Adam Henderson is a technical wizard. Growing up working and tinkering at his father’s computer repair shop located in the shadow of Microsoft meant Adam had access to the latest and greatest technology. By fifth grade, Adam was engaged in white-hat hacking, finding and reporting security holes to companies. By sixth grade, his attention focused on Trackers–spy devices cobbled together from video game controllers, cameras, joysticks, and even remote-controlled cars. Adam called upon three of his friends to test these Trackers, not knowing that the four would quickly get sucked into a world of crime obscured by layers of subterfuge and deceit. This is the world of Trackers, a multimedia book series by Patrick Carman that almost seamlessly weaves short cinematic sequences, puzzles, and video games into the reading experience. As with Carman’s previous books, these elements emerge organically from the narrative, playing an essential role in the story’s development.

The two books in the series, Trackers and Trackers: Shantorian, are framed as the transcript of an FBI interrogation conducted by special agent Gantz. As Adam recalls the events that led to his arrest, he periodically provides Gantz with codes to access multimedia files he prepared to support his story ranging from site rips of websites he encountered to video footage recorded using his team’s Tracker devices. Readers can enter these codes on the Trackers Interface or read the text transcripts Gantz entered as appendices to the FBI’s interview transcript, located at the back of the book. While this process may sound complicated, in practice reading Trackers is fairly straightforward: every time you see a code, either go online to watch the action unfold, or read the text transcript if you don’t have internet access.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss the series with Patrick Carman, who explained, “Kids will find a way to get to the material. Kids don’t have a problem with stopping and starting . . . that’s the way they’re wired.” This non-traditional reading experience appears to be resonating with young audiences. According to Carman, the online videos from Skeleton Creek, his previous multimedia book series, received over eight million views. Carman referenced receiving “…hundreds and hundreds of emails from educators, librarians . . . talking about how these kinds of formats are helping to bring readers that we had lost back to books.” Readers are becoming similarly entangled with the mini-games created for Trackers, competing to earn top scores. The scores have become so high, in fact, that the PC Studio team has been “trying to figure out over the past couple of months if there’s some way that [players are] hacking this thing so that they’re able to get these kind of scores, and we cannot figure out how that’s possible . . . the top three or four people are way beyond what we can do here at the studio.”

Read the rest here – www.wired.com

Intrepid Pictures is going supernatural, buying up feature rights to a pair of young adult novels by Patrick Carman: “Skeleton Creek” and “13 Days to Midnight.”
Intrepid’s Trevor Macy and Marc D. Evans will serve as producers on both projects. Anil Kurian will oversee for Intrepid.

Intrepid has tapped Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson to adapt “Skeleton Creek,” Scholastic’s book-video hybrid series set in Skeleton Creek, Ore., where two teens encounter a potentially supernatural entity while exploring an abandoned gold mine, launching them into an investigation of their town’s long-buried secrets.

The Skeleton Creek website features videos that have tallied more than 8 million hits. “Skeleton Creek #4: The Raven” will be published in May.

Rebecca Sonnenshine’s to pen the screenplay for “13 Days to Midnight,” published by Little Brown Books. Story centers on a boy who’s granted the power of indestructibility from his dying foster father.

Sonnenshine’s credits include “Within,” “The Haunting of Molly Hartley” and “American Zombie.”

Intrepid recently wrapped production on “The Raven,” starring John Cusack and set for distribution by Relativity. It produced action feature “The Cold Light of Day,” directed by Mabrouk El Mechri and starring Bruce Willis and Sigourney Weaver with Summit set to release.

Carman also penned the five-part “The Land of Elyon” series, the three-part series “Atherton,” “The Black Circle,” and the fifth title in “The 39 Clues” series and the multimedia “Trackers” series.

Carman’s repped for film and TV by Susan Schulman Literary Agency in association with Fine Print Literary Management.

Lyle and Nickerson are repped by the Kapler Stahler Agency, the Gotham Group and attorney Ryan Nord.

Sonnonshine’s repped by ICM, Circle of Confusion and attorney Adam Kaller.

Contact Dave McNary at dave.mcnary@variety.com

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If you love Skeleton Creek or Thirteen Days to Midnight, please head on over to the Teen Choice Awards and vote. Both books were nominated by the Children’s Book Council for 2010, but readers decide who wins. Find the list here, where you can also place your votes:

Vote for The Crossbones or Thirteen Days to Midnight

Thank you fans!

Patrick

Young Adult Literature Goes Digital with Skeleton Creek

There’s a new kind of young adult novel in town: the diginovel or “vook” (video-book), which combines traditional printbound text with interactive online components. Patrick Carman’s Skeleton Creek series is one such example of a “vook,” and it proved to be popular with the eighth-grade students we read it with this year. We have written elsewhere (see Groenke and Maples) about how books such as Skeleton Creek epitomize the participatory and interactive nature of today’s media convergence culture—a culture today’s teens are helping to create and sustain. Here, we want to share what students have to say about reading a “vook.”

Skeleton Creek (the first book in a two-volume series) centers on 15-year-old Ryan’s and his best
friend Sarah’s exploits to solve a mystery surrounding their hometown of Skeleton Creek. How did the town get its name? Does it have anything to do with the old gold dredge in the woods? Or the miner, Old Joe Bush, who was killed in the dredge? Is the name “Skeleton Creek” a warning to outsiders—a warning to stay away?

What Students Have to Say about Skeleton Creek

Our students loved the Blair Witch–like creepiness of Sarah’s videos. (One day, when we heard students screaming in the classroom next door, another student said, “Oh, they must be reading Skeleton Creek.”) Our students said the videos motivated them to read because, as one student noted, “You have to read to understand the movie parts,” and “it keeps you wanting to continue turning the page to find out more.” Many students also liked the visual element the videos provided because they liked “[seeing] what’s happening” and “what the characters are like,” and felt the videos “[enhanced] the terror.” One student commented that the videos “add another level of depth,” while another student explained that he sees the hybrid book as a natural progression from traditional books with pictures: “Back then, we had pictures with words in books. Now we have videos with words.” Another student said he liked the “visual perspective” because “it’s almost like a moving graphic novel,” and another student said, “It’s a great way to get information across the way we like to get it.” Yet another student commented that the “videos explain parts of the story that the book doesn’t give you.”

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