Three Winners and Five Questions with Kathy Reichs

We have winners!

… and I’ll tell you who they are, too, but first, let me share some interesting answers I got from Kathy Reichs about how this new teen novel came together. Who doesn’t love to get a little peek inside the world of making books?

1. Your adult books have always seemed very grounded in reality, as far as being plausible situations and containing facts based on your own work. What prompted the addition of a fantastical element when writing for a new audience? Were you influenced at all by the rising interest in werewolves, vampires, that sort of transformation of humans that is so big with teens right now?

Young adult readers seem to prefer an element of grounded fantasy in their books.  So when I was plotting the storyline for Virals, I realized that the genre freed me to try something new.  It’s been fun to work with outside the normal boundaries of day-to-day life, something I’ve never done before.  In Virals, Tory and her friends develop super-sensory capabilities after falling sick from a mysterious virus, and, upon recovery, realize that they’ve been changed, down to their DNA.  So in this book I could create more fantastical situations for the characters to overcome than I normally do.  I enjoyed that liberty immensely.  But one thing is certain: there will be no vampires! 
 
2. Since the narrator in Virals is your main character, who is a teen, how did you go about trying to find the voice for her? Did you model her on anyone?
 
Tory’s character came to me pretty much wholly formed in my imagination.  She’s tall and slender, with unruly red hair and freckles.  Pretty, but largely unaware of it, and fiercely intelligent.  I can honestly say that she’s one of kind. I co-wrote Virals with my son, Brendan, who helped conceive and flesh out the teenage characters.  He’s thirty years younger than me, and has a good a handle on capturing the voice of today’s teenagers.  All of my novels are first person, so keeping that format made sense for Virals.

3. How important did you think it was that she be connected to Temperance Brennan, and what prompted that decision?
 
That was something my son and I agreed upon from the beginning.  I wanted Tory to smart and headstrong.  A link to Tempe Brennan made both of those qualities believable.  Plus, it’s a lot of fun to link my two works in a small way.  I really hope adult readers will give the Virals series a try.  While I definitely changed how the main characters talk and interact with each other to keep the book age appropriate, I tried very hard not to change how I create a story.  I think most of my adult readers will also enjoy Virals because it’s not an attempt to write down to a younger level.  It’s simply a mystery novel with teenage protagonists.  In the end, I think it worked out quite well.

4. With so much concern about the images that teens are exposed to, I love that the girl on the cover is a medium-sized girl, dressed for hiking in the forest, which works for the character, rather than a glammed up fantasy version of what that girl would look like. How much influence did you have on that cover image?
 
Regarding the cover, I had what publishers like to call “serious input,” which translates to getting a chance to voice your opinion!  That said, I love the cover and feel that it captures Tory well.  Tory is brilliant, precocious, and loyal.  She’s a true prodigy, with all the intellectual firepower of her great Aunt Tempe, but at heart she’s still a fourteen-year-old girl.  When I envisioned Tory, I saw a combination of traits from the Tempe character in my novels and the one on the TV show, Bones.  I’m careful to keep Tory as human as possible, however.  I don’t want her to be impossibly perfect as a teenager.  Special, certainly, but Tory has issues and flaws just like the rest of us.  It’s how she overcomes those problems that sets her apart as someone to be admired. 

5. The television series based on your Temperence Brennan books, Bones, has been a hit. Should we be looking forward to any television or film adaptations coming for this series?
 
As they say in Hollywood, my son and I have been “taking meetings” and are “in discussions.”  We’d very much like to see Virals make it to either the big screen or television.  But right now we’re focused on writing the second book in the Virals series, Seizure, which should be published sometime next summer.  Tempe will make an appearance, helping Tory solve a pirate mystery as old as the city of Charleston.  As to the rest, we’ll just have to wait and see!  

And now! The winners are:

coolcanadianchica
sweetheart
Lin

Thank you to everyone who entered, and look for future contests on Shelf Candy in the new year!