Some Halloween-related posts:

1) A lot of people have written me about costumes lately, asking questions like, “What do Specials wear?” “How do you do flash tattoos?” and “Would Dess wear this?”

But you guys would know better than me. A lot of you have done excellent face paint jobs, as shown here. Please use this comment space to share your acquired knowledge and new ideas for Westerfeldian costumes.

The power of psycho-kitty commands you!

2) Vampire fans may be interested in this: A teacher in North Carolina is planning to use Peeps (and two other sf books) in her biology class, if she can round up enough money to buy copies. Click here to read more about the project, and donate if you can.

3) I have been roped into a Scare-a-thon! Lauren Myracle, author of the TTYL series and the amazing new Bliss, has challenged a passel of YA authors to face their fears. So between now and October 31, M.T. Anderson, Holly Black, Libba Bray, Meg Cabot, Cassandra Clare, Melissa De La Cruz, John Green, Shannon Hale, Maureen Johnson, Stephenie Meyer, Kirsten Miller, Sarah Mlynowski and I will all be doing something that we’re horribly afraid of.

Will we survive?

Click here to read the challenge. I’ll be revealing my greatest fear on this blog. Be warned!

4) Okay, this is not Halloween-related, but if you live in or near Toronto drop, by Bakka Phoenix Books at 697 Queen Street West. Not only are they a great sf bookshop, but Justine and I just signed lots of stock for them. Go buy it!

Psycho-kitty photo ganked from io9.

1) Thanks to everyone who came to the Toronto event, especially those who made special T-shirts:

Kelly, whose shirt features one tridecalogism each for Extras (extraordinary), So Yesterday (consumeristic), Midnighters (numerological), Uglies (beautifulness), and Peeps (zombification)!

And Katie, whose shirt speaks for itself. (Though she confided to me that she actually had done her homework before coming.)

Justine was voice-missing from too much touring, and let me do the talking. But I had lots of great, and tricky, questions. Thanks again!

2) If you’ve been following YA for Obama, you know about the Action Hero prizes. Well, tomorrow’s prize is a signed copy of Bogus to Bubbly. Go here to find out how to win.

3) Watch this space carefully, because in a couple of days you will all have the chance to participate in a PhD thesis about online fandom. Because you must be studied! (Dissection optional.)

One of my favorite chapters to write in Bogus to Bubbly was the one about nanotechnology. It was great to finally hand over the spotlight to those wondrous tiny robots that melted the Armory, “cured” Zane’s brain, and built half of Aya’s city.

But since I handed in B to B a few months ago, there have already been some cool new developments in the world of nanos. Here’s a three-legged, crab-walking microbot developed in South Korea. It’s made of a polymer (like plastic), but it’s powered by rat heart tissue. (Eww. But you can’t beat evolution for power sources, I guess.)

Watch it go:

You can really see the heart tissue dynamics in the way it moves.

Pros: It managed to walk for more than a week on one charge of rat heart.

Cons: It only went 50 meters in that week, giving it an average speed of 0.0002 MPH. But if your nanobot was walking around inside something really tiny like, say, a brain cell, this would be plenty fast.

Note that this robot isn’t proper nanotech, because it’s more than a millimeter across. (Your fingernail is about a millimeter thick.) Proper nanobots will be between 1 and 100 nanometers across, at least a thousand times smaller.

But from big things, little things grow.

For more about nanos, you can buy Bogus at at your friendly neighborhood indie bookstore, or at Powell’s, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

And don’t forget that Justine and I will be in Toronto, Ontario Monday night:

Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld
Indigo Bookstore
Toronto, Ontario
Monday, October 27
7:00pm – 8:00pm
Yorkdale Mall
3401 Dufferin Street

Story ganked from io9.

Bogus to Bubbly: An Insider’s Guide to the World of Uglies is out today!

Bogus to Bubbly is somewhere between a giant FAQ and a vast blog post. In it I try to answer every single one of the most common questions that I’ve been asked by fans over the years. It includes the following sections:

An illustrated hoverboard manual!
Notes on the science of beauty, mag-levs, and nanos
A History of Tally’s world, starting with the Rusty Crash
Maps of Tally’s city and her continent
Illustrations of various gadgets from the books
A complete series glossary, plus an essay on slang generation
Mini-histories of all the cliques
Character names and how I came up with them
Where I got the big idea for the series

You can buy Bogus online at Amazon, Powell’s, or Barnes and Noble. Or at bricks and mortar bookstores everywhere!

I hope you enjoy it, especially because it’s dedicated to a whole bunch of you who read this blog.

Also, thanks to all of you who voted for Extras in the ALA’s Teens’ Top Ten for 2008. I’m at #8 on the list, with some pretty impressive company.

And finally, we hope we see you in Toronto:

Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld
Indigo Bookstore
Toronto, Ontario
Monday, October 27
7:00pm – 8:00pm
Yorkdale Mall
3401 Dufferin Street

Bogus to Bubbly: An Insider’s Guide to the World of Uglies will arrive in stores two days from now! That’s Tuesday, October 21.

The guide starts with a Hoverboard Manual from Tally’s era, which gives you tips on riding, repairing, and caring for your very on hoverboard. The manual and other sections of Bogus were illustrated by Craig Phillips, an Australian cartoonist.

Here’s a sneak preview of one bit of manual art:

And here as an added, blog-only bonus, is the rough sketch Craig sent me beforehand:

Actually, he pretty much nailed it the first time. But still, BONUS MATERIAL!

Here’s his website, if you want to look at other stuff he’s done.

