Will McIntosh's Blog

Today, my book WATCHDOG is being released by Penguin Random House, and I'm excited to finally be able to announce that it is being developed for an animated TV series! The creative team behind Dreamworks' HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON TV series, Art Brown and Douglas Sloan, are overseeing the project. Sonar Entertainment, the production company currently adapting Stephen King's MR. MERCEDES for Television, has optioned the novel and is backing the project.

The final hurdle is for a TV network to sign on! I can't even imagine what it would feel like to sit down with my 8 year-old twins to watch a TV show based on something I wrote. Wish me luck!

WATCHDOG is about orphaned 13 year-old twins Tara and Vick, who are trying to survive in a near-future world where robots are common. Sometimes people use robot parts to create custom-made Watchdogs -- animal-shaped robots designed for protection, and often intimidation. When a local crime boss, Ms. Alba, discovers that Tara, who is on the autism spectrum, is a brilliant watchdog designer, she tries to force the twins to work in her sweatshop. Their only defense is for Tara to build their own watchdog to protect them. She builds Daisy, who turns out to be better able to defend them than even Tara ever could have imagined.

Recommended for readers age 8 to 79.

By the way, I'm happy to make Skype appearances for classrooms, libraries, etcetera, to talk about Watchdog, or my YA book Burning Midnight, free of charge.

So, I have a new book out today. UNBREAKABLE is Dystopian Science Fiction, YA, sort of in the tradition of Maze Runner and The Hunger Games. To start, it's 99 cents!

Here's the link, if you're interested:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073D7XLZF/...

There's a twist in there that so far no one who's read it saw coming.

My niece was one of my early readers for UNBREAKABLE, and she said she loved it. Of course, she's my niece, so what else is she going to say? The thing is, my niece is pregnant with her first child, and a few weeks ago her water broke, two months too early. She had to lie still in a hospital bed for four days, to give the little guy extra time for his lungs to develop. She asked for the latest version of UNBREAKABLE, so she could reread it to pass the time. Now I know she really liked it. Mother and son are both doing great, and if I sell zero copies of UNBREAKABLE, I'm still glad I wrote it.

Today is release day for my sixth book, FALLER! This is a wild one, a SF thriller set in an improbable (okay, impossible) world.

FALLER is based on a dream, and not just any dream, but the dream that kicked off my entire writing career. When I dreamed what became FALLER the dream was so vivid, and felt so much like a science fiction story, that I decided to try writing it down. It was the first SF story I ever wrote, and set me on a path that eventually led me to resign my tenured position as a psychology professor to write full time.

If you decide to give FALLER a try, I hope you enjoy it.

It's release day for Burning Midnight! Eighteen months ago, when I learned the book would be released in February 2016, that seems like such a long, long time in the future, but here it is!

To mark the occasion, I thought I'd post a few thoughts on where the idea for Burning Midnight came from. Burning Midnight is about mysterious colored spheres that are hidden all over the world, and if you have two of the same color they give you something. Easy-to-find colors might give you straighter, whiter teeth; rare colors might give you high intelligence, or physical strength. In the book, two teens find a sphere so rare no one knows what it does. But everyone wants it.

So, where did the idea come from? More than any of my other books, this one came out of my past. I can think of at least four parts of my past that influenced Burning Midnight:

1. The Easter egg hunt. Burning Midnight involves palm-sized spheres in a variety of colors, hidden all over the Earth. I wasn’t aware of it while writing, but that’s very much what an Easter egg hunt is. When I was seven, my mother took me to a huge Easter egg hunt on the lawn of our town’s city hall. There were eggs of all colors hidden on the grounds, but only one gold-colored egg. If you found it, you’d receive some fabulous prize I no longer remember. I was squatting beside the boy who found the golden egg. He tipped a piece of drain spout lying on the ground near the building, and out it rolled. In my memory it is bright and perfect and magical. And I was so close.

2. The bottle dump. When I was twelve, my sister, a cousin, and I stumbled on a 60 year-old dump hidden in the woods. We spent a summer hunting for antique bottles, and built a valuable collection of something like 200 that we displayed on our porch. Burning Midnight is about hunting and discovering incredibly rare things in the wild.

