Justine and I went to the Bronx Zoo yesterday. As you may know, Leviathan has tons of animals in it, so I was up for some face-to-face contact. This kind of research is important, because reading about an animal doesn’t tell you how it moves, how it smells, or how it reacts to a sudden shrieking noise that I call “El Banshee.” It just ain’t the same.
We were shown around by an old friend of mine, a wildlife conservator who has an office at the zoo, but usually works in places like Afghanistan, Iran, and Tibet. He and his wife once drove a baby snow leopard across Pakistan, which sounds exciting, because, like, the Taliban is there. He does a lot of dangerous stuff like that. When my friend and I worked together in publishing, the whole office voted him “Most Likely to Die in a Foreign Land.”
But he’s survived long enough for us to get an excellent tour of the zoo.
There were lemurs, who are always totally chill.
And we got to watch a “tiger enrichment session” from really close up.
The tiger is doing tricks because it wants a “bloodsicle.” Here’s what I think: if anything at your job wants a “bloodsicle,” your job is more dangerous than mine.
We also wanted to see meerkats, but sadly there are none left at the zoo. So (as twittered yesterday) my pal took us back to his office where he has a meerkat skull.
No, I don’t think this skull from a meerkat that used to be at the zoo. My friend has always owned stuff like meerkat skulls. It is from him that I learned the term “maggoting room.” I use it often.
As we were leaving, I realized it had been more than a decade since I’d been up to the Bronx Zoo, and years since I’d been to any zoo at all, and that sucks. You can’t expect to understand your own planet if you don’t occasionally check out the other 99.9% of species that live here. And you can’t really be much of a writer if you don’t understand your planet.
There’s only so much that can happen in coffee shops. Eventually you should get your characters out of talking about lattes and into the land of bloodiscles.
So as you guys get older and more stuck in your ways like me, try to remember these deceptively simple words:
Next Tuesday, March 31, I’ll be appearing with the inestimable Cassandra Clare in Houston, TX. Cassie, of course, is the author of City of Bones, City of Ashes, and the just released finale of the series, City of Glass.
Here’s the deets:
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
6:30PM Murder by the Book
2352 Bissonnet Street, Houston, TX 77005
(713) 524-8597
See you there.
And all of you Texas librarians, Justine and I will be seeing you at TLA! Prepare yourselves for bibliographical mayhem!
Update: Because some of you have asked, Justine will not be appearing with me at Murder by the Book. She will be in Houston for TLA, though.
I haven’t done a writing advice post for a while, so here’s one for you.
Rambut = Indonesian for “hair” Rambutan = a hairy fruit, common in Southeast Asia
Observe:
These hairy eyeballs are one of the fruits that Justine and I like to gorge on while we’re here in Sydney, because you simply can’t find them in New York. (Or if by some chance you do, they’re both absurdly expensive and half rotten.)
How to describe the taste? Well, the only similar fruit available in the US is the lychee, but I never had fresh lychee until I came to Australia, and the canned ones suck. So the rambutan really is a new taste—less acid than citrus, sharper than melon, darker than pineapple.
Or maybe I shouldn’t use comparisons. Rambutans have their own flavor, so I should describe them in their own terms. And that means really tasting them, then thinking hard, then wondering for a while how words can even capture sensual experience. In other words, describing the hairy eyeball means really being a writer.
(Which also means maybe failing at being a writer.)
These little philosophical diversions are something I love about travel: Going new places reminds you how much bigger the world is than you thought. For every kind of fruit you’ve tried in your life, there are a dozen species you’ve never heard of. No, make that a hundred—there are thirty species of pears, for heaven’s sake.
And it’s not just food. For every kind of social celebration you can name, some culture somewhere has ten more that don’t fall into any of your familiar categories. For every kind of person you’ve met, there are probably dozens of other personality types out there, unknown and unexpected, walking around experiencing entirely different aspirations and fears than the ones you know so well. Even the human emotions we think of as universal and primal sometimes come in very different flavors.
