You can catch me and Scott at BookPeople tonight and then you can see me do my thing in San Antonio tomorrow night:

Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 7:30PM
With Scott Westerfeld
BookPeople
603 N. Lamar
Austin, Texas

Thursday, 20 November 2008, 7:00PM
Barnes & Noble
Northwoods Shopping Center
18030 Highway 281 North
San Antonio, Texas

Hope to see some of you there!

No, I can’t tell you the names of any of the contributors. But trust me, they are all fabulously excellent writers.

Yes, it is a YA anthology. It will be edited by the marvellous Karen Wojtyla. That’s right, me and Holly, who are editing the Zombie versus Uni***ns anthology, will in turn be edited. It’s, like, a whole editing chain.

Sorry, the anthology is closed.

Yes, there will be lots of different kinds of zombies. Not just your regular Romero types.

I have no idea about the uni***n side of things. I doubt there’s more than one kind. And if there is, who cares? Hmmm, maybe you should direct your uni***n questions to Holly Black or to Diana Peterfreund both of whom know ridiculous amounts about that very lame topic.

Send your zombie questions my way. If I don’t know the answer I will turn to Robert Hood, who is Professor Zombie, and knows everything there is to know about zombies.

Thanks for all the excited emails and comments about the anthology. Us two editors are both thrilled that you’re thrilled.

GO TEAM ZOMBIE!!!!!

What is my spectacular news?

Holly Black and me are editing an anthology: Zombies Versus Unicorns, which will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2010.

We have quite the line up. There are more best-sellers and award-winners and all-round geniuses than you can pock a stick at. Sadly though I cannot name names. That part has to stay secret until the official press release. Trust me, though, you are going to be stunned when you see who is on Team Zombie and who is on Team Lame Uni***n.

Once you’ve read the anthology you’ll be able to vote on which team made a more convincing case. Who will win? Team Zombie or Team Uni***n? I trust you will all make the right decision!

Or face my wrath!

GO TEAM ZOMBIE!!!!!

I touched her hand and she smelled like cherries.

So said second grader, Dylan McAfee, on meeting Michelle Obama. I don’t know about you but I find that deeply adorable.

It is a skill I wish I had. My few attempts have been sad failures. Thing is when I read I get so sucked into the story I have no idea what’s going on around me. Which is not good when there are other people around and, worse—cars. Once I walked into a light post. Let us not speak of it.

I suspect my problem is not just reading and walking at the same time but any kind of multi-tasking. I have a slow simple brain that struggles to do more than one thing at a time. Sigh.

What about youse lot? Are you more successful than I am at walking and reading at the same time?

This is not the first time this has happened.

I wonder what it is about Second Avenue and impromptu live music? Whatever it is I heartily approve.

I miss the tuba though. That was truly excellent.

1. Or, um, some approximation thereof.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing an appearance right here in Manhattan with many fantabulous authors. I did my very first YA author appearance at Books of Wonder. Way back in the olden days with Eoin Colfer and Scott. It was incredible. Peter Glassman (Books of Wonder’s proprietor) has been very good to me and Scott in the ensuing years. It’s always a pleasure to do a Books of Wonder event:

Saturday, 15 November, 12:00PM-2:00PM
with William Boniface, P.W. Catanese,
Suzanne Collins, Joanne Dahme,
Daniel Kirk, Dean Lorey, Amanda Marrone,
Ketaki Shriram and Robin Wasserman
Books of Wonder
18 West 18th Street
New York, NY

Do please join us! Also if you attend would you do me the favour of asking every author there to declare their allegiance on the zombies versus uni***n front? We have a right to know!

Then next Wednesday I will be in Austin, Texas, city of amazing food and people and music. Yum! This is my only event of the How To Ditch Your Fairy tour that includes Scott. I think we shall have fun. Not least because BookPeople is one of my fave bookshops in the entire US of A:

Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 7:30PM
With Scott Westerfeld
BookPeople
603 N. Lamar
Austin, Texas

And then my last event of the tour will be in gorgeous San Antonio. Land of great boots and wondrous food:

Thursday, 20 November 2008, 7:00PM
Barnes & Noble
San Antonio, Texas

And thus will end my HTDYF tour.

Or will it?

Stay tuned those of you who live in Sydney and Melbourne and possibly even Perth. There’s a very good chance that in February and March I will be doing a few events at home for my fabulous Australian publisher, Allen & Unwin. Actually the Melbourne event is not a possibility anymore—it’s an actuality! More info as I gets it.

Really looking forward to meeting some more of you in the next few days and weeks! Zombie power!

