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New View

Posted on by scott

Sorry it’s been so long between posts. But we’re in a new apartment with no internet (argh!). At least we’ve got a phone now.

NEWS FLASH: Our new apartment in Sydney rocks! It’s big and bright and in a really cool neighborhood.

Here’s the view from where I’ve been writing The Last Days, the sequel to Peeps:

That’s downtown Sydney, the Centrepoint Tower is the spaceship-looking thing, and of course that’s a great big exhaust fan. (It’s kind of industrial around these parts.) We can walk to the Sydney Opera House in about 40 minutes, which is how all distances in Australia are measured, by law.

The whole neighborhood is full of cool sights and sounds, and I can’t wait to start exploring.

Meanwhile, thanks for all your great guesses (and general hilarity) in the mighty movie thread. As soon as we get solid internet in house, I’ll be posting the name of the book!

See you then.

SLJ Picks

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Well, the bad news is that I can’t announce contest winners yet. Not because I don’t want to, and not that there are no winners, but because the producers would prefer I wait until the deal is all signed, sealed, and delivered. Sorry for being naive, but I didn’t think it would take this long.

But I will say that many of you have made excellent suggestions for casting, including Emily Browning, who I was already thinking about (but for what part? I can’t say). And one of you has actually got the producers right, but not the book. None the less, that person will win a great big signed author’s copy of whatever you want. (But, frustratingly, I can’t tell you guys who this lucky winner is yet.)

In the meantime, I can announce that Uglies and Peeps have been been chosen as School Library Journal best books of 2005. I’m very pleased about that, and would like to thank SLJ for all the support they’ve given me over the last two years.

I’m in Melbourne right now talking to school librarians, and next week we move into the new apartment, so I won’t be posting as much. But hopefully by the time we get internet access sorted out at the new place, I can share all the great news with you.

In the meantime, keep making casting suggestions. I can tell you that the producers are reading this blog . . .

Publishing Schedule/Casting Contest (Updated)

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A quick post to answer many of your questions in posts and via email (and a contest).

Midnighters comes out March 1, 2006.

Uglies comes out May something, 2006.

The sequel to Peeps comes out late August in 2006.

The Midnighters TV show is an option the WB owns. So far, it’s in a holding pattern for a possible Fall 2006 pilot.

The movie deal of Book X is still with attorneys. I will let you know once that’s all over.

And now for the contest, which has two options. You can:

Cast the Movie
If you want to guess about the movie deal, feel free to use this comment thread to do so. But you can’t just guess which book is going to be (maybe) made into a movie. You also have to cast at least one part!

To win:
a) You must get the title of the book right.
b) Your casting choice must amuse or edify me.

And you can also:

Guess the Producer

To win:
a) You must get the title of the book right.
b) You must also name a title of a previous movie produced by the person who is buying the rights to make a movie of my book.

Make only one guess for each game, please. Do not enter if I told you already (duh).

Winners both get: Something that you don’t already own from my author’s copies bookshelf, signed to them by me.

(And if it turns out that someone actually gets a casting choice right, I will give them something really cool.)

Peeps in Australia!

Posted on by scott

Doesn’t this look like a movie poster?

But no, this lovely image isn’t the poster for a Peeps movie. (There is no such movie!) It’s the cover for the Australian edition of Peeps.

And, as you can see, it totally rocks! Hats off to the Penguin Australia designers.

I’m posting the cover in honor of the fact that Justine and I are leaving for Oz in just four days. I can’t wait to get back to Sydney and summer, to awesome Thai food and cricket and the metric system.

To all my Aussie friends: See you there soon.

(And to the rest of you, more on the real movie deal soon. Hah!)

Midnighters UK

Posted on by scott

I am currently suffering from Martian Death Plague, a hideous form of flu that has kept Justine and I home from the World Fantasy Convention. Being sick blows, but at least I have a few things to post about.

The first is this cover for the UK/Australia version of Midnighters:

As you can see, it’s the moody image from the back of the US cover, which I’ve always liked. Of course, Garth’s quote is prominent, because he is huge in the UK and Australia. The coolest thing is that the spines of all three books will form a clock face when you put them on the shelf together. (I love that kind of thing.)

The trilogy is coming out one-two-three next year, one book each in April, August, and November. (At least I won’t be getting tons of emails begging me to write faster.) For you UK readers, the publisher is Atom. I’ll post the other covers as they appear.

In other news, watch this space for three exciting announcements coming soon:
1. A fab new Peeps cover for the Aussie edition.
2. A first glimpse of the Specials cover.
3. A movie deal, which I can’t tell you about yet. But soon!

Now I’m going back to being sick. Take your vitamins.

Face Full of Monster

Posted on by scott

When I was 11, my cousin and I had our own monster magazine. It was called Big M, because we didn’t care so much about tiny human-sized monsters. We were all about Japanese bigness, and Godzilla was on our first cover. This was before personal computers (so . . . very . . . old) and so the articles were handwritten, the photos snipped from other magazines. Mind you, we weren’t total technical retards. For example, after the brown paper fiasco of issue 1, we realized that white paper makes for better photocopies (or “better Xeroxes,” as we said in those days).

We took out an ad in issue ten or so of Famous Monsters to announce our existence, and soon had three subscribers! We dutifully put together four issues (we were a quarterly before quarterlies were cool) but then grew up enough to want to be rock stars instead of magazine editors.

I don’t have any remaining copies of Big M–my cousin does, I think–but this morning’s mail brought in a total flashback in the form of a new zine called Big Ole Face Full of Monster.

