It seems to me that oftentimes in young relationships once there's a problem of some significance then it's almost like they're both racing for the dumper buzzer.
Lemony Snicket. Now, I'm told - the books, of course, starting from the very first one, became hugely popular, selling millions and millions. And I understand that when you used to go around to talk to your very young fans, you would appear as Lemony Snicket's representative or agent.
When I was researching my very first novel, "The Basic Eight," I was calling right-wing political and religious organizations and asking them to mail me their material so that I could mock them in my novels.
It turns out she is Canadian, my editor, and so she drinks like a fish. So she wasn't a lightweight at all. And in the morning, she said that the idea still seemed like a good one, and here we are.
I had this idea about terrible things happening to orphans, and I knew it was such a horrible idea that the idea of writing it down and then submitting it professionally was obviously absurd.
I met [my editor] in a bar where alcoholic beverages are served and I bought her one and I told her the idea. And she said that she liked it very much, which embarrassed me because I thought it meant that she was a lightweight and that in the morning, as so many women say to so many men, what seems like a good idea, you know, turns out not to be.
I first told the idea to an editor I had met who, after reading one of my novels for adults that was set in a high school, had an idea that I might write something for children.
Like a lot of people whose children were small in the 2000s, I read [Daniel Handler] books out loud and I loved them.
Back in the late '90s, a writer named Daniel Handler decided that kids books were too cheerful. I mean, all the "Harry Potter" series did was occasionally kill off major characters. Thus was born "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" and its mysterious author, Lemony Snicket. "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" is now a great new series on Netflix.
I decided that it might be interesting to have terrible things happen to orphans over and over again.
When you say, "History is written by the winners," you like to think about someone who isn't you. You want to think, "Oh, that's the juggernaut I'm standing against." But you're probably part of it.
I found powerful the idea that everything we have is, in effect, stolen from everybody else.
It's funny, particularly when you're a writer and you're doing well, you have that sense of like, "Oh! My view of the world is the one that's going to be published."
When you start reading nonfiction books about piracy, you realize that it's actually just a history of desperate people.
For every teenager I know, having a phone is a mixed blessing, because your parents can press a button and figure out where you are.
I think pirates, like astronauts, particularly for a boy, are always kind of worth thinking about.
People worry more about girls, for a good reason: I don't think my parents thought I was going to be raped by a classmate or attacked when I was walking alone in some neighborhood. So it's not just paranoid parents.
Mostly, it's flattering to meet fans. As long as it's in a planned, professional meeting, rather than, say, someone dropping by my home, which is not as pleasant.
One has to adopt a sort of Zen calm, in which you know you wrote the best book that you could at the time.
I was never a fan of anything, and yet some people are fans of my books. That's a bit odd. But I like meeting them.
My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.
Like most writers, I look back on all of my finished works with utter regret, and the trouble with writing a series of novels is that you have to go back and read them, and make sure that you haven't forgotten anything you've created, and then when you do that, you're faced with your own mistakes on every trick, from the wrong word in places to entirely the wrong incident.
My work is very dear to me, and certainly I have had all the emotional highs and lows that go with trying to get it to an audience. But I do have some kind of detachment that seems somewhat unusual in my trade. I'm a writer who writes every day. I don't have a period of months where I can't get anything done and I wander around tearing my hair out. When I come back from a book tour, for instance, I might have one day where I sleep late and then check my e-mail, and then go for a walk, and then the next day I'm really itching to get back at writing a story.
Adverbs is a book about love, and I thought that was pretty cheerful, but people who are reading it now are telling me that it's actually quite dark.
I wrote a comedy, which hopefully [Rick director] Curtiss Clayton will bring to the screen, that I thought was the antithesis of all my work. I thought it was light and sunshiny, and Mr. Clayton reminded me that it is the story of a woman kidnapped and forced to do things against her will, which is not what most people think of as light and sunshiny.
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