Last week there was a short piece in MTV News’s Hollywood Crush last week about the Uglies movie. Let me quote it:
Industry sources have confirmed to MTV News exclusively that Screen Gems, in the wake of the success of its current release “Dear John,” is developing — and in fact, fast tracking (!) — a film version of “The Uglies” series.
While there haven’t been any decisions made regarding things like casting yet, we can tell you that our source said production of the movie is planned for later this year. That means we will all hopefully know soon enough who could be playing the beloved teen Tally Youngblood in the futuristic, meaningful tale about a dystopian society that places an incredible emphasis on looks.
Emphasis theirs. Here’s the rest.
In the words of my Hollywood agent, fast-tracking means, “it’s on the list of projects that they are hoping to make vs. the ones that will never see the light of day.” In other words, this is not a done deal. But it’s a lot better than being in that other, not-so-fast-tracked pile.
Now, some of you are no doubt asking about casting at this point. STOP! I’m the wrong person to ask. Trust me, if I hear anything I will tell you here on this blog, on FB, and on the Twitter machine. But in the meantime, I have nothing to do with casting movies.
If it were up to me, you would all get to play Tally for exactly three seconds of screen time. (And this would be why it’s not up to me.)
Plus, I doubt it’s as far along as this article makes it sound. Like, the casting isn’t going on right now. Probably.
Watch this space for more.
In other news!
If you live in Sydney, you can catch me at the launch for Foz Meadow’s debut novel, Solace and Grief.
It’s about a girl named Solace who has grown up in foster care her whole life, and who’s always realize that’s she’s kind of . . . different. She doesn’t like the sun, she’s wicked strong, and if she concentrates really hard, she can hear a conversation two blocks over. Then someone starts invading Solace’s dreams, and things get really complicated from there.
It looks like this:
Here’s the launch deets:
Sunday, March 7
12:30PM
Kinokuniya Bookstore
Level 2, Galeries Victoria
500 George Street
Sydney NSW 2000
I’ll be giving a wee speech about how cool this book is. Of course, I’ll be more than happy to see you guys there and say hi. But please remember that this is Foz’s party, not mine, so buy her book!
It comes out in Australia on March 1. When it finds a US publisher, I’ll let you know.
And finally!
Sorry that I missed the latest Forum Meet-Up. It was scheduled for early Sunday morning, Sydney time, and I woke up ill. Too ill to type!
But I hope you all had fun. I’ll try to check out the questions you left me, and answer some of them here on the blog.
My apologies again.
I haven’t done a writing advice post for a while, so here’s one for you.
Rambut = Indonesian for “hair”
Rambutan = a hairy fruit, common in Southeast Asia
Observe:
These hairy eyeballs are one of the fruits that Justine and I like to gorge on while we’re here in Sydney, because you simply can’t find them in New York. (Or if by some chance you do, they’re both absurdly expensive and half rotten.)
How to describe the taste? Well, the only similar fruit available in the US is the lychee, but I never had fresh lychee until I came to Australia, and the canned ones suck. So the rambutan really is a new taste—less acid than citrus, sharper than melon, darker than pineapple.
Or maybe I shouldn’t use comparisons. Rambutans have their own flavor, so I should describe them in their own terms. And that means really tasting them, then thinking hard, then wondering for a while how words can even capture sensual experience. In other words, describing the hairy eyeball means really being a writer.
(Which also means maybe failing at being a writer.)
These little philosophical diversions are something I love about travel: Going new places reminds you how much bigger the world is than you thought. For every kind of fruit you’ve tried in your life, there are a dozen species you’ve never heard of. No, make that a hundred—there are thirty species of pears, for heaven’s sake.
And it’s not just food. For every kind of social celebration you can name, some culture somewhere has ten more that don’t fall into any of your familiar categories. For every kind of person you’ve met, there are probably dozens of other personality types out there, unknown and unexpected, walking around experiencing entirely different aspirations and fears than the ones you know so well. Even the human emotions we think of as universal and primal sometimes come in very different flavors.
