Omnivoracious

Amazon Exclusive: Eoin Colfer--Unleashed Guest Blogger

Eoin Colfer (pronounced Owen) is the very funny author of the best-selling fantasy series, Artemis Fowl, which began with the eponymous first book in 2001 and is now wrapping up with the eighth and final book in the series, Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian. 

In Colfer's guest blog post below we get the scoop on the Artemis series and more--including (but not limited to) speculation on Thor's underpants and a little Ridley Pearson roasting.  I'm sad to say goodbye to snappy Artemis Fowl, but Colfer convinced him to leave us with a list of his top five favorite books and why he likes them, after the jump.

 

Artemis Blog.

People often ask me how come I’m so good looking. No wait, that was a dream. But people actually do ask me where I got the idea for Artemis Fowl, the teenage criminal mastermind featured in my book series, which is cleverly called Artemis Fowl, the series. And I say to them: Are you saying I stole the idea from Ridley Pearson? Is that what you’re saying? Because it’s a lie! Did Pearson send you? You can tell him from me that he’s barking up the wrong tree. In fact, he doesn’t even have a tree. And if he did, I certainly wouldn’t be up in it watching him work through a telescope.

            And then when I calm down and realise that nobody is accusing me of anything, I say that I got the idea for Artemis from my little brother Donal, or more specifically, from a photo I saw of him taken on his first morning at school. He was wearing trousers with razor creases and holding a briefcase, and I thought that he looked just like a James Bond villain, and wouldn’t it be funny to write a book about a kid villain who was just as much of a genius as Bloefeldt or Goldfinger but only four feet high.

            Apparently a lot of people agreed with me that this was a funny idea, because over the next decade or so more than 20 million people picked up a copy of an Artemis book for themselves. And if you factor in the number of people who shared the book with their little brothers, then that makes 20 million and four readers, because kids do not share with their little brothers, as little brothers tend to store their boogers in between the pages of their big brothers books.

            So, I imagine Ron Burgundy asking: you’ve got a really successful series going, why in the name of Zeus’s beard would you finish it after 8 books? After all, Tolkien wrote twenty four Lords of the Ring books including all the manuscripts, unfinished manuscripts, rough sketches, cartoons, and stick figures that have yet to turn up in his step-grand neighbour’s attic. And that’s not even counting the ones co-written by James Patterson.

            This is a good question. And one I often ask myself in the dead of night when I awake weeping, having dreamed of spiralling sales and obscurity. Why in the name of Thor’s enchanted underpants would I kill the goose that lays the golden egg? This is obviously a metaphor, as I would never personally kill a goose, unless the goose had been genetically modified to threaten the security of our nation (Take that, Ridley!) and I do not get paid in golden eggs. Although I wish I did, as gold holds its value pretty well in our uncertain economy. Also I happen to know that Thor doesn’t wear underpants, as he finds they slow him down when he needs to go potty in battle situations.

 

YA Wednesday: Stephanie Guerra on Edgy YA Fiction

Featured Summer Reading author Stephanie Guerra's debut YA novel, Torn, is the story of two unlikely friends: Ruby, a wild child who thumbs her nose at high-school norms and runs with an older, faster, crowd; and Stella, the classic good girl who secretly wants to be something else. Torn has teenage drug use, a relationship with a much older man, and more of the darker, grittier choices that often come into play during the formulative teen years.  Some of us love that kind of realism in our YA fiction and others may think it goes too far.  Do you think there's a line that shouldn't be crossed in teen books?   See what Guerra has to say on the subject in her exclusive guest post below and you can check out her recommended summer reads for great realistic YA fiction, teen classics,  and more, here.

When I was writing Torn, I knew I was crossing some lines. I’d get into a good work flow and then find myself writing something about teens swigging liquor and I’d pause and wonder, Am I using my powers for evil?

Then the reviews started coming out and the most frequent comments were “extremely realistic,” “strong voice” and “edgy.” Many readers loved the book for these reasons, and said it captures exactly what high school is (or was) like for them. But some readers objected to the substance use in the book, and others felt that a teen’s affair with a forty-year-old man is crossing a line.

So what is too edgy in YA fiction? And how, as a generally law-abiding person who is also a parent, am I okay with writing the messy content in Torn? As an author of realistic fiction, my first fidelity is to realism. And try as I might, I can’t picture adolescence except as an insane ocean of choices about drugs, sex, beliefs, and morals.