Good question! Here are some of the answers:

1. Whingeing is fun. Writers in particular are totally addicted to it. We can’t not whinge.
2. Writers are boring. We don’t get out much so we don’t have much to talk about other than writing, which is one of the least interesting things ever. “Hey, guess what, guys? Today I typed! A lot. Like, I typed maybe 2,000 groupings of letters.” If we whinge about it we figure it sounds a bit more interesting. We don’t get another job because we’re boring and writing is boring: we belong together.
3. Boasting about how you have the best job in the whole world is rude and skiteful and makes rational people want to chunder¹ or kill you. “Look at me! I am so blessed and lucky! Why today I typed. A lot! I think I typed maybe 2,000 groupings of letters. I think I arranged them really well! Go me! Also I did that wearing pjs. And no one at work was mean to me. Because I work at home! Where the ice cream is. My life is perfect!” Oh, shut up, already. It is better to whinge than to skite.
4. Writing is really hard. It makes writers bleed from the eyeballs. Demons take up residence in our brain and sip on our cerebrospinal fluid. But if we told you how it really was—how there are tiny goblins—trained by our evil publishers—that hold open our eyelids and slap our fingers back on to the keyboards thus making sure we never miss a deadline and keep churning out publishable product—you would never believe it so we just whinge about the lesser aspects of writing hell. We don’t get another job because we can’t. The contract with our publishers mean we are indentured slaves until we die.
5. Writing is dead easy. Seriously all we do is sit around and type, luxuriating in our pyjamas, and ordering our minions around, while we feast on champagne and caviar. But if we let everyone know that then too many people would want to be writers. Thus, der, we pretend it’s really hard. “Ow, my brain! It burns! Too many groupings of letters today! I suffer!”

I hope that makes it all crystal clear. I live to answer your questions. And, um, write books. Like the one that’s due next Friday fer instance. Should get back to that. Or sleep, possibly. If the clanking pipes allow.

Oh, and also, what Maureen said.

Later!

1. Or as me and a bunch of my friends used to say “muntah material”. We were studying Indonesian. Don’t ask.

Why does it have to sound like banshees being tortured by trolls? What’s with the even LOUDER clanging? That’s almost, but not quite, like the bell that tolls for thee? Or me in this case.

Am I ever going to get a good night’s sleep again?

Stupid NYC with it’s stupid steam heating. I don’t ever remember it being this loud before. Is it because I have a book due on Friday?!

I’m so TIRED! Waaaaaahhhhh!!

I wish I had a horrible-noise dampening fairy.

/whinge

Yes, I am aware that steam heating is super energy efficient and good for the planet. So, no, I don’t really hate it. But if NYC wasn’t so damn cold they wouldn’t need heating. Stupid coldness.

Oops. Looks like I lied about the whinge ending.

Hahah!

The mighty zombie versus un****n debate began right here on this blog back in February 2007 with me on the side of zombies and Holly Black on the side of uni***ns. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or ignorant. Sheesh!

Let’s just say I am not happy that such a slanderous lie is circulating. John Green will be the first to tell you that it began over here.

In less cranky-making news I will be doing an appearance right here in New York City this coming Saturday with a cast of hundreds, including New York Times bestseller Suzanne Collins of Gregor and Hunger Games fame. But as far as I’m concerned the highlight is being on the same bill as Robin Wasserman of Skinned fame. Have you read it yet? If not why not?

You’ll find us here:

Saturday, 15 November, 12:00PM-2:00PM
with William Boniface, P.W. Catanese,
Suzanne Collins, Joanne Dahme,
Daniel Kirk, Dean Lorey, Amanda Marrone,
Ketaki Shriram and Robin Wasserman
Books of Wonder
18 West 18th Street
New York, NY

Who knows? If you join us you might spot some zombies. Or uni***ns. Though I hope not. I hear those single-horned creatures are definitely not toilet trained. I’m just sayin’.

Apparently we’re not the only ones noticing this phenomenon. The witty and extremely entertaining Scottish writer, Andrew O’Hagan, talked about it an interview he did as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. He claims that the majority of the girls he talked to at one London high school said they wanted to be famous and didn’t care how. He imagines them all growing into very disappointed adults and sees their desire for fame as a symptom of moral decay.

I’m not sure.

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be a writer, but I had other passing fancies. For a while I wanted to be a film director. But I never did anything about it other than watch lots and lots of movies. I didn’t get my hands on a camera, I didn’t enroll in courses to learn how, I didn’t memorise the movies I watched frame by frame. I just fantasised about making movies, which in my mind was more like writing a novel than having to deal with hundreds of different people—producers, camera people, editors, actors, best boys, digital effects people—and do all the other stuff movie directors have to do. I think I sussed even way back then that directing films was too much hard work. Especially for the likes of me. Directors don’t get to lounge around in their pjs all day.

