Born to be an author, Dan Wells opens up about his hotly anticipated second installment in the Partials series: Fragments. This world of this book, according to the author himself, is “like The Stand crossed with Battlestar Galactica starring Hermione [from Harry Potter] as a medical genius.” Sounds pretty cool!
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| Photo by Micah Demoux |
YOUNG ADULT: What is your earliest memory involving writing?
DAN WELLS: When I was in second grade we read “Where the Wild Things Are,” and then picked one of the Wild Things in the pictures and wrote a story about them. I picked the sea monster, and wrote this massive thing that ended up just being the first chapter of a book I intended to write and never did.
YA: Tell us a little bit about your latest work. What is different about Fragments?
DW: Fragments was a blast to write for a lot of reasons, not least of which was the opportunity to stick it to some of the big cities in North America: we’ve seen what happened to Manhattan in the apocalypse, but what about some other places? In Fragments, we see other locations, and most of them are even worse. And, of course, I loved digging into the characters and getting to know Kira, Samm, and Marcus a little better (and Heron, a minor character from Partials who gets a LOT of screen time in the sequel).
YA: Take us through a typical writing day for you.
DW: Wake up, answer emails/tweets/facebook messages/etc., eat breakfast, write or edit for a bit, eat lunch, write or edit for a bit, eat dinner. It’s not an especially exciting life to hear about, but it’s an awesome one to live 🙂
YA: Can you describe the path to getting this work published? What were the challenges? What was easy about it?
DW: That is a very big question that deserves a very big answer, but I can condense it down to just a few key points:
1) The editor approached me, rather than the other way around, because he’d read my John Cleaver series and wanted to do a project together. The takeaway from this is “years of consistently good work will pay off.” The other takeaway is “networking is awesome.”
2) The major challenge of the project was the timeline, which was incredibly fast. We wrote, edited, and revised the entire book in about eight months, which is madness. The second book was worse. The third book has a similarly tight schedule, but we’ve got the process down to a science now.
YA: What were your specific influences for this book? Films, literature, other stories?
DW: Two things:
1) I loved the new Battlestar Galactica, but wanted to do my own version of it, taking the same themes in different directions, and working toward a better ending.
2) I loved Harry Potter, but it always bugged me that Hermione was the smart, capable one who solved most of the conflicts and yet still ended up taking back seat to Harry because he was the “chosen one.”
So basically, Partials is like The Stand crossed with Battlestar Galactica starring Hermione as a medical genius. Sounds cool to me!
YA: Where do you see the sub genre of post-apocalyptic/dystopian young adult fiction going in the future?
DW: I don’t think it’s dead, but I definitely think it’s transitioning into a wider interest in general science fiction–we’re starting to see books like Cinder from Marissa Meyer, that obviously built on the audience that ‘YA dystopia’ created and yet are not themselves dystopias. I think it’s an exciting new time in YA: we’ve seen the fantasies, the paranormal romances, and the dystopias, bring on the science fiction!
YA: If you hadn’t become an author, what path would your career have perhaps taken?
DW: I’ve been writing my entire life; I told my parents in second grade I was going to be an author, and wrote stories and poems and comics all through high school, and moved into novels in college when I got serious about publishing. If I hadn’t made it as an author I’d still be writing something else, maybe as a reviewer or working in advertising (both jobs I’ve held in the past, and liked well enough to pursue them if I had to). But even then I’d still be writing fiction as a hobby, because seriously, it’s my entire life.
Kira Walker has found the cure for RM, but the battle for the survival of humans and Partials is just beginning. Kira has left East Meadow in a desperate search for clues to who she is. That the Partials themselves hold the cure for RM in their blood cannot be a coincidence–it must be part of a larger plan, a plan that involves Kira, a plan that could save both races. Her companions are Afa Demoux, an unhinged drifter and former employee of ParaGen, and Samm and Heron, the Partials who betrayed her and saved her life, the only ones who know her secret. But can she trust them?
Meanwhile, back on Long Island, what’s left of humanity is gearing up for war with the Partials, and Marcus knows his only hope is to delay them until Kira returns. But Kira’s journey will take her deep into the overgrown wasteland of postapocalyptic America, and Kira and Marcus both will discover that their greatest enemy may be one they didn’t even know existed.
Find out more about the author at www.thedanwells.com