Author: scott

Tom Wolfe Warms My Seat

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Okay, I have finally recovered from Book Expo America enough to post about it. In a word? Big:

Okay, this photo is by John Scalzi, and it’s from last year in Chicago. (I forgot my camera.) But let’s face it, the inside of one convention center is much like any other. Basically, it’s many, many football fields full of people pitching, selling, and giving books to each other. Books about food, religion, art, the Knights Templar, dogs, horses, wombats, lemurs, etc. In all, there are 30,000 people sharing 270,000 square feet of space with who-knows-how-many millions of books.

Justine and I were guests of Penguin/Razorbill, our mutual publisher, for whom I was going to sign Peeps. We were picked up at 10AM by a Penguin-sponsored car, including a driver with matching silver tie and handkerchief. (It’s noticing the little things that makes life interesting, okay?) Once at the Expo, we went by the Penguin booth and for the first time laid eyes on the incredible hardback version of Peeps:

You can’t see this online, but the cover features “spot varnishing” on the iris of the eye, which makes it really shiny.) But shiny things only hold my attention for so long, and there was free stuff to be schwagged! (Oh, yeah. We also met The Apprentice guy, who’s doing a book with Penguin. But we didn’t recognize him, because we were living in Australia during that whole “You’re Fired!” thang. Still, I will confirm that he’s got that business-guy handshake.)

Using the Small Beer Press booth as a home-base and schwag drop-off zone (many thanks, Kelly and Gavin), we proceded to raid the Expo for FREE STUFF. I will make a list for your envying pleasure sometime soon, but let us skip ahead . . .

As 3PM apporoached, it was time for me to sign Peeps, so Justine and I headed for the giant signing stalls downstairs. The set-up allows 22 authors to sign at the same time. Barriers channel the people toward the tables, not unlike cattle on a killing floor. We’d already checked out the space, and noticed that Tom Wolfe was signing in my slot (number 11) before me. Erp.

Fortunately my wonderful Penguin publicist, Allison Smith, was there to guide me to the warm-up room, stock me with pens and water, and generally make me feel less defenseless. Backstage with me were Henry “The Fonz” Winkler, superchef Mario Batali, and some football player I didn’t know who had “famous” written all over him. (Also a horde of writers like me, with “not famous yet” lightly sprinkled on us.)

When my appointed hour arrived, it was quite nervous-making heading from backstage toward the signing tables. Especially when I arrived and Tom Wolfe was still there, white suit and all, with a small crowd in front of him. But, hey, I gave the old guy two minutes to wrap up before I moved into The Chair.

Okay, I had six boxes of books (x 24 = 144) to sign, and only 30 minutes to sign them. That’s one every . . . 12.5 seconds! And surging down the channel like enraged salmon were a host of school librarians! (Well, okay, they surged like a host of very polite school librarians. But I wasn’t prepared for the numbers.)

At first I was very nervously keeping to my 12.5 seconds per book, which was weird. Try having a hundred or so 12.5-second conversations in a row some time; your brain will hurt. Then at some point I looked up and saw the dreaded . . . end of the line. But it seemed that only a few minutes had gone by. Was I going to sit there for another 20 minutes, all alone next to my gross of books, tragic looking, making a mockery of the Tom Wolfe Memorial Butt-Warmth?

But then I saw them in the distance, headed toward me, fresh from their 12.5-second dream dates with the Fonz: MORE SCHOOL LIBRARIANS!

Again I was besieged, and this time I husbanded my resources, personalizing and signing in 20- and 30-second chunks, having a good laugh and finally relaxing. But slowly the crowd trickled away, and a few stragglers started coming up to ask if I could sign a book for their good friend “Ebay Auction Winner.” Allison and I decided to wrap up, and I discovered something bizarre: I had gone overtime. The next author in my slot hadn’t shown up, so they’d let me dawdle, and what I thought was about 15 minutes had in fact been 40!

About 100 copies of Peeps were gone into the ether, hopefully to stew and simmer for the next three months, building up a mighty whispering campaign: must buy Peeps, must buy Peeps . . .

I was exhausted and, dare I say it, sweaty. Sort of like I’d been on a hundred 12.5-second first dates in a row.

