Q: What's the film making experience like when shooting a flick about a character that's loved by so many fans?

MSJ: Well, the good news is that I AM one of those fans so I've done my best to pay tribute to the Marvel comic character. I grew up with Ghost Rider and just like some of you I've waited a long time to see a Ghost Rider movie. There's a lot of pressure to make good on that but it's pressure that I welcome. I'm hopeful that the movie will introduce the Ghost Rider to a whole new generation of fans while reminding the faithful why he's the coolest character in the Marvel Universe!

Q: When was Ghost Rider made? What comic book was he first seen in? What kind of weapons does he have?

MSJ: The first Ghost Rider was a western comic put out by Marvel back in 1949, then later re-imagined by writers Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich in 1967. The Ghost Rider as we know him today was first introduced back in 1972 in Marvel Spotlight Vol. 1 by Thomas and Friedrich. Ghost Rider's weapons are many: his superhuman strength, his heavy chain which he used like a whip, his ability to manipulate fire, his motorcycle, which can ride up buildings, and probably most importantly, the Penance Stare. The Penance Stare is a look that the Ghost Rider gives his victims which sears the victim's soul -- it doesn't kill, but it makes the sinner feel all of the sins he's ever committed to others. Death would be a welcome relief to anyone suffering the Ghost Rider's Penance Stare!

Mailer was one of the founders of The Village Voice and became widely recognized for his essays in the 1950s. He is well known for his work in creative non-fiction, a mode of writing sometimes classified as New Journalism. Mailer won the Pulitzer, along with the National Book Award, for 1968's The Executioner's Song, a work of non-fiction about the anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon. He was also awarded with the Pulitzer for The Executioner's Song (1979), a "true-life" novel about Gary Gilmore, a career criminal who was the first person executed in the U.S. after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

The Gospel According to Mark, the last novel Mailer published, told the Gospel from the point of view of Jesus Christ. He wrote two non-fiction books in 2003 - The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing and Why Are We At War? Other well-known Mailer books include 1963's Marilyn, 1968's Armies of the Night, and 1970's Of a Fire on the Moon.

Called Voice, the imprint, which will publish its first title in April, is the brainchild of Ellen Archer, Hyperion's publisher, and Pamela G. Dorman, a 19-year veteran of Viking. It will be just one of a number of new imprints aimed at female readers: Warner Books already has a women's imprint called 5 Spot and in the fall is starting the Springboard Press, for baby boomers, with a large portion of its titles catering to female readers.

Voice is specifically focusing on women from their mid-30's and older and will have a resolutely anti-chick-lit bent, said its founders. Ms. Archer said she wanted to start Voice, in part, to publish books that addressed issues she felt were largely ignored by the news media. "I felt that I, as a 44-year-old woman, working, married and a mother, did not see my life reflected in any of the media stories," she said, referring to newspaper and magazine articles chronicling the battles between working and stay-at-home mothers and the choices that educated women were making to quit their careers to raise families. "I wanted to create a demographic of women in their mid-30's to later that could better illustrate the landscape of a woman's life."

Next month, Hyperion’s sales force will begin marketing five titles to booksellers, starting with The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine. In it, Ms. Bennetts argues that women who "opt out" of careers to raise children forfeit the financial, intellectual, emotional and even medical benefits of working outside the home.

This summer, Harper's Magazine has been serializing a novel for the first time in 50 years. A plot-driven satire about a manipulative doll-company millionairess who buys and renovates much of a small college town in upstate New York, John Robert Lennon's Happyland lends itself to publication in installments. But why it's appearing in Harper's — and not in book form — is one of the more intriguing publishing stories of the season.

The novel was originally under contract to W.W. Norton, but the publisher and author parted ways at the 11th hour, Lennon says, after Norton got cold feet about potential legal trouble. In outline, but not detail, the novel's protagonist, Happy Masters, is strikingly similar to a real woman: Pleasant Rowland, the founder of the American Girl line of dolls, who has been financing the renovation of properties owned by her alma mater, Wells College, in Aurora, N.Y., in the Finger Lakes region. Since 2001, Rowland has converted two 19th-century houses into inns and opened three restaurants in the heart of the lakeside town, stirring up contention: some residents have been resistant to her zealous and unsolicited attention, others have welcomed the spruce-up. In Lennon's zany, entertaining novel, the megalomaniacal Happy Masters goes even further, strong-arming the town mayor and the beleaguered president of the local all-female college, buying up businesses and even hiring someone to drop bricks off the roof of the college library, injuring two students, to prove she needs to build another.

