I've been on my Little Brother book-tour for two days (doing school appearances around Chicago), and for the next two nights, I'll be doing public events at Chicago area bookstores:

Tonight (Wednesday, May 14):
Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville, IL
123 West Jefferson Avenue
Naperville, IL 60540
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
7:00 pm

Tomorrow (Thursday, May 15):
Barnes & Noble, Chicago, IL
1441 W. Webster Street
Chicago, IL 60614
Thursday, May 15, 2008
7:30 pm

Hope to see you there!

(Image: Little Brother Sketch, a concept for the Little Brother paperback cover art posted by Tor's Assistant Mass-Market Art Director, Pablo Defendini)

Last week, I told you about my donations program for my new book, Little Brother. Every time I put a book online for free, I'm inundated by offers of cash "tips" from people who got the ebooks for free. I don't want anyone's money (cutting my publisher out of the loop isn't good for them or me), so I came up with an alternative. I asked librarians and teachers who wanted free copies to step forward and put their names down, and now I'm looking for would-be "donors" to step forward and send them copies of the book.

The project's been a smashing success so far: dozens of librarians, teachers and related trades put their names down for free copies, and we've started to fulfil the orders at a good clip. There's plenty of open orders left, though -- if you're one of those people who wants to compensate me for the free ebook, here's your chance! Link

A German teenager built this elaborate casemod inspired by the first-person-shooter game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl -- it's a detailed model of the melted reactor at Chernobyl, complete with fanciful glowing stuff. It opens up to reveal the PC workings and the interiors of the reactor. Link

The kid-centric online game Club Penguin (acquired by Disney last year) adds 500-1000 words a day to its list of forbidden chat-words in an effort to keep things clean. Wanna bet that kids come up with 2000-4000 new variant spellings a day?

Merrifield also thinks that there is an over-reliance on technology that ignores the human element, which is why they've decided to devote two-thirds of the company's staff to positions such as safety moderators and customer service.

"We know the limits of technology, even though I would put our filtering software up against anybody's, especially because of that human element - we're adding 500 to 1000 words every day to the filters, simply because of slang that works its way into the language.

"And every new pop song that comes out is inevitably going to reference something that was innocent the week before, but isn't so much now," Merrifield said.

Link (via Raph Koster)

Instructables has just posted its latest installment in its collection of HOWTOs inspired by my new novel Little Brother, a young adult book about hacker kids who use technology to win back their civil liberties from the Department of Homeland Security.

This week, it's instructions for building a simple device that will let you spot hidden "pinhole" video cameras:

With one hand, hold up the toilet paper tube to your eye. With your other hand, hold up the flashlight at about eye level and point it away from you. With one eye, look through the tube and scan the room. If there are any small points of light bouncing back, inspect it further. It might be a camera.

Link, Link to feed of Little Brother Instructables

Andrew sez, "Just when you think plushy creations can't get more weird, here comes a macabre soft toy creator in the UK who recreates roadkill. Currently you can choose from Twitch the Racoon or Grind the Rabbit complete with toe tags, tyre marks and cute giblets spilling from their split innards. Other sick creations are in the pipeline." Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

Love these Japanese bookcase animal silhouette dividers -- $15 each, give or take. Link (via Cribcandy)

If this morning's Swedish cardboard playhouses gave you a nosebleed with their 370 Kroner pricetag (approx US$3,221,145.22), you can always make one yourself, with a set of plans like these:

It is easiest to start with a large cardboard box such as a refrigerator or other large appliance. I called my local appliance store and had them save me a box. I told them I was making a cardboard playhouse and they were more than happy to set one aside. If you can't find one large enough you can certainly construct one out of smaller boxes, it will just take more time to piece it together.

Link (via Craft)

Sunday night, I fly to Chicago to kick off my three-week US book-tour for Little Brother, my new young adult novel. I'll be stopping in and around Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Francisco and (probably) New York. The schedule's still being firmed up, but Tor (my publisher) is keeping an up-to-the-minute schedule for each appearance. This is my first publisher-financed tour, and I'm incredibly excited! I hope to meet lots of you on the road! Link

These highly detailed, NYC-inspired cardboard dollhouses from Swedish company Our Children's Gorilla are really delightful. The insides are totally blank, "to be decorated to your heart's content" -- a great balance of blank canvas for imagination and artwork for inspiration. Link (via Babygadget)

Every time I put a book online for free, readers ask me how they can "tip" me for the download. The problem is, I'm not actually interested in tips, since these cut my publisher out of the loop, putting us on opposite sides of the free download equation. My publisher is extremely valuable to me, providing editorial and marketing and distribution services that I couldn't possibly provide on my own without spending a lot more of the cover-price of the book than currently goes to my publisher.