So, with Allison’s help, Justine and I struggled back home, clutching giant bags of schwag and the one and a half remaining boxes of Peeps. (No, you can’t have them. They’re mine, mine, I say in a hissing voice.)

We also clutched an invitation to Holly Black’s Spiderwick Chronicles cocktail party. But I’ll write about that later, because I got all sweaty again writing this. Eww.

I Live to Horse

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Sorry for the lame posting rate these days. Wiscon, supposedly three days long, has expanded for Justine and I to an entire week. It started last Thursday morning at 4:19, then came the trip to Taliesin, and then the next five days seem to have been spent in the Governors’ Club, as far as I can remember. (And as far as photographic evidence suggests.)

That’s all well and good, in fact, it was an excellent week. But after such a schmooze-fest, the last thing I needed was to return to NYC and find myself in . . . another schmooze-fest. Yes, but Book Expo America waits for no man to recover, and it’s all publishing parties all the time here in the Big Apple. Even though my schoozing clothes are still at the dry cleaners.

I’m signing tomorrow at 3:30, in a t-shirt. Still, it’s the first time I’m seting foot in a big book fair, which is quite exciting.

Other good things since our return: Justine won a book at the litblog party, and when we got back Wednesday night, I found that ex-patriot Lawrence Schimel had brought me two copies of El Empirio Elevado from Madrid. For which he is much thanked.

Surely even the most monolingual among us will recognize that as the Spanish title for Risen Empire. Yay, Spain! I really like the strangely light-hearted colors of this cover. It makes me glad that every country has different ideas of what sf books should look like.

The Spanish reviews seem pretty good. And although I know at an intellectual level that Google tranlsations are a cheap shot, but I can’t resist posting this author bio:

Scott Westerfeld is one of the authors of the sort with more literary quality at the present time. In fact, one of its novels was selected by the New York Times like the best one of the year, by its care of the personages, the attention to the language, and its eagerness to create histories full of rate and sense of the wonder. It was born in Texas and lives to horse between New York and Sidney.

Yes, I do live to horse. But for the moment, I live to schmooze.

Frank Lloyd Wright vs. Zombies

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So on our first day in Wisconsin, we took a field trip out to Taliesin, the estate where Frank Lloyd Wright lived for the last 40-odd years of his life. I’ve been meaning to for the five years I’ve gone to Wiscon. We went with Janine and Doselle Young, another sf power couple, braving the cows and silos to reach this modern masterpiece of design.


photo by Doselle Young

Historically speaking, there is no “true Taliesin” to preserve. The main house was constantly rebuilt by Wright and his acolytes, becoming sort of a sort of living laboratory of architecture. But you can feel his ego everywhere, the low ceilings pushing you to sit down when he wants you to, the views perfectly callibrated when you’re in the right chair, facing the right way. The house lets you know who’s still in charge: the dead architect.

Speaking of death . . . like all great architecture, Taliesin has great stories. The house was leveled twice during Wright’s lifetime, once by lightning and once by arson, his third wife burnt alive–along with kids and houseguests–by an enraged gardener. Whoa.

And it just gets weirder. In 1985, more than 25 years after his death, Wright’s body was snatched from the nearby cemetary. You see, his fourth and final wife wanted him exhumed and cremated upon her death, their ashes scattered together. But his family was a bit more old-school than that, and were like, “Uh, no.” But shortly after the wife’s death her supporters went on a midnight raid and dug Wright up. And the ashes got scattered together.

Which brings me to zombies. I wish I could say it was all the tour guide’s talk of murder and grave-robbing, but actually, I’m kind of immature about world heritage sights. Whenever I visit them, I think about where I want to live if there’s a world-depopulating plague. In a Wright house? The Battersea Power Station? Or maybe the Taj Mahal . . . because I’m not really into canned food or solitude, so the only really cool thing about global depopulation is all the freed-up architectural masterpieces.

But then my mind turns to other Last Man Alive issues, like, say, zombie apocalypse. So Doselle and I were standing there in Wright’s incredible house, cogitating on defensive issues. Of course, it does make the architecture come alive, worrying about hordes of zombies attacking.

So here’s our quick analysis, entitled, “Taliesin in Zombie Apocalypse: Fortress or Deathtrap?”

