Blood and Feathers is routinely shouted out as one of those modern urban fantasy classics — I’ve not yet heard a bad word said about the book. The follow-up is here already, and author Lou Morgan would like to tell you about it:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Lou Morgan: epic procrastinator, medievalist, goody two-shoes. Also writer. Solaris published my first book, “Blood and Feathers” last summer, and they’ve just released the sequel, “Blood and Feathers: Rebellion”.

My short stories have turned up in anthologies alongside pieces by Joe Hill and Audrey Niffenegger, and I’m part of the team for this year’s World Fantasy Convention in the UK.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

The war between the angels and the Fallen has spread – and for Alice and angels Mallory & Vin, the stakes just got a hell of a lot higher.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

All over the place. Obviously, it’s a follow-up to “Blood and Feathers”, so it’s grown out of that book and the characters in it, but given that I’m British there’s also echoes of the London riots which I watched with a mixture of horror and a feeling of crushing inevitability, and the sense of global unrest that we’re all aware of.

Like the first book, it’s heavily influenced by medieval art and the portrayal of angels: more often than not, when you see them in paintings or carvings in cathedrals they’re in armour and I wondered how that would translate to our world, right now.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD HAVE WRITTEN?

It’s about the things that interest me; the things I keep coming back to. Things like loss and grief and despair and revenge, and hope and faith and friendship and family: what it means to have someone come along who doesn’t pick you up when you fall down, but makes you realise that you can get up again all by yourself.

Besides that, it’s full of the kind of things that fall out of my slightly magpie-mind: riots, battles, sarcastic Archangels, churches and a funeral parlour run by Death. And maybe even redemption. But to get there, you have to go through hell.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING “BLOOD AND FEATHERS: REBELLION”?

I was pretty daunted by the idea of writing a sequel. It scared me. Would I be able to remember what the characters sounded like? Would I push them in directions they shouldn’t necessarily go? Would I even be able to finish it at all – or did I just get lucky with the whole “finishing a book” thing the first time around? And that was just the existential mess I got myself in before I’d even started.

Balancing the real and the unreal was also tricky. I use an incredibly famous location as the Archangel Michael’s stronghold: Mont Saint Michel, on the French coast. It’s one of the most photographed locations in the world, visited by millions every year and of real significance to a lot of people… and I mess with it. I’d realised I wanted to use it when I visited a couple of years ago – but I also knew that to get the best out of it for the story I wanted to tell, I was going to need to tinker with it slightly. I didn’t want to do too much, though, or what would be the point in using it in the first place? In the end, I had a discussion with my editor Jon about whether it should be The Real Place or I should use it as a jumping-off point and invent something totally new – and eventually settled on inserting a few deliberate mistakes in some of the descriptions. They don’t change anything exactly, but they’re also an acknowledgement that you’re looking at a fictionalised version of the Mont – one where the angels are in charge (because if my angels being in charge of it wasn’t fiction, frankly, I’d be getting nervous).

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE BOOK?

That the quickest way to find out whether or not something works is to do it! Worrying about whether X should happen in a story, or Y, or Z doesn’t solve anything: you just have to get on with it. I guess you can apply that slightly trite idea to life in general.

I also learned to have a lot more faith in myself as a writer. All that “second album syndrome” baggage doesn’t help – because it’s not about you. It’s about the story you’re trying to tell. That’s what matters, and it’ll find its way out when it’s good and ready. Your job is just to sit there, shut up and listen so you can pass it on.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE BOOK?

I loved being able to go back to the same characters and give them more history; giving them real pasts which have consequences and getting the chance to add more light and shade to them. But then I also loved bringing new characters in – ones like the Archangel Zadkiel, who was mentioned in the first book but never turned up in person, and who I’d been itching to write. I think more than anything, it’s just the general mayhem I love: the kind you get when there are angels with swords and guns and people can catch fire and all of them have something they’re fighting for… whether it’s good or bad.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Next time, there’ll be a list of forbidden phrases stuck to the wall above where I write. There were two or three that I kept finding over and over again when we were editing, and good grief was I sick of deleting them by the end of the process. And I’ll make some kind of sensible index for my research: now having several notebooks full of completely, utterly randomised notes, I’m on the verge of losing my mind. And my research.

