A few years ago, the author discovered her writing had taken a back burner. She was spending too much time editing scripts for movie deals that never seemed to go anywhere. "I finally just said, 'I can't stand it anymore! I want to go back in a little room -- because wherever I am, I work in a little room -- and write something that I know will happen.'" So she wrote. Double Fudge, her first book in four years and the last in the Fudge series, came out in 2002. Dream two -- get back into that little room.

"I never stop writing," she said, looking out at the boats blowing about in the pond on an uncharacteristically cool and windy August day. "If something comes, I just write it and put it away. It gives me a sense of security." One day a story came to her about losing a tooth. She raced to her laptop and started writing. As she did, she realized the characters were the same ones that had starred in her 1984 picture book, The Pain and the Great One. "My daughter was the Great One," she said. She had written the original story on a day long before the book was published, when the rain had trapped her two children, six and eight, inside. "She called him [her brother] The Pain," she said, speaking of her daughter who is now in her 40s, "and said, 'I am the Great One, the older sister.'"

What makes O'Shaughnessy's stories truly distinctive, however, is that the gruesome and the macabre are being served up to a playground audience. If you have children, there is a very strong possibility that, at some point, their noses will be jammed in one of Shan's brain-squishing, maggot-swarming narratives.

"When the books were first published, I expected a backlash," says O'Shaughnessy disarmingly. "I ran all the arguments for the defence through my head in case of hostile interviewers - ready to explain why the books aren't a disgrace, that they had a strong moral underpinning. But in fact, there wasn't any outrage. No one, save the occasional parent or teacher, was up in arms at all. In fact, teachers and librarians have very often championed my books."

But then O'Shaughnessy is aware that his young protaganists - the teenage "Grubbs" Grady and "Darren Shan" - are actually following in a grand literary tradition. As long as there has been gruesome sensationalist fiction, there have been young readers lapping it up.

For Jane Austen's generation, it was Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk. Austen satirised the trappings of Gothic romance in Northanger Abbey. In the age of the Victorian periodical, teenage boys loved lurid Gothic serials such as Varney the Vampyre and The String of Pearls.

Burroughs and his publisher, St. Martin's Press, agree to call the work a "book" instead of "memoirs," in the author's note and to change the acknowledgments page in future editions to say that the Turcotte family's memories of events he describes "are different than my own," and expressing regret for "any unintentional harm" to them, according to Howard Cooper, an attorney for the family. He said financial terms of the settlement are confidential.

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According to a statement from the family's attorneys, Burroughs' new acknowledgments note will say that the Turcottes "are each fine, decent, and hardworking people," and that the book was not intended to hurt them. The deal comes 10 months after the family said it had "mutually resolved" issues with Sony Pictures Entertainment to avoid a lawsuit over a movie based on the book. "With this settlement, together with our settlement with Sony last year, we have achieved everything we set out to accomplish when we filed suit two years ago," the family said in the statement. "We have always maintained that the book is fictionalized and defamatory. This settlement is the most powerful vindication of those sentiments that we can imagine."

Burroughs, formerly Christopher Robison, lived with the Turcottes in Northampton as a teenager. According to the lawsuit, Burroughs' entire family was in therapy with Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, a psychiatrist. In 1980, Burroughs' mother asked Turcotte to become his legal guardian so he could attend Northampton schools. His mother still cared for him, but he had a room at the Turcottes' home. Though the family in Burroughs' book is named "the Finches," the lawsuit claims they are easily identified as the Turcottes, and that Burroughs identified them in interviews.

Events in the book which the suit claimed were false include the Turcottes' condoning sexual affairs between children and adults, Turcotte's wife eating dog food and the family using an electroshock machine it stored under the stairs. The lawsuit claims the book also falsely portrays a home in unbelievable squalor, with a young child running around naked and defecating, and old turkey being stored in the showers.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee is a woman of few words and generally avoids media interviews and public appearances.

