A few months ago, I told you I'd finished the sequel to Warm Bodies. I told you I was calling it The Living, and then I retreated into the editing cave to read what I had wrought. It was the first time I'd experienced the whole story as one piece, and upon reaching the end, I had a realization:
This wasn't the single mammoth tome I thought I'd written. In structure, rhythm, and theme, it was actually two books.
This is why it took me three years of obsessive 7-days-a-week work, why I withdrew from life and lost friendships and grew a white patch in my beard. I knew it was a big story, but it wasn't until it was complete that I could see its real shape: two arcs, two endings, 900 pages...
Maybe the 900 pages should have been my first clue. That would have been a dauntingly long book--about three times as long as Warm Bodies--but what matters more than page count is how the story naturally wants to unfold, and if the story wants two books, who am I to argue?
Sometimes the baby comes out twins.
So without further throat-clearing, I'm proud to announce the final two installments in the Warm Bodies Series:
THE BURNING WORLD
July 5th, 2016
THE LIVING
2017
I'm so excited. I hope you are too. It's going to be a weird and wonderful ride to the conclusion of this story, and while I'm sorry we have wait another year to get there, keep in mind The Burning World is nearly twice the length of Warm Bodies, so you're going to have plenty to chew on. (no zombie pun intended, ever.)
And to anyone worried I'm pulling a Hollywood and trying to stretch a small story across several installments: nope. This is a huge story. It was always a huge story. It's about people discovering who they are across multiple eras of their lives, it's about isolation and love and the many kinds of death, it's about the animal fears that rule civilization and what it might take to overcome them, a doomsday church and an undead corporation and an infinite ladder to the future of all life. Two books should just barely contain it.
So thanks for hanging on with me through these twists and turns of publishing. Nothing in my life happens normally.
-Isaac
