As I mentioned in my last post, I spent part of Friday afternoon on the phone with the Uglies movie production team. It was great to go into that conversation armed with all the suggestions you guys have been making, both here and on my Twitter feed.
So thanks for all your input. Now here’s what’s going on:
Uglies is currently optioned to be a movie, or possibly a series of movies if the first one does well. To “option” a book is Hollywood-speak for buying the exclusive right to make a movie based on it. But the buyers don’t have to make a movie. Most options never go anywhere, in fact. But it certainly means that these producers are interested.
(What happens if this group doesn’t make the film(s)? In a couple of years I have the right option the book to someone else. In other words, options have time limits.)
Where are we now? Well, there’s no script, director, or actors lined up yet. So be patient and stop asking me about casting! If there are open auditions, you’ll see it here first.
So this phone call was mostly us getting to know each other and talking about what makes Uglies special to us. Most of the conversation was me talking, which was interesting. Sometimes Hollywood folks seem compelled to tell me all about my books. But these folks listened. And when I told them about my previous post, they were dying to shoot over and read your comments. So keep them coming!
Here are some of the things I told them:
Most of you guys want unknown actors for Tally and Shay, but maybe someone famous for Dr. Cable. The producers get that, and they also understand how important casting is, given that you could break the whole theme of the film by putting the World’s Most Beautiful Actress in the starring role.
I also told them how important setting is to you guys. How the world-building, tech hoverboards, etc., have to be real. This movie should look good, and more importantly, it should look right. Excellently, it turns out that one of the producers has read Bogus to Bubbly. She also sends it along to the screenwriters they’ve been approaching. That is a Good Thing.
I told them you guys want a faithful adaptation, and they said definitely, because, as one of them put it, “The book is a movie already.” In other words, the story doesn’t have to get completely reshaped to fit the screen. (I doubt there will be any of this putting-all-three-books-into-one-movie crap.)
So what are the chances of the movie happening soon? Well, movies cost tens of millions of dollars, and nothing that requires that much money plus human creativity is ever easy to predict. But the producers did say that there’s lots of support for this project at their studio, where certain execs have been known to speak in bubble-talk. This seems like a very good sign to me.
Anyway, that’s everything I know. Watch this space for further developments. So you can stop asking me about casting calls. Seriously.
(Oh, and if you’re one of the producers reading this, don’t worry, I won’t blog every darn thing you say to me. It’s just that a lot of fans have been asking about this for a long time, and I figured it was time to give them a major update. Normally I am a master of discretion, and will only twitter what you say to me.)
Do I have your attention now? Good.
Okay, so let’s say you were going to talk on the phone tomorrow with the producers of the Uglies movie. What would you most want to tell them?
Don’t get into specific casting suggestions or anything like that, because you are a mere author, and they are powerful and wise in the ways of Hollywood. But what one key thing—big or small—should they never forget while working on the film(s)?
Comment away. You have until 3PM Wednesday, New York time.
Update:
We all get an extension till 3PM Friday. Keep the comments coming!
Note update due to Daylight Savings Time!
Dear Commenters, please note that I have set the local time on this blog to UMT +4:30, the time zone of Tehran, Iran. Normally I’m set to Sydney time, which confuses you guys all the, um, time. So I doubt it will make your comment time-stamps any messier than usual.
Here’s the reason for this change: Censors in Iran are currently searching for blogs with Tehran local settings as a way of finding and shutting down sites that are protesting Iran’s recent (probably stolen) election. The more blogs in the world that are set to Tehran time, the harder the job is for these censors to do their job.
(By the way, if you are a censor visiting here from the Iranian authorities, welcome! I hope I have wasted your time. In other news: your regime sucks. Why not just play Tetris today instead of quelling protest? It would be more fun, and you would not personally be contributing to the suckage.)
If you, dear reader, have a blog, you can also set it to UMT +4:30. Somewhere in your dashboard or whatever is a button called “settings.” Click it and you should be able to change your local time fairly easily.
For more on the subject of censorship (in Florida*, not Iran), please enjoy this video from Maureen Johnson.
Update:
This post was quoted in the Wall Street Journal‘s Digits blog today! (Hidley-ho, link-following stockbroker-eenos! Come for the Iranian insurrection, stay for the YA!)
