Author: scott

World Tour!

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Justine and I are only three weeks away to heading off on what we’ve been calling the “round-the-world jaunt that ate March.” This trip may kill us, but for those of you who live in Brisbane, San Francisco, NYC, or Bologna, it will mean a chance to say hi and get books signed.

Here’s our appearance schedule, starting with a trip up the east coast of Australia:

Saturday 25 February 2006
Aurealis Awards Ceremony
Brisbane, Qld

First a short hop up to Bris-Vegas for the Aurealis Award Ceremony. We’re both up for best Young Adult SF or Fantasy novel of 2005! Me for Uglies and Peeps, Justine for Magic or Madness. (I hope she wins, so I don’t have to make a speech.)

A little more than a week later, we fly across the Big Pond to California. We’ll be staying with friends, doing an interview with Locus Magazine, and doing two appearances:

Tuesday 7 March 2006, 7PM
Borderland Books
866 Valencia St
San Francisco, California

I’ll be sitting next to a big stack of Midnighters 3: Blue Noon and Justine will be signing her sequel, Magic Lessons.

And the very next night, doing the same thing, except here:

Wednesday 8 March 2006, 6PM
Books Inc.
Laurel Village
3515 California St
San Francisco

Then it’s off to New York for two weeks of hanging out with friends and making sure the NYC apartment hasn’t burned down, exploded, or become infested with parasites of some kind. For those of you within spitting distance of Manhattah, there’s one public appearance (so far):

Saturday 18 March 2006, 12-2PM
Books of Wonder
18 W 18th Street
New York City

But you aren’t allowed to actually spit on us. It’s just a figure of speech.

Finally in late March, we fly over to Italy for two things in Bologna:

25-26 March, 2006
SCBWI Before Bologna Conference

SCBWI is the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Justine and I are teaching three workshops together about writing for kids. One about synopses, one about slang, and one about regional voices. (Hey, if you want to enroll, it’s cheaper if you do it before February 15.)

And then the Fair itself starts:

27-30 March, 2006
Bologna Children’s Book Fair
Bologna Fair Centre – Piazza Costituzione Entrance

This is an annual event where pretty much every publisher in the young readers’ world comes together to schmooze, eat, drink, schmooze, and buy foreign rights. Justine and I will get to meet all the cool people who’ve translated our works into Italian, German, Japanese, Thai, Swedish, Chinese, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Hebrew, Spanish, and Slovene*. It promises to be full of multi-lingual conversations and good meals, because you can’t beat Italian cities with food named after them. (And that’s no baloney. Hah! . . . sort of.)

And at last there’s the mega-flight from Bologna, to Frankfurt, to Singapore, to Sydney. Followed by sweet, sweet death. (By which I mean, of course, sleep.)

*By the way, did I mention that So Yesterday sold in Slovene? You know, the language of Slovenia. The country Slovenia, next to Italy and stuff . . . Hey, Slovene is the new black, dude.

Peeps Is Unshelved

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How kewl is this?

Unshelved a daily comic strip set in a library, which every Sunday becomes a book review in comic form. This is a fantastic idea, on top of which, Peeps is their book of the week! Color me very pleased.

Check it out:

Ah, if only they’d spelled my name right. But you can’t have everything.

For the full-size version, and the rest of this excellent strip, (and to see my name spelled right! thanks guys), go here.

I will take this opportunity to tell you all that Peeps has been on a winning streak lately:

Top Ten Book for the 2006 ALA Best Books YA Awards

Top 40 Children’s Books for 2005 in Kirkus Reviews

Best Books of the Year in 2005 in School Library Journal
(Justine’s Magic or Madness is on there too!)

Awarded a 2005 Blue Ribbon by the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

Locus Recommended Reading List for 2005.
(Again! Magic or Madness is there in First Novels!)

Cool, huh? So thanks to all the librarians, reviewers, and editors out there who slave to read dozens (even hundreds) of books every year and then bother to write them up. Without you, us readers wouldn’t find nearly as much of the cool stuff there is to read.

And us writers? Well, we’d just starve.

(Feeling an impulse purchase coming on? Just click here. Or here!)

PS Thanks to John, Joe, and Kendall for alerting me to the Unshelved strip.

Pretties UK

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Ah, so nice to have a post without a picture of me . . .

So you may remember not long ago when I posted about the UK cover of Uglies.

Well, the trilogy is coming out at a fast and furious pace in the UK, thanks to a crack team of unsleeping translators, so I already have the British version of Pretties in hand:

You know, when the first UK cover came my way, I hadn’t seen any episodes of Nip/Tuck. Now I’m watching the show, and enjoying it, and realizing how much these covers riff on it. (Which is a good thing: intertextuality R us.) I think it’s the dotted lines that really make the connection for me, though I know that present-day plastic surgeons actually draw them on people before cutting them up. (All together now: Eww.)

Another nice symmetry is that the UK covers have followed the US color scheme so far. That is, blue/green for Book 1 and pink/red for Book 2.

Here’s all four covers for comparison:

Discuss.

PS Pretties comes out in the UK in July this year, and Specials in December. In the US, it’s May 9 for Specials.

“King of the Cool Codes”

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Those are not my words, but the headline writer of The Melbourne Age, the biggest newspaper in Australia’s second biggest city. Eep. A bit blush-making.

The article, by the excellent Mike Shuttleworth of the Centre for Youth Literature, is a result of So Yesterday winning the Victorian Premier’s Award down there. It’s a great big article in the A section, with a big-ole photo of me in my, ahem, coolest T-shirt:


Jennifer Soo

Yes, that’s me looking off into the future of literature. Or maybe flexing my imagination, or thinking, “Hope I don’t look like a wanker.”

