I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.
Commercial books don't even get covered. The reason why so many book reviews go out of business is because they cover a lot of stuff that nobody cares about. Imagine if the movie pages covered none of the big movies and all they covered were movies that you couldn't even find in the theater?
The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted 'Torn Apart' to be extremely accessible and readable.
I have a number of writers I work with regularly. I write an outline for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to accomplish.
My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.
One of the interesting things about YA books - I don't know about Percy Jackson, but I do know about 'Twilight' and 'Maximum Ride': There are a lot of adult readers. In fact, we released 'Maximum Ride' both as a paperback for kids and as a mass release for adults.
A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.
My life revolves around my writing, my wife and my son.
I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.
I love this idea of expanding the game universe. It has been limited. I guess probably because the genre was so successful, and the people who were creating those games made so much money at it they just had no desire to sort of open it up.
There are terrific models for success with reluctant readers, but many school systems and state governments need to set aside their 'not invented here' and 'we have more important problems than education' attitudes.
I'm big on having a blistering pace. That's one of the hallmarks of what I do, and that's not easy. I never blow up cars and things like that, so it's something else that keeps the suspense flowing. I try not to write a chapter that isn't going to turn on the movie projector in your head.
My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.
The vampire underworld is much larger than most people could imagine. It exists in all the cities mentioned in the book, but also in many, many more. Teenagers, especially, seem to like to act out vampire fantasies.
People like to talk more than they like to act. They like to sit there and complain and vent. Somehow they think that changes things, when it doesn't.
