Top showrunners such as John Wells ("Southland"), Ron Moore ("Battlestar Galactica"), Victor Fresco ("Better Off Ted"), Ed Bernero ("Criminal Minds"), Carol Mendelsohn ("CSI"), Clyde Phillips ("Dexter"), Doug Ellin ("Entourage"), Seth MacFarlane ("Family Guy"), Jason Katims ("Friday Night Lights"), Shonda Rhimes ("Grey's Anatomy"), David Shore ("House"), Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse ("Lost") and others have signed a statement opposing shifting two TV writing categories out of the live Emmy telecast (writing for a dramatic series and writing for a movie/miniseries).

The TV Academy announced changes to the show's format Thursday in an attempt to make the program more expedient by time-shifting eight of the 28 categories out of the live telecast. The moves will cut about 15 minutes from the three-hour program.

"Our job is to make an entertaining show that appeals to the maximum number of people but, most importantly, maintains the integrity of the Emmy brand," executive producer Don Mischer said at a teleconference last week.

Though the axed categories were split among directing, writing, acting and producing, writers point out that there were only four writing categories in the primetime telecast to begin with.

"Writers and narrative designers are still relatively new positions on development teams." she said. "This means there's still a level of uncertainty about how best to use and integrate them. I know from talking to lots of fine people in my field that the writing process can often be done too late, without proper access to the team and under extreme pressure. Thankfully, things are starting to get a little better and more writers are being contacted in the first few months of a project's lifespan, rather than the last few months. Personally, I consider I've been very lucky with some of my projects."

"A little more variation in concept and content would be nice, as well, which is something writers and narrative designers can help with. Although they have their place and god knows I've enjoyed them on occasion, I could do with a little less 'Gruff guy with super powers/large weapon kicks assss!' tales. The medium has huge potential, so I'm not sure why there's this constant desire to keep rooting around in Hollywood’s action-movie scrapheap."

"What I think has really worked for the franchise is that the setup and gameplay is ripe with humour," says Pratchett. "You play an evil Overlord, rampaging through a twisted fantasy world, with an ever expanding army of sycophantic minions who loot and pillage for you. What's not to love about that?"

• Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Definitive Collection DVD Box Set. Fans of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who solves crimes using his little grey cells, will adore this fabulous boxed set of the BBC series which starred the brilliant David Suchet.
  
  
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children's Books, 3rd Edition by Harold D. Underdown (Alpha Books)
  
  
• A Silent Ocean Away by DeVa Gantt (Avon), a breathtaking saga of an extraordinary American family.
  
  
• Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon, an ingenious and mirthful exploration of small-town America. (Little, Brown)

"I guess all our films have been about people learning they don't need to be what others expect them to be," Ms. McCullah Lutz said. "It just happens. We get to the end of a script, and I say, "Well, we did it again.'"

*****

"I'd been thinking, 'What happens to these women?'" Ms. Faris said by phone from New York. "L.A. is full of beautiful women, and what happens when they start getting older? Do they go into advertising? Do they go back to school? Do they go to IHOP?" In The House Bunny, the exiled cupcake Shelley Darlington (Ms. Faris) is adopted by the sorority women of Zeta Alpha Zeta, who give Shelley a sense of herself in exchange for tutorials on makeup and men.

*****

Caution, they agreed, is the enemy of comedy. "If you watch 10 Things, it's racy by today's standards," Ms. Smith said of the almost-a-decade-old film. "The most limiting thing in our genre is that the comedic window of what you can and can't get away with has gotten smaller and smaller."

They are Larry Doyle, for the novel I Love You, Beth Cooper (Ecco); Patricia Marx, for the novel Him Her Him Again the End of Him (Scribner); and Simon Rich, for his collection of vignettes, Ant Farm (Random House). The announcement was made Tuesday in Columbus, Ohio, by Thurber House, a national literary center that sponsors the award. The annual prize, worth $5,000, will be presented on Oct. 6.

Dimitri Nabokov says in an interview with the German edition of Vanity Fair that his father must have wanted the work published. He is quoted as saying: "Had my father really wished that this novel not be released, he would have destroyed it himself." The interview is to be published Thursday.

