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Turns out I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year.

Of course, I recently wrote a book in which a young Wrimo gets published, Afterworlds, and I’ve been close to the NaNo organization for a while. (I’m on their Writers Board, and here’s a pep talk I did for them.) But I’ve never technically done NaNo itself—writing the first draft of a novel in November.

But now I have this secret project due in early December, and I see that it’s a few days before Halloween. It’s all coming together! So I’ll be posting my word count and chugging along with the rest of you.

If you want to know more about the concept and the organization, click here.

Need some inspiration in telling your own story? Here’s NaNo’s Sarah Mackey speaking at NerdCon about why stories matter:

Congratulations to those shortlisted for this year’s Aurealis awards. As a judge of the YA novels and short stories, I feel bereft for those whose fascinating works couldn’t be included. Hopefully some of these will appear on other shortlists. Our best short story selections veer towards the upper end of the YA age group with […]

Greetings from Sydney. I’ve been here for a month now, recovering from the Afterworlds tour and putting the finishing touches on my next novel. (The title, etc. of this book is secret now, but much will be revealed early next year.)

In the meantime, and with due deference to the season, here are a couple of cool items to compliment your Hanukwanzamas haul:

Barnes & Noble has a signed and bonus content edition of Afterworlds on its shelves now. The extra material is one of the chapters that Darcy discarded after receiving her editorial letter. (So it’s part of Darcy’s book, pre-rewrites!)

This edition has two stickers on it, one for the extra content and one because it’s signed by me:

Alas, you can’t order the signed version online. But you can order the bonus content edition (without signature) right here.

For Uglies fans, I earlier this year wrote a short story called “How David Got His Scar.” The story is set in the time before David has met Tally, but after Shay’s runaway friends, Croy and Astrix, have reached the Smoke. It tells the secret story of David’s eyebrow scar.

To find this B&N hardback exclusive edition of Uglies, look for this black sticker in B&N stores:

You can also order this edition online right here.

Okay, there are some other holiday deals out there, but I can’t remember them. Will update this post when I do.

And happy Hanukwanzamas!

My twenty-city, three-country, back-breaking tour for Afterworlds is done! Now I can go back to that other job I have. Which is, um . . . writing. Yeah, that’s it.

A few notable things:

The New York Times gave me a great review, which contained this marketing-department-happy-making pull-quote:

“‘Afterworlds’ is a wonderful book for any young person with an interest in growing up to be a writer.”

Though I would add the words or who is already a writer. Because it’s November, and real writings are underway.

Of course, we can forgive the paternal tone here. We all know that YA reviews in the NY Times aren’t targeted at actual teenagers. (I mean, the review also compares Darcy Patel to Mary Tyler Moore and Cary Bradshaw, as opposed to any characters created in, say, the current century.) And trust me, I fully comprehend that it’s churlish to take issue with one’s positive coverage in the New York-frickin’-Times. So I’m not so much complaining as thinking aloud about who the imagined audience for this review is—not teenagers, pretty clearly—and what that says about the overall relevance of the Paper of Record to the greater project of YA lit.

But please, all you Times-reading adults with credit cards, go order my book for the writerly young people in your life! They’re the ones with dark circles under their eyes muttering “word count, word count” at the breakfast table this month.

They aren’t just growing up to be writers; they are writers right now.

Other stuff:

My first flight in the second leg of the tour was delayed, which left me in DFW airport at almost exactly midnight. If you’ve read Afterworlds, you know that this is pretty hilarious.

In Dallas, a model-making fan named Jon-Luc showed me his diorama of the death of the Goeben, which was pretty amazing:

The kind students of Alvin, TX gave me this amazing gift basket:

And at the Texas Teen Book Festival, I learned that there is a tortoise named Deryn.

Had a lovely time at Changing Hands, as always. And at Hicklebee’s Books in San Jose, CA, where visiting authors sign the walls, doors, and columns, I did something naughty:

Had a great time at the NaNoWriMo fund-raiser at Books Inc. in San Francisco. Even though we were up against the Giants in the World Series, we pulled a big crowd. Way to put books before sportsball, SF!

Boston Book Festival was the bomb, as was Toronto last week. And the tour finally wrapped up at the amazing YALLfest in Charleston, SC, where I met the very smart and terribly poised 16-year-old author of Popular, Maya van Wagenen:

And then, with Varian Johnson, I conspired to photobomb the crap out of noted rappers V-Roth, S-Dess, E-Hop, G-4, and D-Paige.*

All in all, it was too much fun.

