Bethany Hagen's Blog

1)      What is the working title of your book? LANDRY PARK TWO, a Tale of Woe and Misery and Atoms: The Dressening

2)      Where did the idea come from? This is the second book in the Landry Park trilogy and picks up a couple weeks after the Big Event that concludes Book One.  The initial germination for Landry Park came from working at my local museum, where playing with pictures of debutantes and pictures of fallout shelters began to create weird pictures in my mind.

3)      What genre does your book fall under? YA Sci Fi, although I would love to see “Future Historical” as a real classification someday.

4)      What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  Aw, crap.  I’m bad at this.  I still like Shailene Woodley as Madeline–she’s smart and thoughtful, which is exactly how Madeline is–although now Shailene will be (an awesome!) Tris, so I think it will be hard to see her as any other YA heroine for a while.  And I’d like Michael Fassbender to be her father just so I can drool over the idea of Michael Fassbender discussing philosophy in a three piece suit.

5)      What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? Oh, this is easy!  Gone with the Nuclear Wind.

6)      Is your book self-published, published by an independent publisher, or represented by an agency?  Landry Park will come out from Dial/Penguin in early 2014, and I’m represented by the amazing Mollie Glick of Foundry Media.

7)      How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?  The first book went through major, major revisions and took two years, but The Dressening only needed four or five months for the first draft.  (That’s fast for me.)

8)      What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?  For Darkness Shows the Stars, almost certainly.  Landry Park has distinct Austen overtones.

9)      Who or what inspired you to write this book?  I wanted to write a book that layered in thorny issues of responsibility and identity with beauty and romance and dashing army uniforms.  I wanted to write a book that could talk about atomic particles on one page and have a heroine kissing in a garden on the next.  I was inspired by books I love so much I wish I could read them all at the same time: Gone with the Wind, Mansfield Park, The Illustrated Man, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Brave New World…

10)   What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?  Let’s see…a mysterious attack in the woods, ballroom dances, radiation poisoning, dresses, a flirty boy with a big smile, a mausoleum hidden in a maze…

So I’m passing the torch onto two fantastic authors, Laurelin Paige and Katherine Ernst, both good friends of mine!  Look for their posts next week!