Synopsis
"Lord of the Flies in a 21st-century high school setting.Welcome to Quarantine 3: The Burnouts , where readers of The Maze Runner, Gone, and Divergent go when they're hungry for more dark, compelling survival stories."
When an explosion rocks David and Will's suburban high school one morning, a deadly virus is unleashed on the school. After a year of quarantine, with no adults around, the students have created their own society. All of the social cliques have developed into gangs-The Nerds, The Geeks, The Freaks, The Sluts, The Skaters, The Burnouts, The Pretty Ones, and The Varsity-and each gang provides a service with which they can barter for provisions. Without a gang, it's almost impossible to secure food, water, territory, or supplies. In the final installment in the Quarantine trilogy, the brothers are reunited on the Outside and it appears as if, for once everything is going right. But inside the school, Lucy is alone with no gang and no hope, until the Burnouts welcome her into their filthy arms. (Goodreads)
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| Lex Hrabe (left) and Thomas Voorhies (right), the authors of the Quarantine trilogy |
Are you afraid when you try to write? I'm afraid every time I sit down to work. Sometimes I'm afraid enough that I pop right out of my seat and instantly come up with a reason why I shouldn't start writing just yet. I'll lie to myself that there are important chores to be done first, that there is some issue in my life that I should probably worry about for an hour, or I decide that I need to make another coffee or tea before I start. I make a lot of coffee and tea. I'd like to tell you that after publishing three novels the fear has gone away or has lessened. I guess it has lessened some. When we sold our book proposal for the Quarantine trilogy, neither of us had ever written a novel before. Being told your first attempt at a novel is going to be published is an incredibly frightening opportunity. I don't get to quite that level of scared anymore, but the fear is still there, waiting for me every day. I'm afraid of writing a bad book. I'm afraid that I don't actually know what I'm doing despite what I've written in the past. I'm afraid of looking stupid. Most times I don't even know what I'm afraid of, but I'm sitting at the computer feeling the fear, and wishing there was a way to know exactly what I should say and how to say it, but there isn’t one. There's just the blank screen and my own gut feeling of what should happen next, or oftentimes no gut feeling at all. The fear tends to lessen once I actually start, and continue to dwindle as the hours pass and my word count rises, but it is always there before I begin and somehow I never get used to it. I always feel convinced that I have a real reason to be afraid no matter how many times I push past it and have a productive writing day. You can bully yourself into starting, you can play loud music to rile yourself up, meditate to calm yourself down, or do whatever else to deal with the fear, but the best days are when you drown out the fear with excitement. The more you're falling in love with your idea, your characters, your scenes, your settings- the more the fear falls away, and the easier it is to start. And starting is the point. Regardless of how you get there, the only way to make the fear go away is to start writing and then keep writing. I know that to be true. |
I’m just really good at ignoring it.
-Thomas Voorhies
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