I get a lot of fan mail that asks, “Will we ever see Tally again . . . ?”
Well, the answer is now official: yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes!
The book I’m writing at this very moment is called Extras. It’s set in the same future world as the Uglies trilogy. It’s Uglies Book 4, so to speak.
But trilogies only have three books, the pedants among you declare!
Okay, fine. Extras really isn’t the fourth book in the Uglies trilogy. And the Uglies trilogy isn’t actually a tetralogy—or quartet, if you prefer real words in English.
No, the Uglies trilogy is totally a trilogy.
Uglies, Pretties, and Specials are one story, the coming of age of Tally Youngblood. Or, as I half-jokingly refer to it, “The Making of an Eco-Terrorist!” And that story is done.
So what’s Extras? Is it just . . . extra?
Well, no. It’s not just extra, it’s more.
Warning: Mild spoilers begin here, and they’re non-mild if you haven’t read Specials yet.
Extras is set a couple of years after the “mind-rain,” a few earth-shattering months in which the whole world woke up. The cure has spread from city to city, and the pretty regime that kept humanity in a state of bubbleheadedness has ended. Boundless human creativity, new technologies, and old dangers* have been unleashed upon the world.
Culture is splintering, the cities becoming radically different from each other as each makes its own way into this strange and unpredictable future . . .
It’s Diego times a planet, and it’s a pretty interesting time to be fifteen.
That’s how old my protagonist is. That’s right, Tally Youngblood is not the viewpoint character of Extras! Deal with it. Sometimes one needs new fish to fry.
But will Tally be making a guest appearance? Well, it’s not like she retired at the end of Specials. But maybe I should let her answer:
Be careful with the world, or the next time we meet, it might get ugly.
Heh, heh.
Spoilers end here.
Extras comes out October 2007 from Simon & Schuster.
More later.
*See “Rusties, end of.”
Hey, sorry I’ve been so lame posting this summer.* But I haven’t been totally lazy. I’ve been writing!
What, you may ask? Well, it’s a secret, and I can’t tell you any details about it yet.**
But here’s a funny thing that happened . . .
Quick note: This would be a good time for anyone who works for my publishers to stop reading. No really. Nothing to see, move it a long, because this is SO unrelated to delivery dates or professional issues of any kind. Okay?
Okay.
So, all you non-publishing types, there I was, 16,000 words (65 pages) into my shiny wonderful new book. Except it wasn’t wonderful; something was deeply, deeply wrong. The voice, the plot, the structure all seemed to be sucking! No matter how much I edited the writing, smoothed the transitions, caffeinated the plot, or voicified the characters, it all just came out flat.
The whole book gave me that icky feeling of inexcusable lameness, like when they rap on Sesame Street, or when my parents would say “The Led Zeppelin” and “Clash,” instead of the other way around. Or when politicians clap along with the musical act before their speeches. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
My novel was to a good book what this object is to a florescent light:
This was taken by me on a NYC street. Is not that the awesomest? What the heck stepped on that light bulb? Godzilla? Truckzilla?
Anyway, back to my tale of quasi-woe. The weird thing was, I was pretty sure that somewhere, maybe just next door to what I was writing about, something pretty cool was happening. The world of the novel was fascinating, but the novel wasn’t.
So let’s skip past many sleepless nights and screaming writing sessions to a day shortly before Christmas. Justine and I were walking to breakfast, and I finally realized the problem . . . I had the wrong point of view.
The main character, the one whose POV I was writing from, was too smug, too knowing, and generally non-likeable. A certain other person in the story was saying and doing much more interesting things. And worse, most of those cool things were being said and done when my POV person wasn’t around, which meant that the reader was only getting told about them.
Which sucked.
So I tossed those 16,000 words, and started over.
Now, I’d like to say this was easy. Like I’m a fearless and industrious perfectionist, who cares only about the final product. But no . . . it came in slow, reluctant stages.
First I said, “Well, we can keep most of this stuff, just change some pronouns and whatnot, and it’ll all seemlessly become Character B’s POV. Just start the story earlier!”