GIVE US YOUR FAVOURITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

(After an exhausting fight against the Fallen, Alice – tired and thoroughly pissed off – decides to school an Archangel in manners)

“Now you listen to me,” Zadkiel dropped his voice to a low hiss. “This is a war. The war. There is no stopping; no getting out. You’re in this – just like the rest of us – to the end. So, frankly, I don’t give a shit if you do it because you’re following orders, or because you want to make it through the day alive, or because you like the look of my fucking haircut. Just get it done.”

Alice stared at him and felt a flush creeping up her cheeks, but was determined to stand her ground. “You didn’t say please.”

“Excuse me?”

“You didn’t say please.”

“I didn’t say please?”

“No.”

“Fine. Alice: would you please take care of this?”

“Seeing as you asked nicely…” She shrugged; out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Castor giving her a thumbs-up and Vin trying to hide a smile behind his hand. Even Mallory seemed to have succumbed to a mysterious coughing fit.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I have a couple of short stories which are knocking about and should see the light of day sometime this year, and at the moment I’m working on a YA book which is still in its very early stages. There’s a few other ideas I’d like to spend some time on which have been stewing for a while – now it’s just a case of waiting to see which one shouts the loudest for my attention.

Lou Morgan: Website / @LouMorgan

Blood And Feathers: Rebellion: Amazon US / Amazon UK / B&N / Waterstones / Hive 

Jon McGoran, man. I’m one of his cohorts in the Philly Liars’ Club and we both share the same agent — lemme tell you, this guy has talent and smarts in spades. Here he talks about his newest, Drift, which is (to me) the adult thriller cousin to my upcoming young adult book, Under the Empyrean Sky — hell, his book could be a prequel to mine. Food and pharmaceuticals crash together in a high-test paranoid thriller. You’re gonna wanna read it, but just in case — here’s Jon to talk about the book:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I write mysteries, crime, thrillers, the occasional science fiction story, and even a zombie story here and there. I have a series of forensic thrillers I wrote as D.H. Dublin, but Drift is my first novel as Jon McGoran. I also write about food and sustainability, formerly at Weavers Way Co-op, and now as the editor of Grid Magazine. Since I eat food as well as write about it, I’ve become a bit of an advocate, working to support urban agriculture and labeling of genetically modified foods. I live outside Philadelphia with my son Will and my lovely bride, Elizabeth, a  children’s librarian.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Cop drinking off a suspension out in the country discovers a plot involving drugs, GMOs & the blurring line between food and pharmaceuticals

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

For a long time, my food writing and my fiction were pretty separate, but as our food systems have gotten more and more out of whack, my nonfiction was getting crazier than the fiction. I figured our corrupt and dysfunctional food system was the perfect backdrop for a thriller, and when I had the idea for Drift, I realized it was time to bring the two parts of my writing life together, to write a thriller about the frightening things that were being done to the food we eat. Most of the obvious ideas for where a thriller would go had already happened in real life. (Corrupt and mysterious forces keeping the public in the dark while releasing untested new life forms into the environment? Been there, done that!) but the GMO issue has a lot of layers and angles. Some of the most powerful and promising GMO endeavors — like plants being engineered to produce pharmaceuticals — become very unsettling when you think about those plants escaping into the environment or cross pollinating with other plants. I was also intrigued by the way big corporations are trying to create situations where society is dependent on them in a very unhealthy way, like an addiction. Those are some of the ideas I explore in Drift.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

Drift is unusual in a lot of ways, I hope. It’s written in first person, which makes it tricky to do some of the things thrillers are supposed to do, but lets you write with intimacy and immediacy, and a lot of voice. Hopefully, my voice is unique, so in that sense, I’m the only person who could have written this story. But, considering the urgency and importance of the topic, I am kind of surprised there aren’t more books out there about GMOs, and specifically more thrillers. (And obviously, a YA cornpunk trilogy about GMOs is going to be insanely successful, so I’ll definitely be looking for that!) The story of what has already happened with GMOs — the actual provable, demonstrable, acknowledged facts — already reads like a thriller. It’s a great and terrible back story that could go in a lot of directions.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING DRIFT?