I’m always exceedingly nervous about any picture of me appearing that I don’t have TOTAL control over. Not to mention articles that quote me rattling along before breakfast on many cups of coffee. But Mike managed to make me sound smart, and Jennifer made me look (passably) cool. Much thanks to them both.

Here’s the article.

For a password, go to Bug Me Not. (If you’re already a Sydney Morning Herald reader, you don’t need one.)

And it starts:

Scott Westerfeld describes his lifestyle as “bi-summeral”. For the past five years, the laconic, softly spoken Texan has moved between Sydney and New York with his partner, Australian Justine Larbalestier (herself a young-adult fiction writer). They met at the Nebula Awards in New York in 2000 (“How geeky is that?” he asks) and now they divide their time between apartments in Manhattan and Surry Hills.

Westerfeld is a writer of young adult fiction, living the perfect life for exploring the teenage cool world. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including So Yesterday, a whip-smart thriller about a New York trend-spotter and a culture-jamming scam . . .

All very blush-making.

Ergo Telescopy

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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.

Last Days Cover Redux

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Okay, so the previous cover designs for The Last Days didn’t get such a great reception. Knives were drawn, tears were shed. But as promised, the drawing board was gone back to. And this time with vamp-tastic results!

Just to remind you, The Last Days is my not-really-a-sequel to Peeps. It’s set in the same parasite-afflicted New York City, but instead of the Night Watch, it follows a bunch of kids trying to start a band and get famous. Of course, making it in the music biz is a tough thing to do under the best of circumstances, but right in the middle of a Zombie/Vampire Apocalypse, it’s really a total pain in the neck. (Get it? NECK!)

Now, this is not a complete design. There’s no text yet, these aren’t the right color levels, and it’s probably not going to be cropped this way. You are seeing a raw image even before the marketing department does! But I just couldn’t keep it from you for another moment.

So here is the new and highly improved cover rough for The Last Days:

IS THIS NOT COOL?

I think that it is. And the fact that the only musical prop is a guitar neck (neck, get it? NECK!) is really great.

The oversized photophobic cat-like eyes are very much the way I imagined peeps’ to be. And the gaze is just the right combination of hungry, horny, and inhuman.

The book comes out in August 2006 in the USA. No, it’s not quite finished yet.

Also: Peeps has been awarded a BCCB Blue Ribbon Award, meaning that it made their top ten list of kids’ fiction books of the year. (Buy it here!)

And in other Peeps news, it seems like toxoplasma gondii, the cat-to-rat parasite that stars in Chapter 4, is all over the web. There’s been some new research about how it affects its human host. (Just typing the words “human host” gives me the chills, yo.)

Here’s a reference on BoingBoing, proving again that I am the sf-parasite-guy, and another at science writer Carl Zimmer’s site. Zimmer rocks, and without his book Parasite Rex, Peeps would not have been written.

New UK Cover

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Discussions of Midnighters characters have taken over recent comment threads, and Blue Noon is my next book out (March 1), so maybe it’s time for some more news from Bixby.

A while back I blogged about the new covers for the Midnighters series in the UK. Well, they’ve changed since then. Here’s a side-by-side view of the new and old:

The new one (on the right) uses the same image as the old, the photo montage from the back of the US edition. But the new cover gives it more space, without the overwhelming type treatment. And of course there’s the change to cursive text, which screams “Oklahoma gothic” to me. The whole thing has a creepier, scarier vibe.

Justine says it looks like an airport paperback, which is a good thing. I think it will sell books.

In the UK they’re all coming out a few months apart, so the other covers are already designed:

Cool, huh?

Midnighters on TV

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Okay, so this is NOT a done deal, but . . .

According to Sci Fi Wire, the chances of a Midnighters TV show have gone up a notch or two. Because of the success of Supernatural last Fall, they’ve ordered a pilot script for Midnighters. See here:

Now all this means is that a writer (a guy called Darren Lemke) has been paid to write a script. If the WB like his work and see a future in the series, it is possible there’ll be a Midnighters TV pilot in Fall of 2006. (Or 2007?)

This would be a gas. I’ve always thought that Midnighters was the most TV-friendly of my series. I just hope they do a good job . . .

By the way, I got this link from Jonathan’s fan site, midnighters.org. Midnighters fan sites seem to be proliferating, as witnessed by Morgan’s site, from which the excellent comics of my last post came.

Anyway, watch this space, and Jonathan’s and Morgan’s sites, for news about this possible series.

But when it comes to Hollywood, never, ever hold your breath.

Midnighters Comics

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Recently on Morgan’s Midnighters fan site, I came across this awesome bit of fan art by Brianne K. It’s a sort of manga-esque version of Midnighters, my trilogy about the adventures of a disfunctional gang of Oklahoma goths in a small town where time freezes every midnight. (How’s that for a pitch?)

I love that the comic is written from Dess’s point of view, because she’s my favorite character. It’s also cool that Brianne doesn’t follow the book’s storyline—she’s just having fun with the characters. Her visualization of Melissa is great, especially that Mona Lisa smile on page 2. That’s Melissa and Rex above, in case you haven’t read the series.

The only drawback of the comic is that it’s only two pages long! But maybe if you click below to read the whole thing, and leave suitably rapturous comments right here, we can convince Brianne to do MORE. (The power of fanfic compels you! The power of fanfic compels you!)

page 1

page 2

And don’t forget to check out all the other cool stuff at Morgan’s site.