3. Monty Python’s Olympic hide and seek skit. Monty Python’s Flying Circus came to America when I was fourteen. I fell in love. One of the many skits that become canon to me involved the Olympic hide and seek finals, where the seeker counted to one million while the hider could hide anywhere on Earth. The game lasted eleven years, then they switched roles and did it all again. Terry Jones is looking in a trash can in Madagascar as the announcer proclaims to the audience in hushed tones that he is officially “cold”, because Graham Chapman is hiding in a cave in Sardinia. This is the hunt for the rarest spheres in Burning Midnight. They could be anywhere, including a trash can in Sardinia.

4. I was a teenage comic book dealer. In the very first chapter of Burning Midnight, Sully is sitting behind a table at a flea market, selling spheres. When I was sixteen I sat behind a table at a flea market selling superhero comic books. In Burning Midnight, when you touch two spheres of the same color to your temples, you get some ability. If the spheres are Lemon Yellow, you grow an inch; if they’re Mustard, you become smarter. You get superpowers. Like a superhero.

I wasn't really aware of all of these influences while I was writing Burning Midnight. I try not to think too hard when I write. But after a little mining of my past, the influences began to tumble out in the light. Thanks for reading. If you get a chance to read the book, I hope you enjoy it!

(A slightly different version of this appeared on the Book-lover's website, Curling Up With A Good Book.)

It's official: my next SF novel, Faller, will be published by Tor Books! This one has a wild, wild premise; I'll provide more details as we move closer to publication. Just to be clear, this is my next adult SF novel--I have a young adult novel, Burning Midnight, scheduled for release on February 2, and if you like my other stuff, I think you'll like it!

You can get your first look at Burning Midnight over on io9.com! They've posted the cover and an excerpt:

http://io9.com/first-look-at-will-mci...

Publication has been set for February 2 -- I can't wait!

I'll be announcing the details on the publication of my next adult novel soon. In the meantime, if you liked Love Minus Eighty, I'm going to have a new story up on Lightspeed.com in a couple of months that is a very different take on cryogenics. The story is titled "The Savannah Liars Tour."

Breaking news! Burning Midnight will be published by Delacorte Press, the young adult imprint of Penguin Random House. It's a Science Fiction thriller about four teenagers locked in a deadly race against a billionaire to find the "Midnight Blue", a mysterious sphere that can bring its owner millions of dollars, or give them unpredictable powers. It's scheduled to be published in early 2016. Kind of a long wait, but if you like my books, I think you're going to like this one!

Release day for Defenders is two weeks away, so, as promised, here is an exclusive sneak peak! This is an early, "quiet" scene, where Oliver is conversing with Five, the only alien invader humanity has managed to capture. Five can read Oliver's mind, which makes for a complicated relationship.


It was insane, utterly insane, to be seeking out old comic books with the world on the brink, but it was the only thing in his life that wasn’t depressing and seemingly hopeless.

Oliver started when Five began to speak aloud. He still wasn’t used to the horrifically bizarre sound of his voice.

“All of that effort, just to move paper with colorful pictures into closer proximity to you. That’s all you’re doing, really.”

“I’m not going to argue with you. I honestly don’t care what you think of my behavior.”

“Of course you do,” the Luyten said. “You used to play online poker. You were very good, weren’t you?”

“I was very good.” Oliver tried to control his rising impatience.

“Now you collect comics. Why is that, do you think?”

“Because poker takes other people, and without satellites I don’t have access to other good players.” He rubbed his eyes; he was tired, even though he was getting plenty of sleep. “Besides that, it takes energy. It taxes your cognitive resources. When I’m not working, I’m too tired, mentally and emotionally, for poker. There’s no thinking involved in collecting comic books.”

“No, there’s certainly not. A child could do it.”

Oliver poked at something caught between his teeth. “A child could do it. Yes. Provided he had a decent income.”
The comment made him think of Kai, of the decision awaiting him when he got home. If he adopted Kai, they could collect comics together. He could teach Kai to play poker; that might inject him with fresh enthusiasm for the game. Was he insane, to consider adopting a twelve year-old boy? He couldn’t imagine sitting Kai down to talk about sex, or disciplining him if he did something wrong. How did you even discipline a twelve year-old? His own upbringing would be no help on that front; his parents had met at an Asperger’s clinic, where they were both undergoing outpatient treatment.