Kola Boof, 37, the Sudanese poet and novelist who claims to have once been bin Laden's sex slave, writes in her autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl, which is excerpted in the September Harper's: "He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen." Boof - who wrote for the soap opera "The Days of Our Lives" until she was axed last month - continues, "He said that he had a paramount desire for [Houston] and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting."

Boof says bin Laden couldn't stop talking about his favorite singer and had lofty plans for her. "He said he wanted to give [her] a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives." But bin Laden's murderous side also emerged in his fantasies about the pop superstar. "[He would say] how beautiful she is," Boof claims, "what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband - Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have womens' husbands killed.

"In his briefcase, I would come across photographs of the Star [magazine], as well as copies of Playboy. It would soon come to the point where I was sick of hearing Whitney Houston's name," Boof writes. But as much as bin Laden adored Houston, he was also dismissive of black women. "African women are only good for a man's lower pleasures," bin Laden supposedly said. "What need do you have for a womb?" And Boof writes that the 9/11 terror mastermind detested her hairstyle. "Why do you wear your hair braided?" he fumed, telling her that "only monkeys" did that.

Brendan Fraser has signed a deal to star in Inkheart, New Line Cinema's adaptation of Cornelia Funke's best-selling children's novel, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Iain Softley is directing.

The book centers on a girl whose father, a bookbinder, has the power to bring characters from books to life by reading aloud. When a villainous ruler and his band of rogues from a children's fable kidnap the man, his daughter and her friends, both real and imaginary, must set things right.

Fraser (The Mummy) will play the father, Mortimer "Mo" Folchart, who also is known as Silvertongue. Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire wrote the adaptation. Mark Ordesky is overseeing for the studio. A fall start is being eyed.

Publishers who want to make their books searchable online but aren't comfortable with Google Book Search now have another option. Publisher HarperCollins and Austin, Texas-based LibreDigital announced today a hosted service called LibreDigital Warehouse that will give publishers and booksellers the ability to deliver searchable book content on their own Web sites.

Like Google Book Search, the service will allow users to search the entire content of a book and preview a percentage of its text and illustrations. Unlike Google, LibreDigital Warehouse allows publishers to customize which pages a user can view, which pages are always prohibited from viewing (such as the last three pages of a novel), and what overall percentage of a book is viewable. Publishers can customize these rules per title and per partner.

The service is the first to allow publishers to digitally capture and deliver book content in a controlled context online, according to LibreDigital.

*****

Google, for its part, maintains that it respects publisher copyright. Google Book Search, still in beta, reveals "snippets" of text when a user searches for books. If a book is not under copyright, Google allows users to view the entire book. Google declined to comment for this article.

"The ability for people to easily search an entire book's content and preview chapters online before they buy it, brings the experience of traditional casual book shopping to the Web," said Brian Murray, Group President, HarperCollins Publishers. "We believe LibreDigital's service is an important tool for helping our authors, distributors and independent booksellers better market and sell titles on the Web, while giving us control over the permissions and presentation quality of copyrighted material."

The unique LibreDigital Warehouse service enables book publishers to display valuable content online in a high-quality, highly-searchable format, while maintaining tight controls over digital rights and permissions. As part of the service, LibreDigital can securely and easily digitize book content, make the content viewable on websites anywhere in the world, and directly interface with search engines and online booksellers. Features offered by LibreDigital include content digitization, asset ingest, automated tagging, digital rights management, digital content display, search, and page view control.

After digitizing a book's content using LibreDigital technology, publishers can provide their distributors and consumers a way to search and virtually preview book content online. For publishers, the new service offers a better way to meet the increasing digital demands of Internet consumers, while also helping book sellers of all sizes to improve their book marketing capabilities and protect the valuable copyrighted works of today's leading authors.