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*Stolen elections and censorship, two great tastes that taste great together!
If judging a book by a cover is bad, then judging a book by its title must surely be worse. After all, covers are pictures, pictures are worth a thousand words, and titles are usually a mere phrase.
But it’s not that simple. Titles name a book, and names are important. A good name can make or break you.
Take, for example, the case of Ziz. Poor sad Ziz, of whom you have NEVER heard.
You see, there was once this trio of awesome creatures. All three were in the Bible [oops, see the update below], rocking out with special dispensations from Yahweh and generally kicking young earth ass. Three unbeatable giant beasties, one of the water, one of the land, and one of the air . . .
Leviathan, Behemoth, and, um, Ziz.
How bad is it to have a lame name? Well, thousands of years after their cameos in the Bible, Leviathan and Behemoth are still both famous. Their names are words in modern English, both meaning, “stuff that is big and awesome and/or scary.”
The word “Leviathan” appears in Moby-Dick, is the title of a famous work of philosophy and a movie, not to mention a record company and a comic strip.
“Behemoth” is equally culture-spanning, including this delightful Polish metal band. (Warning: high-volume flash intro Not Safe For School.)
But Ziz? Ziz has a crappy name, so the creature itself wound up fading into obscurity.
So if names are this important, surely titles are too.
Titles bring the reader into the world of the book. They set them up for what’s coming: comedy, tragedy, farce, or all three. They create inevitabilities (Death of a Salesman) and anticipations (The Year of Living Dangerously), or intensify the poetry of a key phrase (Dude, Where’s My Car?).
Even punctuation can be key. I mean, what if James Kelman’s classic novel How Late It Was, How Late, had been titled “How Late? It Was How Late?”
Totally different story, man.
Which brings us to my next trilogy, the first two books of which are called Leviathan and Behemoth. But seriously, can I call the third book, um, Ziz?
What do you guys think?
Update:
As CosmicDog points out in the delicious and insightful comments below, Ziz is not actually in the Bible, but is a part of Jewish folklore. Behemoth and Leviathan are both in the Book of Job (and Leviathan other places), so that part’s right. I got confused because they are frequently pictured together.
Does this mean my point fails? Or does this mean that Ziz has been double-dissed! First by being left out of the Bible, then by being generally forgotten!
Justine and I went to the Bronx Zoo yesterday. As you may know, Leviathan has tons of animals in it, so I was up for some face-to-face contact. This kind of research is important, because reading about an animal doesn’t tell you how it moves, how it smells, or how it reacts to a sudden shrieking noise that I call “El Banshee.” It just ain’t the same.
We were shown around by an old friend of mine, a wildlife conservator who has an office at the zoo, but usually works in places like Afghanistan, Iran, and Tibet. He and his wife once drove a baby snow leopard across Pakistan, which sounds exciting, because, like, the Taliban is there. He does a lot of dangerous stuff like that. When my friend and I worked together in publishing, the whole office voted him “Most Likely to Die in a Foreign Land.”
But he’s survived long enough for us to get an excellent tour of the zoo.
There were lemurs, who are always totally chill.
And we got to watch a “tiger enrichment session” from really close up.
The tiger is doing tricks because it wants a “bloodsicle.” Here’s what I think: if anything at your job wants a “bloodsicle,” your job is more dangerous than mine.
We also wanted to see meerkats, but sadly there are none left at the zoo. So (as twittered yesterday) my pal took us back to his office where he has a meerkat skull.
No, I don’t think this skull from a meerkat that used to be at the zoo. My friend has always owned stuff like meerkat skulls. It is from him that I learned the term “maggoting room.” I use it often.
As we were leaving, I realized it had been more than a decade since I’d been up to the Bronx Zoo, and years since I’d been to any zoo at all, and that sucks. You can’t expect to understand your own planet if you don’t occasionally check out the other 99.9% of species that live here. And you can’t really be much of a writer if you don’t understand your planet.
There’s only so much that can happen in coffee shops. Eventually you should get your characters out of talking about lattes and into the land of bloodiscles.
So as you guys get older and more stuck in your ways like me, try to remember these deceptively simple words:
Don’t forget to go to the zoo.