There are so many compelling concepts involved in the GMO issue, it was hard leaving some of them out.  Things like the impact of GMOs on insects and animals, and the interaction between the big chemical companies and the government. Luckily, I am working on a sequel.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING DRIFT?

I already knew a lot about what was going on with GMOs, but in researching the topic, I learned a lot more, like how GMO manufacturers are using patent protection to thwart efforts to conduct meaningful research on the long-term health and environmental impact of GMOs.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT DRIFT?

I think the ideas behind the book are important, and I’m a bit of a plot guy, so I really like some of the twists, but, probably like most writers, I love my characters. Doyle especially, because that’s the point of view I am writing from, but really all of them — his new friend Moose and his romantic interest Nola, all the bad guys and minor characters, too. I love the relationship between Doyle and his partner, Danny, and with Stan Bowers, his friend at DEA. There are also characters who aren’t even in the book, who exist off stage, and I find them fascinating, too. WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Since writing Drift I have learned a lot more about heirloom seeds, and I would have included more of that. There are farmers out there using seed-saving and growing techniques that have been around for thousands of years, and suddenly that is subversive or even illegal. Some of them are being aggressively litigated against by companies like Monsanto. I would have included more about that. But I’ll look forward to exploring that in a future book. I might also try to cut back on the coffee.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

As the phone fell away from my face, I thought: My mom is going to die while this fuck- head tries to get his days straight. I don’t remember thinking much after that. I got out of the van, a cardinal sin in the middle of surveillance, and I walked around the corner, straight up to where Danny and Rowan were standing.

Danny’s eyes widened, then his face fell back into the same heavy lidded suspicious gaze as Rowan’s. We’d been working pretty hard the past few days, so I looked rough enough to pass for someone making a buy. As Rowan looked over at me, ready to take my order, Danny flashed me one last glare to remind me how much time and energy he’d invested in his cover.

The first thing I did when I came up to them, I planted a left in Danny’s face. I didn’t pull it, either— I popped him and dropped him. If I was going to pull something, it had to look real.

Rowan yelped like I’d stepped on his tail. He tugged a gun from the back of his pants, but he couldn’t seem to get a grip on it, bobbling it like some half- assed juggler until I snatched it out of the air between his hands and pressed it against his temple.

“When’s the re- up?”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I am hard at work finishing up Deadout, the sequel to Drift. It deals with possible links between GMOs and colony collapse disorder, the mysterious syndrome that is causing billions of bees to vanish without a trace.

Jon McGoran: Website / @JonMcGoran

Drift: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

Ender’s Game is one of my favorite books from high school.

The movie looks pretty rad.

I love Harrison Ford.

I like shiny things and smart science-fiction.

And yet, I’m not going to go see Ender’s Game.

Orson Scott Card has toxic politics shot through with not merely a thread but a full-on threaded steel cable of bigotry and ignorance. And so, I’m gonna boycott the film. Now, to clarify, I’m not saying you should or have to do the same. You do as you like. No harm, no foul.

But I thought I’d highlight why I’m gonna boycott.

First, I don’t want to reward bigotry. Particularly financially.

Second, it is safe to assume OSC spends his money on supporting this ignorance and bigotry given that he serves the National Organization for Marriage (which, benevolent as it sounds, is more about defining and limiting marriage than it is about Yay Marriage For Everybody). This is a pretty good sum-up of his toxic politics — and it’s worth noting that he equates homosexuality with genetic error and the “end of democracy,” though at the same time seems to believe that homosexuality’s, erm, origin story is one tied in with rape and molestation at a young age. This is venomous shit, and I don’t want to pay him to sling it.

