THE STORY BEHIND DEADWEATHER AND SUNRISE
Hi! I'm Geoff Rodkey, author of the adventure-comedy-mystery-romance Deadweather and Sunrise, the first book in the Chronicles of Egg trilogy. Most of the other stops on this blog tour are about the book itself, but I thought I'd spend this stop talking a little about how I came to write it.
I've been a working writer since my early 20's, and I spent most of my career writing for movies. Screenwriting can be a very frustrating business, creatively speaking, and by a few years ago, I'd started to feel so burned out that I began to wonder if I even wanted to keep writing for a living.
But I had this one idea that I really loved, and which I knew would never work as a screenplay because it had three elements that movie studios hate: a period setting, a 13-year-old protagonist, and no clear genre. It was an adventure story, but it also had a lot of comedy, along with a little mystery, a bad case of puppy love, some dysfunctional family dynamics, and a fair amount of colonial-era political intrigue.
And while most adventure stories about 13-year-olds seemed to involve kids who were born special, with some kind of supernatural powers or noble lineage, I really loved the idea of a kid who's not special at all, and just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so all sorts of trouble gets dumped on his head, and he's got to use his wits to survive…even though his wits aren't all that impressive.
So I decided that before I threw in the towel on writing, I'd try to turn the story into a novel--which was terrifying at first, because while I'd fantasized about writing a book since I was a kid, I'd never actually done it.
But I gave it a shot, and I wound up having more fun writing the book than anything I'd done in at least a decade. By the time I finished, I'd realized I DID want to keep writing--I just wanted to write books instead of movies.
More importantly for readers, I think the same elements that were obstacles to making the story a movie--the invented-but-somewhat-realistic historical setting, the mishmash of genres--are what makes it so much fun as a book series.
Someone described Deadweather and Sunrise as "The Princess Bride with 13-year-olds," which never occurred to me as I was writing it, but in retrospect, that's exactly the tone I was aiming for. And one very excited kid at a book signing told me it reminded him of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is equally flattering.
Although it's a little ironic that the points of comparison have been 1980's-era movies, when the whole point of my writing the book was to create something that I didn't think could find a home in the film business.
The giveaway consists of one set of signed and personalized copies of the paperback of The Chronicles of Egg Book 1: Deadweather and Sunrise and an ARC of The Chronicles of Egg Book 2: New Lands. Fill out the fancy doo-hickey to be officially entered. US/CAN, good luck!
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You can find Rodkey at his website
Official Chronicles of Egg website
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Please visit A Thousand Wrongs for the next stop on The Chronicles of Egg Blog Tour!