Update:
As it’s Friday, let me remind you that I haz a Twitter.
https://twitter.com/scottwesterfeld
For those of you who’ve ever wondered what my novels would be like if they were only 140 characters long, I’ve decided to engage in a strict program of twittering once every, um . . . fourteen hours or so. Because that’s what all the cool kids are doing.
To follow my tiny meanderings, go here:
https://twitter.com/scottwesterfeld
So how many of you guys twitter, anyway?
I forgot to mention that Mind-Rain is out! Yes, a few of you commenters have already found it in various stores. If you can’t find it, just ask for it by name!
I was reminded by this contest to win the book on contributor Janette Rallison’s blog.
Anyway, it was lots of fun working on it.
Click here to learn more about the collection.
Click here to read an excerpt.
Here’s a brief description:
In Extras, the last book in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, Aya tells us that when Tally Youngblood made the mind-rain fall, it cured all the pretties and changed the world forever. But Tally and her friends did more than change their world; they changed ours too.
Mind-Rain continues what Tally started, with startling, funny and insightful essays on the world, characters and ideas of the Uglies series, plus the short story that inspired Westerfeld to write the books in the first place.
Think you know everything about Tally’s world? After Mind-Rain, you’ll never look at the Uglies series the same way again.
With essays by Lili Wilkinson, Robin Wasserman, Diana Peterfreund, Sarah Beth Durst, Gail Sidonie Sobat, Rosemary Clement-Moore, J. Fitzgerald McCurdy, Janette Rallison, Linda Gerber, Charles Beaumont, Ted Chiang, Will Shetterly, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, and Delia Sherman.
You can pre-order the book from Borders, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and of course Indie Bound.
A quick post!
Serena Robar is giving away a copy of Uglies on her blog today. Tell your uninitiated friends!
Have you mysteriously forgotten what Uglies is? Then check out this cool fan trailer:
Now I must go to my Lindy Hop lesson.
Justine and I had a great time at Book Expo America (as she explains on her blog), so here’s my report on the festivities.
My signing was a blast, with somewhere about 200 people dropping by to chat with me for, like, 23 seconds each. Thanks for all your kind words and tolerance of my sometimes brain-missing schmoozing. (I can only schmooze about a hundred people per hour before I start to spout the random.) And thanks to everyone who put up with the line changing locations after we ran out of time.
I met a lot of cool people over the weekend, including Shannon Hale. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves enemies on Saturday night! There was this silent auction of art from children’s books, and Shannon, Justine, and I all wound up bidding on the same fabulous piece by John Rocco from his new book Moon Powder. Anyway, we managed not to come to blows. (And Justine and I got the art. Bwa-ha-ha!)
The Alternate History panel with Holly Black and Cassie Clare was also cool. We tried to unpack why messing with history is so much fun, mixing up the familiar with the strange, and days of yore with that which never was. Anyway, the crowd seemed to enjoy our attempts at deep thoughts. Thanks to NYPL’s Jack Martin for stepping in to moderate.
I also did a pair video interviews. One was for Romantic Times, a magazine devoted to romance novels, which is cool. You may not know this, but the romance genre is vast, accounting for about half of all novels sold. And when you add in romance books from YA, fantasy, and sf, it really is the uber-genre. So RT is a big deal, and it was a pleasure to talk to them. (Whether Leviathan is romance or not, I leave as an exercise for the reader.)
The other interview was with Borders, who had their own video studio on the convention floor. Here’s my makeup session, and me being interviewed:
Alas, these interviews won’t go online for a few months, about a week before the pub date for Leviathan. But I revealed a lot more of Keith’s art, though, so you guys should enjoy them.
Anyway, thanks for everyone who worked behind the scenes to make BEA happen, and all the folks who said nice things when they saw my nametag. You rule.
As you can see, my website has had its first makeover in many years. This is to celebrate the fact that my first new series in years, Leviathan, comes out this autumn. (October 6, to be exact.)
Things may be wonky for a while as we play around under the hood. But I hope you enjoy the new look. Let me know what you think!
Click here to contact Scott Westerfeld.
Jill Grinberg
Jill Grinberg Literary Management
info@grinbergliterary.com