Third, yes, OSC has almost certainly gotten paid for the film already. An author of his magnitude may very well have escalators that pay him more if the film does well. Further, if the film does well, then they will likely pay him to make more films from his other books. A success for this film raises his star higher, and for me, that is more than a little queasy-making.

Fourth, the division of art versus the artist is to my mind thinner than we think. I say that as a writer — I find myself hiding in my writing more often than I’d suspect or even like. Just the same, I do believe that we must be able to separate out an artist from his art — at least in the sense of being willing to appreciate art despite the apparent jerkiness of the author or artist. Still, what OSC supports isn’t just him being a jerk: like I said, this is some high-octaine toxicity. This isn’t just him being anti-gay marriage. It’s him making troubling assertions about homosexuality. It’s him supporting that with his money. It’s him being an active political figure and fighting against human rights with his voice, his art, and his money.

Fifth, we’re not exactly lacking for brilliant art and powerful reading material. It’d be one thing if we had, like, ten good books or movies out there — but we have a wealth of beautiful and moving art available to us. And so not going to see Ender’s Game won’t somehow damage the canon, it won’t change the face of art, it won’t remove us from the cultural stream and fail to give us something to talk about at parties. We’ve got a lot of good books and movies to watch without having to support this canker-rimmed asshole at the same time.

Sixth, when asked about the boycott, his response includes:

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

That’s him doubling down and saying, “You need to tolerate my intolerance.” Which is a classic derailing tactic that smells so strongly of horseshit that when he says it I wonder if I’m actually living inside a horse’s ass. Just because we elected Obama president doesn’t mean I have to tolerate racism. Bigoted ignorant fuck-all is still bigoted ignorant fuck-all.

The movie may still be a rampant blockbuster. The lack of my movie dollars may not make one whit of difference (and given what we saw with Chik-Fil-A, it’s actually safe to assume the opposite of a boycott will occur — right-wing homophobes flocking to the theater to cheer on Ender Scott Wiggins Card as in their minds he eradicates whole planets of little gay bugs).

Still, I won’t pitch my chits and ducats into this bucket.

Writing is a craft.

Storytelling is an art.

And publishing is a business.

And so it behooves us, as trembling little ink-fingered word-slingers, to know the business before we tangle with the business. You gotta at least go to the rodeo before you try the rodeo, right? Unless you fancy proctological exams via bucking bull. (And maybe you do; I won’t judge.)

You’ve got to know how it works before you try to work it, and this is true in publishing, too — whether you’re splashing around in the traditional publishing pool or taking a long swim down the indie-publishing river. You’ve gotta know the process. How a book moves from one stage to another. How much control you want — and how much you’ll have. It pays to be smart and knowledgable so you don’t go in and whack your head on the lowest hanging beam and knock yourself out and piss your britches before you even get a book into people’s hands.

But here’s where we start to get it twisted.

We start seeing writing and storytelling as the business. As if all we’re doing is creating a product — a three-pronged story-widget with dual-adjustible elbow pads. An item of carefully massaged content designed to fill a need: supply and demand, by golly! People got rats, we give ’em a rat-whacker. People need cheap food and ungainly diarrhea, we give ’em Taco Bell. People need porn and animated cat GIFs, we give ’em the entire Internet.

It makes sense to fulfill the needs of the audience.

And we can and should comfortably assume that the audience wants some mixture of entertainment and enlightenment — translated, it means they want to read stories. The audience has always wanted to absorb stories, always wanted to braid them into their social, intellectual and emotional tapestries. Stories will always have a place to plug into when it comes to the human mind. Because, trust me on this one, stories make the world go around.

But that’s where our assumptions of supply and demand have to end — but sometimes don’t.

Let’s rewind a bit.

