This week’s strange movie news is that Quentin Tarantino is abandoning his next movie project—a Western tentatively titled The Hateful Eight—and publishing the story as a book instead.

Tarantino made the decision to abandon the film, reports Deadline, after he shared the script with six people and it was leaked to the blogger community. I can understand Tarantino’s anger at this turn of events, but the oddest part of this story, to me, is that Tarantino doesn’t even seem to mind the inevitable blogosphere dissection of leaked scripts:

I do like the fact that everyone eventually posts it, gets it and reviews it on the net… Frankly, I wouldn’t want it any other way. I like the fact that people like my shit, and that they go out of their way to find it and read it.

Um, what? Then what’s the big deal? Apparently Tarantino’s decision—which seems pretty rash to me—was based more on his feeling of betrayal, having only shared the script with six people, including actors Bruce Dern, Tim Roth, and Michael Madsen.

Regardless of whether it’s a rash decision or not—and whether Tarantino will have second thoughts once he cools off, which is certainly possible—it’s fun to imagine what a Tarantino book would be like. Would he simply publish the script? That’s widely available online already, though I don’t suppose that would deter most publishers from working with the filmmaker.

Personally, I’ve always thought that a Tarantino novel would be great fun, and the lack of details about the form in which Tarantino would publish The Hateful Eight allows me to get my hopes up. Clearly Tarantino was born to be a filmmaker, but as a storyteller he’s very novelistic: his films are frequently broken up into chapters, and rely heavily on freewheeling, dialogue-heavy set pieces that would be super-fun to read. I’ve often thought during a Tarantino movie: This would be great as a novel.

We shall see. Either way, this is a story I’ll be keeping my eye on.