Scott Westerfeld's Blog, page 12

First of all, thanks to everyone who came to the Mortal Instruments viewing last night here in Sydney. It was a gas, and the screams were many. So. Many. Screams. Also, I got to sign someone’s Chicken McNuggets box, because global capitalism is global.

I have some cool Leviathan VR pictures to show you, but first here’s a post about my next two weeks. I’ll be at the Melbourne and Brisbane Writers Festivals, and hope that some of you will be too.

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL

Tuesday, 27 August

12:30 PM – 1:15 PM

ACMI Cinema 2

Federation Square

Corner Flinders and Swanston Streets

Science/Fiction

Participants: Scott Westerfeld

Chairperson: Rob James

Scott Westerfeld grew up surrounded by science and technology. It’s no wonder that his books – including Uglies, Leviathan, Midnighters and Peeps – are shaped by science. Find out what makes his stories tick, and how science can be a novelist’s best friend.

Wednesday, 28 August 2013

10:00 AM – 10:45 AM

Deakin Edge, Fed Square Federation Square

Corner Flinders and Swanston Streets

The Steampunk World of Leviathan

Participants: Scott Westerfeld, Naomi O’Brien-D’Ambra

The Leviathan trilogy is set in a steampunk World War I. The books even look like they were published in 1914, when almost all books were illustrated, even books for adults. Tour this extraordinarily rich world with the perfect guide, author Scott Westerfeld.

Wednesday, 28 August 2013

12:30 PM – 1:15 PM

ACMI Cinema 2

Federation Square

Corner Flinders and Swanston Streets

Science Fiction, Science Fact

Participants: Scott Westerfeld, Michael Pryor

Chairperson: Andrew McDonald

Scott Westerfeld and Michael Pryor talk about the inventions and ideas first put forward in fiction, later proved to be fact – or wildly off the mark. Who is the better guide: scientist or novelist? Or does the future rely on both?

I’m also teaching a YA Writing masterclass, but that is sold out.

Again,

BRISBANE WRITERS FESTIVAL

Click here for tickets.

Friday Sept 6th

8–11PM

Maiwar Green, State Library of Queensland

‘Juvenilia’

Featuring Kevin Kwan, Clementine Ford, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Kimberley Freeman (Kim Wilkins), Stuart MacBride and Benjamin Law reading work they scribbled in their youth. A special ‘Juvenilia’ mixed tape set by Simon Reynolds will wrap up the night.

No ticket required.

Saturday Sept 7th

Sat 11:30AM–12:30PM

State Library of Queensland

‘Dystopias’

Scott Westerfeld and Max Barry talk with Marianne de Pierres about dystopias, being a teenager in a world that wants to kill you and our fascination with broken futures.

TICKETS $12-$16

Justine and I are teaching a YA class here too. Also sold out.

And I’m also doing two sessions in the kids section, but I think those are limited to schools. If I’m wrong about that, go here and check them out.

Also, you should check out Justine’s blog for her schedule for both festivals.

I’ll be blogging more about my trip soon, but first a note about the opening of the City of Bones movie next week. Justine and I will be hosting a first-night screening here in Sydney, which is put together by Kinokuniya Bookstore. There will also be a special greeting from Cassie herself, using some sort of magic. (Or possibly recording devices.)

So if you live in Sydney, and enjoy seeing movies on the first night with a screaming, rambunctious, has-read-the-book-several-times crowd, I suggest coming along.

Also, there’s a costume contest!

Here’s the event page on FB, so you can do all that FaceBooky stuff with it. And here are the details for non-FB types:

WHEN: Thursday, 22nd August at 6:30pm

WHERE: Event Cinemas, George Street, Sydney

DRESS: Prizes for best costume

COST: $18.50

Tickets are on sale now and are strictly limited. Purchases can be made in-store (at the cashier counter) or over the phone: 02 9262-7996.

Be there or be truant.

UPDATE

There’s an iTunes sale on the Levithan series audiobooks. From now until August 27, you can buy any of the three for $5.95. (I assume this is US iTunes store only.)

Download LEVIATHAN here.

Download BEHEMOTH here.

Download GOLIATH here.

These are really good, because Alan Cumming rocks.

I’ll be blogging more about my trip soon, but first a note about the opening of the City of Bones movie next week. Justine and I will be hosting a first-night screening here in Sydney, which is put together by Kinokuniya Bookstore. There will also be a special greeting from Cassie herself, using some sort of magic. (Or possibly recording devices.)