To all who came to my events, thank you! I hope it was as fun for you as it was for me. For those of you who missed me, I’m sorry we didn’t connect. Maybe next year.

Yes, I will be touring again next year, though for an entirely new series. (TOP SECRET!)

*Veronica Roth, Sarah Dessen, Ellen Hopkind, Gayle Forman, and Danielle Page. Duh.

I’m still on tour for Afterworlds, because touring is fun.

If you live in Texas (Dallas, Austin and Houston), or in Phoenix, San Francisco, or Boston, you can come see me in the next two weeks! And in November I’ll be in Toronto and Charleston, SC. Just check out my Appearances page for details.

For the rest of you, here are some amusing photos from tour.

This is one I took for my upcoming Tumblr, IndieBookstoreBathrooms:

Here’s what an audience looks like when you’re giving a presentation. In no way intimidating!

And this is evidence of studious reading:

It’s always great to see Midnighters tattoos:

Holly Black and Cassandra Clare were also on tour at the same time, so they left me and Justine friendly notes in various bookstores:

It’s always cool seeing one’s name in lights.

Unlike the cake, the shortbread is not a lie.

And in St. Louis, I got to be in my own covers. AT LAST.

Anyway, that’s a mere fraction of all the cool stuff that happened. Thanks to everyone who came out to buy books and laugh at my jokes. You are all wonderful.

It’s that time again: A TIME OF SPOILAGE.

Use the comment thread of this post to discuss all that happens in Afterworlds. If you haven’t read the book, however, it might be wise to NOT LOOK AT THE COMMENTS.

Don’t forget what happened to this person back in May of 2006. I quote from the famous Specials spoiler thread:

oh god, i read the spoiler section before i read the book. i would have read the book by now but the bookstore doesn’t have it in yet! i got the first two before the sale date. why can’t i do that now!? crap i can’t believe i read the spoiler section . . . crap

The lamentations of one who has been spoiled!

If you haven’t got the book yet, go watch the Afterworlds videos instead. Or if you’re in NYC, come see my launch event tonight.

Or of you live anywhere else, go check out my tour schedule and come get a book signed by me!

JUST DON’T READ THE SPOILERS.

This is an excerpt from a work in progress called How to Write YA. It’s a companion to my next book, Afterworlds about a young novelist living in NYC. Afterworlds launches Sep 23 in NYC, and you can pre-order it at the bottom of this page.

Also, I’m on tour soon! Click here for dates.

What Are Novels?
I’m not going to talk much about the history of the novel. Your local high school, university, bookstore, and library all have departments devoted to that subject. If you want to be a novelist, you should be reading lots of novels, new and old.

Go do that. Keep doing it your whole life.

For now, though, suffice it to say that the novel was invented somewhere between four hundred and a thousand years ago, and in the last century has superseded poetry, short stories, essays, and the rest to become the dominant form of literature.

Novels are powerful. They can help reform corrupt industries (The Jungle), start civil wars (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and provide touchstones for decades-long political movements (Native Son). Novels are so successful that their DNA has invaded other forms, such as narrative history, true crime, and memoir.

So what are novels?

My favorite definition is “a long piece of prose that has something wrong with it.” I don’t know who came up with this, but its point is clear: novels are lengthy and lack the shiny perfection of shorter works. They are usually written in the rhythms of natural speech, also known as prose.

But not always! There are many novels in verse (in YA, most notably Ellen Hopkins’ bestsellers about troubled teenagers). And novels that are mostly prose often include other stuff: poetry, song lyrics, mathematical equations, computer code, “realia” like score cards and bus schedules, and even words twisted and transformed into visual art (Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, 1953). Before the twentieth century most fiction was illustrated. So, yes, novels can have pictures too.

In other words, novels are big and imperfect and supremely rugged, like a battered old trunk that can hold pretty much anything.

Young writers ask me all the time, “How long should my novel be?”

The lower bound of the novel is fuzzy. Science fiction folks (like me) tend to use the Hugo Awards’ definition: forty thousand words or more. In lay terms, a novel should be more than a hundred pages. Of course, the Hugo categories below that length are “novella” and “novelette,” terms that simply mean “little novel.”

