Ketchup

Afghanistan Joe is not the only one to have asked some permutation of "When is the Brin collaboration coming out?" or "What are you writing after Mind Plague?" or "Tell us about Colony High," so here it is! Answers! Truth! Celebrity gossip!

In fact, the opening segment of Colony High has already been released in a gorgeous hard cover collector's edition from Subterranean Press under the name of Sky Horizon. Bonus points: It also won the Hal Clement award this summer. This is David's original novella and it works pretty well as a stand-alone. It's also a sweet high concept alien adventure exactly as you might expect.

When David was approached for a blurb for Plague Year, first of all he had wonderful things to say like "Riveting" and "One of the best debut novels in years." You can't beat that!

Secondly, he also asked me if I'd like to help him complete a project that he'd had a back burner for years. So I thought about that for about two seconds. Uh, yes?

I read the Sky Horizon novella and a stack of notes he'd put together, outlining the rest of the piece, we got our heads together, added some flesh to the plot and developed new, fuller arcs for the characters -- and a deal was born. The project plays to both of our strengths. David's very cerebral and I'm very gritty, though he does action well and I might have come up with a few nice concepts in my time. Also, for example, he said that he sometimes has a hard time killing off the people in his books. Not a problem for me, I said, ha ha, and the action really explodes out of the gates in the second part of the novel.

Colony High is meant to be a young adult novel, but it's YA in the same sense that Ender's Game is YA, full of meat and real-life. Minor plot points in Colony High involve sex, unplanned pregancies, political assassination, slavery, rebellion, and other small things like First Contact, exobiology, and astrophysics.

YA is dark these days, people! Just like the real world. Hooray.

Here's the surprise twist for Afghanistan Joe. The collaboration is 90% done right now. Colony High will not be my fourth novel. It was my third. Past tense. Mind Plague is my fourth, and the Big Secret New Thriller will be my fifth. We have 350 pages of manuscript in addition to David's original novella as well as detailed feedback on the entire enchilada from several topnotch pre-readers. There's a detailed outline in place for the big explosive finale... and you know I do big explosive finales with, well, big explosions and drama.

I don't have a release date to share yet. The trick is that David is even busier than I am, which is a psychotic thing to imagine, but, just to begin with, he has three kids, not two, and all of them are teenagers now. I shudder at the thought!

He's also eyebrow deep into his own next solo novel, just as I am with Mind Plague. He also does a lot of consulting and public speaking and belongs to interesting groups like the Homeland Security SIGMA anti-terrorism think tank. He's also fielding movie deals, game deals, anthology deals, and earning software patents in online communications. Oh, plus he was the host of a one-hour pilot for the History Channel. This is why you need a collaborator!

Basically the book is done. But other things come first.

Soon, I hope. Soon! Because we know where we're heading with two additional books to make it a trilogy, too, and I'd like to get back to that wild alien saga and those heroes and villians... Well, you know, the ones who are still alive.

Questions?

Labels: Colony High, David Brin collaboration

# posted by Jeff Carlson @ 8:59 PM