Advantages
1. Views in all directions to spot approaching zombie hordes, especially from the Romeo and Juliet Windmill Tower located on the estate.
2. Solid sandstone construction, not likely to be torn to pieces by undead hands.
3. Frank Lloyd Wright chairs never let you get “too comfortable.”
4. No major population centers nearby, just farmland. See map.
5. Organic melding of architecture and landscape allows for interlocking fields of fire.
6. Shop in vistors’ center can be looted for tasteful gifts.

Disadvantages
1. Lots of windows to be boarded up.
2. Rough exterior walls can be easily climbed by zombie horde.
3. No last-stand “suicide” basement.
4. Surrounding open spaces allow 28 Days-style “fast” zombies to get a big head of steam up.
5. Bring your own guns a must.

So, yes, a masterpiece, and highly recommended for a day trip if you like cool design. But in case of zombie apocalypse, I would stick to the mall until those 28 days (or whatever) are over.

Plane Leaves at 6:00AM

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I am blogging to you from 4:19 in the morning to bring you this important news . . .
Apparently, there is a 4:19 in the morning! It differs from the normal 4:19 in the following ways:

Complete suckage.
Phantasmagoric darkness.
Unseasonable cold.
Strange fuzziness clings to all objects, especially teeth.

More later on this disturbing development.

Off to Wiscon

Posted on by scott

First things first: Go and buy Valiant now!

Well, maybe not now, because it officially hits the shelves on June 1. But you can always order it now, or go bug your local bookseller. I read it a couple of weeks ago, and let me tell you it is great stuff. For those of you who don’t know Holly Black’s work, it’s elegantly written urban fantasy. Black really knows her fey folk: They’re psychologically real, though otherworldly in that genuinely inhuman (and creepy) faerie way. Her human teenagers, on the other hand, are firmly grounded in the here and now. I love the collision of old-school phantasmagoria and gritty realism, which makes her universe a real pleasure to inhabit.

And this book is her best so far, which makes it a must read.

So, while you’re reading, I’m headed off to Wiscon, my favorite sf convention of the year. It’s billed as “the world’s leading feminist sf convention,” which it certainly is. It consists of lots of panels and conversations about this crazy world we live in, and various imaginary worlds we don’t live in, but might one day.

But it’s also summer camp for smart kids–but with adults, and beer. Or another way of putting it: It’s 800 of my favorite writerly and readerly people all packed into one hotel for a long weekend. We do formal things like sit on panels talking about writing and sf, and informal things like cocktail parties (in which we pretty much talk about writing and sf).

Here’s the schedule of my public events:

40 Common Questions for Pros
Saturday, 10:00–11:15 A.M. Room 623
Every pro writer has answered a million questions from interested amateurs. What are the most common questions you’ve fielded? The most uncommon? Share the questions and the answers with those who are interested. M: Lauren Ann McLaughlin, Jack Byrne, Scott Westerfeld, Ysabeau Wilce

This looks like fun. I love talking about the publishing business, and these kinds of panels always have a big audience of people with very wide eyes.

Pretty Magic Butlers of Roanoke
Sunday, 10:00–11:15 P.M. Readings Conference Room 2
Young adult fiction comes in many forms. Some of it involves the Pretty Magic Butlers of Roanoke who will read for your pleasure and offer spectacular cookies and prizes. Gwenda Bond, Justine Larbalestier, Scott Westerfeld, Ysabeau Wilce.

Me reading from PRETTIES with three other fabulous YA authors. Plus cookies and prizes.

The SignOut
Monday, 11:30am-12:45pm in Capitol Room

Come here with stacks of books and I will sign them. They don’t even have to be my books, I’ll sign anything.

(Note that one of my events starts at 10AM! What kind of revenge-is-a-dish-best-served-cold crap is this, anyway! Don’t they know no one goes to bed until 4AM at Wiscon! Okay. Deep calming breath.)

I may be blogging a bit from the con, or perhaps posting embarrassing pictures (see 4AM comment above). But if case I don’t, I’ll leave you all with some fine writing advice . . . later tonight.

Have a nice Memorial Day, and don’t steal my stuff while I’m not at home.