I suspect that most of the teenagers saying they want to be famous want it the same way I wanted to direct films. Not that much. It’s a shapeless desire. They’re not interested in putting in the hard yakka to achieve it. It’s something to say while they figure out what they really want to do.

Most people don’t know what they want to do till they’re long past high school. For one thing you don’t have that much of a clue about all the professions and ways to make money there are when you’re in high school. My sister had no idea she was going to wind up working in the digital effects industry. I doubt she even knew such an industry existed way back then.

It’s one way in which I’ve always felt lucky. I’ve always known I wanted to write. Most of the people I went to school with had no idea what they wanted to do and stumbled into various different jobs and professions before they found one that suited.

Some people never figure it out. Or get the opportunity to do what they want to do.

Fame is a safe thing to say when you don’t know what you want to do with your life. It doesn’t pin you down to any specific career path. It’s open and nebulous. It’s also something to say to shut the people up who keep asking that annoying question over and over again.¹

I’m not convinced there really are that many people who seriously want to be famous and don’t care how. Once most people think it through and see the side effects of fame—serious fame—they change their minds quick smart. Who wants to end up like Michael Jackson or Britney Spears? Your entire life fodder for the tabloid. Complete strangers speculating about just how crazy you are, knowing what you like to eat, and stalking you with cameras wherever you go.

It’s the very opposite of fun.

Which is why I’m not that worried about today’s youth and their apparent incessant fame desire.

Do any of you desperately want to be famous? Do you know anyone who wants to? Have you come across hordes of teenagers saying they want to be famous and don’t care how? Does this desire worry you? Should I be more concerned than I am?

1. When I was in high school I was always tempted to tell people that I wanted to be a monkey.

Rewriting the Liar book is all I am doing right now. It is the beginning and the middle and the end of each day. It doesn’t matter how much I want to play in my brand-new, shiny, shiny 1930s novel, or how much I want to gallivant about town, I’m not allowed.

I will probably still blog. If I don’t blog my head explodes. But I am unlikely to respond to your gorgeous comments. Though I will read and cherish them as I always do. Of course once I’m finished with the rewrites I head to Texas.

Right then, back to the grindstone goes me.

1. Or, um, possibly next Monday.

1. That it would lead to same-sex couples being able to sue churches that refused to marry them

As Alexander and Tim pointed out this is a lie. To quote Tim:

Churches could not have been sued for refusing to marry homosexual couples—first and foremost this is a violation of the right to freely practice religion which is protected by the US Constitution. Religious institutions (churches, mosques, synagogues, etc.) have the right to refuse marriage to people if they do not fulfill the criteria of the religion, as has been exemplified by the Catholic Church. While it is legal in the US for divorced people to be remarried, the Catholic Church still retains the right to refuse marriage to one who is divorced, because they do not fulfill the criteria for marriage as outlined by the Church. This has been the case for, like, ever.

In the United States and in many other countries it is forbidden for the government to dictate to religions and vice versa. That’s what separation of church and state means.

2. That legal same-sex marriages would make it legal to “teach” homosexuality in schools.

Proposition 8 has no effect on what is or isn’t taught in schools in California. No effect at all. Prop 8 is only concerned with the legal status of same-sex marriages. Those who told Californians that Prop 8 had anything to do with Californian school curriculum were flat-out lying.

If you believe that marriage can only take place between a man and a woman then voting yes to Prop 8 was the way to go. But I am afraid that many people voted for it because of the two lies above. They made their decision based on false information.

If the people pushing the Yes case had faith in their side why did they feel the need to lie to so many people about the effects of Proposition 8?

I’m convinced that if they had not lied the proposition would have been defeated.

Thank you so much to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post. I especially thank you for being so courteous to one another. Elsewhere on the intrawebanets discussions of Prop 8 have become heated and hateful. I’m so glad that this blog has not engaged in such nastiness. Bless!

I don’t hesitate to delete obnoxious comments but the joy of this blog is that it is extremely rare for me to have to. Thank you!

Me, I am in favour of love.

I have a friend who’s been with the same guy for twenty years now. Their lives have been entwined since they met in their twenties. They have a dog together, a house, bank accounts. In every way that counts they are a couple. Very few of my straight friends¹ have been together for so long and with so much love. None of my straight friends have ever been beaten up for walking down the street hand-in-hand with the person they love.