“But all people love their children!” I can hear someone protesting in a whiny voice. Yeah, maybe, but talk about different flavors. In various times and places, people have loved their kids by crippling them, beating them to death, or selling them.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that you need a time machine or even a jet plane to experience difference. I’ll bet that some very different folks live just on the other side of your town, and for whatever reason (social, historical, economic, accidental) you’ve never met them.
Writers need to remember that. I mean, everyone needs to realize that their little sandbox is not the whole world (or a scale model of it, or in any way representative of it). But it’s especially important for writers to keep hitting ourselves over the head with reminders of this simple fact: The world is SO much bigger and humanity so much gnarlier and more complicated than we assume it to be.
And if we forget that, we wind up splicing ourselves and the few people we know best (in my case, college-educated white folks who geek out on sciencey/numbery stuff and music) into every scenario on the planet. We wind up turning this gigantic world into a small one, and wind up writing small books for small readers.
In other words, we become cowards.
(And for us science fiction writers it’s so much worse, because we’re flogging these same, lame photocopies in the distant future and across the universe. Our bigger canvas means a epically vaster Fail.)
So this is my writing advice for today: When the hairy eyeballs look your way, look back. Taste them, swallow them, deal with their weirdness. Then tell stories about them.
Otherwise you’ll suck, both at writing and at life.
This coming Saturday, Justine and I will be doing an appearance at the wondrous Kinokuniya bookshop. Deb Abela and Michael Parker will also be there, and the four of us are going to have a long, meaningful debate about science fiction.
Or maybe a spitting contest.
Where:
Kinokuniya Books
Galeries Victoria
500 George St., Sydney
When:
Saturday, January 20, 2PM
Who: Deb Abela, Michael Parker, Justine Larbalestier, and Scott Westerfeld
Why:
To better the world.
About a week ago, Justine and I went to Penguin HQ to record an interview with each other. Thanks to modern editing techniques, we sound halfway clever and like we’d thought about what we were going to say. (Thanks, Ganda!)
We talk about Justine’s childhood in Australia, living between two continents, and how all that relates to Magic or Madness, The Last Days, and Peeps.
Sam Enthoven also reads from his new book, The Black Tattoo.
Here’s Penguin’s podcast page.
And here’s a direct link to the MP3.
I’ll be hosting the MP3 here, once I snag a copy. But for the moment, listen and enjoy.
(I’ll be back with my next installment about character names soon.)
So we lost the internet for two days thanks to a certain phone company being unspeakably lame. Sorry if I haven’t been posting, commenting, and answering email to your satisfaction.
Plus . . . moving!
We just left the Sydney flat, which was sadly empty and smelling of cleaning chemicals. We’re staying at the in-laws’ for two days before flying back to NYC. And now it is time to reminisce.
Sure, Specials may be at number 5 now. And yes, there’s that big news I’ve been promising you and not delivering, because I am a bad, bad man who drops hints and then is told by his agent that certain news is not public yet (grinds teeth).
But instead of discussing these things, I’m going to pause a moment to list all the things I’ll miss about Surry Hills.
The arched-tree promenade of Hyde Park, a mere five minutes’ walk away.
The glorious AMP Tower, seen at sunset out the glorious big window.
The telescope, which is staying here, alas. No more shall the moon be this cratered disk—orbalicious, blinding. Back to the mercury-vapor-pink skies of Manhattan.
The carnivorous plants of the nearby Botanical Gardens. You ate bugs so we didn’t have to, and yet we hardly knew ye.
The mighty Chesterfield, where much of Specials and The Last Days was penned. Plus, I loved that 6.4-meter ceiling.
Goodbye.
Last photo by Justine, all others by me.
For those of you on the east coast of Australia, a quick heads-up to say that Justine and I will be signing this week at Sydney’s premier sf bookstore, Galaxy Books.
Date: Thursday, April 27
Time: 6:00PM
Place: 143 York Street, Sydney CBD
We’ll be celebrating the Aussie release of Peeps and the import version of Magic Lessons.
Hope you can make it. (But we’ll understand if you’re, you know, 10,000 miles away and stuff.)
If you can’t, you can always read this cool interview with Justine.
