Filling each blank page

 

“Blank paper has always inspired me.” – Daniel Handler

Born in San Francisco on this date in 1970, Handler is a writer, musician and journalist perhaps best known under the pen name Lemony Snicket, after publishing his 13-book children's series A Series of Unfortunate Events and  4-book series All the Wrong Questions under the pseudonym^.    Handler also has published or contributed to a number of adult novels under his own name, including his first book The Basic Eight and the 2019 book Bottle Grove.

Handler began writing A Series of Unfortunate Events – about three orphaned children who experience increasingly terrible events following the death of their parents and burning of their home – in 1998 after struggling to get The Basic Eight published.  “My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction,” he said.    

The Lemony Snicket books, however, were an immediate and worldwide success, already selling some 70 million copies in 41 languages and spawning a film, a video game, assorted merchandise, a mainstream movie, and a Netflix television series.   

 

“I kind of always think my work is unfilmable," Handler said.  "When I meet people who are interested in filming it, I'm always stunned.”