Far more important: there is no upper bound to the novel. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is four thousand pages long. It was published in seven volumes from 1909 to 1927, but it’s all one novel.

I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s answer to the question, “How long should a man’s legs be?” He quipped, “Long enough to reach the ground.” In other words, your novel should be long enough to get to the end of your story.

The artist in me doesn’t care how long your novel is. (But the commercial hack in me suggests that you stay between fifty thousand and a hundred-fifty thousand words. Okay? Are you happy now? You made me be a commercial hack.)

Here’s a much more interesting question: What are novels good at?

Every art form has its specific “affordances,” a fancy design term that asks of an object, “What can you do with it?”

Ropes are good for pulling things, but not for pushing them. Coffee mugs are good for hot liquids (the handle keeps your fingers from getting burned) but desultory for champagne (you can’t see the bubbles!). FaceBook is good for finding old friends, but terrible for keeping old friends (and advertisers) from finding you. Twitter is good for snarking at the Music Video Awards, less so for nuanced discussions.

So let’s compare the affordances of the novel to other narrative art forms, to find out what novels are good for.

Imagine the opening shot of a film: a dirty and decrepit room, years’ worth of old newspapers stacked against the walls, opened and half-eaten cans of beans everywhere, and one wall covered with newspaper clippings about the president of the United States, the eyes scratched out of every photo.

Within seconds, we know that we’re in the house of a crazed assassin. Tension!

This is something films are good at: establishing settings more or less instantly. A film can open in an alternative steampunk Bangkok in the 1930s and, even if you don’t know anything about Thailand or steampunk or the 1930s, you are there.

A novel would require a lot of text to create a setting of that complexity. The writer can’t upload a whole image straight into your retina, but has to introduce the elements one by one. Novels have no audio track; they can’t give the viewer direct experience of the music playing next door, or the tone of a person’s voice.

On the other hand, a written word can do things a movie can’t. Many details escape the camera’s view: the etymology of a phrase in Thai, the construction history of a Bangkok Airways zeppelin passing overhead, or the text of a newspaper clipping that the assassin tore from the wall yesterday and burned. And novels can engage smells, tastes, and textures in a way that films, being audio-visual, can only suggest.

Another cool thing about novels: they have infinite budgets. You can build a whole city for a one-page scene, then burn it down. Your only limit on extras and special effects is your imagination and ability. (Comics also have infinite budgets, with a combination of novelistic and filmic affordances. But that’s another book.)

Here’s a similar, but more subtle, affordance: novels can compel aesthetic reactions across boundaries of taste. What I mean is, a skillful writer can convince readers that a group of musician characters is the most awesome band ever. But in a movie a real band has to appear and play actual music, which will not please everyone.

We novelists reach into our readers’ head and make them create their own perfect music.

The same thing happens with descriptions of beauty and charm, which is why when books are made into films, the casting decisions invariably cause dissent. Novels co-opt the reader’s imagination to create whatever the story requires. Every reader constructs their own version of that graceful waltz, that gorgeous sunset, that irresistible face.

On top of what novels can show the reader, they’re also very good at hiding things. If we need to, we writers can mention “a car” without any brand, vintage, or state of repair. If a detail isn’t important, we can make it disappear. We can walk around in a character’s head for a whole novel and not find out how old they are, what they’re wearing, or what they look like. (In first person, we can even decide not to disclose their gender.)

Sure, filmmakers sometimes avoid showing the main character, but it’s clunky and obvious what they’re doing. In a skillful writer’s hands, the reader might not even notice.

Let’s be clear about something: you can attempt any narrative trick in any medium, and as a young writer you should be stretching the form. But the fact is, some things will work better in film, some in writing, some in comics, and some on the stage.

If you find yourself using a coffee mug as a champagne glass, or as a hammer, you might want to rethink.

Okay, we’ve talked about what novels are good at, but what are novels best at? What’s the thing they do better than any other medium?

Here’s one answer: When you read a novel, you can know the agony of a character’s stomach ache, the limitations of their colorblindness, what bacon means to them, or the way they feel when a loved one comes through the door. Their fears, hatreds, beliefs, prejudices, and the exact words they’re thinking can be laid out on the page. All the fragments of a character’s memories and knowledge can be accessed as easily as the facts in the reader’s own brain.