Maybe all of it was moot. How much time did they have left, realistically? A year? He should adopt Kai, and let the kid eat ice cream for dinner every night, if that’s what he wanted to do.

“Do you want to know why you really collect comic books?”

Oliver groaned. “I’m not the one who tortured you. I have been nothing but civil to you. Why are you so hostile?

“I’m not being hostile. I’m just passing time.”

Until that night, when the people in charge had tired of Oliver’s inability to get Five to tell him anything useful, their conversations had been nothing but polite. Certainly not warm, but polite. Two emissaries, on opposite sides of their species’ struggle to the death, discussing the situation in even tones.

“Do you want to know?” Five asked.

Oliver didn’t answer. Five knew he didn’t want to know, that he was sick to death of having his mind cut open and pinned to a piece of cardboard, but Oliver knew Five would ignore this, because that was the game.

“You collect comic books because you harbor an infantile desire for the superheroes to be real. You want the Hulk, Spiderman, and the Silver Surfer to come and save you. To save your kind. Even a cowboy on a white horse would do.”

Go ahead, Oliver thought, pluck the name of the cowboy on the white horse out of my head. Only it’s not a white horse, it’s a silver horse. The hat is white.

“The Lone Ranger,” Five said.

“Yes, I’m waiting for the Lone Ranger to save me.” Oliver had never actually watched that ancient show, but that was beside the point.

“No one is coming to save you.”

Oliver looked at his fingernails. Had he remembered to pack nail clippers when the security contingent showed up at his house and told him to pack? Hopefully they’d been in his shaving kit when he packed it. He went to the bathroom to look.

“You have no hope left,” Five said. “I respect that. You’re realistic, for one of your kind.”


The screenplay for a potential Defenders film from Warner Brothers is evidently progressing nicely. Meanwhile, I'm putting the finishing touches on a new novel, titled This Broken World, as well as a young adult novel, Midnight Blue. As soon as I finish those, I'm going to start on a new alien invasion. This one will be very different from Defenders.

I just learned that the American Library Association has named Love Minus Eight the best science fiction book of 2013! That means a lot to me, coming from librarians.

My next novel, Defenders, is in production. Orbit Books recently unveiled the cover, and it is slated for release in May. I'll post a few brief excerpts here as the date approaches...

Hi again,

I received some big news a few weeks ago: my next novel, Defenders has been optioned by Warner Brothers! The novel will be published next year, and hopefully (though it's never a guarantee) a movie will follow.

Meanwhile, the film option on Love Minus Eighty has expired, so my fabulous film agent is working his magic, seeking a studio/producer/screenwriter.

In the meantime, if anyone is curious about how I arrived at the title, here's the story. (I wrote more extensively about this, and choosing titles in general, over at Magical Words).

Love Minus Eighty is based on the Hugo Award winning short story, "Bridesicle", and that was my first thought for a title.

The people at Orbit Books thought a decent percentage of potential readers would be turned off by the title "Bridesicle", and consequently never check to see what it was about. I could see that–when I first wrote the short story, my wife hated "Bridesicle". I thought it was provocative. It was one of the few times I didn’t take my wife’s advice, because she’s incredibly perceptive. Later, some readers told me they didn’t read the story because they found the title distasteful.

So Bridesicle was out, and that left me without a title. My wife provided the first piece for a new title. She once worked in a biology lab, where people often referred to tissue samples being “in the minus eighty”, because tissue samples must be stored at -80 degrees Fahrenheit to remain viable. I tried In the Minus Eighty out on various people, and the consensus was that it wasn’t quite right. It was too vague. Ian Creasey, a writer who critiqued the first draft of the novel, suggested I make it Love in the Minus Eighty instead, to better reflect what the novel was about. I ran this by Tom Bauman, my editor at Orbit at the time. He bounced it around with some of their creative people, and they suggested making it Love Minus Eighty. They thought that would look good on the jacket, and had the right sort of pithy, mysterious ring to it. I loved it.

So as you can see, the title was a real team effort!