Admittedly, my own adolescence was edgy. I spent those years in the drug-soaked culture of Santa Cruz and then the booze-soaked culture of Vegas. I, and everyone I knew, was confronted with an array of choices about substances and sex. And so Torn was written with the assumption that teens will have opportunities to experiment, and ultimately, they will have to choose what they’re willing to try and do.

That said, there is an artistic line in what I’m willing to depict, and it’s called “glamorization.” I wouldn’t even stick a toenail over that line. I’ve read a YA book (naming no names) that was like an ad for heroin. It was framed as a cautionary tale, but the descriptions of being high were so enticing that I found myself wondering what I’d missed. So I skip elaborate sensory detail when I’m dealing with something I want to acknowledge but not necessarily promote. Sometimes the event enters the story in the past tense or as a discussion between characters, offering a degree of separation from the immediate experience.

But I avoid didacticism, too. That’s always been a risk in books for young people, and it’s a murderer of good fiction. Therefore, not all of my characters who use drugs will wind up on the street or dead. And I may mention alcohol as part of a scene without proceeding to any lesson. Likewise sex.  My characters don’t always make good choices; otherwise there would be no story. But they do grow.

But to the question: is there a line? Or has YA blurred boundaries with adult fiction so greatly that nothing is off-limits? When I think of books like Doing It, Tricks, Smack, Tyrell, and more, I’m tempted to say no line exists except that which parents establish.

Ultimately, I believe that the question of whether any given book is appropriate depends on the audience. For instance, in my research on building literacy with incarcerated teens (Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, February 2012), I found that street literature (an edgy genre dealing with life in urban ghettos) reflects these students’ life experiences and can help them build literacy, examine their choices, and consider options for the future. Would I give the same books to a sheltered thirteen-year-old from the rural Midwest? No.

To offer another example, by the age of twenty, approximately one in five women has been sexually assaulted. Books like Speak, When Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune, Scars and Thirteen Reasons Why let assault victims know they’re not alone in their experiences and emotions. They offer a safe literary landscape for teens to discuss painful issues without owning them as personal. Some offer coping strategies. But would I teach Kambia Elaine to a tenth grade English class? No.

 So we—the teachers and parents—are to whatever extent we care to try, the gatekeepers for books, as for other media. YA is not a rating like PG. Choices of literature must be based on knowledge of the audience, and the only way to evaluate a book is to read it oneself. Doing so models literacy, establishes a context for conversation, and may be a good launching point for discovering what a teen believes and feels about larger topics. But most of all, paying attention to a teen’s literature is an act of love and connection around the fascinating world of books.

--Stephanie Guerra

YA Wednesday Exclusive: Tamora Pierce Reviews "Seraphina"

Our July spotlight pick for Best of the Month in Teens is Seraphina, Rachel Hartman's brilliant debut fantasy novel that takes place in a world of dragons and humans, narrated by a young woman who is both.  Even for readers who don't typically gravitate towards books with dragons, this is the book to make an exception for. Seraphina is detailed and complex without becoming dense or cumbersome--I absolutely loved it, and so have other readers in the office.  Seraphina has received starred reviews and praise from best-selling authors like Christopher Paolini and Tamora Pierce who wrote an exclusive guest review for the book that you can only find here (or here).  At the end of the post we've also got a short book trailer that's pretty awesome.  If you already love books with dragons, which one is your favorite so far?

 

Tamora Pierce is a best-selling author of fantasy books for teenagers. Her books, known for their teenaged girl warriors and wizards, have received critical acclaim and a strong fanbase. Her newest book, Mastiff, is the third book in The Legend of Beka Cooper series. 

In Seraphina's world, coldly intellectual dragons can take on the shapes--and feelings--of human beings. Sometimes this results in a surprise. Seraphina's father married a beautiful musician, and discovered too late that she was a dragon. She died, leaving him with a daughter who confuses him and his new wife and children.

Now the half-dragon Seraphina is the assistant to the cranky royal music master. She is in charge of Princess Glisselda's music lessons; she books performers for the 40-year celebration of the peace treaty between dragons and humans, and she rehearses the rowdy court musicians. She has to hide the scales on her arm and around her waist, and she can never let anyone find out that Orma, her music teacher, is actually a dragon.