“But all people love their children!” I can hear someone protesting in a whiny voice. Yeah, maybe, but talk about different flavors. In various times and places, people have loved their kids by crippling them, beating them to death, or selling them.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that you need a time machine or even a jet plane to experience difference. I’ll bet that some very different folks live just on the other side of your town, and for whatever reason (social, historical, economic, accidental) you’ve never met them.
Writers need to remember that. I mean, everyone needs to realize that their little sandbox is not the whole world (or a scale model of it, or in any way representative of it). But it’s especially important for writers to keep hitting ourselves over the head with reminders of this simple fact: The world is SO much bigger and humanity so much gnarlier and more complicated than we assume it to be.
And if we forget that, we wind up splicing ourselves and the few people we know best (in my case, college-educated white folks who geek out on sciencey/numbery stuff and music) into every scenario on the planet. We wind up turning this gigantic world into a small one, and wind up writing small books for small readers.
In other words, we become cowards.
(And for us science fiction writers it’s so much worse, because we’re flogging these same, lame photocopies in the distant future and across the universe. Our bigger canvas means a epically vaster Fail.)
So this is my writing advice for today: When the hairy eyeballs look your way, look back. Taste them, swallow them, deal with their weirdness. Then tell stories about them.
Otherwise you’ll suck, both at writing and at life.
In case you haven’t been following the zombie-versus-unicorn thread on the internets, it has come to a mighty climax with the announcement of:
The Zombie Versus Unicorn Anthology! A collection of zombie and unicorn short stories to settle the issue for good, co-edited by Justine Larbalestier (aka, myJustine) and the fabulous Holly Black.
Justine is, of course, the head of Team Zombie, and Holly is the head of Team Unicorn.
How to Ditch Your Fairy is set in a world where everyone has their own personal fairy. These creatures are invisible, but they have a huge effect on your life. Each one has its own special power, so you could have, say, a “good-hair fairy” and your hair would always look amazing, styled by unseen winds. Or a loose-change-finding fairy, and you’d always find a quarter when you needed one.
The protag of the book, Charlie, has a problem, though. Her best friend, Rochelle, has a clothes-shopping fairy, so whenever Rochelle goes into a store, she finds the perfect dress . . . and it’s on sale! Even more annoyingly, Charlie’s worst enemy has an every-boy-will-like-you fairy—and that includes the boy that Charlie likes.
Charlie herself has something much more lame: a parking fairy. Every car she’s in gets a parking space right next to where it’s going. Now, you’d think this would be handy. But it means that since she was a baby, Charlie has been borrowed by friends and family and distant relatives to go to concerts and sporting events and museums and court appearances that she doesn’t want to go to, just because they’ll get a parking place.
By now, she totally hates cars. So the book is about Charlie trying to ditch her fairy, and swap it for a new one. As you can probably tell, it’s a comedy with lots of thrills and spills.
In honor of the release, Justine will be touring for the next few months. Next week, she’ll be in northern California, then doing a couple of dates near home. In October she’ll be in Ohio and Michigan, and in Texas for November. (I’ll be traveling with her some of the time, and maybe popping in to say “hi” in a few places, but this is her tour, not mine. I will be officially appearing at Book People in Austin, though, and I am looking forward to seeing a few of you.)
Sorry for being so long between posts. There’s a good reason, as Justine explains here, we’ve been hiding out at an undisclosed location to finish our next books. In fact, the only reason I’m taking a break is because Leviathan just crossed the 75K word mark!
Pause for woot.
And no sooner do I turn to the internets for relaxation, and what do I see on BoingBoing but manga contact lenses! They’re so totally like the manga heads in Extras that I had to interrupt my fierce writing schedule to show you:
Ahhh!
Okay, my manga heads probably aren’t that scary. But still, I’m glad someone’s trying already. And yes, these are a real product:
Hey, all. Justine and I are fresh off the boat back from Europe. Our Atlantic crossing was wild and wonderful (force 11 winds! tuxedo wearing!), but I’m so far behind blogging-wise that tales of the sea will have to wait.
There are Zeppelin rides to blog, after all. And before I can get to that, a bunch of awesome new books are coming out that simply must be mentioned. The first of these hit the shelves yesterday, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother . . .
As you can see from the blurb above, I called this book a “rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion.” It’s set about five minutes in the future, and follows a group of computer-savvy teens taking on Homeland Security after it seriously steps on their toes. (It’s Little Brother versus Big Brother, you see.)
But the maybe best way to describe it to you guys is this: It’s the closest thing imaginable to a rebellion like Uglies, if such a thing happened right now. That is, young people with the right combination of technology and courage and sheer cussedness pushing back against the Authorities-That-Be. And you know what? That’s a pretty cool thing to be written at this point in our nation’s history.
Plus, you’ll learn zillions of anti-surveillance tricks for use at home and school.
For more, Cory and John Scalzi (who has another cool YA novel coming in August), discuss their books here:
So here is my long-delayed post on the Leviathan-researching Zeppelin ride.
To ride a Zeppelin, one must travel to Friedrichshafen, Germany. That’s the very town where Count Ferdinand Zeppelin set up shop about 100 years ago, having decided to blow his retirement fund on building giant airships full of hydrogen. (Coincidentally, this is what I plan to do with my retirement fund.) As you saw from two posts ago, this town is Zeppelin-themed to the max. The museum there is amazing, and I took loads of photos for the artist I’m working with on Leviathan, but let’s skip that and go straight to the Zeppelin ride.
The day started with a wake-up call from Zeppelin HQ. The weather was crappy, so they’d canceled our flight (heart stops in chest) but were putting us on an earlier one (heart restarts).
We only had a few hours to have breakfast and attack the Zeppelin Museum before showing up at the airfield.
Of course, the moment our taxi came within sight of the hangar, I started geeking out, and thus many photos were taken:
This hangar is big, by the way. The Zeppelin itself is 75 meters (240 feet) long. That’s less than a third of old-school Zeps like the Hindenburg or Graf Zeppelin, but the hangar is still an impressive sight.
As we drew nearer, every little sign made me happy:
Zeppelin Fluge! I’m about to fluge in a frickin’ Zeppelin!
The place where you wait for your flight is a sort of tent-like temp building with a cafe inside:
It was far superior to the average airport lounge, I assure you. For one thing, the outside cafe had a view of the giant doors of the Zeppelin hangar:
Perhaps I will move ahead, skipping past the next roughly twelve hundred photos to the part where we see the actual ZEPPELIN.
But first: they gave us a quick wave of a metal-detecting wand for regulations’ sake. (You know, in case one of us were to hijack the Zeppelin with, say, our fingernail clippers and fly it—oh, so slowly—into a crowd of innocent people where its deadly load of the dreaded element helium would make them all talk funny . . . um, you get the idea.) Then we had a quick run-down on safety procedures; as the only English speakers, Justine and I had a private session.
Finally, we were taken out onto the airfield to await the return of the airship from its previous flight . . .
Wait! Look!
Yes, that’s it. Circling around to land straight into the wind. (And no, those cranes are not Zeppelin-related. They just made a nice composition.)
In this next shot you can see how small the gondola is compared to the rest of the ship. That’s the thing about Zeppelins: it takes lots of helium, or hydrogen, to lift one person. So, yes, those kids’ books in which handfuls of toy balloons lift people off their feet? Damnable lies!
This 75-meter Zep carries only 12 people—plus the flight gear, engines, and fuel, of course.
As it comes in quite close, check out the tilt rotors on the side. Those two engines (and two more at the rear) can angle in whatever direction the pilot wants.
Here, as you can see, they’re tilted up to slow the airship’s descent:
Then the airship “landed,” sort of. Being aerostatic (the same density as the air around it) a Zeppelin never really settles on the ground. It just bounces to a stop on its single wheel, balancing there and pirouetting with the wind like some graceful, ballet-loving whale.
To keep it steady, one guy holds a rope hanging from its front end.
(Yes, that’s a really short movie. But I’m in a hotel room where the internets are slow.)
At this point, they asked me to please put my camera away and maybe pay attention, because we were about to board. Switching out passengers is a bit tricky, because you have to keep the airship aerostatic. So the de-Zepping passengers can’t just walk off all at once. For every two people who get off, two have to get on, keeping the weight the same throughout the procedure.