"The world of bringing book content online is here to stay," said Craig A. Miller, General Manager of LibreDigital. "The work we're doing today is a big step in helping the industry find a balance between making book content easily accessible, while ensuring that literary copyrights of authors are adequately protected."

Yet she does endure a rare and peculiar pain. To Jackie her son is a sick and fragile boy. But to the world, Pete Doherty, former lead singer of the Libertines, now Babyshambles, is a self-destructive rock icon, glorious heir to Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin and Morrison, whose drug-related ends all came at 27, "the year of rock and roll death" as Jack White called it, and Doherty’s age now. Her very worst fear is the subject of ghoulish anticipation. "I meet Peter’s fans who say they never miss one of his gigs, in case it's his last." Her friends thought it consoling to say, look, he’s a rock star: taking drugs and living dangerously is what rock stars do. "But," Jackie cries, "he isn’t their son."

It was the day of her mother' funeral in April 2003 when Jackie realised that Peter (he is never "Pete"to his mum) was an addict. Doherty had flown to Liverpool from the Libertines'tour of Japan to be a pall-bearer. He was fidgety, tearful and melancholy, but Jackie attributed his mood to jet-lag and grief. But when they talked after the funeral he confessed many lyrics to his songs were about drugs. Then in the car to Heathrow – Doherty was to rejoin the Libertines in America – he became anxious, desperate to reach London. He refused to be taken to the airport, demanded they set him down in Whitechapel. He needed to meet someone and it had to be tonight...

Eight weeks later, Jackie was on night duty when a friend of Doherty's called to say Peter was out of control. She heard of drug-induced frenzies, bizarre behaviour. So Jackie rushed to London – her husband, a major in the Royal Corps of Signals had been posted to the Netherlands – to meet with Rough Trade, the Libertines'record label. Her son should seek rehab and he' be fine within two or three years, she was told, a time-frame that seemed pessimistic back then.

*****

This is the first time Jackie, 52, has been interviewed and she is wary of upsetting Peter or those close to him, whom she relies upon for information and to protect him. When I ask about Kate Moss, Doherty' on-off love, she says merely that she met her once. Does it not make her angry that while the supermodel faced no charges and has grown richer, her glamour only enhanced by her then cocaine problem, Doherty is arrested every other week, vilified and imprisoned? "I think everyone should leave them alone," is all she says. "They’ve been deeply in love and people just won't leave them alone."

Claire Forlani, Jacqueline Bisset and Oliver Hudson have been tapped to star in the Lifetime original movie "Carolina Moon," based on Nora Roberts' best-selling novel. "Moon," from Mandalay TV and Stephanie Germain Prods. , is one of four adaptations of books by Roberts that Lifetime plans to run back-to-back on Monday nights in February. The other three -- "Blue Smoke," "Angels Fall" and "Montana Sky" -- are in preproduction. (Nellie Andreeva)

Simon Pegg ("Shaun of the Dead") has been cast to play self-promoting Brit writer Toby Young in the movie adaptation of his bestselling book "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People," in which he detailed his disastrous stint as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair in Gotham. Young is merciless about his own hapless attempts to ingratiate himself with celebrities and impress supermodels. But he is equally scathing about the ego and grandeur of his boss Carter, and the self-importance of the entire Vanity Fair machine.

All names have been changed for the purposes of the movie -- Vanity Fair becomes Sharps magazine, for example, and Carter will be Clayton Harding -- but that's not going to fool anyone. Robert Weide, director of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," will make his feature helming debut with the project, scripted by Peter Straughan. Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen of Number 9 Films are producing.

With Pegg now inked for the lead, casting is under way for the part of Carter -- sorry, Harding -- with a view to shooting in New York and the U.K. next spring.

Peter Carey for Theft: A Love Story (Faber & Faber). He has written nine novels, including the Man Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang.

Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton). The Indian-born author wrote Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.

Robert Edric for Gathering the Water (Doubleday). He was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for Peacetime.

Nadine Gordimer for Get a Life (Bloomsbury). The South African received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

Kate Grenville for The Secret River (Canongate). She won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection.

M. J. Hyland for Carry Me Down (Canongate). The Londoner lives and works in Melbourne.

Howard Jacobson for Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape). The novelist and broadcaster lectured at the University of Sydney for three years before returning to England where he taught English at Selwyn College.

