I wrote a book about two people who don’t even belong in the same story

Here’s everything you need to know about All the Birds in the Sky, my book that comes out in late January. It’s about a witch named Patricia and a mad scientist named Laurence—which means it’s basically 50 percent fantasy and 50 percent science fiction. 

So it’s really the story of two people who don’t belong in the same story together, and their relationship. Laurence and Patricia meet when they’re kids, on the edge of puberty, and they survive the hell of middle school together. Then, they meet again as grown-ups 10 years later, and life is a lot more complicated. Their relationship becomes the thing that helps them figure out who they really are.

Patricia has magical powers. She has a connection to an ancient, amazing secret. But magic isn’t easy, and she has a hell of a time struggling to live up to her potential. And meanwhile, she sees Laurence, who can build gadgets and devices and supercomputers using his own ingenuity, plus information he finds on the internet. When Laurence is grown-up, he becomes a big-deal tech genius and starts getting lots of attention, while Patricia has to keep her magical powers hidden.

And meanwhile, Laurence has to try and understand Patricia’s incredible power, which isn’t like anything he knows. Patricia can talk to birds and even turn herself into a bird sometimes. She can do impossible things that science can’t even begin to explain. And when he meets her again as a grown-up, after she’s gone to the magical academy of Eltisley Hall, she’s become connected to a whole world of witches, with their own secret agenda. For Laurence, who is struggling to feel in control over his world, Patricia’s chaotic world is fascinating and scary.

I’m always fascinated by relationships between people who see the world in really different ways. It’s no accident that while I was working on this novel, I also wrote the story “Six Months, Three Days,” about a man who sees a single fixed future and a woman who sees many possible futures.

With this story, I got to ask some big questions about science and nature, and what humans are doing in this world. But the most important thing for me was always to tell a personal story about two people trying to understand each other — and finding out that they have more in common with each other than they do with anyone else.

And that’s really what became important to me in the course of writing this book. Sure, Laurence and Patricia come from two different worlds and have two very different ways of being powerful. But in the end, they actually understand each other better than anyone else understands them.

So this isn’t just a book about two people who belong in different stories, and what that difference means to each of them. It’s really about two unique people, and what they mean to each other.