash-up YA cover art I've seen!). It makes sense to me that people are passionate about the same things (bird-watching, YA literature, raw vegan cooking) are going to know each other, or want to know each other, or bump into each other in common places (national parks, book signings/trade conventions, Grezzo in the North End), but that doesn't necessarily mean they are colluding on book blurbs or plotting to take down common genre-enemies. Whether or not YA authors, editors, or booksellers are scratching each other's backs, it's still pretty entertaining to envision a "secret cabal" of all those people I talk about all day.


Lastly, the Guardian has launched a children's books website for children's use, kicking it off with Philip Pullman answering questions from his fans. I love what he has to say to aspiring writers: "We shouldn't bother about other people at all when we write. It's none of their business what we write...One of the reasons for JK Rowling's success was that she didn't give a fig for what people thought they wanted. They didn't know they wanted Harry Potter till she wrote about him. That's the proper way round." Take heart, you future entrants to our upcoming art and writing contests!