I would argue being inside people’s heads is the grade-A, number-one affordance of the novel. To never access anyone’s thoughts or feelings in a novel is like using a champagne glass as a hammer. (Artists like to do that sort of thing, of course. But if you try it, you should be ready for the broken glass and severed fingers.)

Here’s a crazy theory for you:

We humans have a superpower. We can look at another person, observe their facial expressions, words, and body language, then add this data together with everything we know about them and all the other humans we’ve ever observed, and make guesses about what’s going on inside that person right now.

Are they sad? Angry? Hungry? About to stab us?

This trick, called empathy, is a very useful day-to-day skill. It helps us know when to comfort someone, when to make a joke, and when to run away. But its long term consequences are far bigger, because empathy turns us into social creatures, who can cooperate to build tribes and cities and the internet. It’s the basis of art, ethics, and civilized society, not to mention a crazy little thing called love.

The novel is the outgrowth of this ability, because to read is to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. Just as movie cameras are modeled on the human eye, the novel is modeled on our empathy. It’s not about watching someone, it’s about being in their head. In other words:

Novels are machines for becoming other people.

As we read, we become someone else. Often this person has a more exciting and glamorous life than we do. They may wield magic or posses awesome technology, live in another era or on another planet. More important, they may think differently than we do, and see the world in radically strange ways, and yet we are still drawn into those ways of thinking and seeing. To read is to travel, not just geographically, but into other minds, other lives.

This is what the novel is best at. And that’s because—more than any other medium—novels are an art form grounded in point of view.

Next week, Part 4—”POV”
Click here to read Part 1, “What Is YA?”
Click here to read Part 2, “What Are Stories?”

My next novel, Afterworlds, is about a young writer reworking her first novel after NaNoWriMo. I thought a fun and useful promotion for it would be a series of writing advice posts. I got carried away.

So between now and November, this blog will host excerpts from a non-fiction book I’m releasing next year, called How to Write YA. You can’t buy it yet, because it’s not done, but you can preorder Afterworlds on the bottom of this page. It comes out September 23.

What Is YA?
Young adult fiction has exploded over the last two decades. Once a small and sleepy corner of publishing, YA has become a major part of the industry, the only category to have grown by double digits every year since the mid-1990s. YA is now a profit center that helps keep the rest of the industry afloat, and the primary engine for creating new readers. The massive sales of YA mega-hits like Twilight, Hunger Games, and The Fault in Our Stars have also help kept a lot of bookstores from going out of business.

I have some theories about why this sudden explosion of young adult literature came about, but I’ll come back to those later. First, let me clear up a really important misconception: The genre of YA is not “fiction for teenagers.”

Partly, this is a matter of fact. Studies suggest that about half the YA audience is adult. But more important, the idea that YA is for teenagers is a conceptual error about the definition of genre itself. Genres are sets of practices, techniques, and stylistic conventions. Genres consist of shared assumptions and shared canon. In other words, a genre is not an audience. When someone tells you that they write “novels for men,” or “novels for old people,” or “novels for urban youth,” they aren’t talking about genre.

So what are YA novels, then, if not books for teenagers?

They are novels about teenagers, from a teenage perspective.

It’s pretty simple, really. YA is the set of all stories about what it’s like to be a teenager. Not from an adult looking on (or looking back) but from inside the teenage years while they are happening. YA is literature (or movies, TV, comics, video games, ballet, or whatever) that takes us into the hearts, minds, and lives of teenagers.

So how did this particular genre get so huge? Why would so many readers want to inhabit the lives of people who aren’t quite children, nor really adults?

To understand that, you have to know what a teenager is.

What Are Teenagers?
A couple of hundred years ago, there was no such thing as teenagers. The word did not exist, nor did the concept. There were only children and adults.

When people turned thirteen or so, many joined the navy, or got married, or went into the mines and factories. Many young people worked sixty-hour weeks, and child soldiers were common. (Some were rather good at their jobs. In the US Civil War, an eleven-year-old named Willie Johnston won the Medal of Honor, the highest his country bestowed.) I spew these facts not to outrage you, but to make a simple point: teenagers didn’t always exist. We had to invent them.

