!!!!!!  Dude!  He is so my new favorite person!  And here I was thinking to myself, literally an hour earlier, that I would probably never be mistaken for a teenager again.  :-)  Thanks, UPS guy!  That totally made my week.  🙂

And she said my name!!!  YAY!  For those of you who didn’t see it (or who can’t make that thing work up there), she was asked about which bear is her favorite, and she mentioned Lusa and said that I wrote the character to be very funny.  Awwwwww.  Lusa is my favorite, too!  Mainly because Vicky set her up to be the most hilarious character — she’s the little black bear who lives in a zoo at the beginning of the book.  She’s totally fascinated by stories of the wild and she’s always trying to figure out what’s going on in other parts of the zoo…at least, what she can see from the top of her tree.  So it’s inherently funny when a bear cub is trying to describe flamingos and giraffes; Vicky handed me the most fun scenes to write there.

I love Kallik (the lonely polar bear cub) too because she’s so determined, even when she’s sad, and she has to be very resourceful with hardly any help or training.  And of course, Toklo is such a grump that he’s really fun to write — I love bad-tempered characters who say what they’re really thinking, because I usually err on the side of politeness in my real life, so it’s extra-satisfying to get to write grouchy dialogue now and then.  (Other examples: Nellie Oleson and Kali from Avatars — you do not want to make them mad!)

Vicky was also asked what she did to learn about bears, and she said she watched a lot of Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, which I know is true because she sent me a truckload of wonderful useful information on bears along with the story outline.  Like what they eat and where they live and what kinds of noises the different bears make — so helpful!  And then I watched a bunch of those documentaries, too, so I could describe how the bears move and stuff.  I know, it’s a tough job, watching hours of adorable polar bear cubs roll around in the snow…but someone’s got to do it!  😉

So yay Al Roker for picking Seekers!  And yay Vicky for being so marvelous on television! 

Speaking of television, I have a movie to recommend, which I found sort of by accident on Netflix and then ordered sort of by accident, too, but I ended up kind of loving it.  It’s called The TV Set, and it’s about a writer (David Duchovny) who is finally getting his TV show produced, but the network (in the form of Sigourney Weaver and hot hot hot Ioan Gruffudd) keeps messing with it and casting terrible people and trying to change large pivotal plot points and then threatening not to air it if he doesn’t make their changes, etc.

Caveat: I am totally fascinated by the way the TV industry works, so it’s perhaps not surprising that I found this movie enthralling.  I pay more attention to pilot season and upfronts and what’s going to make it to air and what’s getting canceled than, like, 90% of America.  I’ve told you how excited I am about Dollhouse, which isn’t even airing until January.  I’ll never get over Firefly being canceled, and I’m still a little sad that Amber Tamblyn’s last pilot didn’t get picked up (oh, it was so totally about zombies, yo). 

And I am already COMPLETELY FREAKING OUT about the fact that five — yes, FIVE — of my favorite shows will all be on AT THE SAME TIME this fall (Mondays at 8pm — how many DVR’s can we possibly own?  Or rather, how many DVR’s can I talk Adam into?  I have a feeling he’s not going to leap into action when I admit that two of those shows are Dancing with the Stars and Gossip Girl.  But hello!  He watches Chuck and The Sarah Connor Chronicles too!  I’m not the only one who will suffer!).  (OK, sorry, rant over.)  😉

Er…point being, I love behind-the-scenes stuff about TV, so this movie is right up my alley.  But it’s also hilarious: Judy Greer as Duchovny’s agent is ridiculously funny and the dialogue is terrific.  If you’re at all interested in TV, or in artists getting meddled with by corporate suits, you might like this movie.  It’s written/directed by Jake Kasdan, who worked on Freaks and Geeks, which was another one of the most amazing TV shows ever to be unceremoniously canceled (by, I’m assuming, mean blind monkeys), so you can guess why he might have some issues to work out.

On the other hand, it’s not exactly encouraging about working in the TV world.  As much as I love TV, it certainly made me feel lucky that I work in books instead.  For one thing, editors are usually nicer than this Sigourney Weaver character about asking for changes.  For another, there are many more books published a year than there are TV shows, and they’re a lot less expensive to make, so the publishers can take many more risks than the networks can.  (End of the world?  Glass pterodactyls?  Telepathic spontaneous combustion?  No problem!)

Not that I don’t have disagreements with my editors sometimes (I’m telling you, that comma is perfect RIGHT WHERE IT IS!), but at least I can be fairly sure they’re not going to, for instance, turn Kali into a blond supermodel, or have Leo take off his shirt in every scene, or make Nellie save a puppy — you know, for the ratings.  😉