So if you live in Sydney, and enjoy seeing movies on the first night with a screaming, rambunctious, has-read-the-book-several-times crowd, I suggest coming along.

Also, there’s a costume contest!

Here’s the event page on FB, so you can do all that FaceBooky stuff with it. And here are the details for non-FB types:

WHEN: Thursday, 22nd August at 6:30pm

WHERE: Event Cinemas, George Street, Sydney

DRESS: Prizes for best costume

COST: $18.50

Tickets are on sale now and are strictly limited. Purchases can be made in-store (at the cashier counter) or over the phone: 02 9262-7996.

Be there or be truant.

Justine and I have spent the last six weeks traveling in the US, which is why there have been zero postings here. Apologies! I realize that this hasn’t been a very bloggy year for me, but it has been a writey year, and which would you rather have, really?

Let me take you on a slideshow of various things I did while in the States:

Shortly after I first arrived, I was greeted by the sight of my latest publication on bookstore shelves. It’s an essay in a collection called Breakfast on Mars, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe. Basically, it’s a bunch of YA writers taking on the dreaded essay, many teen’s least favorite form of writing.

My essay, for reasons you might guess, is all about illustrations in books.

If you’re a teacher or librarian, or anyone interested in non-fiction writing, you should check it out. If you ask me, Stern (a former fifth-grade English teacher) and Wolfe have helped fill a huge gap in the world of YA and middle-grade letters.

The next cool thing to happen on my trip was Manhattan Henge, a twice yearly astronomical event in which sundown lines up with the crosstown streets of Manhattan. It looks like this:

What were the ancient peoples who built Manhattan trying to tell us about May 28 and July 12? We may never know.

The third thing I did was have an amazing dinner with respected private citizen Maureen Johnson and her English offsider, Oscar Gingersnort. This was at 11 Madison, and included crazy-ass dishes like this one:

The courses were many and wondrous, and gave us the opportunity to plot the destruction of all other YA authors what to do at Leaky Con next year.

Nextly, I had a meeting with my excellent publishers about how to market my next book, Afterworlds. The ideas were many and wondrous, and will be revealed in due time. I can’t wait to see what you guys think of this book, which has been three years in the writing. (Because it’s really two books in one.)

Afterworlds will come out late next year, probably on October 28. (This date is a clue to the book’s subject matter! Spin on that one, fannish brains!)

One of my other projects for this trip was to start gathering my “papers,” all the editorial, artistic, and business flotsam that I’ve collected over the last two decades. I’ll be donating them to an as-yet-undetermined institute of higher learning as a huge tax dodge boon to future scholars.

The first step was to collect exactly one first printing of each of my foreign editions, a project which, even in its opening stages, ate my living room floor:

I also found my very first (incomplete) novel, the least embarrassing page of which looks like this:

And that’s all you will ever see of that novel, unless you travel to the as-yet-undetermined institute of higher learning personally. (It’ll be in the box with the big padlock encrusted with contact poison.)

I just realized that this piece of juvenilia is called Keeps, only one letter away from a somewhat more recent (and less appalling) novel of mine. I wonder what the ancient peoples who made me become a writer were trying to tell us about the letters “-eeps.”

In mid-July, Justine and I also had the great pleasure of teaching at Alpha, a residential sf, fantasy, and horror writing workshop for teenagers (basically, a week-and-a-half-long genre writing camp). The young writers and the staff there were smart, committed, and tremendously stylish, as you can see here:

We had a great time. The awesomeness of the students makes me think we’ll do more teaching of this kind in the future. Watch this space for details.

Also, there was a waffle tower. I haz proof:

From there, I traveled onward to San Diego Comic Con, the premier geekfest of our time. There I had many and wondrous business meetings, which you will see the fruits of soon right here. Also many costumes were witnessed. The best of which was Sharknado Hat:

I also enjoyed this shirtless steampunk dinosaur hunter (based on a Greg Broadmoor comic, I think):

Also witnessed were a cavalcade of capitalism aimed directly at the geek dollar, like these bathrobes:

And these leggings:

So let me get this straight. These are Dr Who-themed leggings in the style of van Gogh. In the words of Tally Youngblood, isn’t that one thing too many? (Nah. It’s probably one thing too few. And, yes, I know the reference from the show.)

