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Brendan Reichs and Ally Condie Talk Collaboration, Inspiration and Their Fave (And Not-So-Fave) Moments Touring Together
This week, the B&N Teen blog is excited to welcome Brendan Reichs—celebrating the release of Chrysalis, the final book in his Project Nemesis series—in conversation with author pal Ally Condie, who’s also his cowriter on their bestselling middle grade series starter TheDarkdeep and makes her return to YA with The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe later this month. We caught up with the pair on tour as they chatted about collaboration, middle grade versus YA, and, of course, the parts of their childhood and teen years that inspire their work. (Spoiler alert: Goonies never say die!)
Brendan: Okay Ally! Let’s do some in-conversing! I’m was going to kick this off by posing the one question we always get–and then forcing you to answer it, because you’re phenomenal at answering things–but then I thought, why should she get to have all the fun? So instead I’m going to tell the people what they want to know–which is how we ended up collaborating in the first place. Not many remember that we released our first big-publisher books–Matched and Virals–at almost the same time (a decade ago!) and then proceeded to cross paths everywhere the following years doing publicity. Then we both started working on the YALLWEST literary festival in Santa Monica, where, at a fateful dinner a few years later, over delicious tacos, we admitted that we both wanted to get MFAs in Writing for Children and Young Adults. It was such an unlikely secret ambition to share that we ended up attending the Vermont College of Fine Arts at the same time, which was super incredibly fun, and pulled it off. During that experience we really got to know each other’s writing strengths and decided that crafting a book together would be the most fun of all. And thus, The Darkdeep was born! And we found that our story planning and writing processes are totally in sync, and in no way dissimilar, right? RIGHT?
Ally: As you know, Brendan, it’s like we share one mind when we write, and the book comes out perfectly formed on the page without our really even having to talk about it. (I am now making it sound like we are scary horror movie twins. I am also lying.) The truth is, we both write very, very differently, and we knew that going into the project. You love plotting and being efficient and I love wandering around getting to know my characters by writing pages and pages that might or might not actually make it into the book. For the sake of actually meeting our deadlines for the Darkdeep series, we decided to go your route and outline our co-authored books before we started. This went well initially, but then sometimes during the actual writing of the chapters I would decide to “play” and “have fun” and “go slightly off-script” and you would “swear” and “wail” and “gnash your teeth” because I was making a mess in our sandbox. We realized that the best way to deal with these differences was to talk on the phone instead of text, because we are both capable of being snarky when texting. Another trick we learned was our Third Solution trick. If we were butting heads on which of us had a better idea, we ended up tabling both and coming up with a new one. And every time, that third solution ended up being better than what we had on our own. Magic. So much magic, in fact, that I’m sure it was devastating for you to go back to your own solo work, where no one came in and made a mess in the document while your head was turned…
Brendan:You mean made a MASTERPIECE while my head was turned, of course! I’ll tell you what I didn’t miss in getting back to work on my Project Nemesis series with Chrysalis–not having the story advance itself when I wasn’t looking. There’s something magical in the co-author experience of closing a pesky chapter file, going to sleep vaguely certain that what you’d written wasn’t very good, and then opening the same file a few days later to find everything fixed and perfect and the story advanced another whole amazing chapter. I need to find this type of service for my solo career. STAT. But I did enjoy sending off my Fire Lake kids in signature style by ruining their lives one last time. And then again. And then again. In Chrysalis, I conclude my apocalyptic Project Nemesis series in the most outrageous manner I could conceive. Min, Tack, Noah, and the other survivors have finally escaped the Program and the conspirators who created it, but now real-world consequences are back, and, impossibly, they discover that they might not be alone on the planet after all.
Chrysalis was a wild book to write, with twists and turns like a rollercoaster that I hope match the pace, energy, and weirdness of Nemesis and Genesis. Min, Noah, and the rest find themselves in a brand new environment they don’t understand, and must band together to survive. Only they are carrying the scars of what happened inside the Program and trust is hard to come by, especially when death returns in a very real way. And when they find out that they might not be alone after all? It gets a little bit off the chain. And speaking of the chain, word on the street is that Poe Blythe is no one to mess with. Fact?
Ally: One thing you and I have in common is that we like to put our characters in extremely difficult circumstances, both physically and mentally, and then we ask them to execute impossible tasks. (And in your case, to actually execute…but I digress.) In The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe [editor’s note: out March 26, but you can preorder now!], Poe is out to get everyone who has ever wronged her. She’s also trying to figure how who the traitor is among her crew (she’s the captain of a mining ship in a post-apocalyptic world–think a YA Mad Max: Fury Road on a river). It’s a revenge story…and a romance.
I knew right away writing Poe that she was singular in focus in a way that none of my other characters had been–she’s angry, and she’s ready to ruin because of what people have taken from her. Poe’s living in a dystopian wasteland, she’s in charge of a crew of people on a mining ship on a river in the middle of nowhere, and she’s got to make it all work long enough to finish what she’s started. But even though Poe is ruthless, she’s also motivated by love. In watching the loss of love threaten to destroy her, it made me wonder: could love also redeem her? And does she need redemption at all?