It happened slowly. Britain, in the throes of industrial revolution, often led the way. There, the workday for eleven through eighteen year-olds was shortened to a mere twelve hours in 1833. (Progress!) In 1844, the age for joining the navy as a midshipman was raised to 14. The minimum age of marriage was raised to sixteen in 1929. Over two centuries, a space opened up between the complete dependence of infancy and the rigors and responsibilities of adulthood. We had to give this space a name.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first appearance of the word “teenage” as 1928. The word “teenager” did not appear till 1949. By then, things were changing quickly. In the decades after the Second World War the industrialized world created nothing less than a new stage of life. We invented teenagers.

So what the hell are they?

The legal definitions are too long to list here. In most countries, at some point in the teenage years citizens reach the age where they are allowed vote, consent to sex, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, sign contracts, leave school, drive cars, marry, gamble, join the military, or work at other dangerous jobs. Exactly at what age these all happen depends on geography, and is the subject thousands of pages of law. These laws change all the time, buffeted by social mores, by new technologies, and by moral panics whipped into existence by some of the silliest people on the planet.

In other words, it’s all a bit of a muddle.

The cultural aspects of being a teenager are just as tangled. Whatever teens flock to—skateboards, file sharing, hoodies, rock music, rap music, MySpace—will soon become the subject of a moral panic. This is because teenagers frighten adults.

Five little kids in a store is cute. Five adults, good business. But when five teenagers gather, it’s loitering. It’s time for a curfew, or closed-circuit cameras, or a device that emits annoying high-pitched sounds that only teens can hear. (Seriously. Just google “mosquito teens.”) To put it simply, adults see teenagers as big enough to be dangerous, but not old enough to have been civilized yet.

They are uglies, if you will.

Here’s the weird thing: Despite this underlying terror, popular culture celebrates the teen years as carefree and happy, a time of consequence-free exploration. And in our youth-worshipping commercial world, teenagers (those with perfect skin and symmetrical faces, at least) are put on a pedestal. Images of teens are used to sell everything from clothes to food to music.

And let’s not forget the drama of those years—the time of firsts. Somewhere in all this muddle is when most people experience their first sexy kiss, tell their first meaningful lie, and suffer or commit their first real betrayal. Often for the first time, someone close to them dies. Most people drink their first beer, break their first law, and have their first political awakening as teenagers. These years see our first jobs, our first glimpses of independence, and our first life choices so serious that we can never completely undo them. And, of course, our first loves.

So let us recap. We have a global culture inventing an entirely new phase of life, engaged in a messy, noisy conversation about what it means to be an adolescent. We have an oppressed class, whose passions are harassed and banned, whose rights are curtailed, even while their customs are celebrated and their images ever more glorified and sexualized. We have an age of drama and emotion and reversal, where good days are transcendent, and bad days can feel like the end of the world.

Seems like there might be some pretty interesting stories in there.

Later this week, Part 2—”What Are Stories.”

Starting in three weeks, I will be on tour in the US and UK.
Here are the dates!

Tues, Sept 23
6:00PM
New York Public Library, Jefferson Market Branch
425 Ave of the Americas
New York, NY 10011
For this special launch event, I will be joined by Libba Bray, Maureen Johnson, David Levithan, and Robin Wasserman! Books will be on sale here, as at all events.

Wed, Sept 24
7:00PM
Quail Ridge Bookstore
3522 Wade Ave
Raleigh, NC 27607

Thurs, Sept 25
6:00PM
Barnes & Noble
300 Neshaminy Mall
Bensalem, PA 19020

Sat, Sept 27
7:00PM
Politics & Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20008

Monday, Sept 29
7:00PM
St. Louis Public Library – Schlafly
225 N. Euclid Ave
St. Louis, MO 63108

Wed, Oct 1
6:30PM
Shorewood Public Library
3920 N. Murray Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53211

Thurs, Oct 2
7:00PM
Anderson’s
123 W. Jefferson Ave
Naperville, IL 60540

Sat-Sunday, Oct 4-5
I’ll be in London, England for the Young Adult Literature Weekender
Details to come.

