A recent Michael Grant interview from the Edinburgh Book Festival reveals that there are two new projects in the works. One is ARG, and the other is a (currently unnamed) shared project that is supposed to reunite Michael Grant and K.A. Applegate as a writing team.
For those that are unaware, both Michael Grant and K.A. Applegate are married, and both of them were the co-authors and co-creators for Animorphs, Everworld, Remnants, and several other series. After Remnants, they both decided to write different kinds of books. K.A focused on younger readers with Roscoe Riley Rules, while Michael focused on GONE. So it’s important to note that this new upcoming project will be the first book to reunite the husband and wife duo since Remnants (last published in 2003).
No details yet as to what the project is about or what it will be called, but you know we’re excited! And we’ll be sure to keep you updated on the specifics as we get them ourselves. In the mean time though, here is a quote from Michael on the subject:
“We’ve decided that there’s a lot more peace in our house when we work on separate projects, and we worked together mostly up until we had the children. Before we had kids 13 years ago, and we continued to work together after that, but you know with their tendency to grow, and start talking and things, it becomes a bigger pain in the butt as it were. So it becomes more and more difficult to keep up, and at that point we didn’t have the time for sitting around and argue. It took up a lot of time, but it looks like there’s a project we’ll do together, a single kind of book.”
Also, there are parts in the interview where Michael Grant gives a little more insight into the Animorphs ending vs the GONE ending. Here’s a short quote:
“When we ended Animorphs, the series I wrote with my wife, we caught all kinds of hell from readers because we left an ambiguous ending. We did that for a reason; we went dark at the end and we’d had like this 60 book series, a war story the entire time, so we thought at the end we want to show consequences and we want to show what’s happened to these kids. So we killed off a major character. We had a kind of mix, you know? Some die, some recover easily, some profit from it, some don’t, but I think everybody was more or less OK with that. What they weren’t OK with was that we didn’t put a big giant period at the end of it.
When I wrap this [GONE] series, there will be a big giant period at the end. Everybody will know what happened, it won’t be like Lost where you have to strain to figure it out. As I go along I make sure I know what I’m doing, and it all will make some kind of sense.” He pauses. “Some kind of sense.”
Aside from that, the only other new detail left to note about is for the 5th GONE book. It has now been renamed from ‘Darkness’ to ‘Fear’ (due to cover space). With a total of 6 books in the series, the following upcoming titles are as follows: #4 Plague, #5 Fear, and #6 Light.
You can read the entire interview at: Bookwitch’s Blog.