Justine Commits Bloggery

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Justine, my wife, has been my great inspiration in going online. She had a website before me, has introduced me to most of the cool blogs I read, and has been my excellent web mistress for the last year. For this she has all my thanks, and so much love she would need buckets.

And now, at long last, she has her own blog. Which starts by revealing the way-cool cover of her next book, Magic Lessons. (Sequel to the fantabulous Magic or Madness.) Most authors don’t really have too much to do with their covers, but we actually took the pictures for this one:

But here is not the place for that story. Especially since all this online praise from me is as nothing . . . Justine gets plenty of that in the real world. All that matters now is a big hit count, and maybe lots and lots of comments.

So please go say hi to Justine.

Elephants in the Attic

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Buying art should be like falling in love–you shouldn’t set out to do it, it should just happen.

So here’s how it happened:

When we first got back to New York, we learned that an old Aussie friend of Justine’s has a gallery show up in Chelsea. (This friend’s name is, confusingly, Justine Cooper, so I’ll be calling her Justine C.) Now, I’m always trying to get Justine (Justine L., my wife) over to Chelsea to look at art. In my dot-com days, I actually bought some artworks, mostly as a way to avoid buying crashing tech stocks. So this personal connection of Justine’s was my chance to drag her around the galleries and see what was up this summer.

And the best thing that was up was Justine C.

Justine’s C.’s show is called Saved By Science. It consists of work created in her year as artist-in-residence at the Museum of Natural History. Basically, Justine C. got to poke around in the basement storerooms of the museum (where 95% of their collection lives), finding exceedingly cool and weird stuff to take pictures of. She even used a 1910 camera from the museum’s collection of vintage cameras, which is the sort of touch I love.

Experiencing the show is sort of like exploring an old Victorian mansion owned by a mad-keen collector of butterflies, tiger skins, and vitriated frogs:

(Okay, all these pictures are copyright 2004, Justine Cooper. Do not steal them. I asked permission to post them, you should too.)

This stuff is spooky, melancholy, and beautiful. There’s a weird juxtaposition between the pictures’ cool technical brilliance and the 19th-century mustiness of the subject matter. The (sometimes) high-tech storage equipment clashes with the skins, bones, and antlers, like a spacecraft built to take Earth’s heritage somewhere after a nuclear war.

So Justine and I wandered through these virtual cabinets of curiosities, soon splitting up to explore on our lonesomes. Eventually we rambled back into each other in front of a particular picture, which turned out to be both our favorites.

“I want it,” she said.

I did too.

So here it is, our first major art acquisition since getting married. It’s called “Elephants in the Attic.” And yes, those are elephant skulls, all set out in a row in the attic of the museum. The skulls look almost like something from a Giger painting to me, something alien enough to disturb, yet familiar enough that you can still make elephants out of them in your mind’s eye. Their home in the musty attic adds a layer of sadness and a feeling of forgotten history, which is pretty much what these hidden places are.

Click to behold in a larger format.

It’s full size is 39″ by 30″, which is big. If you go big, you’ll see that the skull in the middle has a tag on it. In person, you can actually read the handwriting on it, which says, “C. Akeley.” This refers to Carl Akeley, the museum’s primary African collector from 1909 to 1926, when he died of a fever in Africa. For MoNH and SF geeks, this is super cool. Akely hunted with Teddy Roosevelt, was something of a creepy eugenicist, safaried with a young Alice Bradley (who later wrote several masterpieces of science fiction under the penname James Triptree), and was instrumental in early conservation movements.

After he was buried in Africa, his bones were stolen by poachers and sold to some collector somewhere. Well, turnabout is fair play.

Anyway, every picture tells a story. This one tells many,

To see Justine C.’s work in person, go to:
Kashya Hildebrand Gallery
531 West 25th Street, New York
until June 4, 2005.

For more about Justine Cooper, go to her site.

To see many of the photos online, go here.

Music

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Possibly because I made a big deal out of her excellent new haircut, Gwenda Bond has cast down a challenge upon me. It’s one of those blog-meme chain-letter things, where if I don’t answer five questions, I shall be cast into a fiery hell. Well, then.

1. The person (or persons) who passed the baton to you.

Gwenda Bond, who has a new haircut.