For Little Brother, I've come up with a solution that balances out my publishers' interests, my interests, the generosity of my readers, and the needs of educators and libraries.

Here's how it works: if you're a librarian, teacher (or similar -- someone who works in a halfway house, social center, or comparable institution), you can send in a request for a free copy of Little Brother. I'll post these, along with your institution's address, on a public web-page (I'm also vetting these to make sure that they really come from educators and affiliated trades, and not just cheap people who want someone else to buy them a copy of the book).

If you're someone who loved the ebook and wants to "tip" me, you can pay me back by checking out the list of teachers and suchlike in search of donated copies, and buy a copy directly for someone on the list, using Amazon, BN.com, Powell's, or your favorite mail-order house. Send in the email receipt (delete anything private first), and the teacher's entry will be marked as fulfilled.

I'm actually paying someone to manage this whole process, out of my own pocket. Olga Nunes, a friend and awesome web-developer, has agreed to take on the task of updating the page, vetting the entries, and answering your questions. You can reach her at freelittlebrother@gmail.com with your solicitations and/or donations.

So there it is: educators, librarians, social workers and other people who work with kids, send in your solicitations now! Generous ebook readers are waiting to send you free copies of my latest book! Link

Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its series of HOWTOs inspired by my latest novel, Little Brother, a young adult novel about hacker kids who fight the DHS with technology in order to restore the Bill of Rights to America.

This week, it's HOWTO build a spice-mister, a low-intensity edible pepper-spray to douse your food with (one of the characters in the book is a serious capsaicin junkie). Being the kind of guy who'd brush his teeth with Tobasco if I could, I love this one.

Putting the spice mister together is not hard. Simply remove the pump, fill with your choice of hot sauce, and put the pump back in.

To add a quick burst of intense flavor to your food, hold the mister a few inches above the dish and spray. Repeat until desirable heat is reached.

Keep it away from your face, and never spray at anyone else - capsaicin in the eyes hurts like hell. Pepper spray is nasty, evil stuff and should never, ever be used on anything except food.

Link, Link to feed for Little Brother Instructables

Jason sez, "A new charter school in Wilmington, DE is in the works. The charter? Homeland security! Young adults, titled 'cadets,' will be trained in SWAT and 'prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator' skills. Kids are definitely our guinea pigs: give it to them at school, at home and at their Disneyland vacation!"

The Project Manager for the Delaware Academy for Public Safety and Security, New Castle Attorney Thomas Little, signed a contract with Innovative Schools, a professional firm which will coordinate the mechanics of preparing the school for its eventual opening...

The first Principal of the institution is to be Dr. Fred Fitzgerald. A retired Captain in the Marine Corps, Fitzgerald teaches English, speech and debate at New Castle Christian Academy. Fitzgerald is also a former executive for Coca Cola in Jacksonville, Florida, and a former Director of Operations for the Port of Wilmington.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

I've just put up my site for Little Brother, my young adult novel about hacker kids who use technology to reclaim the Bill of Rights from the DHS after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Included on the site are:

• Creative Commons licensed downloads of the whole book
• An easy way to donate copies of the book to school classrooms
• Links to buy the book from various etailers (and an offer to get a signed, inscribed copy shipped direct to you by Borderlands Books in San Francisco)
• A place to put your remixes of the book
  

Still to come: the tour schedule, more Instructables HOWTOs, and lots of other news. Link

This simple WikiHow explains how to convert a crappy, mass-produced pink dollhouse into a faerie house:

Collect materials for your home. They must be dry or the glue won't stick to them. For lap siding, you can use cat tail leaves. You can also make a stone cottage, or cover it with birch bark. Norway Pines have wonderful bark for shingles on the roof. Use old slips, fabric and lace for curtains. Layer them for a good effect. To detail the house, you might find some great shapes in potpourri, or from dried flowers from the garden. You can even make an entire faerie house with food!

Link (via Yokiddo)

Here's a nice use for an unloved plastic dollie: a coatrack!