BOFFM is an old-school zine. None of this “color” of which you people of the future speak, and the 8.5″ x 11″ format brings the verb “xerox” to mind. Although it contains real typesetting, Big Ole also has the manic energy of Big M, including Godzilla on the first cover. (A trait they both share with Famous Monsters, by the way.)

Issue one of BOFFM mostly focuses on local horror-movie latenight hosts. It includes a potted history of the Vampira and the death of local television, and interviews with current horror hosts Doktor Goulfinger on Berkeley Community B, Mr. Lobo of UATV fame, and Will “The Thrill” Viharo in San Francisco. Issue one also has reviews of DVDs, music, art, and books, including a quite positive write-up of Peeps, which is how I got sent BOFFM in the first place.

Actually, the trippiest part was reading the review for the DVD of Race with the Devil, which my cousin and I saw in an otherwise deserted cinema in Kaufman, Texas in 1975. (SPOILER ALERT: Peter Fonda is pursued by Satanists, as one might expect.)

It made me happy.

To submit or subsribe to BOFFM, I guess you should go here.

Humans catch bug that makes them cannibals

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“Humans catch bug that makes them cannibals” is the awesome headline for the San Francisco Chronicle‘s review of Peeps. I love you, anonymous headline writer, because I would so read that story.

If only they’d used an exclamation point! The blurb:

Peeps provides plenty of action, suspense and smart-alecky dialogue. Westerfeld . . . does a fine job of using some of biology’s grossest case studies to show how parasites mess with their hosts in fascinating ways. His new book is a standout tale of horror, well worth the attention of older readers, too.

Writing update: The sequel to Peeps is now called The Last Days. It has 15,000 words so far. One quarter done!

Mexico update: We watched the pamplonada here in San Miguel. It’s half running-of-the-bulls and half bullfight. No bulls are killed, although some looked really annoyed. It’s not the same as the pamplona in Spain, mind you.

It’s amateur bull-baiting, actually. Bulls are let out in the town square, and self-appointed heroes hang out and piss them off. There’s something for everyone. For those who believe in bravery, it probably takes some guts to have a bull rush you. For people who find animal-taunting a bit lame, well, we get to watch many of the taunters thrown into the air repeatedly.

But for my TV-addled brain, it was just another reality show, one where people get gored instead of voted out. It called up the same base emotions, and had me screaming things like, “Get rid of that chubby guy with the mullet!” except to a bull instead of a panel of celebrity judges.

They let out the eight bulls out one at a time, but all eight are out together by the end. This rewards “situational awareness” more than reflexes. (My mullet guy got caught from behind while taunting the wrong bull. Sucker.) My favorite was the ginger bull, who went full speed down the street taking out buttloads of gawkers instead of spinning in a circle. Oh, and I liked the one who kicked that guy who was pulling his tail. Nice.

No one died, okay?

See Justine’s blog for more about this affair.

So Yesterday in Paperback

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Still in Mexico, with 8,400 words of the sequel to Peeps already written. To those of you who think in pages instead of words, that’s about 35. More than 10% of a book!

Watch here for the title, which I suspect I will know soon . . .

Forgot to mention that So Yesterday (again, just short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Award) just came out in paperback. It can now be acquired for $7.99 in bookstores or on Amazon.

And now, taken from our very own balcony, the envy-provoking sunset photo of the day:

Buy or Die

Posted on by scott

Okay, the flogging is almost over. Peeps comes out today.

Go buy it, or the small child visits you!


Photo: John Scalzi. Model: Athena, of the Scalzi Agency.

And thanks to everyone working to make Peeps Week a success:
Gwenda
Cory
Jonathan
Margo
Barry
Scalzi
Shane
Lauren M.
Diana (whom I don’t even know)
Lauren C.
James

And of course extra thanks to my one, my only, my always . . . Justine.

Read the reviews.

Buy it here.

Single White Parasite . . .

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Somewhere in an alternate universe this Thursday, this book is coming out:

Here’s how it all began . . . The first title for Peeps was Carrier. This fit better with the original concept for the book, which focused on a character who, like Typhoid Mary, carried the disease of vampirism without actually having the “symptoms.” As that concept morphed into something else, I realized that “Carrier” wasn’t such a great title after all.

The second title was The V-Word, which had a vaguely chick-lit feel to it. Then the title above, Single White Parasite. My editor took me quietly aside to suggest a re-think.

In my last post, I mentioned how cover limbo is like band-name limbo. If you’ve ever been in a band, you’ll remember that moment when you’ve been trying to pick a name forever, so everyone sits around saying stuff like, “Why don’t we call ourselves The Chairs. Wouldn’t it be cool? ‘Cause we’re all sitting on chairs right now!”

Well, novel-title limbo is even worse. Writers must realize that if those few words in their title suck, there’s some sizeable number of people who won’t bother to read the other 70,000. And that means you starve and die.

Here are a few examples of my other books that went into title limbo:

Evolution’s Darling was called Economies of Measure forever. Although I still think that’s a classy title, my publisher took me aside and said, “Sounds like a textbook.” There were hundreds of intermediate stops before I came up with “Evolution’s Darling.” In the end, I actually added a paragraph in which the term “Evolution’s Darling” came up, just so I could use it as the title.

Risen Empire was originally called Succession, but Tor didn’t like that because they’d just had another book with a similiar title. But I got to keep “Succession” as the series title.

But back to the book that comes out this Thursday. Finally I realized that my word for vampires, “parasite positives,” was a perfect title. And Peeps was born. And I’m very happy with it.

Of course, in the alternate-alternate universe, I wound up with this title and cover combination:

Ewww.