The folks over at Chapters (the blog of Books-A-Million) have interviewed yours truly and Morgan Baden about our collaboration, The Hive! Here’s a little excerpt:
The plot kicks off as Cassie, the protagonist, makes a fateful error—she posts a tasteless joke about the president’s grandchild—and is forced into hiding, running for her life from the Hive. But the reason she makes the joke is to try to fit in at her new school. Do you have any personal examples of these kinds of peer-pressure-induced mistakes?
Morgan: I would love to find someone who doesn’t have a personal example of a peer-pressure-induced-mistake! In a way that’s one of the reasons I love writing YA so much – it gives me the chance to transfer all the regrettable teenage decisions I once made into fictional characters, and lets me then control the outcomes of their bad decisions.
Barry: I think a lot of us like to look back and say, “I was fiercely independent as a teen! I never followed the crowd!” But the truth of the matter is that most of us did. There are some things I did as a kid that I look back on and think, “Oh, wow — that was seriously uncool and I didn’t even question it at the time because it seemed like EVERYONE was doing the same.” But I grew up in a pre-digital world, so I was allowed to do stupid stuff. Today’s teens — like Cassie — live fully documented lives, where their mistakes and stupidities will follow them forever.
Head over to the site to read the rest of the interview and see what made me say, “So, so, so, so doomed.”