One of the cool things I found out on the Leviathan tour was that the libraries of Howard County in Maryland are doing a little experiment called Pass the Book.

Here’s how Pass the Book works:

Step One: Obtain six hundred copies of Midnighters.

Step Two: Tag each one with its own unique tracking number.

Step Three: Release them into the wild!

Step Four: Let people read the books, register them online, and pass them on as they see fit.

Step Five: Monitor them using the internets!

That’s right, six hundred copies of Midnighters: The Secret Hour are being given away free and are traveling across the country right now. They look like regular copies, except for this sticker:

There’s also a page inside with detailed instructions on how to register the book online. To check out where the registered copies are right now, just click here.

I was given one of these books at my appearance in Baltimore. To be precise, it was Midnighters number 130, a multiple of 13! It flew with me to Los Angeles that very night, where I gave it to a bookseller. So hopefully it will appear on the map soon.

If you find number 130, let me know! There are also three other copies that I autographed, all of which are multiples of thirteen.

Click here to read more about Pass the Book.

Touring Update: Justine will be in Philly tomorrow, Thursday, to talk about her new book Liar. I’ll probably come along to say hi, so maybe see you there.

Thursday, 29 October, 7:00 pm
Justine Larbalestier
Big Blue Marble Books
551 Carpenter Ln
.
Philadelphia, PA

Click here for the rest of Justine’s appearances. And here for my remaining tour details, including Canada. And click here to buy my new book, Leviathan!

In other news, it’s time for a special Halloween Walker Wednesday!

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?