My agent tells me that I’m allowed to shout it from the rooftops. The book in question is SHIP BREAKER, a young adult novel about all of my favorite things: global warming, peak oil, genetic engineering, poverty and collapsed societies. You know, happy fun stuff. Fortunately, it’s also a ripping adventure. Joe Monti at Little, Brown is the cool guy who decided to buy it, in a two-book deal.
Now, I know I’ve been talking about my other book THE WINDUP GIRL aka the “big book” mentioned in an earlier post (all 150,000 door-stopping words of it)– that one is still in the works. Should be done by the end of this week or next as all I’m doing now is cleaning up sentences and typos.
But while I was working on the monster book, I decided to take a detour into this other project that I’ve been mulling for quite a while. SHIP BREAKER was the result.
Here’s a photo of the industry that helped inspire the story. It comes from Edward Burtynsky. I watched a documentary about him and the images of ship breaking stuck in my head. Click through to see more of his industrial landscapes.
The other set of inspirations came from cool technologies like the one shown below.
l’Hydroptere is currently trying to break the world sailing speed record and the 50 knot barrier with their trimaran hydrofoil.
And the contrast between these two images is pretty much what the story is about.