As I’m wont to say: “I get emails.”

And not just Target ads, phishing scams, or weird porn advertisements, either. I get actual emails from what I must assume are actual readers of this site and/or my books and they ask me for advice about writing. One of the more common emails asks some version of this question:

“What sells?”

My first initial answer to this is an admittedly snarky, utterly reductive: “Stories sell.”

And despite its Snark Factor of 7 and its utterly simplistic nature, the answer is pretty much as far as I’m willing to take it. Because I surely don’t know what sells. I mean, do you? Fuck, does anybody? Reskinned Downton Abbey fan-fic? BDSM space opera? Murder mysteries solved by imperious hedgehogs? Erotic Guy Fieri autobiographies? (I just threw up a little.) I have no fucking idea. I can take a look at the bestselling books same as you can — and at any given time I might see epic fantasy or a powerful crime novel or some Twilight knock-off or some thriller by some legacy thriller writer who has been secretly dead for 15 years and his books are now written by a machine intelligence built from his 700 other books. And none of those things are emblematic of anything. They’re outliers by the very definition of the term. They’re the narrow end of the wedge, the thinnest sliver of earth on the far side of Bell Curve Mountain.

Publishers think they know what sells. And they’re probably better at it than I am, but just the same, I can’t help but imagining editors and sales executives sitting in a darkened office somewhere in the Flatiron District, sorting through pigeon guts and hastily shaking a Magic 8-Ball and huffing vapors from the cleaning lady’s cleaning bucket trying to mystically discern just what the hell the audience will want to read next — The Next Big Book Trend that will set All Of Publishing Aflame. A series that will keep B&N buoyant! That will keep publishers solvent!

They might think they know.

But they don’t really know.

We don’t have an easy metric. No occult equation, no secret publishing algorithm.

Because stories aren’t products. Stories aren’t neatly-digestible cubes of content.

Your novel isn’t Tab A designed to neatly slide into the eager and obvious Slot B.

Stories are broken mirrors. They’re fractal displays and unkempt jungles. They’re a sunset made beautiful by an unpredictable confluence of clouds and chemicals and the unknown and forever unexplored context of those who will behold just such a sunset.

My response after the snarkgasmic “Stories sell” is inevitably, “Fuck what sells.”

First, because as noted, nobody knows anyway.

Second, because — is that what you want to write? Is that the only reason you’re writing? When you first started making up stories — probably at a young age — did you sit there as an eight-year-old trying to figure out who would buy your Avengers/My Little Pony mashup comic book or did you just tell that story because telling stories is fucking awesome? You did it because that story spoke to you. Because it leapt out of your brain and body like a goddamn xenomorph chestburster — a gory splurch and there’s the tale, running around giddy and bloody.

When you look back on all the stories that moved you through your life — whether we’re talking Infinite Jest or Die Hard or Batman: A Killing Joke or The Handmaid’s Tale — do you think that those were created by their storytellers as products? That they were articulated as carefully-crafted widgets whose only goal was to rake in beaucoup bucks? Were they crass expressions of creative capitalism written by brands instead of people? Or were they the stories that those storytellers wanted to tell? Had to tell? Loved telling?

Listen, I wrote a lot of crap before I managed to get to Blackbirds — and a lot of the crap I wrote was me running hurdles over what I thought would actually get me on bookshelves. I thought, “I’ll write anything at all as long as it gets me published.” And it was me trying to headbutt square pegs into circle holes. I worked myself dizzy leaping hastily through a world of finished and unfinished novels I didn’t actually like. They weren’t me. They weren’t anything I really wanted to read. They were a collective artifice created based on what I imagined were the trends — what I believed publishers wanted to buy and what bookstores could sell. Never mind the fact that by the time you pinpoint a trend it’s already too late (months to write the book, months to edit, months to publish, and by the time those add up to the year or more it’s gonna take to get it out there, the trend has slipped its leash and darted through the closing door).