The 46-year-old Novato Fire Protection District information technician was celebrating her badness Wednesday after learning by e-mail that she had won the romance category in this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Initiated in 1982 by San Jose State University, the annual contest challenges entrants "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."

"I know that thousands and thousands of people enter this contest, so to float to the top is like the ultimate for a really bad writer," she said happily. "There's no greater prize for a really bad writer. And it takes a lot of work to be this bad. I'm hoping you have to be good to be this bad."

"Bill swore the affair had ended, but Louise knew he was lying, after discovering Tupperware containers under the seat of his car, which were not the off-brand containers that she bought to save money, but authentic, burpable, lidded Tupperware; and she knew he would see that woman again, because unlike the flimsy, fake containers that should always be recycled responsibly, real Tupperware must be returned to its rightful owner."

Have you ever wondered why you can't get off the couch and exercise -- despite paying for an expensive gym membership, despite your New Year's resolutions, even despite the doctor's scolding at your last checkup? Turns out that your inertia may be coded right into your genes.

Based on some intriguing preliminary studies in animals, J. Timothy Lightfoot, a kinesiologist, and his team at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, suggest that genetics may indeed predispose some of us to sloth. Using mice specially bred and selected according to their activity levels, Lightfoot identified 20 different genomic locations that work in tandem to influence their activity levels — specifically, how far the animals will run. Lightfoot's team is the first to identify these genetic areas and the first to figure out that they function in concert. The researchers say the areas they found on the mouse genome may have analogs in humans, and the UNC team is now gearing up to conduct a similar study in men and women. "We have put forward a fairly complete genomic map of the areas that are associated with regulation of physical activity," says Lightfoot, whose study is published in the current issue of the Journal of Heredity.

Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda says he has just acquired the rights to the long-forgotten screenplay and plans to start filming next year. Titled Frontera, the film was written before the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude turned Garcia Marquez into an international literary star known to most of the continent simply as Gabo.

"Nobody knew it existed, and the most surprising thing is that it is a Western. I don't think anybody knew he had written anything like that," De Anda told Mexican newspaper Reforma. De Anda says he first heard of Frontera as a young actor about 40 years ago when he was offered the part of the younger hitman. He assumed the screenplay had been written by Alcoriza, one of the giants of Mexico's cinematic golden age.

"When I finally bought the rights, about a month ago, I discovered the surprise that the story was not in fact by Alcoriza, but by Gabriel Garcia Marquez," De Anda said. He now plans to play the older partner, and is considering pursuing Mexican stars Gael Garcia Bernal or Diego Luna for the role of the upstart.

First of all, YA SF is gigantic and invisible. The numbers speak for themselves: a YA bestseller is likely to be moving ten times as many copies as an adult SF title occupying the comparable slot on the grownup list. Like many commercially successful things, YA is largely ignored by the power brokers of the field, rarely showing up on the Hugo ballot (and when was the last time you went to a Golden Duck Award ceremony?). Yet so many of us came into the field through YA, and it's YA SF that will bring the next generation into the fold.

Genre YA fiction has an army of promoters outside of the field: teachers, librarians, and specialist booksellers are keenly aware of the difference the right book can make to the right kid at the right time, and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to convince kids to try out a book. Kids are naturals for this, since they really use books as markers of their social identity, so that good books sweep through their social circles like chickenpox epidemics, infecting their language and outlook on life. That's one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences — it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works. They pay keen attention, they argue back. There's a consequentiality to writing for young people that makes it immensely satisfying.

You see it when you run into them in person and find out that there are kids who read your book, googled every aspect of it, figured out how to replicate the best bits, and have turned your story into a hobby. We wring our hands a lot about the greying of SF, with good reason. Just have a look around at your regional con, the one you've been going to since you were a teenager, and count how many teenagers are there now. And yet, young people are reading in larger numbers than they have in recent memory. Part of that is surely down to Harry Potter, but on this tour, I've discovered that there's a legion of unsung heroes of the kids-lit revolution.

It's almost a given these days that movie critics are elitist, while moviegoers are populist. When the highest-grossing films get panned by critics, what good are critics? As publishers across the country dump their reviewers, this is not exactly a rhetorical question.

Believe it or not, though, critically acclaimed films generally do better than critically panned films at the box office -- if you measure their performance in the right way.