So no more pictures for, like, sixty seconds, until we were aboard.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside:
I’m in the last row, so that’s about everyone: ten passengers and two flight crew. (The woman standing was both tour guide and co-pilot.) Every seat is an aisle and a window seat, and those windows are huge. Basically, you’re flying in a big wrap-around picture window, which bubbles out so you can look straight down if you want to:
By the way, we’re flying over Lake Constance, between Germany and Switzerland.
Here’s the Zeppelin’s flight control panel, covered with what are technically known as das blinken-lightz:
Love that little Zep silhouette at the bottom. This control panel would totally pass muster in a James Bond movie.
Okay, so I have to pause in the blogging now. I’ll be showing you more of this flight later, revealing the many wonders seen from the air (not to mention the cool landing protocols). But uploading all this stuff on hotel wi-fi is, like, a total waste of Paris-time.
So one more aerial vista, and I’m out of here:
Beautiful, yes? But rest assured, the best is yet to come . . .
Oh, there is much to write about Z-Day. (No, not z as in Zombies, z as in Zeppelin!)
I have many pix from the Zeppelin Museum, and from our flight today. But posting it all will take a while.
So let me take you back to yesterday, when we arrived in Friedrichshafen, the home of all things Zeppelin. As I’d hoped, it is a very themed town—they know what we Z-geek tourists want to see!
Like, here’s the big fountain in town . . .
Um, what is that cherub holding? Could it be a . . .
Yes! First Zeppelin sighting! But there were many more to come. A Zeppelin Hotel, a Zeppelin restaurant (very cool inside), and even “Graf Zeppelin” coffee. But my favorite Z-object was this awesome playground toy:
I wish I had the bandwidth to upload all my pictures from around town. But it is almost sleep-time here in Germany, and the hotel internets are slow. (Worst. Aspect. Of. Traveling.)
Next I’ll post some pictures from the Zeppelin Museum, and then many pictures and movies from our flight today.
But just to whet your appetites, here’s one of me in the rear window of the actual airship. Just click on the picture to see my terribly smug face in full size.
Hey, all. This is probably the longest I’ve gone without blogging, for which you have my abject apologies. Travel makes the internets hard.
As I’ve said, I’m on a research tour for Leviathan, checking out all the European locations for the novel and, of course, the Zeppelin hangars of Friedrichshafen, Germany. (We’re not there yet, but you’ll be seeing those in later posts.)
My first trick was seeing the Alps from above, straight from the plane on the way to Rome:
Awesome mountains. I’m so glad I set part of Leviathan here.
In Rome, I finished the Uglies Guide. (Look for that this fall.)
Then we flew to London for a mini-tour of England. Thanks to everyone who warmly welcomed us there, and asked such interesting questions. My favorite: “Did writing Uglies make you see people differently?” Still mulling that one.
Right now, Justine, Holly Black, Maureen Johnson, Cassandra Clare, and I are all ensconced in a 17th-century tower in Bologna, Italy. We’re attending the annual Children’s Book Fair here, where publishers from many lands come to sell and buy translation rights for teen and kid books.
So far I’ve met with publishers from France, Israel, Holland, Germany, Australia, and the UK, some by chance and some by design. Brazil and Thailand are tomorrow. It’s a great way to meet a lot of the far-flung publishing world, and to find out weird stuff about how teens in different places read. Here are a few factoids:
Germany loves fantasy. The magicker the better, so say the Germans.
Holland doesn’t like fantasy or science fiction, but Maureen Johnson rules there.
Manga is so huge in Italy that there’s a teen imprint named after a manga character. Ugies is a monster hit in France.
Another cool thing about Bologna is seeing all the art. One of my favorite traditions is the huge bulletin board where hopeful young illustrators pin up their work for publishers to look at:
This photo shows just a tiny fraction of the art here, of course. There are any huge aircraft-hangar sized spaces fool of books and art. It’s an awesome display of creativity.
Less uplifting is the vast Hall of Agents, where agents sit at tiny desks pitching books to possible buyers all day long. My hats off to those who toil in the mighty foreign rights mines:
Anyway, enough of the business end of things. On Friday, the research tour moves into the Tyrolean mountains, and a week later into the Zeppelin hangars of Friedrichshafen!