That, of course, failed to work. After all that smoothing and editing, lame Character A had saturated the prose. So I told myself, “Well, maybe we can have two points of view, and I can keep maybe four or five thousand words.”
And that worked even less. Character A dropped back into the story like a led zeppelin, possibly even the led zeppelin.
So after much toing and froing (mostly froing), only a tiny fraction of those lost 16,000 words have been rescued. And all have come at an editing cost roughly equal to writing them from scratch in the first place. Possibly more.
But I promise, the novel is much, much better, and I am a happier writer-person. More importantly, these next months of effort will be far more enjoyable, and the next forty years of having this book on my shelf much less embarrassing. Also, I got to keep 100% of the thinking I’ve already done, free of charge!
And all at the small cost of one month’s work.***
So my words of wisdom for today are:
“Sometimes tossing out vast quantities of words is better than letting a whole book bleed slowly to death. Don’t give up, just start over.”
Okay, maybe that’s not the feel-good story of the year. But these are:
1. The Last Days and Justine’s Magic Lessons have both been nominated for the Aurealis Awards! Yay to us and the other nominees:
Monster Blood Tattoo: Book One. Foundling by D.M. Cornish
The King’s Fool by Amanda Holohan
Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillie
2. After twenty-two months in print, Uglies has joined Pretties and Specials on the NY Times bestseller list. It’s wild for such an old book to appear for the first time on a bestseller list, and it can only mean that you guys are still talking it up to your friends. Yay to you.
3. Last July I blogged about some haiku I wrote for an issue of Subterranean Magazine. This issue can now be downloaded for free. Big yay to those publishers who realize that freely downloadable materials lead to more sales, not fewer.
*Southern hemisphere summer = December to February.
**Don’t even bother asking.
***Okay, maybe two months, if you include Thailand. But seriously, non-publishing dudes, I was chilling in Thailand.
Way back in this post, I gave a brief history and explanation of all the character names in Midnighters. As promised, and because you asked so many times, here is episode two of “Why I Chose the Names I Did.â€
All about Uglies!
Tally Youngblood
This was obviously an important one. Midnighters bounces between five POV characters, but we’re stuck inside Tally’s head for 240,000 words! So obviously, her name can’t be too annoying or unwieldy. “Plaztercrappitastica” is way out.
But Uglies takes place 300 years in the future. Names probably won’t be the same as now. So I needed something that’s not a current name, but that doesn’t make your brain fritz when you read it. So I chose a regular word in English.
That’s right: “tally” as in “count.” As in “Hey, Mr. Tally-man, tally me bananas.”
Thus, the little spell-checker in your brain doesn’t ping every time your eyes scan across those letters. (And the real-world MS Word spell-checker doesn’t draw a squiggly line under it.) “Tally” is capitalized, of course, so you know it’s a name, but otherwise “tally” reads as a perfectly normal word.
But not too common. When’s the last time you actually used the verb “tally” in a sentence, like “Let me tally those Scrabble scores for you, Old Chum?” Too common could be very bad, like if you named a main character Ask, or Her, or The. (Actually, “Said” would be the worst. Even writing about the late writer Edward Said can be quite tricky.)
“Tally” in itself doesn’t mean anything, but her last name has a host of associations. Youngblood is sort of halfway between “Young Turk” (a political upstart) and “fresh blood” (a newcomer). You can tell Tally is going to disrupt the system.
In fact the whole thing would be a bit too obvious, except that last names don’t get used very often in the uglies world. Usually people only say Tally’s last name when she’s in trouble (in that parental way, as in, “Get back in this house, Scott David Westerfeld!”), which makes it especially appropriate.
I knew I’d chosen the right last name for Tally in Pretties, when the savages who think she’s a renegade god fallen from the sky started calling her “Young Blood.” It just fit.
