My favorite marketing example, “Just Noticeable Difference” theory, in action: http://t.co/922WsH4x5K == http://t.co/hQ62vsosY0.
Read Austin Grossman? His new novel “You” is out today. Really interesting look at video games & storytelling, super nostalgic for 80s kids.
Listening to voice actor auditions for “Lexicon” audio edition. This is as cool as it sounds.
Compendium of News
I’m seriously losing the battle to Facebook and Twitter. It’s just
so easy to post stuff there. I hardly even need to think about it.
For a blog I actually have to spend time composing
my thoughts. I know that’s not really evident, but I do.
As a result, I have accumulated a COMPENDIUM OF NEWS, each item of which failed to inspire a blog all by itself, but which nevertheless requires mention. So buckle in, sparky.
Syrup Movie: Trailer & US Release Date
There was a teaser, now there’s a trailer! Those are different, trust me.
The film is out June 6, 2013 in the US. But there’s something called a “sneak on demand” on May 2nd, which I think is some kind of Internet thing? I don’t know. Will it be viable outside the US? I don’t know! But I’m excited!
I think that’s my shoulder at 1:10. I’m not sure. I didn’t think I was wearing a jacket. But I was definitely standing behind Amber Heard while she made sexy at the camera and no-one else was around. Don’t tell me I imagined that. It happened.
Lexicon: Early Reviews
My fifth novel,
Lexicon, comes out June 18 in the US & Canada and a few days later
in the UK, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. I’m not promising
this is the novel that will finally allow you to talk about me without
the other person saying, “Who?”, but the early signs are good.
There’s a big print run lined up, early reviews are very positive,
and awesome people are saying awesome things:
“About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell.” —Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of ‘The Magicians’
“Lexicon grabbed me with the opening lines, and never let go. An absolutely thrilling story, featuring an array of compelling characters in an eerily credible parallel society, punctuated by bouts of laugh-out-loud humor.” —Chris Pavone, New York Times Bestselling author of ‘The Expats’
“I don’t know how you could craft a better weekend read than this novel of international intrigue and weaponized Chomskian linguistics. It’s the perfect mix of philosophical play and shotgun-inflected chase scenes. Like someone let Grant Morrison loose on the Bourne identity franchise.” —Austin Grossman, author of ‘Soon I Will be Invincible’ and ‘You’
“Dazzling and spectacularly inventive. A novel that jams itself sideways into your brain and stays there.” —Mike Carey, author of ‘Hellblazer’ and ‘Lucifer’
And there’s this Amazon.com review I really like and this one and this from bitethebook.com and a soon-to-be-released starred review from Kirkus.
Also film rights to Lexicon have been optioned by Matthew Vaughn, director of a slew of incredible movies including Kick-Ass 1 & 2, X-Men: First Class, Startdust, and Layer Cake. Did I mention this already? I don’t think I did. Anyway, I think we’ve been down this road often enough to realize that “optioned” doesn’t mean “there will definitely be a film.” But it does mean there might be. And I think Matthew’s record of turning optioned properties into films is running at around 90%. That’s what he told me, anyway. So that could happen.
Book Tours & Events & Things
Melbourne, Australia: I’ll be launching Lexicon at an Embiggen Books event on the day of Aussie publication (Tuesday 25th June). They have a Countdown Timer running so you can always know exactly how many seconds you have to wait.
USA: So this is kind of awkward, because I have a film and a book coming out a few weeks apart and I live a really long way away. I mean, it’s the good kind of awkward. It’s the kind of problem you like to have. But at this stage it’s looking like I’ll be in the US for early June, either in LA or New York, but won’t come back for a whole tour. I’m thinking I might do some kind of pre-release thing in whichever city I visit, where I read from the new book and then leave you all frustrated and unable to purchase a copy.
UK & elsewhere: Sorry, you need to make me a lot more famous, to justify those air fares.
Jennifer Government
Do you want a Jennifer Government wallpaper? Of course you do! You’re not crazy!
Digital artist Mark Hirst decided to do these for no particular reason and kindly made them available in several sizes.
Also these days Jennifer Government is looking less like a film and more like a TV series. Just FYI.
Machine Man
Look at this Korean Machine Man cover. There’s a flamingo on it. Are there flamingos in the novel? No! Not that I recall. But there it is. The back of the cover has a whale and a stag as well.
Japan
Korea
On the right is the Japanese cover, which I think is super cool. That comes out on May 10. I say this knowing full well that not a single person will think, “Oh, that’s good to know. I’m an English-speaking Max Barry fan living in Japan right now.” But still.
Also that Machine Man film is still ticking along. You might have thought that since there has been nothing announced for a year or two, that dream was gone. But no! FYI.