After SDCC, Justine and I spent a week in LA, where various meetings were had. Some of these shall be the subject of my next blog post. But no, there is no fresh movie news of consequence. The usual movie options are afoot, but the feet in question are slow moving. Sorry to disappoint you. The wheel of Hollywood turns slowly, but it grinds exceedingly fine. (Not really. It usually grinds pretty crappily. But it does grind onward in the case of Uglies and Leviathan. We shall see.)

______

Okay, more about the trip in a week or so. I’ll be blogging here more often, because I’m almost done with Afterworlds. Thanks to all of you who’ve stuck around and enlivened the comments section while I’ve been writing.

Caio for now.

I have three appearances at . If you’re in Melbourne, now might be a good time to book them. (The first appears to be sold out already.)

NOTE: The MWF brochure says that adults can only come to school events if they are accompanying a child. On the website, however, you can just buy an “Extra Adult” ticket alone. Or, you can just rent a kid. I’m not sure anyone will actually kick you out either way.

Tuesday 27 Aug 2013 at 12.30 pm

SCIENCE/FICTION

Scott Westerfeld grew up surrounded by science and technology. It’s no wonder that his books – including Uglies, Leviathan, Midnighters and Peeps – are shaped by science. Find out what makes his stories tick, and how science can be a novelist’s best friend.

Venue: ACMI Cinema 2

Code: 2603; Age: Year 6-9

Price: $7 (SOLD OUT)

Wednesday 28 Aug 2013 at 10.00 am

THE STEAMPUNK WORLD OF LEVIATHAN

The Leviathan trilogy is set in a steampunk World War I. The books even look like they were published in 1914, when almost all books were illustrated, even books for adults. Tour this extraordinarily rich world with the perfect guide, author Scott Westerfeld.

Venue: Deakin Edge

Code: 1701; Age: Year 5-8

Price: $7

Wednesday 28 Aug 2013 at 12.30 pm

SCIENCE FICTION SCIENCE FACT

Scott Westerfeld and Michael Pryor talk about the inventions and ideas first put forward in fiction, later proved to be fact – or wildly off the mark. Who is the better guide: scientist or novelist? Or does the future rely on both?

Venue: ACMI Cinema 2

Code: 2703; Age: Year 5-8

Price: $7

for more info and to book tickets.

As part of teaching at the Alpha Teen Workshop, I’ll be appearing in Greensburg, PA. Justine will be there with me! Here are the details:

Sunday, July 14

2:00-4:30PM

Barnes & Noble Greensburg

5155 Route 30

Greensburg, Pa. 15601

Click here for the store locator.

For those of you not in western PA, here’s another cool Uglies trailer (or really, a title sequence) by Kate Warinsky. It’s not the real thing, even though it looks like it.

Click here for bigger.

Enjoy!

Back in the sepia-toned days of early 2005—before Twitter, T-Pain, or even Twilight—I published a book called Uglies. Of course, back in those days, we didn’t call them books. We called them codexes, but it was much the same object: a quantity of papyrus that told a story.

Anyway, back then, book trailers weren’t really a thing. Trailers were for movies (which we called flicker-shows) or sometimes for videogames (which were collectively known as Pong). So Uglies was unleashed into the world with only the whispers of a few score Simon & Schuster sales reps (or bookmongers, as we knew them) to guide its passage.

By the time my next big series, Leviathan, hit bookstores in 2009, trailers were all the rage. So this beautiful example was created, and has since been viewed over half a million times. And yet Uglies remained untrailered.

Many of you sought to correct this imbalance by creating your own Uglies trailers, like this one, this one, this one, or this one. All of which are pretty (heh) cool.

But the time has come for Uglies to have its own official trailer!

So here it is at last: Uglies, the trailer!

If you know any other unofficial Uglies trailers, please link to them in the comments!

As the guy who wrote Uglies, there are certain kinds of news stories that are forwarded to me by everyone. Hi-tech tattoos, bizarre plastic surgery, stuff that hovers, and of course anything having to do with beauty. So it was no surprise that a recent story about the Miss Korea contest flooded my inbox.

The basic story went like this: Plastic surgery is so prevalent in South Korea that all the contestants in their national beauty contest look freakishly alike. Look, we haz proof!

And yes, I will admit that this is a somewhat chilling image. With a few exceptions, it looks like twenty photos of the same woman dressed and styled a bit differently. And yes, the South Korean appetite for plastic surgery is large. According to this NY Times article, about 20% of women there have had some sort of cosmetic procedure. These are true facts.

