Warm Bodies sequel update--but real this time!

For publisher pitching purposes, I was asked to write a detailed synopsis of everything that's going to happen in Book 3, which is kind of like writing the whole book in Cliff's Notes. Everything's there, it's just simpler and shorter. For example, instead of several chapters describing Frodo's journey from Shelob's cave through the Orc fort and into the Cracks of Doom, you'd get, "Frodo simply walks into Mordor."

The end result is a compact little model of the story that you can hold in one hand and examine, and many thoughts occurred to me as I examined it. One was holy shit, this is a weird book. Not only for its contents, which are pretty weird (zombies, semi-zombies, maybe-zombies, ghosts, goats, boats, gaps in reality, and trippy philosophical pseudo-magic) but for how it functions as a sequel. Warm Bodies was essentially about one person's struggle with himself; the sequel is about several people's struggles with themselves, each other, and the wider world and all its broken systems (cultural, political, cosmic). So I always knew it was going to be a bigger book, but now that I stand back and look at it...wow, this is a lot bigger. Not just in length (I'm 200 pages in and predicting around 500 or 600 by the end, compared to Warm Bodies' 230) but in scope. As a sequel to Warm Bodies, it's so disproportionately ambitious, I might be trying to build a space shuttle on the frame of a hang glider. It probably would have been more sensible to start from scratch and tackle these ideas in a whole new story, but...this is where R took me, so fuck it, I'm going in. I hope when the time comes (I'm guessing mid to late 2015) you'll be crazy enough to go in with me.

-Isaac



P.S Just to be super clear, my last post was very definitely an April Fools prank based on all the goofy theories I've heard about what's going to happen in this book. The sequel will not, in fact, be a grotesque mashup of every known YA cliche. Thanks.