A novelist tops the lists of major magazines as entertainer of the year, and that’s awesome to behold. Finally, writers have more cachet than skanked-out pop stars and NBA players.

JK Rowling is Entertainment Weekly’s #1 entertainer for 2007. She should’ve been named entertainer of the decade, considering we’ll be watching Harry Potter movies until well into 2010.

And in Time Magazine, Stephen King reveals that he and John Cougar Mellencamp are collaborating on a play, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County. How cool is that?

What’s the gist of the story?
King answers: “[Mellencamp] had bought a place in Indiana by a lake, and he said that the person had told him the place was haunted. Well, you hear that — when you buy a place that’s been around for a while in the woods, people are going to say it’s haunted. [Apparently], there was some kind of tragedy that involved two brothers and a girl in the fifties — one of the brothers shot the other one apparently in some kind of a drunken game. Killed him. So the other brother and the girl jumped in the car to take the kid to the hospital, because they thought maybe they could save him. They ran into a tree and they were both killed. So apparently the ghosts haunted the place. So John asked me, “Do you think we could turn this into a play?”‘

In a dubious honor, Norman Mailer posthumously won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Click the link and scroll to the bottom….it really is a stinker of a scene.

In what has become the most glamorous strike of all-time, the WGA picket line has become de rigeur for celebrity watching. The slogans and speeches are also certain to become the wittiest in labor history. Blogs (our favorite is Nikki Finke’s for breaking WGA news), new media, and the internet have become instrumental in communicating the writers’ concerns. Check out speechlesswithoutwriters.com for A-list celebrity rants and writerly musings.