So. Very. Tired.

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Woke up at 8AM Thursday in New York. It is now 10PM Saturday in Sydney. That’s 46 hours in my personal time frame, almost half of which was spent in an economy-class airplane seat. So very tired, but must stay awake another hour . . .

Thursday lasted a really long time, about 32 hours, because we were flying west the whole evening. But moments after Friday finally caught up with us, Justine and I slipped across the International Dateline, straight into Saturday morning. Hah! Take that, Friday!

Wait . . . I like Fridays. Well, at least Justine avoided most of the Eleventh of November, an evil day in Australian history.

We arrived tired, smelly, and homeless, and immediately drove around with her parents looking at apartments. Saw some incredible harbour views, but comprehended nothing. Water pretty.

Back when we were leaving Manhattan, I looked back at the skyline and said, “It’s so beautiful at sundown.” It was 3:45 in the afternoon, and the sun was sinking.

But here the sky was still light at 8PM, and it’s 20 degrees at night. Those are metric degrees, which means it’s 70F . . .

Okay, I’m just babbling. Sleep now.

Midnighters from Russia

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I just semi-randomly discovered this online. It looks suspiciously like a cover for Midnighters from Russia!

That’s my name on top. I happen to know from previous translations that Ckott=Scott. And it sure looks like Jessica wielding Jurisprudence and Rex (Jonathan?) with some sort of heavy Dess-made weaponry.

But why is Jessica blond? And Rex sandy-haired? (Dude, if it’s Jonathan, he doesn’t look very Hispanic.) And both of them are kind of old. And that car antenna is mighty hefty . . . don’t they have those in Russia?

I love the slithers, though, and the dark moon looming. And the word “Midnighters” totally rules in that spiky cyrillic font.

There’s a kind of Hardy-Boy literalness to the cover that I like, and I can’t wait to see the next two in the series. Just think, maybe we’ll get a picture of the halfling!

It’s almost like writing comics . . .

Peeps in Australia!

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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

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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

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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.

Strange Pleasant Smell

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A strange but pleasant smell was reported to have engulfed Manhattan and Queens last night . . .

Justine and Shannon Fowler and I were on the way to a Japanese restaurant at about 8:00PM, and discovered ourselves sniffing the air. “Something smells like caramel,” Justine said. I thought it was more like peanuts roasting (in sugar, so almost the same thing). Shannon mentioned maple syrup. The smell followed us from the East Village all the way to Hudson Street on the west side.

“How odd,” we said. How could one smell stretch so far across the island?

Even more astonishingly, the story appeared in the New York Times this morning entitled “Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers.” The story reports that the smell extended as far as Astoria, Queens.

According to the Times:

Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister. There were so many calls that the city’s Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to look into it.

But there is no word yet as to what the strange, sweet-smelling cloud may have been. I have detected no behavioral changes in my fellow New Yorkers today, nor any other mysterious effects.

It was quite nice, though. Did any of you also smell it?

In Pretties-related news, photos for the front cover of Specials were shot on Tuesday. I’ll share any images that come my way.

Pretties is OUT!

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A trip to my local Barnes & Noble today reveals that PRETTIES IS OUT! On the local favorites table, there was a stack of ten, right between Eragon and Sisterhood of the Unwashed Pants.

And I also hear that Amazon is shipping them right now.
Excellent . . .

And now as part of Pretties Week, a quick note on fun with facial symmetry.

In Uglies, there’s a scene in which Tally and Shay choose which side of their faces is prettier, and use that side to base their future pretty-face on.

You see, everyone’s face has two different sides, but the pretties in my world have perfectly symmetrical features. So the two sides are exactly the same. Scientists think that symmetrical faces are more attractive (to most people) because major differences between the left and right half of your face can result from malnutrition and other developmental problems. Attraction to symmetrical faces is evolution’s way of steering you toward well developed mates.

But it’s really fun to see what you’d look like with symmetrical features. Take a picture of yourself, then take one side and flip it over. However, as the result above shows, you have to get a good, straight-on photo. And as these pictures from a Regents Exam Facial Symmetry activity page show, make sure NOT to tilt your head when taking facial symmetry photos!

Because this:

can turn into this:

Which is not a good look.

Pretties Week Begins!

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Pretties comes out on November 1, just over a week away, so it’s time to begin the celebrations!

For those of you who don’t know, Uglies and Pretties are set in a world in which cosmetic surgery is not optional. The society has lots of theories about what makes a face the right kind of pretty, and this week I’ll be discussing the science behind those theories.

So let’s start with . . . face averaging!

One of the ways scientists generate fake pretty faces is to visually average the general population. Basically, you stick a lot of pictures of faces into a computerized blender and morph the results together. See how the third face is pleasanter to look at than the first two?

It is believed that averaged faces tend to be more attractive because it’s good to have a wide variety of genes from across the local population. People with a wider set of ancestors are (by definition) less in-bred, which means they’ll have more disease resistance and other neat superpowers like that. So we’ve evolved to think that people with genetically average faces are good mating material.

So how do we know what’s average? Answer: By looking around at the people where we live.

The faces above are from a German University, which is why they’re white. In a recent University of Western Australia study, however, researchers found that in a mixed-race society, the faces considered most attractive have mixed racial characteristics.

Australia’s population is composed mostly of Asians and Europeans, so when reporting the study the Sydney Morning Herald chose a model with Scottish, Spanish, Phillipine, and other Asian ancestry to make their point:

A definite hottie. Of course, the US version would have more African ancestry and probably more Latin American in the mix as well.

Anyway, averaging faces is only one technique that the Pretty Committee in Uglies uses to create beauty. And of course in the real world, we find all kinds of extremes attractive, as well as personality, accomplishments, and shared personal history. We’re just talking about statistics here, not individual preferences.

For me, averaging (especially by computer) often leads to a bland beauty. Like, say, these two faces composed of 64 Germans each:

Generic + Vaguely Creepy = Yawn

Last Mexican Pix

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Okay, re-entry into the first world has given me the most astonishing flu-thing (possibly acquired on the bus to Atlantic City), so I will be brief. Below are three pictures I took in Mexico that I never blogged. I now blog them as my feverish brain melts:

A flower on our veranda in San Miguel taken at sunset. When I can take a picture this good with our crappy camera, you know stuff is pretty.

This is my picture of a hummingbird, taken among the same flowers. Compare with Justine’s photo-essay on the subject. Trust me, these guys are hard to get into the lens. In German, I think they’re called “movingquicklybirds,” or perhaps, “fasterthanscott’scrappycamerabirds.”

One of their many names in Mexican Spanish is chuparrosas, which translates literally to “rose suckers.” Now that is some seriously poetic wordplay, dudes. No, really. It reminds one of chupacabras, the mythical Mexican goat-sucking bat.

In San Miguel, as in heaven, freshly made tortillas are brought to your door by a fleet of motorcycles. Can we please just surrender to Mexico now?