When she plays the solo for the funeral of the realm's murdered prince, Seraphina is suddenly raised into entirely new, visible levels of peril. People she always avoided are noticing her. She has to attend social functions, where she is caught up in court politics, between those who support the treaty and those who want to destroy it. She runs afoul of conspirators who want to start the war again--one of them may be her own grandfather. She even discovers that Prince Lucian, who is betrothed to Princess Glisselda, is not only very sharp-eyed but also very agreeable to be around. He appreciates her insights on intrigue at court and in the city and uses her as an unofficial investigator into the ongoing unrest.

The plot thickens. A new religious order plots riots and revolution. Exiled knights return to report an unregulated dragon flying near where the old prince was murdered. The dragons are trying to send Orma for corrective surgery--they think he's gotten too human and they want to cut those parts out of his brain. Seraphina fears that if she tells the prince and the princess what she is, they'll hate her forever, but their work to preserve the treaty celebrations is bringing them closer together. And all of them are terrified that the dragons will decide that humans are not worth the trouble, and will destroy them at last.

I loved this book even more the second time I read it than I did the first. The characters are interesting and engaging, and I love the new look at dragons. For all that she's half-dragon, Seraphina is a very believable human being, caught between different loyalties and just trying to keep everyone she loves alive. But don't take my word for it--read it yourself!

--Tamora Pierce

 

Three Books That Make Me Terrified [scared sh*tless] to be a Father by Justin Halpern

With Father's Day only a day away, we thought the perfect person for a guest post would, of course, be Justin Halpern, bestselling author of Sh*t My Dad Says and his latest book, I Suck at Girls, which we loved so much we made it a Best Books of May selection.  In this exclusive essay Halpern shares his thoughts on the lessons of fatherhood he took from books by Upton Sinclair, Richard Price, and Cormac McCarthy.

I grew up in the eighties and early nineties in front of a television.  On TV, fatherhood breaks down in to two categories: The dad who loves his kids and shows up to all their graduations and sporting events, and the irresponsible dad who has an alcohol problem, seems like he’s turned the corner, but ultimately disappoints his child.  When presented with those two options, the answer seemed easy.  “I’ll be the good dad who loves his kids!”  Then, in eighth grade, I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

 Although this book is probably best known for its depiction of turn of the century meatpacking producers and the immigrants who worked there, for me it was the first book I read that detailed how much responsibility came with having a child.  Sinclair uses Jurgis, the patriarch of an impoverished Lithuanian family and puts him through hell, a hell Jurgis accepts because he needs to provide for his family.  There’s not even a question in Jurgis’s mind that he needs to keep working, even when the bottoms of his feet are infected and rotting.  Then, finally, after Jurgis loses family member after family member he sets out on his own and for the first time in the book, the character expresses some level of happiness even though he’s a hobo. 

Sure, maybe most took it as a commentary on the dream of capitalism that America was selling, but I took it as Sinclair grabbing me by the shoulders and screaming “Fatherhood is a prison!  RUN!”  I would have signed up for a vasectomy right then and there if they had offered it to fourteen year olds. 

Being a father is much different in the twenty-first century.  Parenting techniques are debated to the point where many people, including myself, tend to take for granted our most basic duties as fathers; to keep our children alive.  The Road by Cormac McCarthy reduces fatherhood to it’s the bare essentials. The father in this story doesn’t worry about whether or not he should try attachment parenting.  Instead he worries about whether or not a roving band of cannibals will toss his son in a basement and eat him while he’s still alive. Reading this book will remind you of the primal obligations of fatherhood.

Hopefully when you’ve finished raising a child, they’ve become an upstanding citizen and someone you’re proud of.  Unfortunately that doesn’t always happen.  Richard Price’s Lush Life is largely a story about cops and inner-city kids, but what stood out to me was the relationship a Detective named Matty had with his sons who end up committing a very stupid crime.  Price does a beautiful job of showing us a father trying to come to terms with his own mistakes for the good of his children, something I hope I will be able to do someday.

--Justin Halpern

YA Wednesday: Alyson Noël Exclusive for Summer Reading

 

This week's featured summer reading author is Alyson Noël, whose young adult paranormal series, The Immortals, had readers on the edge of their seats last summer for the conclusion of the epic love story between Damen and Ever.  Now, there is a new YA series from Noël to get excited about--The Soul Seekers.  The highly anticipated first book, Fated (released yesterday), introduces readers to Daire Santos, a girl whose strange visions are a hint of her ability to travel the worlds of the living and the dead, and Dace, the blue-eyed boy who has materialized from her dreams. 

