DOUBLE LIFE: They may have made their...

DOUBLE LIFE: They may have made their reputations as novelists, but a handful of Orange County authors, including Doug Muir and Jo-Ann Mapson, have another title: teacher. This fall, writer Elizabeth George is meeting weekly in her Huntington Beach home with 10 students from her Coastline Community College class. Says the best-selling George: “I think it’s easier for the teacher and the students to relate to each other if both are currently working on novels.”

GOING BACK: The hiring of Australian author Thomas Keneally in 1991 to teach in UC Irvine’s graduate program in writing was a boon to the program. But the author of “Schindler’s List” says leaving the program at the end of the school year will not be easy (E1). . . . “I feel guilt-stricken every time I think about it,” says Keneally, who has frequently returned to Sydney, Australia, to tend to personal and professional business: “It’s purely this problem of being binational and straddling the Pacific, which is a good way to get a hernia.”

MOVIE DEAL: A movie of UCI writing program alum Whitney Otto’s 1991 novel about eight members of a quilting bee, “How to Make an American Quilt,” begins shooting next month under Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment banner. The cast includes Winona Ryder, Anne Bancroft and Ellen Burstyn. “We believe we have stayed true to the spirit of the book,” says producer Sarah Pillsbury. . . . Otto is not the first UCI grad to have a book she wrote as her thesis made into a movie. In 1991, Marti Leimbach’s “Dying Young” became a starring vehicle for Julia Roberts.

HIGH TECH: Forget old-fashioned book tours. Now it’s TV and radio “satellite tours.” Laguna Niguel author Nancy Taylor Rosenberg recently did her first live satellite feed to promote her new legal thriller, “First Offense.” From a New York studio she spoke to a succession of 23 different television stations around the country. “It’s kind of nerve-racking, but it works,” she says. . . . In addition, Rosenberg’s new novel will be advertised on the cable television’s Court TV during the O.J. Simpson murder trial.