Justine’s Tour

Posted on by scott

A big announcement here:

Next Tuesday, September 16, is the release date of Justine’s next book, How to Ditch Your Fairy!

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.

Click here for Justine’s story of how she came up with the idea. And here’s her bio on her flashy new website.

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.)

You can order HTDYF at Powell’s, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

Click here for details on all of Justine’s tour dates.

Gustav and Librarian DOA

Posted on by scott

Two things:

Those of you who’ve bought merchandise at Wearable Extras, the online store of all things Westerfeldian, should pat yourselves on the back today. As I mentioned back when Wearable Extras opened, I don’t get any money, but one dollar of each purchase goes to Katrina relief.

Now a horrible admission: I suck at administrative details, and hadn’t totaled up the sales or found a charity to send the money to. But that turns out to have been a good thing, in a way. With Hurricane Gustov roaring through the Gulf, I’ve buckled down and finally figured out how to collect from Spreadshirts. So $531, representing 531 of your T-shirts, went to the Red Cross yesterday to aid victims of Gustov.

All best of luck to anyone who got evacuated or otherwise soaked. Our thoughts are with you.

Secondly, Librarian DOA just sent me this cartoon review of the Uglies series.

The cool thing is that it was made with Toonlet, a cartoon-producing tool for those of us who are drawing impaired. (Which very much includes me.)

Click here to see it full size.

Cycler Interview

Posted on by scott

Early last year, I got to read the unfinished manuscript of a book called Cycler, by Lauren McLaughlin. It was about a girl named Jill who has a problem: she changes into a boy four days a month.

Obviously, this isn’t the best way to go through puberty, what with all the identity issues and stuff. So with the help of her parents, she’s managed to keep her transformations hidden. In fact, she’s repressed her memories of being a boy to the point where her male self, Jack, has developed his own personality–and he’s very much a boy.

A boy who’s getting really tired of being hidden . . .

Needless to say, the book was really awesome, and I wound up blurbing it:

Artfully fractured and wickedly smart. A brilliant screwball comedy about love, self knowledge, and the secret identities inside all of us.

The book has taken a while to come out, as first novels do, and in the meantime I’ve become pals with Lauren and her husband Andrew. So now that Cycler is on shelves, I thought I would convene with her and do a quick IM interview.

Here’s our conversation, unedited and in its original IM-y format! (Argh, so many typos.) I’m on the right side and Lauren, for reasons that will soon be revealed, is the cat.









By the way, Lauren’s husband (Andrew, mentioned above) is a fashion photographer, and he did the photo for the cover:

You can buy Cycler at Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon. Or at many fine real-life bookstores across the land!

If you have any questions of your own for Lauren, feel free to ask them in the comments, and I’ll see if she’ll answer them.

All best to everyone going back to school!

Done and Done

Posted on by scott

Well, after a very productive month in our Undisclosed Location, Justine and I have both finished our next books! Much wooting occurred.

Of course, there’s still all the rewriting, editing, cover designing, catalog printing, marketing and selling into stores that has to happen. All of which means these books won’t be published until, oh, about a year from now.

This is why Bogus to Bubbly is coming out on October 21, to make the long year of waiting fly past. (Zoom.)

In the meantime, I can get back to blogging a bit more often. Thank you all for your patience during crunch time! Sorry to have been away.

There are a few things I missed. First, here’s the cover for the Brazilian version of Peeps:

I really like this cover. It’s sort of like a graphic novel, with plenty of peeps-like images. As you can see, the title is Os Primeiros Dias, or “The First Days.” I guess “peeps” didn’t translate into Portuguese, so the publishers thought it would be cool to set up the sequel, The Last Days.

I wish I’d thought of that. Well, except that when I was working on Peeps, I didn’t realize I was going to write a sequel.

And if you’re a Peeps fan, you totally have to read this article in the NY Times. It’s about a scientist who infects his patients with hookworms (as in Chapter 5, aka “Bahamalama-Dingdongs”) . . . on purpose!

So here’s the story: David Pritchard, the scientist in the article, noticed that people in Papua New Guinea who were infected with hookworms were less likely to suffer from asthma and hay fever. Now, this was nothing new. As I point out a few times in Peeps, parasites are so intertwined with humans that we can get sick when we don’t have them around.

Basically, your immune system has evolved to deal with lots of parasites—our ancestors lived in a very dirty world compared to us. But these days, people in industrial societies have hardly any parasites, so our immune system gets bored and starts making trouble. Sort of like a third-world army with no enemies to fight, it starts trying to take over the government. Allergies, asthma, Crohn’s disease, and other auto-immune issues may be related to people being too darn clean!

Dr. Pritchard wondered if hookworms were suppressing the Panuan’s immune system, and helping them escape hay fever. So, in the proud tradition of mad scientists everywhere, he used himself as a subject. That’s right, he infected himself with hookworms, which sounds . . . itchy. He has since expanded to larger human trials, and so far the treatment seems to work well on allergy sufferers. Maybe one day it can be used for more serious conditions, like Crohn’s Disease.

Good luck to him. Plus, I love this last paragraph:

“I gave myself 50 worms, and I felt it,” he recounted. “I had stomach pains and diarrhea. But with 10 worms, we’ve ascertained a dose that does not cause symptoms. The patients are happy. They’ve kept their worms, and I get an e-mail a day from people all over the world who want to be infected.”

See? Everything in moderation.

Even worms.

Manga Heads!

Posted on by scott

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:

Read more about them here at Inventor Spot.

I will be posting more soon . . . promise

First Lines

Posted on by scott

There is a mini-cult of first lines among us writers. The first line is sort of like the lobby of the book: the first thing you see, coloring all subsequent impressions. It’s one place where you’re truly allowed to show off.

So we writers like to geek out on first lines. We get all excited about collecting and trading them, having top-ten lists and all-time faves. We even reveal our chapter first lines in advance as tiny spoilers.

As many people have spotted, Uglies, which begins:

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

pays homage to the opening of William Gibson’s Neuromancer:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

I bring this up now because of this article on io9 discussing great science fiction first lines. It’s cool to read all these lines all together, and of course it doesn’t hurt that they include my adult novel, The Risen Empire, which opens with:

The five small craft passed from shadow, emerging with the suddenness of coins thrown into sunlight.

Oddly, io9 calls this line “a little adjective-heavy.” Dudes, it only has one adjective, the word “small”!

So for the sake of deep analysis, here are all my YA novel first lines:

The Uglies Series
Uglies
“The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.”

Pretties
“Getting dressed was always the hardest part of the afternoon.”

Specials
“The six hoverboards slipped among the trees with the lightning grace of playing cards thrown flat and spinning.”

Extras
“Moggle,” Aya whispered. “You awake?”

Midnighters Series
The Secret Hour
“The halls of Bixby High were always hideously bright on the first day of school.”

Touching Darkness
“At last, everything was sorted out.”

Blue Noon
“Bixby High’s late bell shrieked in the distance, like something wounded and ready to be cut from the herd.”

The New York Trilogy
So Yesterday
“We are all around you.”

Peeps
“After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah.”

The Last Days
“I think New York was leaking.”

Soon I’m going to expand on this post, and talk about why I started books with these lines. In the meantime, I’d be interested to hear from you about them

Plus: What are your favorite first lines? Pick any novel you want, except mine!

Airships over Manhattan

Posted on by scott

It’s been a particularly good week for writing about airships. Several times I’ve looked up, and there was the Direct TV blimp floating past.

Now, obviously, this mere blimp isn’t as cool as a dirigible. Blimps are just big, cigar-shaped balloons, while the airships in Leviathan and the Zeppelin I rode in Germany have frames to keep their shape. (That’s why they can be so much bigger.)

But still, it’s cool to see that classic airship silhouette among the cranes, water towers, and skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline. There’s nothing to make me grab my camera like a future that didn’t happen intruding politely on a weekday afternoon (or evening).

So enjoy, and by all means click to enlarge:


Photos by Scott Westerfeld. Steal them—steal them all!

Name This Book

Posted on by scott

So, I need a title.

Most of you will remember the anthology I edited about Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Since then the same publisher (Teen Libris) has done a number of these collections, including this recent one about Stephenie Meyer’s Twlight series:

Lately, Teen Libris and I have been discussing a similar project for yours truly—a book about the Uglies series.

Of course, this is very different from Bubbly to Bogus, which is a behind-the-scenes guide to Tally’s world, with maps, diagrams, and such. This anthology will be a dozen or so other YA authors writing essays about the series, with subjects like:

“David vs. Zane”
“Shay: Evil Antagonist or Secret Hero?”
“Why do people get plastic surgery?”
“The dangers of technology and conformity”
“Slang and language use in the series”
“Radical Honesty versus being Pretty: are they the same thing?”
“The idea of wilderness in the series”

This is just a random list, but it gives you the idea.

So my question is, What do we call this book? Here are few lame suggestions of mine:

The Color of Cat Vomit
Adventures in Special Circumstances
Facing the Future
Skin Deep
Ugly Truths
Pretty/Ugly
Turning Pretty
About Face

Some of these are okay. But we’d really like to have your help this.

So comment away, and give us some good titles!

Note: This book won’t come out until 2009, but Bubbly to Bogus comes out October 23, 2008, and you can pre-order it now from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Powells!

Zeppelin Fever

Posted on by scott

Airships are in the news today, with a big article in the NY Times about the latest uptick of commercial interest in lighter-than-air transport.

Of course, somebody’s always trying to reanimate Zeppelins, but so far all those attempts have ended in failure (except as tourist attractions). So why would anyone think that this time will be different?

Well, here’s the thing about airships: they float, so you don’t expend energy to keep them in the air. They move much slower than planes, but they eat less fuel per pound carried. As oil becomes more expensive—not to mention destructive to our planet and our foreign policy—that advantage becomes bigger, and bigger, and bigger . . .

So maybe airships aren’t viable right now. But does anyone think that in the long term, oil’s going to get cheaper? Sure! Because the middle east will stabilize, the Chinese will decide they don’t really want cars, and Americans are going to stop wasting fuel at every possible opportunity! But just in case that stuff doesn’t happen, we may find Zeppelins in our future. The French post office is already looking at them for freight transport, as is DARPA, the US military’s mad-scientist group.

There are lots of cool pictures in the article, but one really caught my eye. A French architect named Jean-Marie Massaud has designed a lighter-than-air hotel that looks a bit like a whale. As you might suspect from the title, so does the airship in Leviathan!

I’m still sworn to secrecy on Leviathan art, but here’s Massaud’s vision:


Courtesy Jean-Marie Massaud

Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s the slide show for the article.

Must write now. At 56,717 words, about 20,000 to go!