But whenever you run into a story like this one, that depends so heavily on a telling photographic image, please remember one simple rule: photographs aren’t real.

Photographs are artifacts of technology, records of specific combinations of light, lens, and angle. Photographs are easily manipulated. Photographs are two-dimensional representations of a 3-D world. Photographs can be more or less accurate, but they are never the whole story.

Take the worst photo ever taken of you and compare it to the best ever taken. Do they look even remotely like the same person?

For that matter, pick up your phone and take a photo of yourself right now. Then walk to a different part of your room and take another. Same place, same hair, same clothes, but often these two photos will look completely different. Not because you photoshopped them or cheated in some other way, but simply because the living, breathing, moving reality of you got sliced into two different tiny moments of time.

The forces of light, shadow, and expression morphed you into two different versions of yourself. Neither of which was real, because photographs aren’t real! Using a single image to reflect a real human being is like describing a lush, complex novel in a sentence. Sometimes you can tell which which book someone’s talking about, but a whole lot goes missing.

Back to our Korean beauty queens. Here are two of them before and after hair, make-up, and photoshopping got involved:

I say again: photographs aren’t real.

Korea doesn’t have some mass convergence of facial phenotypes caused by cosmetic surgery. Maybe they will one day, and maybe in certain social circles there one can spot noticeable similarities. But all we have proof of here is a particular aesthetic of hair, make-up, and photoshoppery associated with a particular beauty contest.

There is no emergency. Return to your homes, Crims.

(The before-and-after images first appeared on Ilbe, and as far as I can tell, reached the English-speaking infosphere on koreaBANG. Thanks to both for this valuable service.)

So whenever you read about a scientific study on beauty that relied on people rating photographs (as I did while writing Uglies), or see a story about how bloated or haggard some poor celebrity has become, or come across at photos that make you feel bad about yourself, just remember . . .

Photographs aren’t real. But you are.

___________

On a COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE, here is my new author photo! I haven’t done one in ten years, and given that I just turned fifty, I figured it was time.

In the interest of full disclosure, I offer you the image before and after it was slightly retouched by my sister-in-law, noted visual effects artist Niki Bern, and include my notes to her.

Please do not actually USE that one as my author’s photo.

Instead, go with this version:

photo by Niki Bern, 2013

Everyone has permission to use this in all media forever. A bigger one can be found here.

If you’ve never tried the audio book of Leviathan, it’s pretty awesome. Alan Cumming does a wonderful job with all the accents and characters.

For the next day or so, you can download the audiobook for only $5.99 from Audible. (Offer only good in the US, I think.)

Click here to make it happen.

As a reminder, here’s one of my interviews with Alan about the books:

Also, on Monday morning, US time, there will be another low-price offer for another of my books, which I’ll announce right here. I’m not allowed to tell you till then, so come back Monday!

Last night I had a great time at the Aurealis Awards in Sydney. And I’ll be appearing at the Sydney Writer’s Festival next week. On Saturday, May 25, at 11:30AM, I’ll be on a panel with Lauren Beukes, David M. Henley, and James Bradley.

What is speculative fiction, and where do the boundaries start to blur between genres and sub-genres? Have the classic genres changed now that we live in a world where technology has caught up?

This is free and no bookings required. Event details.

Just got back from my 50th birthday vacation, and will resume normal blogging shortly. Thanks for sticking around.

When I was at Adelaide Writers Week last month, I did an extended interview with Sean Williams, who writes the Trouble Twisters series with Garth Nix. The ABC was kind enough to film the talk and put it online.

I talk about Uglies, Leviathan and the history of illustrations, living with another writer, from whence inspiration comes, my other books, and pretty much everything else writerly. It’s a whole hour long!

Hope you enjoy it. Thanks to Adelaide Writers Week for having me, to everyone who asked questions, to the ABC, and to Sean for being a great interviewer.

Here is the ABC page where you can download this as audio or video. Click here for the other talks from Adelaide Writers Week.

A few notes:

1) For you USians, note that “the ABC” (Australian Broadcasting Company) is not the same as “ABC” (American Broadcasting Company).

2) At 13:15, I meant to say “Book 2″ instead of “Book 3.”

3) Justine, in the audience, is caught tweeting at 26:45.

4) My pronunciation of “manga” is weird sometimes. I’m from Texas.

5) At 36:00 I briefly confuse Miyake with Miyazaki, because I was wearing the former. #humblebrag