July 13, 2021
GIVEAWAY – Outliers CLOSED
Week 28 – Outliers
Genre: Dystopian
Release Date: March 6, 2018
Cover Design: Kate L. Mary
Formats: ebook, audiobook, and paperback – get the ebook FREE!
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Universal
Audible
Goodreads
It’s week 28, which means it’s time to talk about Outliers! Like I mentioned last week, I have some books I remember writing well and others I don’t really recall, which means sometimes I won’t have a lot to say about them. Outliers is one I remember very well.
Here goes.
Back at the end of 2017 I was having an issue with major lower back pain. It would come on randomly and spasm up my back and down my leg and hurt so bad I couldn’t do anything. One of these days, I decided to stop torturing myself and take the day off work, which meant I was looking for something to watch. My sister-in-law had just mentioned how she started watching The 100 on Netflix and thought I would really enjoy it. The thing is, I had tried to start watching it a few years earlier and wasn’t impressed – it was a CW show, after all, and the first episode felt a bit too teenagery to me. Since she recommended it, however, and I had the day off, I decided to give it another shot and needless to say, after getting a few episodes in, I was hooked. I spent the next couple weeks devouring this show. At the time, season 4 had just ended, so most of the plot still revolved around the various groups fighting (the grounders vs the group from space vs the people in the bunker), and I loved the juxtaposition of these three very different groups who had very different ways of life and even technology. Which is what inspired me to create the three groups in Outliers.
Initially when I started writing this book, I wanted it to be a kind of Robin Hood retelling set in a post-apocalyptic world, but as the story developed, I quickly realized that wasn’t what the story was going to be at all. (I still want to write a Robin Hood retelling, though.) The story and characters and their problems grew too dark and complex, and I felt like if I tried to model the story after a classic and stay true to it, things would slip through the cracks so to speak. So I decided to let the plot evolve on its own and see where it took me.
I loved, loved creating this world. This is the first time I delved a little bit into fantasy, which is a big deal for me because I’m not really a big fan of fantasy. But building the world and creating creatures that were able to survive there ended up being really enjoyable, and I definitely plan on revisiting it again in the future. (More than I already have.) Coming up with names for the creatures wasn’t always easy because I didn’t want to call them anything that was even a little similar to what exists in real life, but I came up with an easy solution by simply describing the animal to my kids and asking them what they thought the thing should be called. My daughter is responsible for coming up with the name marsopian – which is a large, hairless desert rat in the story.
While the world became all mine quickly into developing the story, there is one part that was heavily influenced by The 100 and I want to be sure to give props to them for it. Asa, the hero of the story, was VERY inspired by Lincoln. Very. He had all that baggage but worked hard to make sure it didn’t drag him down.
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