This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

News: the Fire paperback is coming out on January 25, 2011 and is available now for pre-order on Amazon and BN.com. I don't have any timing information regarding Bitterblue, but I promise to post it here once I do.

So, my subject heading is a line of dialogue I enjoyed from last week's episode of Bones. More specifically, I enjoyed Bones's reaction to it. Bones (a.k.a. Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist who catches murderers with the help of FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth and an excellent team) is one of my favorite ladies on TV. If you're looking for a show full of satisfying murder mysteries that make any sort of sense, then I wouldn't particularly recommend Bones. But if you're looking for funny dialogue and strong characters and relationships, well, I think this one fits the bill. I can't get enough of Bones and Booth -- they're the perfect foils for each other -- and I love Bones's extreme logical nature combined with her sudden…

Warning: this got rambly! Don't stress out: it is not assigned reading and there will not be a quiz.

Okay. About a year ago, I blogged about intertextuality in books and music. I.e., the way we bring every book we've read to every new book we read, and make connections; the way our enjoyment and appreciation of Jane Eyre is liable to affect our reading of any book about a lonely person going to live and work in a remote and mysterious house, for example. Or the way, if you've listened to a lot of Dvorak, some parts of John Williams's movie scores are going to sound pretty durn familiar. (There's probably some other word for "intertextuality" when it relates to music, but I don't know what that word would be.)

Well, this week I've been thinking about intertextuality in TV shows and movies. (Again, maybe there's a better word for it in this context?) There's an aspect of intertextuality that comes into play in movies and TV constantly: the a…

Dutch cover for the YA edition ----> click to enlarge ----->

So, I read Jane Eyre, first published in 1847, before I ever read Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca (1938) or Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting (1958). Do you know those two books? Both of them are obviously influenced by Charlotte Brontë's novel; I'd go so far as to call the Stewart book an homage; and it's hard to read either without thinking of Jane. I loved and read and re-read all three of them; and eventually the day came when I couldn't read Jane Eyre without thinking of Rebecca and Nine Coaches Waiting. My appreciation of the novel that was written first began to be influenced by later novels Charlotte Brontë never could have read.
I love that time-travel aspect of intertextuality. Here's another example: Now, when I read Hamlet (c. 1603), I enjoy it even more than I used to, because I'm bringing Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1964-65) along with m…