We have a
new official cover for the first installment of
The Bane Chronicles and now, EW also has an interview with the fabulous authors of
The Bane Chronicles, Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson, and Sarah Rees Brennan!
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: First thing’s first: How did you come up with the idea for The Bane Chronicles?
MAUREEN JOHNSON: We always have jokes about each other’s books, and I have my designs on several of Cassie’s characters. It started over a long series of jokes like about what we would do.
SARAH REES BRENNAN: I came in a little later. Maureen and Cassie were chatting about several different adventures that characters could have had. Then we were all in France together when we started telling Magnus stories to each other.
CASSANDRA CLARE: We’d all rented this house [in France], and it had one really big fancy room that we couldn’t possibly use. We were sort of gingerly sitting in there, and then we started making jokes about Magnus and what he would think of the room. Maureen had one about Magnus during the French Revolution. Sarah had her theories about why Magnus was really banned from Peru, and it sort of expanded. I said, “It’s really a shame that we couldn’t write these as a series of ongoing stories, because it’s not really a novel format. It’s more of a series of interconnected short stories.” That was when we first started talking about it seriously.Why did you decide on 10 installments?
CLARE: We had the realization that the best home for a project like this was probably the Internet because it allows for extremely non-traditional publishing formats. Then we started to buckle down and talk about what the stories would be and how they would be written. Since there’s three of us and we’re writing each story — Maureen’s writing half, Sarah’s writing half, I’m writing half along — it seemed fair to split them five and five.
Each installment is written by just two of you. How did you decide who would write what?
BRENNAN: When we started talking about it, it became clear what we were most interested in. I’d be like, “Well what about the other Mortal characters? What about Raphael?” What if he and Magnus had a history? And sometimes the stories we planned to write take a dramatic turn. Cassie, Maureen, and I were just on tour together, and a lot of people were asking about the characters in The Infernal Devices. Cassie and I got to talking about it on the bus, and we’re like, “Well, this could be a Bane Chronicle and then we had to break the news to our editor that we had a different Bane Chronicle!
JOHNSON: A lot of it did happen in that room in France, and it did feel like the right setting for this — the place to be doing this crazy project. We talked a lot about time periods because we had so many to choose from. We went in like it was a smorgasbord and said, “We have four or five hundred years of history to play with. What are some awesome settings since we can do anything? Where should we go?”What can you tease about What Really Happened in Peru?
CLARE: There’s a dropped mention in one of the [Mortal Instrument] books that Magnus is banned from the entire country of Peru, and he never says why. So this is the story of… I don’t want to spoil Magnus’ banning! But it actually covers a lot of centuries of Magnus’ visits to Peru.
BRENNAN: I do not know an obscene amount about Peruvian history. So I’d be looking at it and find that in one century Peru had this huge piracy problem. Magnus and pirates, obviously! And in another century there were confidence tricksters going all around preying on travelers, so what if Magnus met a confidence trickster? That sort of thing.
Check out the full interview over at
Shelf Life (EW)
No comments:
Post a Comment