Sounds like the perfect book to start the summer, right?

We asked Noël to share a little something about summer reading and she sent us the exclusive essay below.  You can also read an excerpt from Fated  under More to Explore, here, and check out an exclusive video from the author about the book below. 

Amazon Exclusive from Alyson Noël :

If I had to choose a favorite childhood memory, it would easily be the last day of school.

Any last day of school—they all held equal appeal.

Though I should probably explain that the choice is less about my not liking school (loved the early years—later, school and I came to the understanding that while we may not like each other, we were indeed good for each other) and more about the onset of summer. The heady anticipation of three deliciously long months sprawled before me like a lazy cat.

As a native Southern Californian, the lure of summer was less about a spike in the temperature, and more about daily trips to the beach, a friend’s pool, the couch in my den, or a blanket on the lawn in my own backyard—always with a book (or two) in hand.

Early childhood reading was defined by The Little House on the Prairie series, and anything featuring a horse on the cover—Misty of Chincoteague a particular stand out. The early teen years were when Judy Blume’s Deenie and Forever, and SE Hinton’s The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and That was Then This is Now, rocked my world.

While required high school reading lists introduced me to some of my favorite authors, particularly F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, and the Brontë sisters, choosing a book for the pure pleasure of immersing myself in the journey (as opposed to analyzing and dissecting it for class discussion) held far more appeal. And because I came of age at a time when teen books were not nearly the phenomenon they are now, my high school summers were spent picking from my mom’s extensive collection of Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, and Stephen King paperbacks.

Since books have played such a prominent role in my life, it comes as no surprise that I made Daire Santos, the protagonist in my new young adult series, The Soul Seekers, an avid reader as well.

When we first meet Daire in Fated, she makes mention of a “water-warped paperback” she’s been “lugging around.” Although the title goes unmentioned, I imagine that book to be Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—assigned reading for her English class. Though, that’s not to say she’s not enjoying it. If asked, Daire would tell you it’s taught her to be less complacent in her life and her thinking. A lesson that comes in handy when she moves to the mystical town of Enchantment, New Mexico and her whole world is flipped upside down.

Adjusting to a new town, getting acquainted with the grandmother she’s never met, undergoing a brutal initiation in her training as a Seeker, fighting soul-stealing demons, journeying to mystical worlds, and falling in love for the very first time, don’t allow for much downtime. But if I had to assign Daire a summer reading list, it would definitely include all of the books I read and loved as a teen.

As worldly and experienced as Daire is, as exciting as her life has become, I have a pretty good feeling she’d fall for S.E. Hinton’s Pony Boy just as hard as I did. -- Alyson Noël

Michael Scott: The Secrets Behind (the Immortal) Codex

On May 22, 2007, the first book in Michael Scott's series for young adults, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, made its first appearance. Exactly five years later--this Tuesday--fans will learn more of (the rest of?) Nicholas Flamel's secrets in the sixth and final book, The Enchantress. We chose The Enchantress as an editors' pick for summer reading and in the Amazon exclusive below author Michael Scott sets straight a few historical details about The Codex--the book at the core of the series.

At the heart of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel is the ancient book, The Codex, the Book of Abraham. The story begins with the theft of the pages from the book and, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that not only have the Flamels and Doctor John Dee fought over the book for centuries, but that the entire adventure really began centuries ago, when Nicholas bought the book from a mysterious one-handed stranger.

Fantasy fiction is filled with magical books and scrolls, most famously, The Necronomicon in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The extraordinary and shamefully neglected Clark Ashton Smith created The Book of Eibon, while Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, used the Unaussprechlichen Kulten when he wrote about the Cthulhu Mythos. These are all fictional books--but the Book of Abraham is different. It really existed.

Author Katie Workman: Mother's Day Gift to Ourselves

[The editors at Omnivoracious are grateful to Katie Workman for this special guest post about her new cookbook, The Mom 100 Cookbook: 100 Recipes Every Mom Needs in Her Back Pocket, selected as one of our Best Cookbooks of the Month for April.]