Official trailer for Syrup! OMG OMG OMG http://t.co/irYn0qWXwk
I’m ruuuuunning in the rain… just ruuuuunning in the rain…
Heading in to meet some people at my beloved Richmond Tigers (football team). Being slightly famous is finally paying off!
Also look out for the copy I signed as “George R. R. Martin.”
Signed my name 1,200 times. Keep an eye out for a rare unsigned copy of “Lexicon” this June; could be worth something.
Oh FINE I’ll find out what the Harlem Shake is.
Exactly four months until “Lexicon” is published. I have a good feeling about this one.
This means I’ll have a book & a movie out in the same month.
"Syrup" movie in US theaters in June!! OH GOD IT’S HAPPENING
"Syrup" film release date to be named within 2 weeks?? Meantime, Syrup Movie Fans is giving away more books: http://t.co/us3tsGWl
The UK Advanced Reader Copy of “Lexicon” (June 2013) looks super slick. http://t.co/JbEA0zbZ
Book Sadist
I was in a bookstore recently and there was a boy, about 10, who
wanted a book. His dad was not sure he should have the book. The
issue wasn’t the book itself; the book was fine. The issue was that
the book was #3 in a series, and Dad established that the boy had borrowed
the first two from a library.
“Why don’t you borrow this one from the library and I’ll buy you a different book?” he said.
The boy mumbled something I didn’t catch but I’m guessing was some variation of, “I want this book.”
I figured that Dad was seeing the book as an object, and feeling it would be wrong to have book #3 sitting on the shelf without #1 and #2. The boy was seeing the book as a story he wanted to get into his head. He had already loaded books #1 and #2 into his head and he didn’t much care how #3 got there.
E-books have made a lot of people think about whether they want books or stories. Because you can get stories cheaply and efficiently in e-book form, but you can’t put them on your bookshelf. You can’t gaze lovingly over your collection, or hold them in your hands and feel the paper speak to you.
Really, though, it’s only the latest manifestation of an old dilemma. There have always been people who have treated books with reverence, laminating their covers, turning their pages with care, and never cracking their spines. And there have been people like me.
I don’t set out to destroy my favorite books. They just wind up that way. And while I have no problem with people who take care of their books, I have to admit I don’t quite get it. Sometimes people bring me a book to be signed and they apologize because the book is dog-eared and crumpled. I love seeing that. Those books have been loved. Hard.
P.S. The boy got his book. I saw him walking out with it.
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Book Sadist
Nothing’s hotter than having a copyeditor correct your sex scenes.
So everyone agrees I don’t have to worry about these bodies.
My neighbor's low battery smoke alarm has been chirping once every 30 seconds for a month. Legally, when can I murder them?
Lexicon Covers
My next book has gained not one but TWO covers: one for the US & Canada
and one for the rest of the English-speaking world. They’re super different.
This means either that one publisher is making a big mistake or that each
understands the tastes of its own market best and those tastes are quite
different. Or else that art is subjective. It’s one of those.
Click a cover for a larger version.
I am happy with these covers. I especially like the boldness of the American version. Although maybe I’m biased because my name is freaking huge. It’s hard to dislike that.
I would like to name and thank the cover designers, but I don’t know who they are. I’m going to find out and update this post. I assume it’s someone.
Lexicon is due for publication in June 2013.
I have covers to show you! US & UK covers for my 5th novel "Lexicon" will hit my website in a couple hours.
One year everyone will believe Nate Silver's prediction and not bother voting.
Win a copy of the hot new novel everyone's talking about, thanks to Syrup Movie Fans: http://t.co/GrNuUozF
I am SO excited to see Syrup star Shiloh Fernandez in the new Evil Dead. DON'T GO IN THE CABIN SHILOH. http://t.co/gx1GOAZW
I don't like to brag, but I just got an auto-reply email from Douglas Coupland.
What Margaret Atwood says when you ask her to blurb your book: http://t.co/iRVu7Oup
It's that time again when I need to persuade famous people to blurb my new book. Who to pester?
First “Syrup” Movie Stills
Stills! Where do they come from? How do they get out there? I don’t know. But they have begun popping up on sites like Amber Heard Web, Shiloh Fernandez Source, Kellan Lutz Online, and Syrup Movie Fans. So: behold!
(Unless you want to completely avoid spoilers. As in, you haven’t read the book. And you don’t intend to. But you really want to see the movie. And you’re browsing my site. You’re a strange person.)
Amber Heard as 6, Shiloh Fernandez as Scat:
Scat gazes skyward while a machine lurks ominously in the background:
Kellan Lutz as Sneaky Pete:
Now for some ANSWERS to COMMON QUESTIONS. I don’t believe there’s an official release date yet, but it can’t be too far away now, can it? Not with these STILLS. So I’m guessing within the next six months.