I can hold my husband’s hand or kiss his cheek in public without fear. Because I’m a woman and Scott’s a man we were able to have our love sanctioned by the state. There are very few places in the world where same-sex couples enjoy the same privileges we take for granted.

The majority of the voters on those propositions agreed that only some people are allowed to have their love sanctioned. They agreed that only some lovers can visit their partner in hospital without question, can be covered by their partner’s health insurance, can adopt together, can migrate to their lover’s country.

That so many voters are still against equality depresses me. That in California some are blaming the passing of Proposition 8 on black voters depresses me. Let’s not go down that path. Let’s look instead at the youth demographic which cuts across race and class and religious affiliation:

CNN exit poll

Vote by Age Yes No
18-29 (20%) 39 61
30-44 (28%) 55 45
45-64 (36%) 54 46
65+ (15%) 61 39

What do those stats prove? That the future looks wonderful. The majority of young people under 30 get that straight marriages are not safer or happier because gay and lesbians are prohibited from marrying. They understand that the opposite is true. Which is another reason it’s such a pleasure to write books for them.

It saddens me that I have something wonderful that many of my friends are not allowed to have. I want to give them a piece of this cake too.

I want people to be allowed to marry if they want. And not to if they don’t want.

I want everyone to be included in all the cool things that life has to offer.

1. Of my generation. My parents have been together for more than forty years.

You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can’t fly; zombies do not run. It’s a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I’ll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

Exactly! But wait there’s more what is even better:

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you’re careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them—much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares—the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.

That is why zombies are so powerful and so chilling. You can fight them off. You can get away. But in the end? Not so much.

No one escapes death.

Un***rns as a metaphor? For what exactly? Tooth decay? Give me a break. They are a beastie entirely without resonance.

Zombies for the win. Yet again.

Update: Because I am nothing but fair I am pointing you to Diana Peterfreund’s response. In which she defends lame sparkly boring uni***ns. Feel free to go over and point out her wrongness.

Update the second: Now John Green, who is on the side of zombies, weighs in.

Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States of America and NYC rejoices.

Me too.

1. Which kind of went awry. The fire department showed up within seconds to set things right. Yay, FDNY!

But who am I kidding?

Like everyone I know my concentration has been totally shot by the US election. I’ve been writing and rewriting the same sentence of the Liar novel for the last three weeks. This afternoon when all our attempts to work failed, me and Scott went and phone banked. The Bowery Hotel was overrun with volunteers, using their own phones to make calls to people all over the country,² telling them where their local polling station is, giving them a phone number to call if they need a ride.

Last election I knew maybe two people who volunteered and I thought that was amazing. This year I have friends working for the Obama campaign in California, Florida, Kentucky, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. There’s a whole YA for Obama site. Here in NYC it’s all anyone is talking about. At my hairdressers, at the gym, in the laundromat, at our favourite cafes, at the cheese shop, everywhere!

I cannot wait for tomorrow. I cannot wait till there’s a result—a good result. Because then I’ll get my brain back. Fivethirtyeight doesn’t need my constantly refreshing it anymore and I suspect the Liar novel would like me to work on more than one of its sentences.³

Let it end now, please.

If you’re USian go forth tomorrow⁴ and exercise your democratic right: vote!

1. Write like the wind!
2. Particularly battleground states like Indiana and Ohio. Wow, they must be sick of all those phone calls. Though I gotta tell you all the people I spoke to were lovely. Chock full of enthusiasm and rearing to vote if they hadn’t already.
3. You’ll be shocked to learn the Liar novel has more than one sentence. There’s at least a few dozen. Possibly more.
4. If you haven’t already.

In 1868 there were 86,973 registered African-American voters in Mississippi representing 56% of that state’s voting population.¹ They were able to send two black senators to Washington: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce. But by 1892, following legislation specifically aimed at preventing African-Americans voting, numbers dropped to 8,922 or 11% of the voting population and there were no more black Mississippi senators.²

By 1955, after decades of legislation, poll taxes, and voter intimidation that went all the way up to murder, the number of African-Americans registered to vote in Mississippi was less than 5%. In some counties, even ones with a minority white population, the number of African-Americans registered to vote was zero.

In that same year, 1955, Gus Courts and Rev. George W. Lee set out to register voters in Humphreys County. Of the 16,00 eligible African-Americans, they persuaded 400 to pay their poll tax. Ninety-four went on to register. A process involving repeated visits to the registrar’s office because over and over again the office claimed to be too busy to process their forms.

