(Or An Alliterative Throwing-In of the Towel)
John Howe writes: Every now and then, a person just gets too busy to think. So, I confess. The following is an admission of failure – and a newsletter with little or nothing to say. (Which, it must be said in passing, has never been a reason sufficient to shut me up.) Am currently working on writing and illustrating two books and (distractedly) researching a third. Suddenly taking the time to write something else than what will go in one or the other seems no only unreasonable but treasonable. (This business of author-illustrator is rather like taking on two jobs at once.) An unexpected side-effect of writing a non-fiction book was that I naturally end up buying dozens of reference books, which all ended up stacked everywhere they could stack, until, finally fed up with stumbling over and bumping into piles of the things, new shelves seemed the only solution. I don’t know about you, but in this household, modest unassuming projects gradually assume colossal proportions and I ended up building a full wall of shelves. The books went in (there’s even still room, but rapidly shrinking) and suddenly a particular patch of wall seemed to call out for more home carpentry, so a drawing pulpit got itself made. Read the rest here…
The groovy folks from WETA write: Herewith the news updates from Weta HQ. 
After 43 days of hour-long commutes and filming in freezing conditions in the United States, film-maker Peter Jackson is home to film his version of heaven for The Lovely Bones. Completing the movie in Wellington during an uncharacteristically dry summer felt almost like making two separate movies, Jackson told The Dominion Post yesterday. He was giving an exclusive interview during a photo call with his main stars Mark Wahlberg, 13-year-old Irish actress Saoirse Ronan and 18-year-old Kiwi Rose McIver. “It has got a strange feeling about it. I had psychologically got used to the idea that we were done with the movie when we’d shot our chunk in Pennsylvania. But what we are doing here is very different.”
Composer Howard Shore brought J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary imagination to vivid life with his Academy®- and Grammy® Award-winning score to Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Shore crafted a fully-developed musical epic that related the classic tale with moving and intricately related themes for each of Middle-earth’s cultures and charted the One Ring’s journey with an exhilarating flourish. [