1. Dismember your doll

2. Arrange hands and feet on board in an order you like. Space them evenly apart, marking their positions with a pen or pencil. Set limbs aside.

3. Drill 3 holes per limb. I counter sank the holes so the board would lie flat against the wall. Make sure your holes will not come too close to the edge of the limb, because the screw make poke out of the side of a hand or foot.

4. Position keyhole hanger and mark the spot. Chisel out the wood until the hanger fits snugly and until the drywall screws’ heads fit.

Link (via Craft)

Marilyn sends us this, "photo gallery of bizarre playground equipment mostly from Russia includes a happily impaled Baba Yaga, ghouls, a climbing turnip, decapitated monkeys decorating a swing set, and a stationary merry-go-round." Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

(Image: Olga Shvetz)

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section. Many of us grew up in an era before the young adult section -- when the kids' section in the store was just picture books and some 400-volume sharecropped series like Sweet Valley High. No longer -- practically every bookstore now sports a large (and growing) YA section filled with some of the most amazing work being done in any literary genre today.

Indeed, a quick browse through Boing Boing's archives turned up this (incomplete) set of links to my YA section, the young adult books I've loved and blogged here -- most of them are not available on the science fiction shelves of your local store, only in the YA section:

Scott Westerfeld: Pretties/Uglies; Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm: Good As Lilly; Daniel Pinkwater, Scott Westerfeld, Peeps, Jonathan Strahan (ed), The Starry Rift; John Varley: Rolling Thunder, John Varley: Red Thunder; John Varley: Red Thunder; Scott Westerfeld: Uglies, Michael de Larrabeiti: The Borribles; Justine Larbalastier: Magic's Child; Justine Larbalastier: Magic or Madness; Ragnar: Got Your Nose!; Philip Pullman: Northern Lights trilogy; Scott Westerfeld: So Yesterday; Scott Westerfeld: Midnighters trilogy; Kathe Koja: Going Under; Ellen Klages: Portable Childhoods; Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Jane Yolen (eds): The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens; Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York;

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

So while there's a personal motive to this post -- letting you know where to find Little Brother at your bookstore -- there's also a general tip for living the happy mutant life: check out the YA section at the bookstore and see what's been going on under your nose!

Here's a little more on the subject from Patrick:

We've all been neglecting to include a very important piece of information: *if you want to buy a printed copy, you're going to have to go into the YA section.*

Some copies may wind up shelved in regular SF or general-fiction sections, but most bookstores are pretty rigorous these days: if it's published as YA, it goes into the YA section. As you know, Bob, we made a deliberate decision to publish it into the YA channel, not least because it's the kind of book we know *we* would have loved when we were 15. But it suddenly occurs to me that there are probably a lot of people who now have it in their heads to keep an eye out for *Little Brother* the next time they go into a bookstore...but that doesn't mean they're going to actually go into the section with all the chapter books, Narnia displays, Percy Jackson endcaps, and so forth.

Of course, if they do actually venture over that threshold, they may well discover a whole bunch of outstanding SF and fantasy that's been published onto those shelves in the last decade or so. Powerful SF novels like *Uglies* and *Peeps* by Scott Westerfeld, who John Scalzi calls "the most important contemporary SF author that most of the SF field has never heard of." Fantasy like Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy, or sui-generis novels of science and human character like Ellen Klages' *The Green Glass Sea*. It's almost as if there's an entire alternate world of good reading over there.

Sam Brown's "Sheep" stools look like great kids' room additions -- nothing says "innocent childhood" like sitting on a headless sheep. Link (via Babygadget)

British schoolchildren in the west of England are terrorizing their chums by impersonating pedophile stalkers.

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall police told the Manchester Grauniad:

"Information from the public has highlighted a possibility that the offenders could be children aged 10 and over, masquerading as a paedophile. The investigations are continuing and at this moment we are looking into every line of inquiry and are not ruling out any possibility. However, the language used on the social networking sites such as Bebo and MSN is at times childish. [No change there, then - Ed]

"It could be youngsters playing a sick game to try and intimidate friends they have fallen out with. This will be treated seriously and we will be contacting the families of the children involved and we will try and help them by involving social services."

