My apologies for not posting, responding to comments, or answering much mail for the last week or so.

I’ve been finishing the rewrites on Specials, which included writing a totally new ending—a much better one, I hope. I have to turn the book in tomorrow night, so that it can be released on schedule. (Maybe early! I’ll let you know.)

In a related story, Cory Doctorow gave the Uglies trilogy a lovely write-up on Boing Boing yesterday, pushing my Amazon ratings into three figures. (I believe that is a w00ting offense.)

In the meantime, Sydney weather has been weird. On New Years’ Day, temperatures reached their historical record for this time of year . . . at 11AM! By 2PM it was the second hottest day on record in the city ever. The temperature? 45 Centigrade. But what’s that in Farenheit? Ah well, allow me to give you Americans a little lesson in metric.

As readers of Uglies know, I’m a fairly metric guy, and I think we’ll all be metric-users at some point in the future. But temperatures are much harder to convert than most measurements, because the zero-point is different. Metric uses the freezing point of water; US measurements use the freezing point of salt water. (Which I find slightly random.)

So when I came to Australia I learned this handy Centigrade poem:

30’s hot.
20’s nice.
10’s a jacket.
Zero’s ice.

Pretty easy, huh? Except you will note that 45 isn’t in there!

Well, to assist your imagination, we have this handy photograph:

That’s from today’s Sydney Morning Herald. It’s happening not terribly far from us.

This is the arid continent, after all. When it gets up to 45, things start to burn. At present there are 27 bushfires out there blazing on the edges of Sydney. I live in the middle of town, so you don’t have to worry about me. But do give a thought to the fireys (as they say here) who are out saving people’s homes.

And just so you know, 45C is 113 Farenheit. A hundred and thirteen!

Here’s the weirdest thing: After the southerly breezes finally arrived last night, the termperature dropped freakishly fast, down to 20C (68F). The discrepancy was so great that this morning when Justine and I made breakfast, the air that spilled from the kitchen cupboards was still noticeably hot—like opening an oven.

How weird is that?

Specials will be finished tomorrow, and I’ll start blogging more and answering fan mail again. Thanks for all your patience.

WARNING: The comment thread of this post contains massive spoilers if you haven’t read Pretties.

Sorry I’ve been offline so long, but I’ve been in Byron Bay relaxing with Justine‘s family. We did lots of body surfing, ate lots of good food, and I slipped out of the fun occassionally to work on Specials rewrites. (Thanks to my sister-in-law Niki for the invite!)

The coolest thing we did at Byron was swimming in a tea-tree lake. That’s a salt-water inlet surrounded by melaleucas trees, the soothing oils of which saturate the water. The lake is the color of tea, and it’s very peaceful and supposedly really good for you.

While I was marinating, that article I was interviewed for in the New York Times came out. Featuring this scary-ass picture:

Stephan Elleringmann/laif

Ahhhh! Although I guess any story that starts with a dog eating a woman’s face couldn’t have a nice picture. Still.

They quoted me twice! Apparently, writing Uglies and Pretties makes me an expert on face transplants.

You can read it here, or if you don’t feel like registering, here’s my quotes:

A new face might one day be a covetable luxury item, suggested Scott Westerfeld, a science fiction writer, whose novels “Uglies” and “Pretties” project a future in which a compulsory operation at 16 makes everyone conform to an ideal standard of beauty. In that future world, “it’s not just how much cosmetic surgery you get, it’s how often,” Mr. Westerfeld said, adding, “There will come a day when having extreme cosmetic surgery will be like buying a $1,000 Gucci bag, an indication that you are a member of the privileged class.”

. . . and then somebody else talks, and then . . .

Mr. Westerfeld noted that such themes, once the province of science fiction, now parallel mainstream attitudes about the self and identity. There is increasing acceptance that “as human beings we get to choose who we are,” he said. “And the line between what you get to choose and don’t choose is moving all the time.”

I can’t remember what I was trying to say there exactly. But at least I didn’t sound like too much of a wanker.

In other news, Uglies is an Amazon Top Ten Teen book!

That is all. We’re tired. But stay tuned for my Sydney Opera House photo essay!