Jay Kristoff – Literary Giant

Melbourne peeps, there are only a few spots left for the GEMINA launch party. Click here to avoid much tears of sadness!

Everyone else, you got your pre-orders in yet?

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Melbourne! You can find details for the GEMINA launch partayyyy here! Bookings are gonna be essential, so don’t miss out.

Five weeks to laaaaaunch. Pre-order links below:

Amazon/Barnes&Noble/Indiebound/Powells/Book Depository

US tour deets soon! Pre-order here:

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Like roses in his hands

So, every so often, you get to live a moment in your life, and even as it’s happening, you know it’s a moment you’re going to remember for the rest of your life. This happened to me and my partner in crime Amie K on Saturday night, when we were treated to a musical interpretation of ILLUMINAE at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival.

The production was put together by the awesome team at Argo Sound, the composers were two awesomely talented guys named Connor D’Netto and Ben Haim. The musical piece encompasses a few key moments in the book – AIDAN awakening, Ezra and Kady talking about their first kiss, the black box recordings,  Ezra’s space fight sequence.

I say this a lot, but whether it be illustrations or paintings or word art or poetry or whatever, the single most amazing part of this amazing job of mine is seeing people take the art I’ve created and making art of their own with it. And the art these guys treated us to on Saturday night was truly special. The whole time I was sitting there, as twilight rolled across the river and we listened to our book coming to life in a medium we never imagined, the question “Wow, is this actually happening?” was rolling through my mind.

If you’d like to listen to it, there’s a pretty good quality stream of the feed on Argo’s facebook page. Nothing captures the moment like being there, but it’ll give you some idea of the amazing work Ben, Connor and their incredibly talented team of musicians and voice over artists put into this thing.

To all the folks at Argo, to the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, Brisbane Music Festival, State library of Queensland and University of Queensland School of Music, thank you.

Thank for taking our art and making something amazing.

Thank you for a night we will NEVER forget.

Droogs!

As the title of this post suggests, the second part of the Illuminae Files, GEMINA, is out in six weeks! Pre-orders are a huge part of any book’s success, and given that we have the best readers in the world, I’m just gonna leave some links below and make puppy dog eyes at you.🙂

Amazon/Barnes&Noble/Indiebound/Powells/Book Depository

US tour deets very soon!

Droogs!

After much teasing on twitter, Amie and I can at last reveal our GEMINA news! Although if you looked at the photo at the top of the article you already know it, so yeah . . .

ANYWAY

One of the things we wanted to do with GEMINA was make the book bigger than ILLUMINAE (not in terms of page count, but yeah, we did that, too). We wanted to make the conflict grander, the book and stakes feel bigger, make GEMINA a book that could stand on its own two feet. One of the ways we thought to do that was to play with some new document formats, and one of those is a visual diary.

You see, Hanna, our MC, is an illustrator who records her thoughts by drawing them. And during the siege of Heimdall, she has her trusty journal with her. We’re incredibly pleased to report that Marie Lu, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the LEGEND and YOUNG ELITES series has illustrated all of Hanna’s journal entires in the pages of GEMINA. And they are AMAZING.

We are so incredibly proud to have Marie along for this ride. She was the first person to read our little 130 page sample of ILLUMINAE, back when it was just an insane dream that we thought would never get printed. Marie saw it before we’d even sent it to our agents. She’s been an insider on THE ILLUMINAE FILES since its inception and one of its most passionate advocates and we can’t wait for people to see what she’s come up with!

We hope you love it!

You can pre-order GEMINA by clicking the links below:

Amazon/Barnes&Noble/Indiebound/Powells/Book Depository

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, this is not the HUGE news that I promised this week. RELAX, that’s still coming. On Wednesday in fact (Tuesday for the US). But I realized the other day that we were so goddamn busy at the time, I never actually blogged about this when it happened. And this is huge news, too.

So, for the sake of posterity and those of you who missed the announcement on Twitter/in Publishers Weekly waaaaaayyy back in May, BEHOLD:

Amie and I sold a new series to Random House, the amazing folks who publish the ILLUMINAE FILES and my upcoming YA series LIFEL1K3! Bang your heads, motherfuckers!

A quick FAQ about the new series:

What’s the first book called?
The working title is currently ANDROMEDA, after one of the main characters in the novel. This title could change, however. The working title for ILLUMINAE was VOID, and that sure as hell didn’t stick. So at the moment, UNTITLED is probably the safest option.

It’s another science fiction series?
Yep. Come join us. All the cool kids are doing it.

What’s the first book about?
We sold it as “the Breakfast Club goes to Star Fleet Academy”. For those of you not old enough to remember tBC, it’s basically Misfits in space.
It’s a science fiction series, set in the far future, where a ragtag group of losers, delinquents and discipline cases at a military academy end up having to save the universe – presuming they don’t kill each other first.

Is it another alternate format series like THE ILLUMINAE FILES?
Nope. There’s no sense repeating yourself.
The series will be written 1st person (which is a new thing for me). There are six main characters. We’re taking three each.

Is the story set in the ILLUMINAE universe?
Nope. The universe in the new series has a more classic space opera vibe to it. Think Star Trek or Babylon 5 – a small group of alien races, including humans, discovering  the secrets of a much wider and more dangerous universe.

But what about the rest of the ILLUMINAE FILES books?
The new series doesn’t start until 2018, after the ILLUMINAE FILES is finished. We’ve already handed in ILLUMINAE 3 to our editor. It’s in the can, friendo.

Can you tell us anything else?
We can! But we’re not going to! You have two more ILLUMINAE books and LIFEL1KE and NEVERNIGHT2 to tide you over until 2018.🙂

God, don’t you two ever fucking sleep?
For the weak, sleep is.