Authors Are Rock Stars Tour: Interview with Author Dan Wells

I am really excited about this incredible tour - Authors Are Rock Stars - hosted by three amazing ladies, What a fantastic idea! I had an amazing time with the event from the first day, right on throughout the whole month and I'm thrilled to bring you an author that for me, is hands down a Rock Star - DAN WELLS! He is the amazing author behind the Partials Trilogy. The first book, Partials was one of the best books I've read so far this year. Dan, it's always a pleasure having you on my blog, thank you for taking the time out to answer these questions. I can't wait to see what happens next with Isolation & Fragments. To those who haven't read Partials, you have NO idea what you're missing!!

Interview:

Currently Available from Balzer + Bray

For me, the world you’ve created is really vivid. It’s not often that I can picture with such detail the landscape and characters in a book. Can you tell us a bit about the world building and its process for you while working on this PARTIALS trilogy?

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. The setting was one of my favorite parts of the book, and I did a lot of research to make sure I got it right. One of the little details that TONS of post-apocalypse stories get wrong is Manhattan's subway system--it seems like such a great place to have a chase scene or a fight scene or a really scary, tense kind of cat and mouse game, and I initially wrote that exact thing, but it turns out that Manhattan's water table makes that sort of thing impossible. Without constant maintenance the subway system would flood, top to bottom, pretty much in the first couple of days, and certainly after the first rainstorm. I was very sad to lose the scene, but I'm glad I took the time to research it. (Besides, the truth suggests so many more possibilities for the future....)

Some aspects of the story were hard for me to read. Yet, I understood the power behind the government and what its ultimate goal is – survival of the human race. Without you or I giving too much away, was this something you knew would always be part of the story? And have you had any fallout from the sensitive subject matter?

The day authors aren't allowed to include sensitive subject matter in their books is the day I move into the forest and join the Voice. Books have always been a source of truth and controversy and unpopular opinions, and I see no reason to pull any punches in my writing. what I tried to do, and what I always try to do, is to show both sides of the story. There are few, if any, outright "villains" in Partials, just people with very different ideas on how to save the world. The Voice and the Senate both have humanity's best interests at heart, and sometimes one's "right" and sometimes the other is.

Available from Balzer + Bray, Feb. 26th, 2013

Speaking of difficult things… what was the hardest part in writing PARTIALS?

The hardest part of writing Partials was that same thing, actually--making sure the bad guys weren't bad, just "incorrectly good," so to speak. My editor and I had a phrase we shot back and forth constantly: no mustache-twirling. Every character, every motivation, had to make sense and come from some kind of "good" root, even if it got twisted by emotion or circumstance on the way to completion. This rule helped make some of the Senators into much more interesting characters, especially Delarosa, and we get to see a lot more of her in FRAGMENTS.

Kira and Samm are two such strong characters within the story. Our main protagonist Kira is one smart cookie! I was really impressed with her and I loved her voice. You did an incredible job making her an actual teen, even with all the science. And then Samm, he was so mysterious and yet I loved the bits and pieces we learned about him as well. Can you choose 5 words to describe each character?

Kira: I care, sometimes too much.
Samm: My conviction should scare you.

The scientific aspects of the story were highly entertaining to me as a reader. I looked forward to following along as Kira worked through her thoughts. Can you tell us a bit about how you developed the scientific side of the story?

The science all came first--I knew what kind of story I wanted, and some of the basic elements, and built RM as the foundation that would support the entire thing. The things Kira learns in the various labs throughout the story will continue to play a massive role in FRAGMENTS and all the way through Book 3. The science itself came from lots and lots of research, which was fun because science is a big hobby of mine anyway. I love to read about it and learn about it, and I hope PARTIALS inspires at least a few people to feel the same.

With the recent release of the cover for FRAGMENTS, which by the way is amazing, did you have any input in the covers? And how to you think that they fit in with the trilogy?

My input into the covers stops and ends with the emails they send me to show what they look like--their covers are their covers, whether I like them or not. Luckily, so far I've loved all of my Harper covers, so hooray. I'm not sure how the third cover will look, but the pattern seems clear: first we have one person looking at a bunch of buildings, then two people looking at one building, so the last one ought to be three people looking at no buildings, right? I'll go ahead and shoehorn that into the outline...:)

Available from Balzer + Bray Aug. 28th, 2012

Congratulations on the up and coming release of the PARTIALS short – ISOLATION on August 28th! I’m all about the back story and can’t wait to understand more of what happened in the past within your trilogy to make the world what it is today. Will we get a chance to learn any major key points to things that happened in PARTIALS, or things that’ll make sense later on in the trilogy?

One of the things I love about science fiction is the process of change--PARTIALS presents a neat future, but I really wanted to show the steps of how that future came to be. ISOLATION is, essentially, one of those steps. The story follows Heron, a side character from PARTIALS who gets much more screen time in FRAGMENTS, as we get to see through her how the Partials were created, trained, and used by the humans. It's a small story, really, just a few days in the life of a soldier, but it's one of my favorite pieces of the entire PARTIALS universe.

February 26th, 2013 the release date for FRAGMENTS is a long way away until I finally get to see what happens next, would you happen to have maybe a little teaser you could share with me us?

FRAGMENTS will show you:

Exactly who set the bomb in the beginning of PARTIALS...and it's not who you think.
A few more famous cities, and how they fared after the end of the world.
A full-blown Partial vs. Partial warzone.
Another plan to save humanity, probably the simplest and most horrifying one yet.
Many, many new insights about Nandita and the Trust, though whether any of them are true or not I can't say:)

And lastly, what authors are YOUR Rockstars?

Victor Hugo
AA Milne
Fred Saberhagen
Bernard Cornwell
William Gibson
Neil Gaiman
I could go on and on...

Find Dan Online:

Blog | Website | Facebook | Twitter

Add Dan's books to Goodreads: HERE

Order Dan's books Online:

Amazon | Barnes and Noble | The Book Depository

Check out my review of Partials: HERE



Check out the Partials Book Trailer:

*I am not compensated at all for any of the links within this post.