Wed, Oct 8
4:00PM
BookCourt
163 Court St
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Thurs, Oct 9
6:00PM
New York Comic Con
Javits Center
655 W. 34th St
New York, NY 10001

Tues, Oct 14
7:00PM
Barnes & Noble
Stonebriar Center Mall
Frisco, TX 75034

Thurs, Oct 16
7:00PM
Blue Willow Bookshop
14532 Memorial Dr.
Houston, TX 77079

Sat, Oct 18
12:25PM – panel event
2:15PM – solo talk
Austin Teen Book Festival
St. Edward’s University
3001 S. Congress Ave
Austin, TX 78704

Mon, Oct 20
7:00PM
Changing Hands
6428 So. McClintock
Tempe, AZ 85283

Tues, Oct 21
7:00PM
Hicklebee’s
1378 Lincoln Ave
San Jose, CA 95129

Wed, October 22, 2014
7:00PM
Books Inc. Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness St
San Francisco, CA 94102
This is a special ticketed event, where I’ll be giving loads of writing advice. Price includes a copy of the book. Fifteen percent of proceeds go to NaNoWriMo!

Sat, Oct 25
6:00PM
Boston Book Festival
1100 Massachusetts Ave
Boston, MA 02138

Nov 7 – 8
Time TK
YALL FEST
Charleston, SC

The schedule for my Afterworlds tour is slowly coming together, and I’ll be posting a draft of it here soon. But there’s one special event I want to mention now:

On October 22, I’ll be doing an event in San Francisco to benefit NaNoWriMo. In this special presentation, I’ll talking about the craft of writing, the importance of NaNo, and other stuff of interest to young and not-so-young writers.

This is a ticketed event, and you can buy tickets now! (See below.) The ticket price of $22 INCLUDES a copy of Afterworlds and a guaranteed place in the signing line. On top of which, 15% of the purchase price goes to support NaNoWriMo.

All the folks at Books Inc. are early supporters of my career, so I’ll make sure that this is the best event I can make it. Hope to see a ton of you there.

Wed, October 22, 2014
7:00PM
Books Inc. Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness St
San Francisco, CA 94102

Buy tickets for NaNoWriMo and Books Inc. Present SCOTT WESTERFELD

Brown Paper Tickets Ticket Widget Loading…

Click Here to visit the Brown Paper Tickets event page.

If you can’t make the even but would like to pre-order Afterworlds from Books Inc, click here.

As you guys know, I’ve been matching donations to NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program. Today, Tuesday June 17, is the best time to donate, because folks who donate between noon and 1PM US Eastern (9AM-10AM Pacific) will be automatically entered to win one of five signed copies of Afterworlds.

That’s right, you get to read it NOW.

The YWP is revamping their website, refreshing their already excellent (and free!) curriculum guides for schools who participate in Nano, and expanding their outreach to correctional facilities, halfway houses, and juvenile detention facilities.

Click here to donate and support young writers.

The trailer for my next book, Afterworlds, will premier on io9 sometime today! (When, exactly? That’s a secret!) It will appear right here later tonight.

My two events at BEA today (Friday, May 30) are:

The Craft of Writing Panel
Me with Brandon Mull, Kiera Cass, and Amy Ewing.
Uptown Stage, Javits Center
2:00 – 2:30PM

Afterworlds Signing
S&S booth #2638-9, Level 3
3:45 – whenever 150 copies are gone.

Hope you guys like the trailer! In the meantime, check out my HUGE BANNER at BEA:

To all you folks coming to Book Expo America in NYC, I’ll be signing copies of Afterworlds and otherwise entertaining you! For you non-BEA attenders, I’ll also be at the 92nd St Y for the launch of Cassandra Clare’s City of Heavenly Fire. And there’s also a surprise on Friday. (Scroll down.)

Here’s the whole week:

Book Launch for The City of Heavenly Fire
With me, Maureen Johnson, Kelly Link, and Holly Black.
Lexington Avenue at 92nd St
Kaufmann Concert Hall
Monday, May 26
10:00PM

Click here for tickets and details.

BEA EVENTS

Talent Show and Silent Auction
River Pavilion, Javits Convention Center
Wednesday, May 28
5:00-7:30PM

Join the ABC Children’s Group and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) in supporting and protecting the free speech rights of young readers. More than 100 pieces of art from well-known children’s illustrators will be auctioned. Proceeds from the auction support ABFFE, the Kids’ Right to Read Project, and Banned Books Week.

I shall be performing my uncanny “double-Donald.” You must buy tickets!

The Craft of Writing Panel
Me with Brandon Mull, Kiera Cass, and Amy Ewing.
Uptown Stage, Javits Center
Friday, May 30
11:00 – 11:30AM

Afterworlds Signing
S&S booth #2638-9, Level 3 (not the cattle yard)
Javits Center
Friday, May 30
3:45 – 4:45PM

Afterworlds Trailer Revealed
Friday, May 30
Time: ????
Website: ????