Also, watch this space for big news early next week.
UPDATE: Okay, we did the reading and it was way fun. Thanks to all the folks at Galaxy for having us, and to Jess (who posts comments here) and our pal Deb for coming along.
We’re leaving on our World Tour tomorrow, but before we go I’d like to say goodbye to lovely Sydney. Ages ago, I took a bunch of pictures of the Sydney Opera House. This building is famous and iconically Sydney-ish, and it’s practically required by law that a picture of it appear alongside every mention of this city.
But the usual pictures never capture how cool the SOH is in person. How alien and dazzling, and how much fun Dess would have with the sheer mathiness of it. So here’s me trying.
Of course, the classic view of its “sails” is pretty cool . . .
But what you don’t get from that distance is how much like a grounded alien spaceship the building is. As you get closer, the sails tower over everything, till you sort of expect them to swallow the tourists. This is a BIG building. It’s intimidating and jaw-dropping, like getting too close to a sleeping dinosaur.
Supposedly, the goal-state of every English garden is that you can point a camera in any direction and get a perfectly composed picture. The Opera House gets much closer to this state than any garden I’ve ever seen. As you walk through the sails, unexpected compositions appear all around you.
Sometimes they’re soft and curvilinear . . .
And sometimes they get that alien spaceship/dinosaur vibe again.
But the coolest feature of the Opera House is the tiles. Every surface is covered with them. The tiles come in several shapes, and are organized in patterns that reflect the curve of the sails. There’s this self-similar fractal thing going on, so as you get closer or step away, the same curves pop out at your eyeballs at different scales.
And the tiles are really shiny, so the sun gets involved in the whole transformative process . . .
The whole building has this totally math-ilicious-ness about it that I’m sure Dess would love. Walking among its shifting shapes is sort of what I imagine it would be like to be in her head at midnight.
To see what I mean, click here for a monster-big version of the tiles in action.
Cool, huh?
Overall, it’s my favorite piece of modern architecture in the world. I’ll miss it while I’m gone.
Westerfeld’s Law #1: When you live around the corner from the best Thai food in Sydney, you eat a lot of Thai food.
Westerfeld’s Law #2: When that food is next to a telescope store, you stare longingly into that telescope store frequently.
Westerfeld’s Law #3: When you stare longingly into a telescope store frequently, you eventually BUY A TELESCOPE!
The laws in graphic format:
Or to put it another way, I have bought a telescope . . .
iPod for scale
My little Celestron is very cool. It’s quite small and indestructible, as you can see, perfect for taking camping (or, say, to boutique hotels out in the country). It takes up zero room in the house, and swivels around quite pleasingly on its little base. The fact that I don’t have to set up a tripod means that I will actually use it, rather than it gathering dust.
But one thing I will say is, it’s really a stupid idea to have telescope stores open during the day. Like, what are you supposed to do for the hours between purchase and sunset? Well, I briefly watched this couple breaking up on the veranda of a nearby apartment complex, but one really shouldn’t do that sort of thing.
So mostly I looked at Centrepoint Tower, and experimented with putting my digital camera right up to the eyepiece:
Cool, huh?
But mostly I was waiting for friggin’ Mars to rise! Celestial dance, my ass. It took forever!
Finally, though, the splendorous red planet arose. And was really hard to find. That’s what I always forget about telescopes, all that looking through a narrow tube for a little dot. How did Gallileo and those guys ever manage to, like, discover stuff?
But finally I found Mars, and it was pearly and beautimous and red. I can’t wait for Jupiter to return to the southern night skies, and for the moon to reappear. I love my telescope. (And must now purchase a more expensive one.)
Also, I have vowed never again to use my telescopic powers for evil, even to find out what happened with that couple who broke up. I will only look at the moon and stars, and possibly Centrepoint Tower when bored during the day.
PS For comparison, this is what Centrepoint Tower non-telescopically looks like from my window:
I’ll see if I can take some lunar pictures, once the moon comes back. Stupid new moon.
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
244 5th Avenue, 11th floor
New York, NY 10001
212-620-5883
info@grinbergliterary.com