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.

8.5 Gigs, 6.5 days of music, 1991 songs

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought.

Physical media? Phah. My last iTunes purchase was “Hustle Rose,” by Canadian artsy-electronicky band Metric.

4. Songs playing at the moment of writing.

None. But the bell of the Ukranian church down the street is ringing, which apparently has something to do with Sunday.

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs).

According to my iTunes counter, I’ve been playing:
“Hustle Rose” by Metric
“Pocket Knife” by PJ Harvey
“Mariama” by Baaba Maal
“Midnight in a Perfect World” by DJ Shadow
“Don’t Look Back” by Luscious Jackson

6. The five people to whom you will ‘pass the musical baton.’

I refuse. I break the chain. I call upon the fires to consume me.

But I promise not to mention Gwenda’s new haircut again.

Teen Fiction Rules

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Something I get asked a lot is: “Why do you write more for teens than adults?” I’ve tried a few times, but I’m not sure I’ve ever given the truly kick-ass answer that the question deserves.

Fortunately, writer and secret agent Gwenda Bond, who runs one of my favorite lit-blogs, has come to the rescue on this one. On top of being recently and stunningly re-coiffeured, she links today to a great essay by Lauren Mechling, about why it’s better to write teen fiction than the other kinds:

Teen fiction is undergoing a remarkable transformation — the Wakefield twins of Sweet Valley High have had to step aside for new characters that are both believable and cool. The days of nice-enough, blonde-enough, B-plus-enough heroines are over. The new kids on the block have moxie and magical powers and, dare I say it, soul.

It’s not just the world of teen fiction that’s cast a spell on me; it’s also the people I’m writing for. Teenage-hood fascinates me — it makes me giddy and breaks my heart at once. Same goes for teenagers. Teens don’t get their due credit. They’re not unformed creatures, wobbling toward sentience; rather, they’re super-formed, super-sensitive, super-perceptive. They pay attention. They stay on their toes. They get it.

(Click here for the rest.)

All very true. And of course there’s also the other things that make being a YA writer better:
a) More and cooler fan mail (with more “!!!” marks);
b) Staying on the shelves and in print a lot longer;
c) Being hand-sold with great enthusiasm in stores and personally recommended by librarians;
d) And best of all, switching from fantasy to sf to realism without agents predicting career-death (unlike much of the adult world, where readers demand the same book again and again–how sad is that?).

So, has anyone read Mechling’s book: The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber?

So Yesterday in French! (with contest)

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Just heard this morning that the new French publisher Panama has made an offer on So Yesterday.

The French have been very, very good to me. This is the fourth of my books to be published there, after Evolution’s Darling and Risen Empire/Killing of Worlds. I’ve gotten great reviews in mainstream papers like L’Express and Le Monde, and one of my translators won an award for his work on ED. Much more of this, and I will become the Mickey Rourke of science fiction. But you can’t argue with excellent Google-translated reviews like this.

Interestingly, the title of Evolution’s Darling was translated as L’I.A. et son double, or The A.I and Its Twin. This has historical precedents in a whole sub-theme of French titling, most famously The Theatre and Its Twin, by Atonin Artaud.

This whole weird title-transaltion thing reminds me of when I first got to college. I was on the same floor as a woman from Italy. Whenever we talked about American films, she would crack us up with the literal translations of the Italian release titles. All I remember is that Airplane was called “The Craziest Airplane in the World.”

After learning this, my friends and I spent the next four years refering to all movies this way.
Thus:
The Godfather became “The Craziest Family in the World.”
Jaws: “The Craziest Fish in the World.”
Terminator: “The Craziest Cyborg in the World.”
All the President’s Men: “The Craziest Quaker in the World.”
Etc.

So here’s a contest for you all: The first commentor to correctly guess the name of So Yesterday in French will win:
a) A signed copy of the trade paperback edition of So Yesterday, or;
b) If you already own SY, you can have whatever else you want (that’s on my author’s copy shelf).

Only one guess per commentor!

My guess is “The Craziest Cool-Hunter in the World.”

Note: I don’t know what the title will be yet. So the contest will end when the translator and publishers make up their mind.

Bon chance!