I could really learn to hate Jeff Stone.

SCBWI reports that he’s a first time writer. His degrees are in English and journalism. He has a movie deal and there was a five house auction on his first book. His first book. And Random House won, as in, tried hard and beat out the competition by offering him a seven book serial deal. With the money he sent his wife and kids to China for a month and a half. All this, because our man just happened to befriend someone who worked at Andrea Brown, someone who happened to be their second in command there. Where on EARTH is my writing muse/fairy godmother at times like these?
Oh, and check out the pictures of this guy’s editors — both of whom donned monk’s robes and picked up ceremonial swords to pitch the series to their people. Can they BE any more enthused about him? Do you all want to slap him yet? Jeff Stone is probably a really nice guy. Let’s hope so. It seems he’s taking a page out of the book of so many writers and writing about… an ethnicity not his own. In the words of Leonard Chang, it’s not that you shouldn’t do it… it’s just that you’d better do it right… So, good luck to the very Caucasian Jeff Stone and his seven-book series called The Five Ancestors, a story combining the disparate elements of adoption, Shaolin kung fu, and more.