Betsy Franco, Children's Book Author/Actor

My play is opening tonight. The director and the actors have created such an awesome rendering of my novel. I'm so grateful. Palo Alto Children's Theatre, Mar. 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12. 650-463-4930 See you there.

On this blog page, you'll see a constantly growing set of photos from the Oscar weekend. It was pure fun to be in the third row center for the event and see James in his pink dress close up. My whole family was there to enjoy the event with me.

I learned so much from playing my son's James' mom on General Hospital. I could feel how completely he was committed to his character, the crazy artist Franco. When I got back to my sketch comedy group (Suburban Squirrel) and my drama group (Studio-33), I was so much more deeply committed to my characters. (more…)

I spoke in a creative writing class at Gunn and had a great hour with them. Tarn Wilson, the teacher, had read 15 minutes of my novel, Metamorphosis, in class, so they were familiar with my character, Ovid and could give me valuable feedback about the first page of the sequel. We talked about the (more…)

Children's Theater of Palo Alto asked me to write a play of my novel Metamorphosis. It's a challenge but a lot of fun to change the form and include all the crazy elements of the book. Which brings up my latest concern. Common sense media is posting very narrow reviews on Barnes and Noble. (more…)

Amy Krouse Rosenthal's blog and Youtube from Chicago were really cute and made me feel good. Thought I'd pass them along.
http://blogs.vocalo.org/author/amykr

Tom and I are going to do some more events with an open mic so that teens can read their own poetry. We'll be promoting Metamorphosis, Junior Year, at the events as well. Some poets at our Hicklebee's Books event said the only places they can read are at adult poetry readings. I'll keepyou (more…)

The Kepler's event was standing room only, which was thrilling for me and Tom. Many teens from all over the area and many adults were in the audience. Thank you to everyone who came.

We showed Tom's drawings on a powerpoint and spoke about our creative processes and our collaboration. I had baby photos (more…)

Hey, I'm filming a scene from my latest novel. It's exciting. A friend of mine is in a film class and we've cast two really good actors from Palo Alto High School.

I took a screenwriting class at Stanford that was excellent. The teacher was Adam Tobin. During the class, I wrote a screenplay adaptation of my novel, and now I've reworked a five minute segment for filming. Should be fun.