James Lasdun for Seven Lies (Jonathan Cape). The Londoner lives in New York and has published collections of poetry and short stories.

Mary Lawson for The Other Side of the Bridge (Chatto & Windus). She was born and brought up in a farming community in Ontario and now lives in England with her husband.

Jon McGregor for So Many Ways to Begin (Bloomsbury). The Bermudan-born author who lives in Nottingham was the only first-time novelist on the 2002 Man Booker longlist.

Hisham Matar for In the Country of Men (Viking). He was born in New York and spent his childhood in Libya and Egypt. He has lived in London since 1986.

Claire Messud for The Emperor's Children (Picador). Her first novel, When the World was Steady, was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

David Mitchell for Black Swan Green (Sceptre). He spent several years teaching in Japan and now lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.

Naeem Murr for The Perfect Man (William Heinemann). His acclaimed first novel The Boy was published in 1998.

Andrew O’Hagan for Be Near Me (Faber & Faber). He was nominated in 2003 by Granta magazine as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelists.

James Robertson for The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hamish Hamilton). His first novel, The Fanatic, was published in 2000.

Edward St Aubyn for Mother's Milk (Picador). His previous novels include A Clue to the Exit.

Barry Unsworth for The Ruby in her Navel (Hamish Hamilton). His Sacred Hunger won the Booker in 1992.

Sarah Waters for The Night Watch (Virago). Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, won the 1999 Betty Trask Award.

Amazon.com on Monday announced it has launched Library Processing, enabling its thousands of library customers to receive Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records and have books and other media they order from Amazon.com fitted with Mylar jackets, bar codes, and other essential preparation services.

Each of these services can be tailored to meet the needs of each library, and each library will be able to manage their processing profile online. Amazon.com says the service will significantly reduce library overhead costs and decrease the time from "box to shelf" so that library patrons will have faster access to newly ordered media titles.

"Libraries already use Amazon.com when they need fast and reliable delivery of products at competitive prices, but our library customers have told us they would like Library Processing in order to better serve their patrons," said Greg Greeley, vice president of books, magazines and corporate accounts."

Beowulf & Grendel. Released in June, this Canadian art film was made in Iceland, starred Scottish actor Gerard Butler as Beowulf, and was directed by Sturla Gunnarsson, a Canadian descendant of Vikings.

Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. The opera, which premiered in June, is based on John Gardner's 1971 book Grendel, which tells the story from the point of view of the monster. The opera, featuring mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as the dragon, was written and directed by Lion King queen Julie Taymor and composed by her companion, Elliot Goldenthal.

Beowulf: Prince of the Geats. Due in 2007 and filmed in such locales as Norway and South Africa, it features a little-known cast and Emmy-winning filmmaker Scott Wegener at the helm. He rewrote the story to make Beowulf a man caught between two cultures as the son of an African explorer who marries into a Geat clan.

Beowulf. Also due in 2007, director Robert Zemeckis' version of the epic will use the performance-capture technique of his Polar Express. Besides Jolie and Hopkins (as the Danish king harassed by Grendel), the cast includes Ray Winstone as Beowulf and Crispin Glover as Grendel.

This isn't Buffy's first foray into comics. And it remains to be seen if it ranks anywhere near Joss Whedon's best foray into comics: the all-too-brief "future slayer" saga Fray, which follows the dystopic advetures of Buffster's 24th-century successor. (Some will persuasively argue that this is Joss' best comics effort. I will counter with a spin move and the old axe-to-the-head. So watch it.)

So what's going on in the extended Buffyverse? Well, you may recall the show ended with the creation of an army of Slayers. Now they're organized, and the tide has turned in favor of the good guys. Ah, but you know how much Whedon hates winners: Soon an "old enemy" surfaces (Dark Horse is cagey on Big Bad's identity), and Dawn starts "experiencing serious growing pains." I hope that means the Scoobies will be fighting a mutant, undead Alan Thicke.

"I am so pleased to have written my first children's book and to have my dear friend Wendell Minor illustrate it. I thought it would be a daunting project, but with six grandchildren and eleven step grandchildren, I've been telling stories to children for a long time," said Mary Higgins Clark.