Link

Mudpuppy's Magnetic Monster figures tin is a great gift for the monster-loving kid in your life -- it's a set of lovely illustrated magnetic monster body-parts to mix and match into your own gruesome creations. Comes with four reversible backgrounds for enacting monstrous dramas of your choosing -- and the tin is just the right size to stick the backgrounds on and build monsters upon -- great for car trips and the like. I found mine at the wonderful, friendly kid store Hello Sunshine in Toronto, but they don't seem to have it in their webstore, so here's a US retailer that'll sell you one over the web, for those of you not local to the shop. Link

Next Thursday, May 1, I'll be launching my next novel, Little Brother, at Toronto's Merril Collection, at 7PM. Little Brother's my first young adult novel, a book about young people who use technology to fight for the restoration of the Bill of Rights to American politics, setting them square in the crosshairs of the war on terror.

BakkaPhoenix books will be selling books at the event, and they're also happy to take pre-orders for custom inscriptions -- CDN$19.95 for the book, plus $9 and GST for shipping in Canada, $15 to the US, $20 to Europe, and $25 to the rest of the world (BakkaPhoenix: 416 963 9993, inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com). Link

Mark sez, "You guys have written before about these anti-teen noisemakers before when they were used in the UK. Well, they're being deployed in the US now and, inevitably, someone is not happy about it..."

"It's horrible, loud and irritating," said Eddie Holder, 15, who sprinted from his apartment for school one morning covering one ear with his hand to block out the noise. The device was installed outside the building to drive away loiterers. "I have to hurry out of the building because it's so annoying. It's this screeching sound that you have to get away from or it will drive you crazy.

"A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union said the organization does not have a position on the issue. But James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Boston's Northeastern University, said that putting crowd-monitoring devices in the hands of private businesses and citizens is "dangerous.""

Link

See also:
Anti-teenager sound weapon
Kids turn "teen repellent" sound into teacher-proof ringtone
High-pitched, anti-teen alarm is now ringtone, techno track

(Image: Creepy Mosquito Powerpoint slides)

The voice-changing Dalek helmet looks like it would be a lot of fun -- hey, hon, let's play stern Dalek and recalcitrant Time Lord! Link (via Gizmodo)

My next novel, Little Brother, is coming out in a couple weeks -- it's a young adult novel about hackers who use technology to challenge authority. The folks from Instructables saw an early copy of the book and were really inspired by all the ingenuity demonstrated by the book's heroes, so they've made a series of HOWTOs in the voice of M1k3y, the techno-guerrilla who tells the story in Little Brother.

The first one has just gone live: Photo-Emulsion Screen Printing, a HOWTO for making t-shirts for your movement's wardrobe needs.

The general idea: After stretching fine-mesh cloth over a wooden frame, you spread a thin layer of photosensitive emulsion on the screen and let it dry. You then take a black image on transparent or translucent surface, place it against the screen, and then expose the screen to light. The light causes the emulsion to harden and bind to the fabric. Where the light strikes the screen, the emulsion will bind, making a solid layer. Where the light is blocked (ie where your black image is placed) the emulsion remains water-soluble. After exposing the screen, you spray down the screen with water, washing off the emulsion only where your image was placed; this clear area is where ink will be pressed through the screen when you print. Finally, you lay the screen on your t-shirt, other fabric, or paper, spread ink on the inside of the screen, and press the ink through the screen. If you use textile ink, you can heat-set the ink after it dries, and it'll be permanent and washable.

Link, Link to RSS feed for Little Brother Instructables

Instructables user Randofo created this awesome HOWTO for turning your beloved old tees into a handsome rug. I have so many damned tees (and I give away a bushel's worth every year to charity) -- my only problem with this is that I'd eventually run out of floorspace. Maybe a layered look? Link (via Craft)

The Starry Rift, a new anthology of teen-oriented science fiction, comes out today. It's edited by Jonathan Strahan, and includes fiction by Neil Gaiman, Steven Baxter, Greg Egan, Jeffrey Ford, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Goonan, Ian McDonald, Kelly Link, Scott Westerfeld, Garth Nix, Walter Jon Williams and others -- including me (with my story Anda's Game).

The editor, Jonathan Strahan, did a fantastic job in pulling this together, and it couldn't come at a better time. Teen literature is peaking right now, and a high-quality anthology that introduces young people to authors they can plunge into for books and books and books is a timely and great idea.

Jonathan's giving away five copies of The Starry Rift to the first five young readers who write to him and name the last sf novel they loved and why. Link, Buy it on Amazon