My last two books were middle grade, so it felt great to roll up my sleeves and get into the darker, grittier material that YA lends itself so easily to. I like going back and forth between middle grade and young adult novels. It definitely feels like it keeps me fresh, and it’s fun to try on different worlds and characters. I know The Darkdeep was your first middle grade novel–how do you feel about going back and forth between the two genres? Does it drive you nuts, or is it like having a bowl of ice cream followed by a whole bag of chips? (In other words, is it like LIVING THE DREAM?)
Brendan:It’s like having a whole bag full of frozen ice cream chips: completely delicious, yet inherently dangerous. I wrote a lot of Chrysalis while we were still churning through The Darkdeep, so I had weeks where in the morning I was writing a brand-new third-person chapter for a middle grade book in a boy protagonist’s voice, followed by revising a first-person young adult chapter in a girl’s voice later that afternoon. I recall sending you at least one whole chapter in the wrong…everything. But despite these logistical hiccups, I found the actual of work of writing for a younger age group to be tremendously gratifying. To put it bluntly, I love working in the middle grade space. I liked exploring friendships, first and foremost, like we do with our plucky group of heroes in The Darkdeep. We wanted to write something in the vein of The Goonies meets Stranger Things, and I think we accomplished that with Nico, Opal, and the others. When they discover the Darkdeep lurking in the basement of mysterious houseboat–and learn that by entering it, figments of their imagination will come to life and interact with them on the island–the story kicked off all the things I loved about kids’ adventures from when I was young: danger, excitement, action, a high creepiness factor, and just the right amount of scares. But that’s just me. What did you like when you were a kid? Did you have the normal amount of parental neglect rampant in that decade, which allowed us to basically run around unsupervised?
Ally: OH yes. I certainly did. Both of my parents worked full-time, and I was the oldest, so I was in charge of the younger ones during the summer. We liked watching soap operas we were not supposed to watch and also a TON of cartoons, like He-Man. We lived in one of last houses at the edge of town, so we also played a lot of very survival-type games. I remember one time we ate dry cat food because we were locked out of the house (to this day, my brother and I are not sure whose fault that was, both the locked-out part of it and the eating-cat-food part of it). We also rode our bikes wherever and whenever and ate a lot of white bread and Nestle Quik. It’s like you always tell kids when we’re doing school visits, Brendan–parents cared about their kids so much less in the 80s. We just had to be home by “dark.”
Ah, memories. Do you have some favorite ones from being a kid, and from our tour/collaborating together? (Because we do kind of act like kids when we’re on tour.) One particular tour memory I have is of me really, really wanting to buy a donut from a specific store in Austin, Texas, because I had seen a picture of the donut and I knew it had Cap ‘n’ Crunch on it, and you were very nice about standing in line in blazing heat with me while we obtained said pastry.
Brendan: It was…so hot…in that donut store. And I’m pretty sure you didn’t even eat the donuts. Like, I’m pretty sure you left those donuts in your hotel room. There may actually be the slightest chance that I ate the donuts, two unrefrigerated days later, in protest of said donuts being left behind like trash after I lost five solid pounds sweating while you picked them out.
We had a lot of great tour memories of me really not liking waking up early, me being late to the lobby to meet you at every stop, me driving rental cars around like five different cities while you patiently and smartly didn’t comment about how bad I drive, and me wanting to take a nap and you wanting to go hiking so we watched Amazing Race reruns on Netflix instead. But my favorite tour memory was when we made Darkdeep slime during a store visit for the first time, and you began to chastise me because I was winging it without referring to the recipe at all, and you were smugly waiting for a disaster to unfold, and I crafted the greatest batch of Darkdeep slime in human history. No one at the event could deny it. That is my fight song, Ally Condie. But enough about how great my Darkdeep slime is. What’s next for you? Or do you wanna drop some cool SECRET DETAILS about the next Darkdeep novel….
Ally: I ate that donut, Brendan. I think of it often. And I also ate my words about that slime. You showed me. You showed us ALL.
Ships in 1-2 days.
Up next? Well, for both of us, it’s The Beast, the second book in the Darkdeep series. That one was so much fun to write, because we knew our writing process better, and because we knew our characters better, and because when you write the second book in a series you get to amp up EVERYTHING. We have more mysteries, more monsters, more about the Beast (obvs!). We also added a really fun element, which was a YouTube crew coming to Timbers and wanting to figure out what’s going on there, and we also let our readers in on some secrets about the Torchbearers and about the mysterious Thing in a Jar.
And after that? Who knows? Maybe you’ll find us driving a rental car on a road to nowhere, eating donuts and crafting slime, or maybe we’re each going to work on something new and exciting that we can’t talk about yet…
Anything is possible.
Brendan Reich’s Chrysalis is on shelves now. The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe hits shelves March 26, but you can preorder now.