Good god, have we gotten ourselves backed into a corner when it comes to feeding our families, getting dinner on the table, fighting the good fight.  Open the paper, turn on the news, and there’s another scary missive about pink slime or childhood obesity or pesticides.  It’s enough to make you want to curl up and under the bed and hurl a takeout menu at your family.  “I can’t possibly do all of this right,” we think. “Maybe I shouldn’t even bother.”

As Mother’s Day slides towards us, here’s what I’m thinking.  Let’s stop acting as though life isn’t extremely messy and complicated.  Let’s stop beating ourselves up.  Let’s try and imagine that just because we’re not going to cook a homemade dinner from scratch every night, it’s not worth doing it a couple of nights a week.  Let’s not hold ourselves to impossible standards, believing that if we don’t do all of our shopping at organic farmers’ markets, calling each purveyor by name and discussing the quality of the soil, we should hang our heads in shame and let the food police haul us off to a place where bad mothers go.  This isn’t really a resolution (‘cause we all know how those things usually turn out), but more of a Mother’s Day gift to ourselves.

Guess what I did last night?  After a full day of work, I spent the dinner hour on the phone being interviewed on the radio about the importance of cooking for our kids and families, and then I ORDERED A PIZZA!  Because I wanted to take my kids to a dance performance at their school.   And the pizza was great, and the dance performance was better, and I have another chance to make dinner tonight.

When I thought about writing The Mom 100 Cookbook, the simple concept was to create 100 recipes that every mom needs to have in her back pocket.  Recipes to answer those every day dilemmas like “there’s a bake sale tomorrow and you signed me up to make what?” and “I need to get out of my chicken rut,” and that evergreen crowd pleaser, “I’m going to find a way to make my kids eat their damn fish.”  Twenty dilemmas, five recipe solutions for each quandary, and some gorgeous photography, and the main part of the book was done. 

But it turns out that just as important as the recipes is the need for us to feel enthusiastic about cooking, empowered in the kitchen.  We want to face dinner hour with a little more joie de vivre than we feel when it’s time for a dental cleaning.  Because we get to feed our kids every day--every day!   So this book is full of tips for making things easier, getting the kids into the kitchen, preparing as much as possible ahead of time, and other thoughts about making cooking just plain old more fun.  

Even the small wins feel great.  Make a dish you know your family will like.  Ask your kids to pick out a recipe or two for the coming week.  Make a double batch of something, and freeze half.  Make homemade brownies. Take a look in your pantry and make a list of what you need to stock up on, so those rushed weeknights go a little more smoothly.  Pick one new chicken (or beef or pasta) recipe, and ask the kids to help.  On a Sunday evening, chop up some garlic and onions and tuck them into containers in your fridge, so later in the week when you come home and look at your recipe, the phrase “mince two cloves of garlic,” doesn’t bring you to your knees.  You’ve minced the garlic!  Allow your future self to thank your past self graciously for being so thoughtful.

There never seems to be enough time to do everything we want to do, the way we’d like to do it.  But when we’ve gotten to a place where getting dinner on the table seems way too daunting, it’s time to tell the food police to pack up their thesis about the care and propagation of endangered heirloom potatoes and play somewhere else.  We have dinner to make.

John Irving and "Crushes on the Wrong People"

[The editors at Omnivoracious are grateful to John Irving for this very special guest post about his new novel, In One Person, selected as one of our Best Books of the Month for May.]

In One Person is about a young bisexual man who falls in love with an older transgender woman--Miss Frost, the librarian in a Vermont public library. The bi guy is the main character, but two transgender women are the heroes of this novel--in the sense that these two characters are the ones my bisexual narrator, Billy Abbott, most looks up to.

Billy is not me. He comes from my imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager. Most of us don’t ever act on our earliest sexual imaginings. In fact, most of us would rather forget them--not me. I think our sympathy for others comes, in part, from our ability to remember our feelings--to be honest about what we felt like doing. Certainly, sexual tolerance comes from being honest with ourselves about what we have imagined sexually.

Those adults who are always telling children and young adults to abstain from doing everything--well, they must have never had a childhood or an adolescence (or they’ve conveniently forgotten what they were like when they were young).

When I was a boy, I imagined having sex with my friends’ mothers, with girls my own age--yes, even with certain older boys among my wrestling teammates. It turned out that I liked girls, but the memory of my attractions to the “wrong” people never left me. What I’m saying is that the impulse to bisexuality was very strong; my earliest sexual experiences--more important, my earliest sexual imaginings--taught me that sexual desire is mutable. In fact, in my case--at a most formative age--sexual mutability was the norm. What made me a writer was definitely a combination of what I read and what I imagined--especially, what I imagined sexually.

