Where did RUINS come from--and where is it going?
A few years ago, a HarperCollins editor named Jordan Brown was talking my agent about their line-up. "I'm looking for a dystopia," he said. "Something really dark, really mature and sophisticated, but still YA. Do you have anything like that?" I assume that my agent smiled knowingly at this point, but I know the story only secondhand; what I do know is that she gave him my name. "I don't have anything like that right now," she told him, "but I have an author who'd hit one out of the park if you could convince him to try it." This is why my agent is awesome. Jordan looked me up and read my first book, a semi-YA thriller about a teenage sociopath, and he liked what he saw. He sent me an email with a simple question: do you have any dark dystopian novels in your trunk somewhere?
The next day I had a conference call with him and fellow editor Ruta Rimas, and we just talked: what kind of stories we liked, what kind of characters we loved, what kinds of technologies made us excited or interested or scared. I threw out a ton of ideas I'd been kicking around and hadn't done anything with, they threw back a bunch of their own, and slowly the Partials Sequence began to take shape in my head. I could see the tiny community of human survivors, picking through the ruins of our once-great civilization; I could see the Partial army, stratified into ranks and jobs and models, struggling to overcome their limits built into their bodies, searching for a purpose now that the original cause of their creation had disappeared. And behind them both, linking the species in a legacy of death and mystery, was RM, the world-ending plague, the root and solution to all of their problems. "I'll do it," I told them. "This sounds awesome, and I'd love to write it for you, but you have to give me six months to outline it."
"You said you usually outline in only three months."
"That's for one book," I said. "This is a trilogy, and if I'm going to do it I'm going to do it right. I need to know exactly how the third book ends before I can start writing any of the first one."
I dove into that outline like a madman, trying to figure out exactly what all the pieces were, and how they fit together. Who was the main character, and what did she want? What kind of world did she live in, and how had society changed to adapt to that world? What made her a hero--and who were her villains? Jordan and Ruta and I agreed on one thing very early on: while the story needed bad guys, none of them were really evil. This was a world teetering on the brink of destruction; death was constant, plague loomed over everything, and extinction was at the door, scratching to get in and end both species forever. A world like that was a world where people could talk themselves into some very dark, shifty, questionable things, all justified in the name of survival. All of the villains who fought against Kira--and even Kira herself--were just good people trying to save the world, each in their own desperate way. I spaced those villains out, so we could have a chance to really get to know them an their differing ideologues: in the first book we meet the Senate, proudly touting the Hope Act as the salvation of humankind, violently opposed by the Voice and their cries for freedom above all else. In the second our view expands, and we get to know the Partials leaders and their plans to save their own species from their ever-looming expiration date. The crux of that novel comes in the verbal showdown between Kira and Dr. Vale, yet another leader struggling with this overwhelming dilemma and the impossible choice it presents.
For the third book I saved three of my favorite villains of all, though I'll keep my words cryptic to avoid major spoilers. One of the villains you've already met, and Fragments ends with the terrifying realization of exactly how far Marisol Delarosa is prepared to go in the name of saving the human race. The second villain is perhaps the most sympathetic yet--a good man, in over his head, trying to keep control over the shattering Partial army as more and more of them expire, and his superiors do nothing to help. What will a man like that do, pushed to the limit? Last of all is the villain I've been waiting for years to write; the darkest, spookiest, gut-punchiest villain of all. The man who's been lurking in the margins for three books, glimpsed and forgotten, the mystery Kira's been spiraling toward since the very first page. We've seen his work, we've seen his agents, and in RUINS we learn his name: they call him the Blood Man. Why call him that? I bet you can think of some very spooky reasons, all on your own.
The story we concocted those years ago is finally coming to an end. The pieces are on the board, the threats are looming large, and there's no time to waste. Life on Earth has reached it's final hour--and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
I can't wait for you to read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment