Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 20

Booklist on The Secret Sea

The first review of The Secret Sea is in, from the folks at Booklist! Check it out (emphasis mine):

Even though he’s grown up in New York City, 12-year-old Zak has lived a fairly sheltered life. He has a heart condition that has caused his parents, now in the middle of a contentious divorce, to keep tight tabs on him—and they would only be tighter if Zak’s parents knew he was hearing voices. But when Zak has a premonition of the subway filling with water and the mysterious voice he thinks of as his guardian angel warns him to run, Zak listens, only to find himself trapped in an alternate-universe New York with his two best friends, Moira and Khalid. Facing dangers from both this new world, which isn’t kind to women, and the increasingly untrustworthy voices in Zak’s head, the three struggle to find a way home that won’t have cataclysmic consequences. Lyga (After the Red Rain, 2015) returns to middle grade with a darkly compelling, if occasionally complicated, look at family, morality, and the long-term effects even seemingly small choices can have. A thoughtful—and thought-provoking—piece of science fiction.

“Occasionally complicated?” I was going for “always complicated.”

WiRL: “You’ve gotta keep up with the other kids”

(Image: NYT)

Episode 63: The One with Sensible Screentime

Morgan damns Barry with faint praise. Mornings! Showers! Is the “limit your kid’s screentime” notion an anti-feminist plot? Barry’s theory that multiple TVs lead to divorce. Plus, Morgan preps for her first writing conference…and makes a soul-searching confession.

Stories I Never Told: Watchmen

[image error]Given that this has happened, I guess it’s time to tell this never-to-be-told tale…

A long time ago, I had an idea for a story. The great thing about the idea was that it could fit into any DC comic at any time. Talk about versatile, eh?

Here goes: Whatever DC comic I was lucky enough to be writing, I would start having shadowy figures show up, saying cryptic things. Eventually, I would reveal that those figures were, in fact, the characters from Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Rorschach, the Comedian… All of ’em.

And they would be acting totally like typical superheroes. Right down to insipid expository dialogue. Like, “Good thing Dr. Manhattan decided to resurrect the Comedian and Rorschach! We need the team at full strength!” And “This parallel earth is so different from our own!”

In short, I would pissing off a metric ton of Watchmen fans by repurposing the characters in this way.

Until…

Until it’s revealed that these “Watchmen” are actually just denizens of the DC Universe cosplaying as characters from their favorite graphic novel!1 So, yeah, it would basically just be me trolling the fans.

Told Paul Levitz this idea once. He laughed.

Because it has been established that Watchmen exists in the DCU as a graphic novel.

Why isn’t there an I Hunt Killers movie/TV show?

Of late, I have noticed a certain topic coming up on social media. And it boils down to the question at the top of this page.

For those of you new to the series, rest assured: It was attempted and it failed. There’s no one to blame — things just don’t work out sometimes.

I get it, though — if you’ve read the books and you really, really liked them1 then you’re sitting around going, “WTF, Hollywood? These books are perfect for (as one person wrote to me) ‘a television show or series of blockbuster movies.’ Get on it!”

You want a movie or a TV series. Hell, so do I.

Here’s the deal: There are a ton of books that would make great TV or great movies. A ton of them. Thousands of books are published each year; mere hundreds of movies are made. Not everything that’s worthy will be chosen.

And in general, so far as I can tell, Hollywood decides to make a movie or a TV show from a book based on one of two factors:

Someone very powerful really loves the book and insists on turning it into a film, or
The book is a mega-super-duper-bestseller, so Hollywood knows there’s a built-in audience for it, making it a risk worth taking

It’s not just about “It’s really good and would make a great movie!”

As to #1: Well, look, if any of you out there are close personal friends with someone powerful in Hollywood, sure, go ahead and hand that person a copy of I Hunt Killers. Because if Brad Pitt or Reese Witherspoon or Ryan Reynolds or Jennifer Lawrence read and love it, it’ll become a movie. I guarantee it.

But so far, that hasn’t happened.

As to #2: Hey, I know you loved the books, but we need a couple hundred thousand of your friends to love it, too. Or at least to buy it. Don’t get me wrong: I Hunt Killers is without a doubt the most successful book of my career; it even landed at #3 on the bestsellers list! But what makes something a “hit” in publishing doesn’t always measure up to something that will get Hollywood’s attention. As best I can tell, I’d need to sell four or five times more copies of I Hunt Killers to get Hollywood to sit up and take notice. And at this late date, with the book being so old, the odds of hundreds of thousands of readers suddenly discovering it are pretty slim.

The news isn’t all bad, though. There’s still option #1. Rest assured: My agent is always working to put the book in front of the right people, and even though we’ve had no luck thus far…we only have to get lucky once.

And thank you for that!

WiRL: “Scotland, My Favorite Country”

Episode 62: The One with Eight Followers, Maybe Twelve

Morgan is obsessed with Snapchat. Follow-up on programming your brain and baby paranoia. Leia climbs on a truck. Vacations are good. New ideas for stories! The scourge of outlining. Morgan publishes an essay. Pitching vs. blogging. The frustration of being ignored by editors and agents.

Summer 2016 Teen Author Reading Nights!

The schedule for the Summer 2016 series of Teen Author Reading Nights has been announced! Yours truly will be reading from The Secret Sea on August 3, but be sure to check out all of the amazing authors who show up each month. (All readings begin at 6pm at the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library.)

June 1

Tara Altebrando, The Leaving
Jennifer Castle, What Happens Now
Gordon Korman, Slacker
Lois Metzger, Change Places With Me
Sarah Mlynowski, Think Twice
Lindsay Ribar, Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies

July 6

Caela Carter, Tumbling
Melissa Grey, The Shadow Hour
Jeff Hirsch, Black River Falls
Kathryn Holmes, How it Feels to Fly
Ann Stampler, How to Disappear
Stephanie Kate Strohm, The Taming of the Drew

August 3

Aimee Friedman, Two Summers
Barry Lyga, The Secret Sea
Amanda Panitch, Never Missing, Never Found
Laura Stamper, Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies
Sarvenaz Tash, The Geek’s Guide to Unrequited Love

Ebook Sale for I Hunt Killers!

The ebook edition of I Hunt Killers is on sale through May 27 for a mere 99¢! Yes, for less than a buck, you can get all the gore, all the crazy, and all the WTF???!

Check it out:

Amazon/Kindle
Barnes & Noble/Nook
iBooks
Kobo

Get a Sneak Peek at The Secret Sea

Want to get a sneak peek of The Secret Sea before its August 23 publication? Well, satisfaction is only a click away!

My publisher has put together a sampler of four new titles, including The Secret Sea. It’s absolutely free (of course!) and you can get it by clicking on this link right here.

Enjoy! And don’t forget to preorder at Amazon or BN.com!

WiRL: “A 5x Multiple on this Particular Slot Machine”

Episode 61: The One without a Daddy Blogosphere

Does a debut have to be big? Guess what: Your sales aren’t determined by the quality of your book. Are celebrity memoirs worth the massive cost? Morgan has opinions about Captain America: Civil War. The (missing) narrative of the Stay-At-Home Dad.

Stories I Never Told: Archvillain

So, as I indicated recently, the third Archvillain book, Yesterday Again, was never intended to be the finale of that series. I had always meant for the series to go on for quite a while, possibly as many as ten books.

Sadly, reality intruded on my fantasy. The books just didn’t sell well enough to justify further volumes, and the publisher pulled the plug (as is its right).

But I get a lot of people asking me if there will ever be more Archvillain books, and since the answer is “No,” I figure there’s no harm in relating what might have been, had sales warranted. Settle in — this is a long one…

OK, so first of all, realize that the ending of Yesterday Again was there because I had to end the series. Originally, the book was supposed to conclude with that moment where Kyle zooms in on the videotape and realizes that Mighty Mike has called him “master.”

Dun-dun-dun! Boom. End of book.

The next book begins with Kyle terrified and baffled beyond belief. Why on earth would Mike call him “master?” What the hell is going on?

That book was to be titled Power Swap. Here’s the description I wrote for myself when I was plotting it out:

Kyle realizes that although Erasmus was destroyed in the chronovessel, he still has a back-up of the AI on his computer from when he last synched his iPod! He outfits himself with a new iPod and reinstalls Erasmus. Of course, this version of Erasmus has no memories of the time traveling, but it’s still super-smart…smart enough to help Kyle construct a gadget designed to suck Mighty Mike’s powers out of Mighty Mike and into Kyle [using the radioactive dirt Kyle stored in the basement in Book 1]! But things go awry when Lefty hops into the picture at the wrong moment…and suddenly Kyle’s brain is in Mike’s body, while Lefty flies around Bouring with Mighty Mike’s powers! Mairi and everyone else in town is baffled by the weirdness, but in the end, Kyle is able to set things right…only he can’t restore ALL of his powers — in the end, he is left with only his super-intelligence.

I had decided that I wanted Kyle to be smart, but that having superpowers made him too much of a match for Mike. I liked the classic Superman/Lex Luthor dichotomy of a normal man with super-intelligence facing someone with godlike powers. So that’s what I wanted to set up.

The next book would have been titled Rorrim. Kyle is still trying to figure out the truth behind Mighty Mike, so…

Kyle, desperate to figure out his connection to Mighty Mike, tries building another time machine. But when it explodes, it sends him to a parallel dimension, a world where the Azure Avenger is the world’s greatest hero, Malicious Mike is a horrific villain…and Mairi is dead!

The idea here is that in the alternate universe, Kyle and Mike acted differently during the attack of the dirt monster in Book 1. Mike screws up and Mairi dies as a result, which drives him mad and turns him into Malicious Mike. The Azure Avenger is the only one who can fight him, and soon everyone regards him as a hero. Kyle is pretty psyched that he’s a hero on this world…but less psyched that Mairi is dead. He realizes that even though the results were less than ideal, maybe he did the right thing back in Book 1 when he let Mike [appear to] save the day. He returns home a little more sober.

The next book would have been another time travel jaunt, titled Tomorrow Today:

Kyle receives visitors from the future, including grown-up versions of the Mad Mask…and himself! Along with them are a creepy new supervillain called The Giggler (he just won’t. stop. laughing.) and Walter Lundergaard, who — due to the vagaries of time travel — is meeting Kyle for the first time. These guys all want Young Kyle to join their “Villains Club,” and of course they’re up to something nefarious. [Truthfully, I hadn’t worked out what yet!] The big takeaway, though, is that Kyle is crushed to find that — as an adult — he has apparently embraced villainy and become a bad guy.

OK, so then my plan was more stories of Kyle going to alternate universes, trying to figure out a way to avoid his fate of becoming a villain. There are plenty of realities in the multiverse where he’s a hero. The only problem is this — in every single one of them, Mairi dies.

Every. Single. One.

Kyle realizes that the only way to keep Mairi alive is to accept that the world will always see him as a villain. And so the series ends with him gladly declaring his villainy, claiming that he will shake the heavens themselves, and that in the future, the world will ask, “Where were you when the stars fell down?” which brings us full circle to the beginning of the series.

But…! But a part of Kyle knows, deep down, that the world needs someone to protect it from himself. And so he creates Mighty Mike and sends him back in time (as in the epilogue to Yesterday Again) as a way of mitigating his own villainy. Thus, Kyle is both villain and hero. (His actions in creating Mighty Mike, BTW, spark a villain war, with Lundergaard and the rest of the bad guys trying to kill Kyle.)

That was the general plot/character arc of the series. Here are some more details:

Who/what is Lundergaard? My general idea for Lundergaard is that he was a genius scientist in another reality. His time travel experiments created a paradox that wiped out that universe and only he survived. Now he’s trying to make changes to our universe, traveling through time to make “time tweaks” in an effort to make our universe into his own. Given his track record, you can’t really expect that to turn out well, can you?

Who betrayed Kyle? In the epilogue to Yesterday Again, Kyle mentions that he was betrayed by “M–” Which isn’t really helpful since roughly half the cast has a name starting with M. The answer is…Mairi! Yes, Mairi, Kyle’s best friend, ends up betraying him in the future, leading the members of the Villains Club to his secret lab, where he’s creating Mighty Mike. Why? Well, she genuinely thinks it’s for the best. She eventually re-learns that Kyle is the Blue Freak and is horrified that he wiped her memory. She thinks he needs to be stopped and is willing to make a deal with the devil to do it. It’s a really sad moment — everything Kyle has done in the series is to protect Mairi, and she ends up turning on him.

What about the Mad Mask? The tween version would have showed up in future books to bedevil Kyle, and the adult version from the Villains Club would be in the mix, too. What about the adult version trapped in the 1980s? Honestly, that was never part of the plan at all! I added him to Yesterday Again when I learned I had to wrap up the series in the third book, so I didn’t have anything in mind for that version.

What the hell was the deal with the lighthouse? We would learn in one of the future books that Kyle himself built the lighthouse during a time travel trip to the past. None of the other Bourings in the multiverse have one — he built it so that he would always know he’d gotten “home.”

The last bit I’ll talk about was something I hadn’t told my editor. Or, indeed, anyone at all until now. That was that I planned to reveal that Kyle was gay.

I decided early on that Kyle was gay, but I also wasn’t sure how much I wanted to deal with it. After all, the series is about a bunch of twelve year olds and one of the things I liked about it was that — unlike my YA books — there was no sex. No yearnings. It was just an action series, pure adrenaline and comedy. There were friendships, but no pairings. It was sort of refreshing after writing stuff like Boy Toy and Goth Girl Rising.

And then I started thinking about the character of Kyle and I decided on this:

In the middle of a fight for his life, while desperately trying to survive, Kyle would suddenly pause and go, “Oh. I just realized I’m gay!”

And that would be it! He would dive back into the fight, win, and go home…

To his parents…

Now, realize that one of the running gags in the books is that Kyle thinks his parents are idiots. And Kyle also thinks he is the most self-aware person in the world.

So, there would be a moment where he would decide to come out to his parents. He would sit them down and say, “Mom, Dad, I’m gay.”

And they would look at each other and go, “Well, yeah, we figured that out years ago.”

And Kyle would spend the rest of his life gnashing his teeth over the fact that his idiot parents figured it out before he did.