Crossing stitches

Calico Crossroads is releasing two new designs next month in the Oriental series: Harmony and Serenity. Neither is anything I’m likely to stitch, but I think they’re both quite pretty. I especially like the blackwork borders.

Blocks

Lawrence Block, one of my favorite authors, has a book to be released on January 30, 2007. I’d say it’s a new book, but evidently it’s about forty years old. This is a re-release. This time around the book is called Lucky at Cards. In the 1960s, the same story was called The Sex Shuffle, and not only did it suffer from a title that Block didn’t like, but the distribution was small. There’s sample chapter that you can go read. I’m not going to read the sample chapter. I’ll just want to read the book even more than I do now. I’ll wait until I can read it all at once. I love the tagline, “He handled cards like a master, but could he handle her?”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of Block’s books that I’ve read so far, and though I haven’t read all of them yet, I’ve read quite a few.

There’s a movie being filmed that Block had a hand in writing, My Blueberry Nights. Here’s what LB has to say about it.

If you’ve been reading the film trades lately, or the Sunday New York Times a week or two ago, you’ll have noticed that My Blueberry Nights, the film I wrote with and for Wong Kar-wai, is kicking up quite a stir. They’ve made a distribution deal with the Weinsteins, and the film’s cast (Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, Tim Roth, David Strathairn, et. al.) are excited about their work, and are talking about WKW in the same awed and reverential tones actors tended to use when speaking of the late Robert Altman. I wasn’t there for the filming, and have no idea how much of what I wrote wound up getting shot, but that’s essentially beside the point; WKW’s process is a highly individual one, with the film sort of growing as it goes, and I have the feeling I’m going to be very proud of having played a part in it. I don’t know when it’ll be released, though it should be sometime in 2007. Trust me, you’ll hear about this one.

And here’s the plot outline from the Internet Movie Database:

A young woman (Jones) takes a soul-searching journey across America to resolve her questions about love while encountering a series of offbeat characters along the way.

Sounds interesting. I’d say “total chick flick” if it wasn’t for Block’s influence, though you never know. It might be anyway. I’m looking forward to hearing about it as it gets close to release.