"We are thrilled to reunite longtime friends Mary Higgins Clark and Wendell Minor in such a special collaboration," said Rubin Pfeffer, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster Children's. "Through his art, Wendell catches the spirit of Mary's brilliant writing and truly brings Ghost Ship to life for children. It's as if this pairing was always meant to be."

Set in Cape Cod, Ghost Ship is the story of a friendship between two boys, one visiting his grandmother on summer vacation in Cape Cod and another a cabin boy for a sea captain with stories to tell of his adventures on the high seas centuries before. Evoking the mystery and history of the high seas and the rich stories of Cape Cod, this is a book for children and for families to share and to make the world of long ago very near and real.

"Mary Higgins Clark is an amazing storyteller and in Ghost Ship she creates a story rich in character and adventure that will inspire young readers to imagine the stories of their own past," said Paula Wiseman, V.P. and Editorial Director, who will be editing the book.

The literary value of the English-language novels about Paris is beside the point. Paris sells. "This is cliché Paris," said Marie Babin-Burke, the buyer of new fiction for W H Smith, the English-language bookstore on the Rue de Rivoli. "People who read these books aren't interested in what really happens at different levels of society. They're into the fantasy Paris, the Paris of sophistication and magic and Champagne drinking." The display tables of W H Smith are filled with novels set in Paris, next to the guidebooks to Paris, histories of Paris and memoirs about Paris.

Alas, the plots may not surprise, the prose may not dazzle critics. But, Ms. Babin-Burke said, "even clichés can be more than nice." Tayana in Salaam Paris, for example, has been entranced by Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina. In her two years in Paris, Sabrina had "learned how to live," Tayana says, vowing, "I must one day go to Paris too."

*****

Slick marketing is a feature of at least some of these books, as the covers attest. Salaam, Paris features the dark-eyed Tayana, a red-lipsticked smile piercing the sheer red veil; Paris Hangover shows a bare-legged, strapless-gowned, stiletto-shoed female figure on a bed, a pastel Eiffel Tower in the distance. In addition to the hunger-for-love-in-Paris theme, there is a midlife crisis version, which has received better reviews.

One of them is Katharine Davis’s Capturing Paris. It is the story of an American expatriate couple living an elegant life in Paris. Their lives unravel when the husband loses his job, another woman intrudes, and the wife is confronted with the collapse of the life she has built for herself in Paris.

Sales of the book, "For One More Day," will be supported by a marketing effort that will include in-store signage, a 25-city initiative to encourage customers to discuss the book at Starbucks stores, and a charity tie-in to promote literacy.

Starbucks declined to disclose the terms of the deal with the book's publisher, Hyperion. The company, which is based in Seattle, has parlayed successful sales of music compilation CDs into a small but profitable business that has included deals for exclusive content with musicians like Bob Dylan and Alanis Morissette. This year, Starbucks extended its reach into the entertainment business through a deal in which it promoted the low-budget film "Akeelah and the Bee" in its stores.

Selling the latest book by Albom, author of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" and the memoir, "Tuesdays with Morrie," takes that strategy a step further, said Ken Lombard, head of Starbucks Entertainment. "For One More Day," which Starbucks said "focuses on the connection between parents and children," goes on sale in Starbucks stores October 3. It also will be available in traditional retail outlets, where it will go on sale about a week earlier, Lombard said. Starbucks is timing the beginning of its promotion to coincide with Albom's book tour, during which he will visit Starbucks coffee shops in eight cities, Lombard said.

Move marks the first foray of the world's biggest online retailer into content creation not limited to its Web site. Company isn't looking to co-finance the film but does bring an intriguing variable to the table: a pledge to use the clout of its site as a marketing tool for the theatrical and DVD launch.

Novel by first-time writer Donohue combines literature and fantasy and covers issues of identity. A 7-year-old is kidnapped by forest-dwelling changelings, who replace him with a look-alike. Book tracks the changeling's attempt to meld into a family and the boy who roams the woods with a pack of feral children.

Author's pic deal was made by UTA, which has guided Amazon into such recent showbiz ventures as "Amazon Fishbowl With Bill Maher." Donohue already appeared on that show, part of an ongoing Amazon.com campaign to propel sales of the book. That enthusiasm led to the movie deal, said Laura Porco, Amazon director of merchandising.