Shay
Shay is a real name, but it’s not very common. If you check the US Social Security baby name rankings, you’ll find that it hasn’t cracked the top thousand in the last ten years. It made 981 back in 1995, but that was as a boy’s name in the US. In it’s place of origin, Ireland, it’s a girl’s name that means “fairy palace.”
I’m not sure where it came from in my brain, but I like that it shares two letters with “Tally,” because they’re more alike than most readers realize. Heh.
David
David has the only “normal” name, and of course he’s from outside the system, so he should stick out. Because he grew up in the wild, David’s kind of old-fashioned, like that home-schooled kid in your town whose name is Ezekiel, or whatever.
And yes, David is my middle name, and I have a tiny scar across one eyebrow. I actually don’t know where David got his scar, but I got mine fencing. (Wear the mask, people! That’s what it’s there for.)
Zane
Zane’s name started out as “Asher,” after a friend of mine’s kid. But ultimately I didn’t want any city-dwellers to have normal names. Justine suggested Zane, which has the always science-fictional Z-thing going on, so I liked it.
“Zane” is actually a last name, and fairly common. Mostly, I like that it rhymes with “sane,” and that in both books 2 and 3, Zane is Tally’s main link to sanity. (Or at least her real self, which may or may not be sane.)
Peris
Sounds like, but isn’t, a real place name: Paris. Again, it’s familiar and yet not quite 20th century. Also, Paris is a mystical city of lights that people fantasize about going to, sort of like New Pretty Town, where we first meet Peris. (Just thought of that.)
In the original outline, Tally’s pretty former friend was named Peri, and was another girl. But their first conversation was easier to write using “he” and “she.” (How lazy is that?) Also, I liked that Tally had a BFF who was a boy, and that it wasn’t about romance.
Dr. Cable
Like Peris and Tally, Dr. Cable has a name recognizable as a normal word. But “cable” brings to mind electronics and suspension bridges, so it’s much more technological and cold than, say, Peris/Paris. Think steel cable and wiry muscles. (Or being overcharged to watch TV.)
Andrew Simpson Smith
Like David, Andrew was raised in the wild, so he has an old-fashioned name. Plus I like it that his name is “smith” even though his people haven’t invented iron yet. (Smiths all got their name from being blacksmiths, or silversmiths, or whatever.)
Part of me thinks it amusing that the babarian is the only character in the trilogy with a middle name, becasue triple-barreled names sound posh and non-barbarian to me.
Crims
Australian slang for “criminals,” to go with all the other Aussie slang in the book: crumblies, littlies, spagbol, etc.
Who have I forgotten?
Also: Pretties has climbed to #4 on the NY Times children’s paperback list. You may woot. Specials has retreated from the hardback list, but all those people buying book 2 have to finish sooner or later. Hah!
Warning Do not put spoilers on this thread! Put them on the Specials Spoiler Thread. Spoilers in this comment thread will be deleted!
Update:This post has been boingled! Run for your lives!
Here’s some fan art to amuse you all, perhaps making up for my lack of postage.
But first a little news: Specials and Pretties have appeared on the NYT bestseller list! Specials has re-listed at #7 on the chapterbook list, and Pretties debuts at #8 on the paperback list.
The crazy thing is that Pretties has been out for more than a year. So the book’s appearance on a bestseller list means that you guys have been talking it up! And I mean that: At this point the only marketing is word of mouth. (And slipcases! Someone give me slipcases!)
So onward to the fan art . . . Here’s happy Tally celebrating the news. Dance, Tally, dance!
Animated gif by Breca H.
And here’s a vision of New pretty Town from the UK.
Picture by Joanna L., who’s working on a university design project based on Uglies.
And finally, an entry in the long-awaited Halloween costume ball, Dess with Purposelessly Hyperinflated Individuality!
Costume designed and worn by Kallie P., plus Psychokitty!
Send any more costume shots to my fan mail address. To do that, here and click “contact” in the upper right corner. Then replace the “at” with the “@”. Why is this so hard? To make spambots choke on their own bile, that’s why.
(I will keep your names secret, of course.)