One more piece of news: Justine and I will be appearing in Canada next Monday! I’ll be promoting Bogus and she’ll be talking about her new book, How to Ditch Your Fairy.

Indigo Bookstore
Toronto, Ontario
Monday, October 27
7:00pm – 8:00pm
Yorkdale Mall
3401 Dufferin Street

Hope to see some of you there!

You guys may remember that last year I was a judge for the National Book Awards. Sherman Alexie’s excellent Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian won, and you should still check it out, and the rest of that year’s nominees too.

But we have a new crop for 2008, just announced this morning, and here they are:

Of these, I’ve only read The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks, which is totally and completely amazing. By E. Lockhart, it’s about a girl at a posh boarding school who infiltrates a secret boy’s-only club, wreaking havoc on their brains. You guys may see similarities between Frankie and the chaos-making heroes of So Yesterday. But it’s less about marketing and advertising, and more about boys vs. girls and rich vs. not-rich.

Emily (which is what the “E.” stands for) also wrote two other books I loved, Fly on the Wall and Dramarama. if you’ve ever been to a summer drama camp, you simply have to read that last one.

I highly recommend Disreputable History, and I’m sure all the other books on the list are awesome too. Our pal Holly Black was among the judges, as was Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), so you know those were some interesting conversations.

Anyway, here’s what to look for in your friendly neighborhood bookstore or library:

Hey, everyone. This whole week, Justine and I will be in Ohio and Missouri. She’s promoting her new book, How to Ditch Your Fairy.

Here are the dates:

Monday, 6 October 2008, 7:00PM
Joseph-Beth Bookstore
2692 Madison Road
Cincinnati, OH

Tuesday, 7 October 2008, 4:15-5:00PM
Scheduled stock signing
Fundamentals
25 W Winter Street
Delaware, OH

6:00-7:30PM
Cover to Cover
3560 North High Street
Columbus, OH

Wednesday, 8 October 2008, 7:00PM
Books & Co at The Greene
4453 Walnut Street
Dayton, OH

Thursday, 9 October 2008, 7:00PM
Kansas City Library
4801 Main Street
Kansas City, MO

Also, there’s a contest on Justine’s blog, where you can win a signed copy of How to Ditch Your Fairy. And for the grand prize, a gift certificate to Forever 21, which comes with your own personal shopping fairy.

I’m literally blogging from the lobby right now. The hotel has forced us to check out (we’re flying to Detroit tonight) and we haven’t been picked up for the appearance at Pooh’s Corner in Grand Rapids yet.

So I’m sitting here on a couch next to the gift shop and remembering that the wonderful German publisher of Peeps, Kosmos, have been sponsoring fan-art comics contests lately.

I don’t have all the info about these contests, but down below you can see a few of the wonderful efforts they’ve inspired. They prove that manga and western-style comics are going strong in Germany.

Click any of these images to make them bigger.

This one’s from Sandra Chemnitz. Great use of layout and frames.

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And here’s one from Rita Folduari, who made her own paper for the comic! There’s a cool mixed-media thing going on, using both pen and watercolors.

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And this one from Daria Jurek, which looks somehow very German to me:

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All of them very awesome, as are many of the others submitted. Once I figure out where these contests are being held, I’ll let you know. (My German is shaky.) I think more might be coming in.

Oh, and here’s the cover of the Kosmos version. A special non-existent prize for the first commenter to translate the tag line. (It’s from the book, and I figured it out on sight.)

And click here for the scoop about Justine’s appearances.

Justine and I are back on the road, where she’s promoting her new book, How to Ditch Your Fairy.

Here’s where you can see her tomorrow and the next day:

Wednesday, 1 October 2008, 4:00PM
Pooh’s Corner
Breton Village
1886 1/2 Breton Rd. S.E.
Grand Rapids, MI

Thursday, 2 October 2008, 7:00PM
With Kathe Koja and Michael Spradlin
Oak Park Public Library
14200 Oak Park Boulevard
Phone: (248) 691-7483
Oak Park, MI

Coming very soon: The German publisher of Peeps has been running a fan comics contest, and the results are amazing! I was going to post them today, but we’ve been traveling. Tomorrow or the next day, depending on how the hotel internets stack up.

And for those of you who are interested in yet more political dialog, there’s another post by me over on YA for Obama, in which I discuss Morgan Freeman in greater detail.

There’s a general conversation floating around the internets about the relationship between science fiction and young adult fiction. I get this question a lot, as a writer of both adult sf and YA books. And recently I was interviewed for this article in Baltimore City Paper.

So why are sf and YA so compatible? Well, there’s an old joke that goes, “The golden age of science fiction is . . . fourteen.”

In other words, the time when you’re most likely to think about the rules being different, or everything we know collapsing, or how different the future will really be is . . . when you’re fourteen. That’s because most teenagers haven’t been brain-washed into thinking that the assumptions and customs of our little corner of space and time are hardware—fixed, immutable, natural.

To young people, the rules are more like software: hackable, tweakable, tossable. Updateable, rewritable, rethinkable.

And maybe even fixable. Because whatever the Secretary of the Treasury does to unmelt our economy over the next few weeks, you guys are going to have to do the real fixing.

You’re going to spend your entire adult lives in the future, after all. So it’s mostly your job to think about it, worry about it, and read about it. That’s what makes it so much fun to write for you guys.

Anyway, check out the article, and let me know what you think.

Special Note to Folks in Philly! Tonight Justine will be talking about How to Ditch Your Fairy at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore:

Justine Larbalestier
Wednesday, 24 September, 7:00PM
Big Blue Marble Bookstore
551 Carpenter Lane
Philadelphia, PA