The bigger question is, who gives a fuck?

I certainly didn’t.

I was totally forcing it.

It’s an almost Fight Clubby realization — Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat. It’s not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go. It’s, And then, something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. And it’s It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

This isn’t about not paying attention to publishing. Or about completely averting your gaze from the market. It’s about not appeasing the market above your own interests.

It’s about finding that crucial middle ground in the Venn diagram between the circles of what you want to write and what people want to read.

The goal is to write a book whose infectiousness — whose saleability — exists because you put yourself and your love of the story into it, not in spite of it.

It’s not about asking “What will sell?”

It’s about asking, “What do I want to write? What do I love? What do I want to read?” It’s about creating stories and art that are products of wonder and madness instead of creating products that have no wonder or madness at all.

It’s about listening to your own voice before the voice of the marketplace.

The business part will come.

For now:

Craft your writing.

Art the fuck out of your stories.

And hell with what sells.

Just as buildings are made of bricks and last night’s dinner was made of donuts and whiskey, the INTERNET IS MADE OF LISTS. And one of the lists I see periodically pop up like a gopher at the hole is the one where the writer curates her list of the essential reads in a particular genre.

And I thought, well, I can do that.

Except, man, I’m totally lazy.

So, I thought, for fun, I’ll crowdsource it. And as it turns out, I have a blog — beards-beers-and-books.blogspot.com, which unfortunately this week was shut down by the NSA for hiding Edward Snowden’s cat videos. So, here I am at my second blog, giving it a go.

This’ll be a series, I think, where I drop in and ask this question about certain essential genre and subgenre (and other as-yet-unseen categorizations and classifications) reads. I’ll tally the top ten by the next post and it’ll all start all over again. Like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. But more fun. Or something. YOUR FACE IS FULL OF SHUT UP.

So, today, since I’ve got a couple books loosely defined as urban fantasy (ahem, ahem, cough, cough, Blue Blazes, out now), I thought that’s a good place to start.

As such, here’s your task:

In the comments, list your top three essential urban fantasy reads.

Name of book and author of book.

You can just give titles or talk about the books or use rare artisanal Korean emoticons to express your pleasure. I trust your judgment.

Then, next Monday, I’ll list the ten top books that appeared.

So: top three urban fantasy reads.

Let us begin.

Okay, so I don’t usually recommend that authors respond to negative reviews. (I probably shouldn’t even be responding to this one, but when did I ever take my own advice? DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO, KIDS.) Authors don’t have much to gain from highlighting negative reviews, though sometimes negative reviews are themselves incentivizing in terms of selling the book for you (“I hate how every time I open the book it dispenses free liquor and cookies and I hate liquor and cookies!”) I mean, reviewers have every right to not like a book for whatever reason. Even if that reason seems ‘wrong’ to the author, hey, whatever. This isn’t academic criticism. This is the Internet. Open to whomever to say whatever.

And even the review I’m about to showcase — which is a review for my upcoming YA, Under the Empyrean Sky — is a review that the reviewer has every right to maintain. This person doesn’t like certain things, hey, so be it.

Oh, also, as a caveat, this is not not not a winking nudgey unspoken suggestion for you to go all Internet Crusade on this reviewer. Author-led pitchfork mobs are creepy and constitute a kind of low-grade bullying and I’m not a fan — I just think this review offers up some stuff I wanna talk about. Please don’t go and respond or start shit with this reviewer. Kay? Kay.

So, the review:

“I was totally looking forward to this book as the plot sounded very interesting with the genetically modified corn angle. I almost stopped reading after just a few pages because I found the language extremely offensive. The teen lingo used by Cael and friends ruined this book for me. It wasn’t just a word here or there but very extensive in the first part. It does ease up as the book progresses but yuck! Could’ve been cleaned up and then very enjoyable as the plot is good.

The teen sexual content I also found offensive and with the language and sexual content I can’t recommend this book to anyone unless they especially are looking for that flavor of writing. This is the kind of book that kids read and think… well everyone’s doing it…. when they’re NOT. Not talking like that and not the other stuff as well.

