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Alice, Michael, and Moi

Posted on by scott

Spent the morning at breakfast with Alice Walker! (Littlies: she wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple back in 1982.) Me, her, and the exceedingly charming Michael Hoeye were featured at a children’s author breakfast for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association.

Alice Walker, despite her vastly higher face rank, graciously spent much of her speech responding to what Michael and I had said. Regarding Uglies, she talked about being in South Korea recently, and being disturbed by how many women there were getting cosmetic surgery to make their eyes more western-looking.

Then she read from her new picture book, which was eloquent and beautifully illustrated. At the signing afterward, we swapped signed books!

I have proof:

Then Justine and I headed across the . . .

bridge.jpg

to San Francisco!

For a couple of earlier tour photos, check out this post on Justine’s blog, from one of our first events (in which I look like a dorky school teacher), and this one from a walk around Jack London Square (in which I look like a crazy person).

Madeleine L’Engle, RIP

Posted on by scott

The author of A Wrinkle in Time has left us. Her work is one of the things that made me a writer, a science fiction and fantasy fan, an avid reader. Hers were the first books I read that mixed math and magic, the quest and the quantum. To put it simply, without L’Engle’s tesseracts, Midnighters would have no tridecalogisms.

Here are a few more thoughts I put down for New York Magazine‘s Culture Blog.

And here Gwenda Bond quotes L’Engle at length on what authors know or don’t know about what their novels mean.

According to the NY Times obit, A Wrinkle in Time has sold six million copies since 1962, but lately moves only 15,000 copies per year. One copy a year for every 20,000 Americans? Somewhere, IT is having a good laugh, and getting ready.

How many of you guys have read her work? (Believe me, you should.)

One for Sorrow

Posted on by scott

I hope you’re having a good Barzak Day!

If you haven’t heard of Barzak Day, don’t feel bad. This is the first Barzak Day ever, because Chris Barzak’s very first novel is arriving in bookstores right now . . .

Beautiful cover, beautiful book. It was sent to me last year to blurb. Now, I’ve only written a few blurbs in my career (five or six), because I’m a slow reader and want to spend my blurbs wisely. But after reading One for Sorrow, I knew it was time to peel off another one from my tightly rubber-banded roll. Here it is:

“An honest and uncanny ride through the shadows between grief and acceptance. This is how real magic works.”
-Scott Westerfeld

Blurbs are hard to write. Distilling a whole novel into a few words, while trying to sell something to someone standing in a bookstore, is no easy task. But this felt like the right blurb for this novel. One for Sorrow is about that weird intersection between grief and magic, how sadness can bubble up and move the world in paranormal directions.

One thing that my blurb doesn’t convey is that this book is also scary, in a very cool way. Not the kind of scary where you’re nervous about a monster under your bed. More like the kind where you’re nervous that there might be, um, another universe under your bed. One where the rules are skewed and different and a little bit wrong, but that you’d probably crawl on into if you glimpsed it, just out of curiosity.

It’s that kind of book.

A quick word of warning: this book is also probably best for 14 and up. There are some fairly steamy scenes.

You can look up more details or buy it here.

Inside a Dog

Posted on by scott

Just when you thought obsessive refreshing was the most fun you could ever have . . .

This whole month, Justine and I are guest-blogging at Inside a Dog, the premier website for Australian YA. We’ll be posting more frequently than I do here, and answering reader questions. It should be fun.

And while you’re there, you can explore the rest of Inside a Dog’s (insideadog.com.au) awesome contents:

Tons of book reviews.

Interviews with YA authors like M.T. Anderson, Margo Lanagan, Carol Wilkinson, and many more. (Oh, and me and Justine!)

Audio dowloads and screensavers.

And, one of my favorite features, the first chapters of new and upcoming titles. Highly useful.

Before you ask, the whole first-comment-wins-a-sampler thing doesn’t work over there. But we will be giving away some cool stuff over the next month. Because we have I’m an Extra T-shirts all over the place, and they must go!

We’ll be blogging there until August 6*, so come over and check us out.

*And I’ll be here too, of course.

P.S. The NY Times reports what we already knew: librarians are cool.

German Uglies

Posted on by scott

Okay, you’ve had to sit through me getting my cranky on in my last post. So here’s something much more happy-making:

Yes, it’s the German covers of the Uglies trilogy.

In a funny way, these are the most “realistic” of the covers for the trilogy. The model for Ugly looks like a real girl. Her skin is a bit freckly, her eyes a bit small. Not that she isn’t pretty, but she’s definitely not a pretty.

But the image for Pretty is almost freakish. As I’ve often said, if we saw a pretty here in our world, we’d probably find them a bit weird and exaggerated. Plastic sugery arms races tend to go in strange directions, after all. (Warning: Following that link risks severe eyeball damage.)

And Special is the best of all. It takes the exact same face and makes it totally mean. Sort of like a Chucky doll with tattoos.