And again, thanks for getting me on the list. Without you guys, I’m a crazy guy saying “bubbly” way too much.
Yes, I may be in Thailand, but I’m working terribly, terribly hard on my next book.
No, really. So it wasn’t me who found these videos on YouTube, I swear. I’m working way too hard.
But here they are:
This video for So Yesterday has lots of cool split-screen energy.
And a smooth one for Midnighters. Check out the casting.
And this one, although it’s not really about Uglies, does give you some idea how much work goes into making people in magazine ads into pretties. (In some ways, Photoshopping inspired the trilogy more than cosmetic surgery.)
And here’s another really creepy one about extreme retouching. A must watch. It’s like the operation unfolding before your eyes.
And finally, I mentioned this excellent video review of Uglies in a previous post, but include it here for completeness.
Can you guys find any more? (One link per post, please, or my spam filter has a whole bag of zap with your name on it!)
I finally got a scan of the Times interview mentioned in my previous post. Here’s what it looked like in hard copy, including a suitably diabolical photo:
See, it’s much better with Han Lee de Boer’s photo included. I love me a photographer who shows up with surgical gloves and a scalpel. It was a great way to finish off the interview (so to speak).
Plus that pull-quote: “If I can save just one nose . . . ” Hah! (I slay me.)
Actually, Han and I liked a slightly different shot better. Maybe this cropped version should be my next author photo:
credit: Han Lee de Boer
Or better yet, I can use it for when I teach creative writing classes . . .
*Bwah-ha-ha-ha-cough-cough.*
Hey, and you can go see more of Han Lee de Boer’s work here. His subjects include many much famouser (and prettier, and closer shaven) people than me.
And for those of you who missed it, here’s the text of the interview with Amanda Craig.
So back when we were in London, which seems years ago now, I did a bunch of interviews. They’re starting to leak out this weekend, so I thought I’d give you guys a heads up.
Note to US and Australian readers: my YA books only appeared in the UK this year, so it’s all “new, new, new” to them.
First, here’s a profile by Amanda Craig, the YA and children’s reviewer for The Times—paper sometimes known as “The London Times” to us clueless USians.
Amanda’s a huge Uglies fan, so her profile is pretty cool. (And by the way, here’s her review of Uglies from earlier this year.)
There was also a great photoshoot for the article, in which I posed with a scalpel, surgical gloves, and an evil leer. Sort of the-author-as-Dr.-Cable. The photo isn’t online yet, but I’ll try to track it down. I’m dying to see it.
Secondly, I sat down with Meet The Author, a video series in which authors discuss their books. They have a whole siteful of cool interviews.
I’m trying to sound non-stupid. Can’t you tell?
It’s an interesting format: The author, which would be me, sits and talks straight to a camera for a minute or so. It’s all one continuous take, no editing, so it’s sort of raw and stumbly, but real. And highly unnerving for those of us who are used to rewriting our words a few dozen times before anyone see them.
Here are the results for The Last Days, Midnighters, and Peeps.
Note that for the moment, Peeps is called Parasite Positive in the UK. Apparently the slang word “peeps” has different connotations there, or something. (Trusty British readers, can you verify?)
(Hey, you can download these as audio from the iTunes store! Search on “Meet the Author,” then open up the “Meet the Author UK Podcast.”)
And finally, an amusement unrelated to the London trip: The Wikipedia entry for Samhain now lists Midnighters as a “Modern Popular Culture” reference.
One small wiki-woot for me, one giant step for Darkling-kind.
Update: This wiki-factoid was pointed out to me by Lyra!
Can you identify this object?
Yes, it’s a cake. And if you look closely, you’ll realize that it’s a cake shaped like a copy of Uglies!
How did such a thing come to exist, you ask?
Well, early this year I got a call from a South Central High School in Indiana. They wanted to start a One School/One Book project, and they wanted to use Uglies as their guinea pig.
I said that was awesome (as I usually do to people who want to buy 500 copies of one of my books), and said I’d be willing to come for a visit as well.