"We are always trying to innovate, based on listening to customers and the things they're passionate about," she said. "This was a book we passed around to our editorial and merchandising teams. Everybody was excited by Keith's voice and felt this could be a great movie."

Having led the way in bringing publishing into the digital age with its award-winning podcasts, Penguin's blog will be a destination where an editor will post the latest news from the company: new acquisitions, sneak previews from works in progress of some of Penguin's best-loved authors, industry gossip and advice on how to get published. The blog will give readers a glimpse into the editor's office, offering insight into the day-to-day running of the company and how books are made. The first blogger will be Venetia Butterfield, Publisher of Viking, the hardback imprint which counts Will Self, Nick Hornby, Jonathan Coe, Claire Tomalin, Jeremy Paxman and Rageh Omaar amongst its authors.

Right down to the label, "chica lit" is one pop-culture trend that was entirely predictable: Just add a Latina heroine to chick lit, then change the "k" to an "a." The only question is, "What took so long?" With titles like "Friday Night Chicas," and "Cinderella Lopez," chica lit is a small but growing niche within chick lit, the category that has spawned such thinly sliced genres as "mommy lit" and "hen lit," not to mention such hybrids as the chick-lit mystery.

What all the varieties have in common is a focus on the real-life concerns of regular women. There's usually some added glamour, but the heroines tend to be middle-class professionals dealing with friendship, romance and career. That some of those heroines should be Latina — in a country with 40 million Hispanics — should have been a no-brainer.

"The publishing industry expected us to be writing tales of oppression and exile and misery and all this sort of stuff they were used to, and instead we were writing legitimately what our lives are like," says Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, the Albuquerque, N.M., author who launched the chica-lit revolution three years ago with "The Dirty Girls Social Club." Her newest is "Make Him Look Good." "I'm an Ivy League graduate, middle-class person who just lives a regular American life — you know, born and raised here, don't speak all that much Spanish — and there are lots and lots of people like me."

Over the course of the 20 years I've been publishing fiction, a none too subtle transformation has taken place in the design of book covers. My first novel used Henri Rousseau's The Dream, into which the heads of my characters were carefully hand-painted, in the same style, peeking through the foliage. (These days, they would probably just bung in photographs.) The cover of my second novel is a piece of original art (aka, a moon rock), with two crossed drumsticks and a joyful spatter of paint, capturing the exuberance and abandon of the main character, a rock'n'roll drummer.

Yet my latter covers have all capitulated to the computer. By the 1990s, designers were glued to their screens. If you scan Waterstone's today, you will be hard pressed to find any covers employing original art. (One delightful exception is Allegra Goodman's Intuition - congratulations to Dial Press - whose watercolour cover is every bit as exquisite as the text inside. You would never believe that a mere filing cabinet could look so beguiling.) For the most part, designers now just drag photos off the web, and play with backgrounds and fonts at the keyboard. That's why a strange drabness, coldness, and sameness is plaguing the aesthetics of book publishing - and at a time when the pleasures of physical books, as opposed to electronic media, are vital to defend.

*****

I'm not one to complain about the advent of the computer overall, which has made writing so much more convenient. But over-reliance on this clinical technology is estranging in the decorative arts. That's why, at my wit's end this last weekend, I took my cue from Mitchell and hauled out my coloured pencils. I drew my own damn book cover -- luminous, one-of-a-kind, and, like one of Tolstoy's real beauties, not quite perfect. We'll see if my publisher bites. Call me a Luddite if you will -- at least I tried.

In a meeting at the author's home, the renowned director and producer conceived of a groundbreaking miniseries, and within two hours Goodkind was sold on the concept, and negotiations commenced. Ten months later the deal was finally concluded.

All of Goodkind's novels have been international best-sellers. Translated into 20 foreign languages, there are more than 10 million copies in print. The Sword of Truth series began with Wizard's First Rule in 1994. The 10th novel in the series, Phantom, is on sale now. The 11th and final volume is under contract and will be published in 2008.

Raimi and Donen hope to begin production of the opening miniseries, Wizard's First Rule, within the next year, to be followed by ensuing volumes of the epic novels. The development process will begin while Raimi completes Spider-Man 3.