Casting your eyes over all three faces, you see the subtle change in expression that mirror Tally’s journey, from curious ugly to vacant pretty to imperious, cruel Special. How cool is that?

Big props to the designers over at Carlsen, the German publishers of Uglies.

By the way, does anyone know a German-language reason why the titles are singular?

Alternate Worlds

Posted on by scott

It’s been a while since I’ve ranted against a major paper for misconstruing genre, so let’s dust off the old soapbox. And, yes, I’m going to be mean.

Here’s an outrageous bit of genre-subliterate hooey from the Guardian:

Michael Chabon’s new novel is a brilliantly written fantasy with a not-quite-fatal flaw at its heart . . . .

The real problem with the book is the piecemeal way Chabon introduces his alternate reality. It’s an unwritten rule of the genre (well, it’s written now) that you should be able to define the difference between the parallel world and ours in a single sentence. Armada triumphs, Elizabeth assassinated (Keith Roberts’s Pavane). Axis powers defeat the Allies (Dick’s The Man in the High Castle). Lindbergh becomes President (Roth’s The Plot Against America). No such establishment of a baseline is possible with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”

Argh. You mean the genre of alternate worlds has been allowed to evolve past the rulebook of the English Amateur Historians’ Counterfactual Society? Heavens forefend!

That’s right, young readers. About a million years ago, writing alternate history meant you could only change one thing: Confederacy wins, Ghandi hit by train, cheese not invented. And it was the singularity of this shift that proved how clever you were, by showing how many dinosaurs you could kill by stepping on one butterfly.

And yes, that’s still a perfectly glorious thing to do. But to assert that any book not hewing to this rule must be “flawed” is super-lame. Plus it means you probably haven’t read as many comic books as, say, Michael Frickin’ Chabon!

The writer of this article, Adam Mars-Jones, goes on to state that he can think of only a single exception to this “unwritten” rule, Nabokov’s Ada. I will allow commenters to come up with a burying horde of examples. (Though I will mention that in Pavane rail trains are never invented, surely not as a result of a victorious Armada, so Mars-Jones’ own examples fall apart. Nyah.)

However, as I’m currently editing an anthology of essays about Phillip Pullman, let me rant specifically on His Dark Materials. In Pullman’s world:

1) The Reformation never happened. (There’s a Pope Calvin!)
2) Texas is a nation. (Possibly Reformation related?)
3) Victorian arctic pseudo-sciences all turned out to have a basis in reality. (Yes!)
4) People have externalized souls, polar bears can talk, plus witches.
5) Many, many other things.

Okay, so maybe that number 4 is the key to Mars-Jones’ thinking. HDM is all magicky, so maybe it doesn’t fall into some weirdly strict Mars-Jonesian category of counter-factual.*

Yes, in many magicky books like Narnia, lots of things are different: beavers talk, White Queen dominates, Jesus is a lion. But whatever they symbolize, such worlds aren’t “alterations” of ours, and Pullman’s world is. HDM has an Oxford, a London, a Texas, Zeppelins, and telephones. (Note to Guardian editors: The presence of Zeppelins categorically indicates alternate history. Look it up.) And the fact that in Pullman’s world there are more alternate worlds, of which Lyra’s is one, more or less seals the deal.

I’m sure the younger readers of this blog will be mystified that anyone would even make a proclamation like Mars-Jones’. An average-size shelf of manga contain a thousand worlds with ten zillion alterations, picked and chosen from a million columns. (I still have no idea what the Catholic Church is supposed to be in Helsing, but it’s awesome.) This is what sf and fantasy have become: every world is a reworking of an alteration of a speculation. And that’s a good thing.

To suggest otherwise in one of my favorite papers is unacceptable. And worse . . . it means yer old and stuffy.** Nyah again.

I’m just glad I live in this world, the one where the world-alterers won.

__________________________

*The term that airship pilots use for “alternate history.”
**Told you I would be mean.

BEA Swaglist

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There were many requests in the comment thread of my last post to list the titles and authors of my swag. Okay, I’m listing them. But remember, they’re mine, all mine! Bwah-hah, etc.

Plus, most of these books don’t come out till autumn.

And for a screen-filling, monster-huge version of this photo, click here.

TOP ROW FROM LEFT

The Penalty by Mal Peet
YA set in Brazil, about a soccer prodigy. I’ve heard good things about Peet.

13 Bullets by David Wellington
Splatterpunk vampire novel, by the author of the online zombie apocalypse novel Monster Island, which was cool.

Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa
Hardboiled detective in Tokyo. Adult themes!

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Non-fic about what would happen to Earth if all humans disappeared instantly right now. Like, how long it would take everything to go back to a pre-technology state. I am so reading this, if only so my next zombie apocalypse novel has good science.

Poseur by Rachel Maude
Three girls start their own fashion label. A very pink book.

