Tor Books and Expanded Books produced a funny interview/trailer thing for John Scalzi and me in honor of our latest books — he’s bringing out a young adult novel in the Old Man’s Warverse in August called Zoe’s Tale that I’ve read a little from and it’s dynamite!
Here’s the latest Instructables HOWTO to tie in with my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of young geeks who use technology to restore liberty to post-9/11 America.
This week, it’s HOWTO start a flashmob:
Timing is everything
This refers back to the whole participation thing. If your event is spontaneous in nature and just requires people to show up at the same time and do something goofy(say, gather at a subway stop and follow the first bearded person you see as if they were Jesus), they won’t need much time to prepare. The ideal time for this sort of event is at the end of the workday (between 5 and 6PM) during the week as a) the streets are more crowded and b)participants are more available. For whatever reason, Thursdays seem to be most effective.
If you are planning something more elaborate, like a Costumed Rampage, you want to give people at least a week to prepare, and preferably two. These events are most effective in heavily populated shopping and tourist areas, so Saturday afternoons work best. Note: these often turn into drunkfests.
It’s timely, smart, relatable, realistic, thought-provoking and fun, and that’s why I strongly believe that readers will be talking about Cory Doctorow’s novel for a very long time. More …
Random House has produced a wicked audiobook for Little Brother. Like all my work, there’s no DRM on this title, period, and it also comes with permission to take up to 30 minutes and use them in your own remixes! The audiobook is available here, or through this widget, which you can embed in your own pages.
This book has a whole bunch to recommend it: It’s fast-paced, well-written, and the protagonist is engaging in a geeky way, if just a tiny little bit generic. The book is a bit didactic in places. However, since in some ways it’s a fictionalized manual for how to build an underground resistance to an evil government, that’s only to be expected. Really very good, and based on what I remember about my own teenage years,