There’s a cool interview with Keith Thompson, the artist for Leviathan, over at Tor’s Steampunk Month!

Keith at work on Leviathan

Here’s a quote from the interview about researching the images:

What kind of research did you do for the book, either for artistic inspiration or for historical details?
“It’s a bit dangerous for me when the setup is as interesting as WWI. I actually had to pull back a bit as my research was taking away time from the art at points and it was making me far too pedantic about my details. That might have been fine for a drier and harder type of alternate past story, but I knew that Leviathan was meant to be a rip-roaring type of adventure and that a fun and fantastical angle to the art was extremely important.”

Click here to read the rest of the interview.

We are in Seattle tonight, then I’m headed solo onto Tempe, AZ!
(Sarah’s going to Mexico to write. Lucky person!)

Here’s where I’ll be for the next few days:

Monday October 12, 7:00PM
(with Sarah)
Third Place Books
Location: 17171 Bothell Way NE
Lake Forest Park, WA 981555

Wednesday October 14th, 7:00PM
(just me)
Changing Hands signing
Location: 6428 South McClintock Drive
Tempe, AZ 85283

Click here for all tour details.

Click here to buy Leviathan.

As some of you have commented here or written to me about, there have been virus and malware issues on this blog.

But they are gone now! So I can finally post the cover of Leviathan . . . soon.

Thanks to everyone at MDDHosting for kicking malware ass all weekend.

That is all.

ganked from I Can Haz Cheezbuger?

Behold my new beautiful Italian cover!

I Diari Della Mezzanotte means The Diary of Midnight, I presume, which is quite pretty. And I like me a simple iconic rose for a cover image.

One of you can probably translate the tagline better than Google Translator, which can’t do better that, “When midnight chimes worst, nightmares are advancing in the dark.”

Um, yeah. What the machine said.

It comes in Italy out on Thursday, March 5!

Meanwhile, you should all head over to the new fansite, thesmokelives.com, which is the most populated Uglies fansite I’ve seen in a while. (That’s probably because their sister site is His Golden Eyes, which is Twilight-related.)

Enjoy!

About a year ago, Justine and I were guests of honor at High Voltage Confusion, a yearly convention in Detroit. As we blogged here and here, we had an incredible time and met lots of lovely people.

Our introduction to the local folks was via a long interview with blogmeister John Scalzi, best known for his crankiness at the Whatever. He asked us the usual stuff about ourselves and our work, but then we branched into a far-ranging discussion of YA. I listened to the interview recently, and it was one of those, “Huh, I was pretty smart that day” things.

It really sums up my thinking about our field, and Justine is also on song. So if you’ve got a spare, um, close to an hour(!) forty-five minutes, take a listen.

After you click here, you have to scroll down to “Teh Awesome Duo—Revealed!”

And if listening to me and Justine pontificate for that long is too much, there’s always . . . hoverboards!

So I’m happily perusing this article about Iceberg, a new iPhone novel-reading application, and what do I see . . .

That’s right, the little graphic showing how the app works uses page 12 of Specials as the example!

But shouldn’t they have, like, War and Peace or whatever?

Pteropus, also known as the flying fox, is one of my favorite inhabitants of Sydney. The “foxes” are really fruit bats, with meter-wide wingspans and a taste for figs and mosquitos. They don’t echo-locate like smaller bats, but they do have a distinctive chirp, like a tongue click in some alien language. Pteropus also has a pleasant musky smell, like a faraway skunk in those moments before you realize what you’re smelling.

For the next couple of weeks, we’re staying within view of the Royal Botanical Gardens, which swarms every evening with foxes heading out to the suburbs. Dusk is prime mosquito hunting time, of course.

Here’s the view from our balcony, with the Opera House peeking out from the trees. In the top right, the first bat of the evening has just taken wing.

After many tries, I managed to catch one whizzing just overhead . . .

In close-up, you can see the mammalian skeletal structure—the tiny feet and the vestigial fingers sticking out from the wings.

And remember, this thing’s big. Three feet across! Walking at night, we occasionally startle one out of a low tree, and it’s like a leather kite coming to life just over your head.

Anyway, that’s what I’m staring out at these days. Book 1 of Leviathan is in copy-editing, and the research for Book 2 is in full swing . . .

The other day I went into the offices of Simon & Schuster to shoot some video about Leviathan, and they cleverly had me doing double duty on this pre-Xmas video. It is slavishly devoted to the notion that Books Make Good Gifts (aka Publishing Is Recession Proof, Right? RIGHT?), but still pretty cool.

The amazing thing is the company I’m keeping. Just try to imagine the after-shoot party with me, Bill O’Reilly, Maya Angelou, and Dan Brown all hanging out. The mind boggles.

Click for the actual video.

By the way, my 50s college professor shirt is by D.L. Cerny, my new fave place for dapper. Because shirts make great gifts!