Zugzwang by Ronan Bennet
A chess thriller (?) set in 1914. That’s the same time period as Leviathan, so it’s a must-read for me.

The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee
An affair in 1711 London, by an Aussie writer who Justine adores. And yes, nice cover.

I repeat the swag photo, for ease of use. (And again, for a screen-filling, monster-huge version of this photo, click here.)

MIDDLE ROW FROM LEFT

Deadline by Chris Crutcher
A teen has one year to live. Crutcher rocks.

Foundling by D.M. Cornish
Lavishly illustrated Book 1 of Monster Blood Tattoo series.

The Asbolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
YA about a Native-American teen who wants to become a writer.

Betwixt by Tara Bray Smith
YA supernatural about kids with gnarly powers.

Boy Toy by Barry Lyga
By the guy who wrote The Amazing Adventures of Fanboy and Gothgirl, so should be really good.

Electric Church by Jeff Somers
Hardboiled cyberpunk.

Grub by Elise Blackwell
A parody of the publishing world. Can’t wait.

I repeat the swag photo, for ease of use. (And again, for a screen-filling, monster-huge version of this photo, click here.)

BOTTOM ROW FROM LEFT

Little (Grrl) Lost by Charles De Lint
Small visitor in 14-year-old girl’s life. Love De Lint.

Shojo Beat 3
A manga compilation.

Shonen Jump 2007
Another manga compilation.

Chibi Vampire by Yuna Kagesaki
Vampire manga!

Chain Mail by Hiroshi Ishikazi
See previous post.

Avalon High by Meg Cabot
A working document of the upcoming manga version of her series. It starts out in real art, changes to pencil sketches, then is just a rough script. Kewl object to own.

Apollo’s Song by Osamu Tezuka
Manga from the Astro Boy dude.

Boy by Takeshi Kitano
Lit fic by the guy who made the film Hana-bi.

BEA Swag/First Page Test

Posted on by scott

So on Halloween night when you get home, do you ever take a picture of the collected swag? Or at least dump it on the bed and ogle?

Well I don’t Trick or Treat much anymore, but here’s (most of) my BEA swag, all organized by size.

Mmm . . . free books.

When buying books, I usually avoid the back cover (spoilers!) and go straight for the first-page test. Judging a 80,000-word document on the basis of one page may seem cruel and unusual, but I’ve found that most books reveal a lot about themselves in that first minute. At least, they reveal more than real-live human beings when you first meet them. A human, after all, might just be having a bad day.

So here’s a quick BEA-swag-related First Page Test for your delectation.

Chain Mail, by Hiroshi Ishikazi (Tokyopop)
(fourth from right, bottom row)

I stood in front of the mailbox and cried. Snow fell around me, frosting my hair and shoes, slowly blotting out the words of the test results I held in my hands. Out of over twenty-five thousand test-takers, I had placed first in Japanese, Mathematics, Science, Basic Studies, and General Studies. I had finally made it.

But it was too late. My mother was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. If I had only studied harder, if I had only gotten these results a month earlier, maybe it would have made a difference.

Melting snow slid down my back. I shivered, remembering the sound of flesh striking flesh . . .

Things that brought me in:

1) “I stood in front of the mailbox and cried” is a lovely first sentence. We are somewhere specific, and something specific is happening.

2) I like “frosting” a lot, because it’s being used in a slightly unusual way, and is strong visually. And there’s something perfect about the snow alighting specifically on the character’s “hair and shoes.” Hair, because it reveals that she’s not wearing a hat—she just stepped out to grab the eagerly awaited mail. And shoes, because she’s looking down at the letter, and also because she’s crying—staring at your shoes is not usually a sign of happiness. (I’m assuming the protag’s a girl because of the cover, by the way.)

3) Wait, she’s crying because the test results are perfect? Brain was ready for the opposite. Unexpected is good.

4) The second paragraph sets off a wave of micro-mysteries for the reader. How did her test results make her mother go away? And is her mother dead, or something else?

5) “Melting snow slid down my back. I shivered, remembering . . . ” is a cool way to physicalize the bad memory. And “flesh striking flesh” is definitely bad, bad, bad.

Things that kicked me out:

1) The construction “test-takers” is clunky to me. Like, why not say “students”? I mean, we know this is about testing. You could just say “Out of twenty-five thousand, I had placed first” and it would make sense. Still, the term is probably just a literal move from the more elegant Japanese. Translations get a few extras free passes, because I like the odd feel of an ocassional literalness.

2) Maybe we’re going a little too quickly into the explanation of this little micro-mystery? I’m not a fan of flashbacks that start before we’re fully in a scene, which always seems stagey.

These are minor quibbles, though. I’d definitely keep going.

I’ll be doing more of these soon. It’s a fun and easy way to dispense writing advice. But I won’t be doing any American authors, for reasons that I will soon reveal.

And in fairness, I’ll be putting up my own first page soon . . . Extras‘, that is. So you can mock it to your hearts’ content.