YOUNG ADULT: What are some of the qualities in your latest work that set it/you apart from what’s currently out there on the young adult market?
JEFF HIRSCH: That’s a tough one. The great thing about the YA market right now is that it isn’t at all a monolith. There’s an amazing variety of work out there so it’s tough to compare yourself to a single aspect of the genre. I will say that what I’m going for is a fast paced and immersive adventure story, but one that takes the reality of the characters and their world as seriously as possible while trying to avoid some of the more overused tropes.

YA: Can you describe the path to getting this work published? What were the challenges? What was easy about it?
JH: This book is the second part of a two book deal with The Eleventh Plague. The path to getting to that point was a long one. It involved spending more than a year writing another book that to this day lives in a deep dark drawer never to be seen again. After that, it was about the perseverance needed to stick with The Eleventh Plague through nearly three years of intensive rewriting before I even started submitting to agents. 
What was easy? Choosing the people I’d work with, my agent Sara Crowe and editors at Scholastic David Levithan and Cassandra Pelham. All three of them are just the best.

YA: What were your specific influences for this book? Films, literature, other stories?
JH: I can’t say there was any particular single piece of work that I was thinking about while writing this, but I’m always influenced by the work of people like Joe Hill, Bryan K. Vaughn, Joss Whedon and Suzanne Collins.

YA: How has Magisterium been an evolution from your previous work, The Eleventh Plague?
JH: For me, The Eleventh Plague was all about a kind of gritty realism–no magic, monsters or high tech gadgets. With Magisterium I wanted to let loose a bit and go in a completely different direction. While I still try to treat the world in as realistic a way as possible (given the circumstance, that is), it’s a place with far more possibilities than the world of The Eleventh Plague, a much larger ‘playground’ I guess you could say.

YA: If you could cast the Dream Film Adaptation of your work, who would you cast? 
JH: Let’s see, for Kevin I’d say Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire. I always imagined Glenn as an American Beauty or Ghost World era Thora Birch. For Aamon, who else but the very sadly deceased Michael Clarke Duncan.

YA: If you hadn’t become an author, what path would your career have perhaps taken?
JH: I shudder to think. I don’t think anything other than writing has ever seemed like a viable career option for me. I’m honestly just not very good at anything else. If we can go to dream jobs though….hmm. If I hadn’t become an author I would very much like to have been a rock star. Or Batman!