We recently created a new website that incorporates our author blog – go to randomhouse.com.au/blog for all the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors.
Find out what’s being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
As a parent or teacher the following couple of questions might resonate. You send your teens to a place where there are no rules and no limits – is this book about teenage anarchy? Are you being irresponsible writing a book where teens are in a broken society? Well, actually, no. Burn Bright is about a teen forging her own way, self-regulating when there are no guidelines. My main character, Retra, is the moral compass for the book. This is a story that empowers teens and explores the notion that given an absence of societal conventions and guidelines, young people will still make good choices. It’s also a story of finding courage and self and learning the value of friends, all the things that (in my mind) are important in the world.
Are the Ripers vampires? It’s a question that I’m starting to get a lot. They glide silently across floors, they are tall, strong, beautiful, ageless and they live in perpetual darkness. They exist in a world of bats, black, lace, velvet, but my answer is simply … read the books and find out. Their true identity is one of the key reveals at the end of the trilogy. I suggest that you have fun along the way trying to guess ahead.
The same can be said for the uthers, the strange, almost invisible creatures who provide the food and make the clothes on Ixion. The idea for them came out of my fascination with the notion that there are often things in the corner of your eye that you can’t quite see and never quite know about. But when you turn your head to catch a better glimpse they disappear altogether.
Deserted churches figure largely in the novel, Burn Bright, as well – not merely because as buildings they provide evocative architecture, but because they help build a sense of the forbidden and mysterious. At thirteen I was lucky enough to travel to Europe and was indelibly imprinted with images of the basilicas and churches in Italy. They made an impression that lasted thirty plus years and eventually found expression in my dark fantasy story. Back then, in Rome, thirteen-year-old me was so awed by the history and beauty of these great churches that I found myself running my fingers over surfaces just to absorb as much through my senses as was possible. In Burn Bright tried to give the reader back a little bit of my inspiring experience.
As I said yesterday Burn Bright went through many versions. But some elements were there from the start. The physical nature of Ixion was one. It was always an island in my mind – perhaps because I’d lived recently on an island myself and was still enamoured with its ambience. But it also reflected my interest in nocturnal lifestyles and how they affect the people and creatures that inhabit them. I spent some time researching and found out all sorts of interesting things, like the fact that there are over 1100 species of bats in the world and over seventy percent use echolaction to travel. Among the varieties of sub species are fish eating and vampire bats. I found this so intriguing that I used their Latin names as a basis for the names of the gangs in the story.
It seems kind of strange for a science fiction writer turned to crime writing to suddenly pop up with a teen novel. But Burn Bright has been with me for so long I feel like I’ve been writing it all my life. I actually started putting words on the page seven years ago and the story wound through various incarnations until it became what it is today. While I’ve been on tour talking to school kids, it’s really struck me how a writer inevitably never fails to write about their life in one way or another. Mostly, it’s not recognisable in the text to anyone but the author, and that how it should be. We (fiction writers) are not in the business of autobiographies. But we are in the business of synthesising life and remixing it so that it offers something entertaining, potentially inspiring and hopefully meaningful to readers. My synthesis happens to involve an ever-dark island and runaway teens.
The Random Blog 