Then George Lee was murdered. The number of registered voters in Humphreys County dropped to 22:

Gus Courts was warned that if any of the 22 walked onto the courthouse lawn to vote they would be killed. They gathered in his store that morning and made a decision: they had not resisted the pressure that long only to crumble on election day. They walked to the courthouse, where each was handed a sheet of paper containing ten questions. “Do you want your children to go to school with white children?” was one. “Are you a member of or do you support the NAACP?” was another. County officials would not permit them to vote.

That’s 1955: only fifty-three years ago. Well within living memory. But then efforts to stop African-Americans and other minorities from voting did not stop in 1955. They continued to battle to exercise their right to vote throughout the 1950s and 1960s. That battle continues in different forms today.

This year the number of registered voters in Mississippi increased by more than 130,000. A large percentage of the new registrations are African-American. Those statistics are being repeated all over the country. Even here in NYC I know people who will be voting for the very first time. That’s a large part of why this election is so historic and so riveting. Not just because of who is running, but because of who is voting.

1. Remembering that women could not vote.
2. To date there have only been five African-American senators.

He bravely responded to Lauren Myracle’s dare and faced his worst fear.¹ And, um, well, go see for yourself. Yes, that is me you hear laughing. C’mon, wouldn’t you have laughed?

I can’t believe he did that . . .

I seriously can’t believe it.

1. As, um, I did not. Not because I’m more cowardly than Scott but because I’m busier! My books don’t write themselves, you know! Okay, neither do Scott’s, but my book’s trickier than his! Honest.

Over at Daily Kos, Meteor Blades has an article on accents in which he points out that, yes, everyone has one and quotes Geoffrey Nunberg being smart on the same topic:

If authenticity is a matter of heeding your true inner voice, then it probably isn’t surprising that people listen for signs of it in the way you speak. And our idea of an authentic accent reflects our idea of the authentic self. It’s the natural speech you sucked up from the surroundings you grew up in, unfiltered and uncorrected. It’s how you’re supposed to sound when you’re talking to yourself.

It’s also a delusion. Or at least if your speech is like yourself, it’s because both are a work in progress. My own speech covers a lot more territory than it did when I was growing up in a New York suburb. Sometimes it shifts toward what people would hear as East Coast nondescript. And sometimes it gets pretty sidewalks-of-New York, particularly when I’m talking to friends from college days. (”Hey — you never used to talk like that,” my sister once said to me after she overheard me talking on the phone with one old friend.) But it doesn’t make sense to ask what part of that is my “authentic” voice. You grow up, you meet new people, you change the way you talk. If you still sound the same way you did when you were fifteen, you haven’t been getting out enough.

That’s my emphasis on the last sentence. Because, well, EXACTLY. People who travel a lot, live in other places, and pick up some of the local accents, aren’t freaks, they’re just paying attention. Accents are never set in stone unless your ears are clogged and you’re living in a hole in the ground. (And even then wouldn’t you pick up a worm accent or something?)

We are all hybrids.

That is all.

Get it? E. Kristin Anderson, who works at the fabulous Book People in Austin, is a parking fairy. Just like the one Charlie has in How To Ditch Your Fairy. Only, you know, not invisible. Isn’t that superb?

Coincidently, me and Scott will be hanging out at Book People on 19 November at 7:30PM. Can’t wait!

Happy Halloween!

This is my current theory:

The world I’m living in right now is much more interesting than any world I could write.

I can’t look away from the election. From the world financial crisis. From all the crazy stuff that’s going on.

Is anyone else having the same problem?

1. Plus now having to look for a new webhost

Thanks for chiming in on last post. I no longer feel like I have lost my mind. Just my website for a couple of days. And, praise Elvis, may it never happen again.

We can now resume normal blog activity.

For those who missed the post that was only visible to a handful of you for most of the day there’s a sneak preview of my latest published effort.

Thanks to everyone who wrote to share their concern about the absence and/or weirdness of my site today. It’s nice to know you care.

I’m getting lots of reports of posts not showing up and people not being able to comment.

My story is called “Thinner Than Water” and is the longest short story I’ve ever published. In fact, I think it secretly wants to be a novel. It’s also one of the few I’m happy (ish) with. So I decided to share a teaser with you.¹ Enjoy!

I’ve been working on this story on and off for well over a decade. It’s based on various Demon Lover ballads and, I realised just today, stories, too. Like this one by Elizabeth Bowen, which I read many, many times as a teenager. And various ones by Shirley Jackson collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, which I didn’t read till well into my twenties.

But those stories stuck, oh, how they stuck.

I think upon reading “Thinner Than Water” you too will see the influence.

Don’t you love how stories beget stories? I sure do.

1. Though be aware this is the pre-copy editing version.