I haven’t seen the film; I am waiting until I can see it in a cinema. Because having a novel turned into a feature film, that’s kind of a big deal. I don’t want to watch the end result of that on a DVD. I want to sit in a theater and crane my neck and eat popcorn. Right?
The movie doesn’t strictly follow the plot of the book. I can say that without seeing it because I wrote many screenplay drafts, and they didn’t strictly follow the plot of the book. I don’t think movies should be like books only with all the parts you’d normally imagine filled in. I think they should do their own thing. They should be true to the core of the book but express that in whichever ways work best. Also, you know how I rewrite my novels to death? Oh. Well, I do. I change a lot in each new draft. So imagine me adapting my own novel. It’s a miracle anything survived.
If you missed it before, here is a teaser. I think it’s awesome. I was so happy when I saw this. I watched it about thirty times in a row.
Aram Rappaport and Kellan Lutz at a "Syrup" presser in Russia: http://t.co/bEG6zUAF
1 minute 23 seconds of "Syrup" movie: http://t.co/4Bmg76AT
Revenge of the Rats
In
1957, a psychologist named B. F. Skinner decided to see what happened
when you put a rat in a cage with a lever that made food come out.
He discovered that if the food came out whenever the lever was pushed, the rat
would settle into a healthy work-life balance of pushing levers and running
hamster wheels. But if the lever only delivered food sometimes—if
it randomly might or might not—the rat would work that lever like there was
no tomorrow.
This research underpinned much development of poker machines and gaming. Now Diablo III reveals what happens when the rats have internet access: they bitch about drop rates.
The Diablo series of games are simple: you run through dungeons, hit monsters, and collect the items that fall out. Usually the items are crappy, but sometimes, randomly, they’re awesome, and allow you to fight even more powerful monsters, which can randomly drop even more awesome items. The game ends when you starve to death in your apartment surrounded by empty soda cans.
Actually, that’s not true: there is an end-game. Your character can’t progress beyond level 60 and there’s a hard maximum to the potential quality of items. So there is a diminishing returns thing: early in the game, you find better items often, but as your equipment approaches the theoretical maximum, your odds of finding something better become decreasingly smaller.
Diablo III had a few problems when it launched, and there was much bitching on internet forums. A great deal of the bitching was about drop rates; that is, how likely food was to arrive when you pressed the lever. Players thought drop rates were too low, if you were wondering. They wanted food to come out more regularly. A very popular proposal, one mentioned in almost every discussion, no matter how relevant, was that more situations should deliver “a guaranteed rare,” a “rare” being a high-quality item. That is, instead of food only coming out sometimes when you pushed the lever, it would come out every time.
This feedback around drop rates was offered to the developers in the form of an unholy maelstrom of teenage-grade internet fury that raged for many weeks. Players railed against the bitterness of a life of inadequate drop rates, expressing their incomprehension that such stupidity should exist and turning viciously against their former idol, game designer Jay Wilson, who was now revealed not as a benevolent provider of sometimes-food but rather the very face of evil, Diablo himself, as it were, He Who Made The Lever Not Work Often Enough.
Some of the angst was understandable. Diablo III introduced an in-game Auction House, which meant that instead of throwing your old items away as you found new ones, you could sell them to other players for gold. The marketplace being virtual and therefore operating with a degree of efficiency rarely seen in the real world, it was soon a lot easier to find good items on the Auction House than to go around hitting monsters hoping that one would randomly fall out. This in turn allowed players to obtain items approaching the hard maximum quite quickly after starting the game, and rendering their chances of thereafter seeing anything better randomly drop from a monster close to zero.
After sufficient buffeting, the developers decided to increase drop rates. They also created more “guaranteed rare” situations. This was very warmly received by the community. It wasn’t enough, though, and since then drop rates have been raised again, and “legendary” items radically overhauled to make them much better, i.e. more like food. At the same time, a new reward system was introduced called “Paragon Levels,” which periodically deliver such an enormous explosion of congratulation to the player that it almost feels sarcastic. This has quieted community angst, although at this point it’s hard to tell how many of them are left. I suspect a lot have stopped pushing the lever.
The interesting part about the rats who like to gamble is that they don’t do it for food. They don’t press the lever only as many times as required to deliver the same amount of food as when food delivery is guaranteed: they press it more often and more rapidly. They like to see if they can win. Although “like” could be the wrong word; it may be more accurate to say that the uncertainty creates stress, which they feel the need to resolve. I would imagine there are some pretty pissed-off rats, when they press the lever a bunch of times and still nothing happens. They would rage on the internet if they could. And they’d be justified, since it wasn’t their choice to get in the cage. Somebody put them there, who knew what would happen.