Stay tuned for details on this. But here’s a behind-the-scenes picture from making the trailer:

Pretty cool, huh? More still coming in the next week.

And finally, I’m still matching any and all contributions to the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program, the wing of Nano that assists teen novelists. The YWP is revamping their website, refreshing their already excellent (and free!) curriculum guides for schools who participate in Nano, and expanding their outreach to correctional facilities, halfway houses, and juvenile detention facilities.

Donate in the next month through this website, and Justine and I will match the first ten grand of your donations.

Tell your friends!

As a little kid, I understood by doing. I rarely listened to music without picking up an instrument, or watched TV without twitching along with the scenes, like those old guys whose shoulders dip and fists clench whenever a boxing match is on. More important to the ultimate course of my life, I couldn’t read without writing.

The word “fanfic” had barely been invented in those pre-internet days, but I spent thousands of pages cloning Tolkien, wrote many proto-novels channeling Joanna Russ, and still commit the occasional Raymond Chandler-esque simile.

Writing has always been a part of my reading. I think it’s a part of any writer’s reading. We understand books by making them.

That’s why I’m a supporter of NaNoWriMo, the month-long festival that invites everyone to become a novelist. A few years ago, Justine and I produced writing tips for every day of November. And my next book is about a young Wrimo who sells her novel to a big publishing house and moves to NYC.

But I’m here today to raise money. This year, the NaNoWriMo Associate Board is focusing on the Young Writers Program, the wing of Nano that assists teen novelists. The YWP is revamping their website, refreshing their already excellent (and free!) curriculum guides for schools who participate in Nano, and expanding their outreach to correctional facilities, halfway houses, and juvenile detention facilities.

This is all great stuff. If you love novels and writers, you should help out. And as a bonus, if you donate in the next month through this website, I’ll match the first ten grand of your donations.

Seriously. We all want to see the novel flourish in the future, right? We want young people to understand the form, to embrace its history and its future, and to continue the mad practice of creating these absurdly long, imperfect strings of text.

We all want this.

So click here to read more about the YWP and to donate. Then tell your friends to do the same.

As you know, I’ve already revealed the cover of Afterworlds, three posts ago. But I also wanted to show you the cover of the special advanced readers’ copies (ARCs) sent to bookstore owners and the like, because it’s seriously my favorite promotional object of my entire career:

Now, I know that looks like the back cover, but it’s the FRONT, because the blurbs were so funny that Sales was like, “Put them on the front!” (And yes, they are real blurbs. Thanks to John, Maureen, and Shannon!)

Alas, only 200 copies of this were printed, and they are hard to acquire. I only own three, and you can’t have them!

For those of you in the trade, there will be many more ARCs with the real cover, at places like Book Expo America. (I’m signing there!) But I love that these silly ones are in short supply.

So collectible.

Also, I knew this thing was long, but now that it’s here in physical form and 599 pages, I realize how THICK that is:

As you can see it’s 5cm (2 inches) thick, almost twice as fat as Justine‘s next book, Razorhurst. Which is her longest book yet.

Of course, I’m cheating because it’s really two books (Darcy’s book and the book about Darcy). But still, I win.

For the next week, I’ll answer any non-spoilery questions about my next novel left comment thread of this post.

Let me answer a few obvious questions, just to get them out of the way:
Afterworlds comes out September 23, 2014.
It will be published by S&S in the US and UK, Penguin in Australia, Pocket Jeunesse in France, and Eksmo in Russia.
More countries/languages to come!
I will be going on tour (no firm schedule till late summer).
No movie or TV deals on Afterworlds yet.

Over to you guys now. Ask away!

(Note: Questions about other books will be mocked or ignored!)

Publishers Weekly has a lovely article about my next novel, Afterworlds, which comes out September 23.

Click here to read it.

The piece has lots of interesting details about the book, and some bonus news about the super secret Uglies deal I’ve been working on for the last few months. (More on that in the next few weeks, right here!) Also news about my “How to Write YA” book, which also comes out this year, and which will be serialized on this very blog.

And just to round things out, here’s the lovely cover from the Hungarian edition of Goliath, painted by Richárd Vass:

There will be lots more in this blog about Afterworlds as the year goes on!