Exclusive: David Hughes Explains Hollywood's "Development Hell"

David Hughes mines Hollywood's depths for the untold stories behind the unmade movies (Sandman, where art thou?) and the unmade versions of movies that actually did reach the screen (like the fourth Indiana Jones film, written by Frank Darabont and meant to include Sean Connery).

In this exclusive guest post, Hughes answers the question at the heart of his acclaimed and — newly updated — book, Tales From Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made:

We often hear this phrase, ‘Development Hell’, thrown about. But what does it mean? (I should know: I wrote the book on it.)

In an ideal world, a screenwriter would write a script, and assuming it's brilliant, attract (a) a director, (b) actors, (c) finance, and (d) members of the opposite sex. In practice, these things seldom happen — especially (d). Of all the scripts that get written (fewer than 1% of those that get started), fewer than 1% get anywhere near anyone with the power to get them made; of that 1%, only 1% will actually be made. In other words, every film you see is like Rocky’s whole life — a million to one shot. Many of the rest wind up circling the drain in a place called Development Hell.

Development is what happens when everyone with an interest in an unproduced script tries to help it get to a place where it’s ready to be turned into a movie. This will tend to involve studio executives, producers, actors, and multiple screenwriters — some brought on board because they have a particular ‘voice’, others because they had a hit the previous weekend. When all of these people pull in the same direction, working together to create the best possible version of a particular story — or, in most cases, one that’s achievable for the money — development can go smoothly. When some or all of the collaborators are pulling in different directions, and this process continues indefinitely, that’s Development Hell.

So how can budding screenwriters avoid this special form of damnation? One way is to refuse to sell anything you’ve written, leaving your perfect script as words on paper, like the blueprint for a wonderful building that will never be constructed. Another way is to be so amazingly rich, you can finance your own films. Another If, however, you want to see your masterpiece on the big screen, and you don’t have the necessary millions to make it yourself, there’s a pretty good chance you will end up in the special place reserved for screenplays that started out so perfect, they just had to be rewritten. And rewritten… And rewritten… The name of this particular circle of Hell? Why, Limbo of course.

The above article has since been optioned by a major Hollywood studio, and now features a talking dog, a car chase and a more “relatable” protagonist. A new writer is being drafted in to ‘punch up’ the second paragraph, and by the time they’ve finished, everyone will forget why they liked it in the first place.

Find more Hollywood stories and exclusive guest posts at the Amazon Studios Hollywonk blog.

Comedian/Author Michael Ian Black on Why the Movies Get Love and Marriage All Wrong

"Love," writes Michael Ian Black, "is cinema’s abiding theme, especially romantic love, the kind of 'meet cute' love that surmounts every roadblock on its journey to happy ever after."

But love (and marriage) in the movies, well, that bears little resemblance to the life that the comedian, actor (The State, Wet Hot American Summer) and best-selling author has found himself living, and, one might venture to speculate, the lives most of us live. Do you agree? Here's more of Black's take, written just for Amazon: 

"It’s no wonder that movies get marriage so wrong. After all, they are almost diametrically opposing experiences. Movies are about escape. Marriages are about 'no escape.' Once you tie your life to somebody else, there is no turning back, at least not without an attorney.

One of the things that inspired me to write my new book, You’re Not Doing It Right, is my annoyance at movie marriages, particularly the romantic comedy marriage. Hollywood has given us two, equally false, notions of marriage. Either it’s the joining of two gorgeous young people “destined” to be together, or as a wheezing and cold institution inhabited by miserable and middle-aged wheezebags, usually meant to illustrate a counterpoint to the love the gorgeous young couple in the film will share once their destinies are realized, and they are able to finally be together against all odds. Yawn. Boring. Wrong.

In my experience as a husband of thirteen years, marriage is neither of these things. Yes, my wife and I are both gorgeous. Hollywood got that part right. And yes, we had to surmount a few obstacles to be together, such as the fact that she was living with her boyfriend when we met.  But our trip down the aisle wasn’t the beginning of a perfect life together. It was the start of something else, something that cannot be encapsulated in ninety minutes and a soundtrack by Maroon 5."

Read more on the Amazon Studios Hollywonk blog.