[cutting one sentence due to a very light spoiler]

If 4% of the population is truly gay, I find it very contrived to find so many gay characters appearing all of a sudden. It’s only unique for the first how many times?”

So.

Let’s talk a little bit about this book.

It has some profanity in it. Some of this profanity is of the “made-up” variety. Like, there’s a parlance these characters use in this world — they might say “Lord and Lady,” or “Jeezum Crow,” for instance. But they also use some mild profanity — crap, piss, ass, shit. (I don’t recall if I drop the f-bomb in here, but let’s all remember that PG-13 movies let you get away with one good f-bomb per film, by gosh and by golly.)

It has some sex in it. Mostly sex by suggestion — I’m not writing hardcore teen orgies. It’s sex painted by negative margins — more about what’s inferred rather than what’s explicitly described.

Further, the “gay character” thing. Yeah. I don’t know what the percentage of gay people in the world is, and in this case, I don’t much care — I think it helps to make sure that writers are thinking about characters who don’t all live on Heteronormative White Dude Mountain, and I wanted this character to be gay and it made sense to have that in the world and to make it reflect a part of the world (boys and girls in my sunny dustbowl dystopia are forcibly married off at the age of 17, and purely in heterosexual couplings).

Thing is, I think young adult books should reflect what it’s like to be a young adult.

I remember being a teenager. It was fucked up.

That time is frequently painted with this rosy kind of nostalgic glow (“These are the best times of your life”), but dude, dude, that’s so not true. It’s hard. Your brain is a cocktail of anger and sadness and lurching sexual need and confusion and fear and freedom and giddy anarchic expression. You’re still half-kid but now you’re also half-adult and nobody knows how to treat you — more kid or more adult? And just when they treat you like an adult you still prove you’re half-kid and when they treat you like a kid you show them how you’re capable of being an adult.

Throw that all into the context of an agricultural dystopia and… well.

Just a head’s up, Parents Who Think Their Kids Are Chaste Little Angels —

Teens have sex. Teens curse.

And that’s reflected in the book.

It’s a book I want adults to like, but it’s a book I want teens to read. And that means speaking all that pesky “teen lingo” (?!). YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, PRUDISH HUMANS.

Anyway!

A few more quick tidbits on the book —

The book has a new tagline:

FEAR THE CORN. And everything that floats above it.

It also has a Booklist review:

The first book in Wendig’s Heartland trilogy sets the stage. Flotillas, peopled by the wealthy Empyreans, float above the Heartland, allowing the lowly Heartlanders to grow only Hiram’s Golden Prolific corn. This monstrous crop has taken over everything, leaving deformed, malnourished farmers and their families to survive on the government’s stingy handouts. Eighteen-year-old Cael and his longtime enemy Boyland and their crews are constantly pitted against one another, striving to earn the title of best scavengers. When Cael discovers an amazing row of real garden fruits and vegetables, he unearths not only a possible death sentence for him and his friends but also torture for his family and other Heartlander citizens. It’s a tense dystopian tale made more strange and terrifying by its present-day implications. The Heartland teens understand that they are pawns in the hands of the powerful, fed an insidious combination of hope and coercion to keep them all under Empyrean control. Escape only brings retribution to their families and friends. Cael has two more books to conquer this perversity, and it will be interesting to see how he does it.

Finally, I don’t think I listed this blurb the last time I talked about the book, but —

“Wendig brilliantly tackles the big stuff—class, economics, identity, love, and social change—in a fast-paced tale that never once loses its grip on pure storytelling excitement. Well-played, Wendig. Well-played.” —Libba Bray, author of the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Going Bovine, and The Diviners

(Holy crap! Libba Bray! If you have not read The Diviners, holy shit, fix that, stat.)

The book comes out July 30th.

Preorder: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

UNDER THE EMPYREAN SKY