But the author of To Kill a Mockingbird broke her silence briefly Monday at a ceremony inducting four new members, including former home-run king Hank Aaron, into the Alabama Academy of Honor. Lee, who lives in Monroeville, is a member of the academy, which honors living Alabamians, and was in the audience for Monday's ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, Academy of Honor chairman Tom Carruthers joked with Lee, saying he knew she had something she wanted to say to the crowd. "Well it's better to be silent than to be a fool," Lee said.

The audience burst into laughter and gave Lee a standing ovation.

Details of the agreement, including the name of the New York publishing house, will be released Tuesday, said Michael Wright, a spokesman for Los Angeles-based literary agent Sharlene Martin of Martin Literary Management.

"The family and publisher have pledged to leave Simpson's manuscript entirely intact, but they will also add key commentary," Wright said in a prepared statement. "The Goldmans, the publisher and Sharlene Martin will all contribute portions of sales proceeds to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice."

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Last month, a federal bankruptcy judge awarded rights to the book to Goldman's family to help satisfy a $38 million wrongful death judgment against the former football star.

Morning routine: I get up just before six and come downstairs, put food out for the cats and open the cat flap. Then I work out for 35 or 40 minutes - I have a very large bathroom with an elliptical cross-trainer and a bicycle. After that I listen to the Today programme while I have a shower or bath. I'm usually downstairs by 7.30 and have my breakfast, just fruit. I start work by 8.45 and go on for about three hours.

Fitness routine: I try to have an hour's exercise a day at least. So say I've done my 35 minutes on the machines, I will walk for the remaining 25 minutes (except Wednesdays when I go to a Pilates class).

Regular route: I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair. At the moment I am thinking about a novel set in and around Portobello Road and the market, so I walk there a lot.

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Gadget: A memory stick. I have one with a couple of novels on it, and lots of articles and speeches. It weighs nothing and goes in your handbag. It's so easy.

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Writing room: I've got a small office at the top of the house, where I can be sure of being away from anyone. My housekeeper comes in four mornings each week (she's marvellous - I'm not enamoured of housework and I don't really do any). But I've got a round table downstairs where I sometimes work at weekends.

Disney executive vp production and development Brigham Taylor will oversee the big-screen version of the tongue-in-cheek manual, which gives today's coddled youth instructions on potentially hazardous activities, such as how build go-carts and make a bow and arrow. It also provides trivia, historical anecdotes and advice on life that have inspired interest from fathers and nostalgic middle-aged men.

"Dangerous," first published in the U.K. in May 2006, has held the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on the New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists since its May 2007 stateside release and sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. The Collins/HarperCollins release also won the British Book Award for book of the year. Its success has inspired two upcoming books, "The Daring Book for Girls" and "The Dangerous Book for Dogs," a satire by several writers from "The Onion."

The book is the latest feather in Rudin's full cap. The literary-minded producer, who has a production deal with Disney and its specialty division, Miramax Films, has scored mainstream hits like Paramount Pictures' "Failure to Launch" and upscale Oscar winners including Miramax's "The Queen." His upcoming book adaptations include Dreamworks/Paramount's "Revolutionary Road," with Evamere and BBC Films, and Miramax's "No Country For Old Men," which earned acclaim at this year's Festival de Cannes.

Charles Simic, a Pulitzer Prize- winning writer, will receive two major honors today. He will be named the 15th poet laureate of the U.S. by the Librarian of Congress, succeeding Donald Hall, and he will receive a $100,000 award from the American Academy of Poets. The laureate appointment, which can be one year or two, comes with a $35,000 annual stipend. Separately, the American Academy of Poets said it plans to announce that Simic is the winner of its Wallace Stevens Award for "outstanding and proven mastery" of the art of poetry. Executive Director Tree Swenson said the announcement was moved up today from Friday because of Simic's laureate appointment.

"The fact that he has been appointed just reconfirms the importance of Charles Simic's work in the contemporary poetry landscape," Swenson said in a phone interview. Simic, 69, received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant of $500,000 for the period 1984-1989. He won the 1990 Pulitzer for poetry for his collection The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems. His reaction to the brace of honors today was humorous. "Now I just have to break a leg. It's just too much luck," he said in a telephone interview. "I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of good luck, being a superstitious person."