So last Thursday Justine and I flew down to visit friends in Kentucky, then early on Friday morning crossed the river to Indiana.
Now it’s one thing to see what effect my books have on one person or a group of friends. But a whole school? That’s a different order of magnitude altogether.
The students had made Uglies games:
And art projects:
And even built hoverboards:
Okay, the hoverboards didn’t fly, but they were tricked-out in ways that made them feel more real than the hoverboards in Uglies. They had great personal touches, like band stickers and sports-team logos, and one Hello-Kitty color scheme. (Pink is the new hover, I guess.)
That’s how the whole day was: Cool stuff all over the walls, kids asking smart questions, all the results of a school-wide conversation about one book.
It’s a great idea, and no doubt took a lot of hard work. (And a grant from the Harrison County Community Foundation.) I hope that South Central keeps doing it in years to come, experimenting with all sort of books, and that other schools try out the idea as well.
It was really cool, and I feel honored to be chosen, and grateful to everyone who helped it come into being. (And thanks for Gwenda and Christopher for letting us crash.)
Plus, there was cake.
So here’s a question: If your school did a one-book project, what would you want everyone to read? And let’s focus on books other than mine, because obviously anyone reading this probably already likes me.
So what would be cool for a whole school to read? What book would most change the way everyone saw their high school?
I nominate Lois Lowry’s The Giver and S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders.
What about you guys?
Hey, we’re headed out of town in an hour, and blogging may be sketchy, but to keep you guys entertained . . .
Is anyone planning any Westerfeldian Halloween costumes? Specials? Pretties? Midnighters? Peeps? Or just plain old zombies?
Let me know, and maybe we can put together a photo gallery in early November.
And to fill your swag bags with more than teeth-ruining candy, Penguin is running a bookclub sweepstakes! Enter to win up to ten copies of six books, including my latest, The Last Days. Basically, that’s one copy of each book for all of your bookclub members!
Spread the word.
Ciao till next week!
A few days ago, Justine wrote a post about character names. She and I agree pretty much on this issue: We don’t stress out insanely about finding the one and only true name that magically brings a character to life. When I hear other writers talk about that stuff, I wonder if perhaps it’s a way of procrastinating to avoid the real work of getting inside character’s head. (That is, knowing their favorite breakfast condiment, shoe size, and relationship to Pluto.)
But people are fascinated with names, or at least the people who write me fan mail are, so without further ado . . .
Here’s the first episode of “Why I Chose the Names I Did,” which is all about my first YA series, Midnighters!
Jessica Day
Her working name was Gillian Flood, which I still think rocks. “Gillian” is the name of a pal of mine (who managed to get a law degree in the time it took me to write the whole trilogy: congrats!). Alas, my heroine’s name was destined to change.
The “Flood” went early on, in the proposal stage. Basically, an editor at the packaging house happened to have the last name “Flood,” and they found the confluence a bit weird. So someone chose “Day,” for obvious reasons—indeed, too obvious, some might say (including me). I didn’t raise much of a fuss at the time, because this was not where I wanted to fight my battles. So “Gillian Day” it was.
After the book was done, one of the higher-ups at HarperCollins decided she didn’t like “Gillian.” My frequent shortening to “Gill” sounded fishy to her. “Jillian” was proposed, but that spelling felt like a spike in my brain. The issue languished, and the book’s protagonist remained unnamed until late in the editorial process, when I not-so-brilliantly suggested Jessica/Jess as a replacement. (See directly below for why this was dumb.)
And thus Jessica Day was born.
Dess
Dess (no last name) was always named “Dess.” As she puts it in The Secret Hour, it’s supposedly short for Desdemona, but secretly short for “decimal.”
I think Dess’s name is perfect, quick-witted and math-geeky, just like her.
Alas, it friggin’ rhymes with Jess. I didn’t even notice this until an editor had run the Search-and-Replace right before the page proofs were produced for The Secret Hour. Egads! All those Desses and Jesses next to each other, causing eyeball fatigue! Some readers have written to say it makes their brain hurt, others don’t notice at all.
In Touching Darkness, I pay a swift homage to this issue:
Beth turned from her cooking. “You have a friend called Dess, Jess?”
“Yeah, it’s a mess.”
At least one highly visual reader said it got even worse for him when this next double-S feminine name was thrown into the mix . . .
Melissa
Melissa is the first of a Westerfeldian breed: interestingly crazy women whose names begin with M. Later in Midnighters we meet Madeleine, and readers of The Last Days will see the tradition continued with Minerva (more on her in a later episode of this show). Some might suggest that David’s mom in Uglies, Maddy, also fits this profile. That’s probably a bit unfair, though Tally might think otherwise.
But within the midnighters’ world, the m has tons of connections, which brings us to . . .
Madeleine
The initial M makes Madeleine a typographical sister to Melissa. Plus they’re both mindcasters, misanthropes, and malcontents.
But more importantly, a madeleine is a pastry with a history. Savor this, if you will . . .
photo credit: The Food Section
You see, a madeleine features heavily in Rememberance of Things Past, Marcel Proust’s book in which a man eating a madeleine has a memory flashback, vast chunks of the past skittering out of his mind for the next 800 pages, all because of the familiar taste. That’s right, it’s exactly the sort of effect that touching a mindcaster can have (and, of course, mindcasting uses tastes as its central metaphors for people’s thoughts and memories).
Cool, huh? Touching Darkness, and indeed the whole Midnighters series, is all about the rememberance of things past . . .
Pretentious? Moi?
Rex Greene
“Rex” means king, which makes the name pretty ironic at first. He’s supposed to be the leader of the midnighters, but he’s somewhat shaky, as kings go.
Of course, by Blue Noon Rex is more of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Hah!
I have no idea where “Greene” came from.
Jonathan Martinez
Jonathan’s name also just came out of nowhere. Of all the characters, he’s the only one whose last name is a data point about him. After all, he’s Hispanic and has some plot-related knowledge of Spanish. (Also, it would be lame to set a book in Oklahoma without a Hispanic character, especially given the importance of history and colonization in the series.)
“Martinez” is pretty common, just as Greene and Day are. In fact, all the midnighter characters have vaguely generic last names, as if they’re just being slotted into historical roles handed down over the generations. But maybe that’s overthinking it . . .
Other Characters
Don Day: as in “dawn day”? An appalling combination that also didn’t occur to me until too late. Argh.
Beth: for some reason, the ultimate little sister name.
Jessica’s Mom: She has no first nameI What’s up with that? Well, Jessica is really much closer to her mom than her dad, so while she often thinks of him as “Don,” her mom is only ever “Mom.” A subtle but effective way to show family dynamics.
Constanza Greyfoot: I just love “Constanza” as a slightly overblown name for a comic character. And of course (spoiler alert!) her last name is a big deal in Books 2 and 3.
Cassie Flinders: Matthew Flinders was an early European explorer of Australia, where I started to write the series. Cassie herself is an explorer of the Blue Time. And Cassie? Well, “Cassie-Anne” was going to be my name if I’d been a girl. (Tell no one.)
Angie: is a friend of mine who was house-sitting for us while I wrote The Secret Hour. You see, I was telling her how to pay bills and fix the toilet via email, just as the Darklings told Angie what to do via . . . tile-mail. Or something.
That’s all I can think of. Are there any of your fave Midnighters characters I’ve missed?
Actually, that was fun. I’ll write soon about character names in my other books, ending up with The Last Days, of course. Which is (did I mention?) out now!
If you haven’t read the series and your interest is piqued, feel free to go buy Midnighters.
Shay's Story, a graphic novel version of Uglies, is OUT NOW!
The Uglies series has been adapted into graphic novel form, with the events of the trilogy told from Shay's point of view in three volumes.
The first one comes out March 6, 2012!
Click here to contact Scott Westerfeld.
Jill Grinberg
Jill Grinberg Literary Management
info@grinbergliterary.com
