Interview (and Giveaway) with Ecosystem Author Joshua Bellin

I’m so excited to have Joshua on the blog today to celebrate the release of his new novel, Ecosystem, which sounds amazing. Don’t forget to enter the Rafflecopter contest at the end of the post for your chance to win a signed copy of Ecosystem! Here is the fabulous cover:

Seventeen-year-old Sarah is a Sensor, gifted with the ability to survive within the sentient Ecosystem that swept away human civilization centuries ago. While the remnants of humankind huddle in small villages of stone, Sarah uses her psychic connection to the Ecosystem to travel freely in the wild in search of food, water, and fuel. Sarah doesn’t fear the Ecosystem—but she hates it for killing her mother when Sarah was a child. When she hunts, she hunts not only for her people’s sustenance but for revenge.

Then Miriam, an apprentice Sensor, is lost in the Ecosystem, and Sarah sets out to rescue her. Joining Sarah is Miriam’s beloved, Isaac, a boy who claims to possess knowledge of the Ecosystem that will help their people survive. The harrowing journey to find the missing apprentice takes Sarah and Isaac into the Ecosystem’s deadliest places. And it takes Sarah into the unexplored territory of her own heart, where she discovers feelings that threaten to tear her—and her society—apart.

A thrilling fantasy adventure from the author of Freefall and the Survival Colony series, Ecosystem is the first book in a YA trilogy that includes The Devouring Land (2019) and House of Earth, House of Stone (2020).

About Joshua:

I’ve always been a huge Nature geek–whether that meant playing with frogs when I was ten years old (see the photo) or, more recently, participating in environmental advocacy on issues including climate change, fracking, and so forth. Maybe this explains why, as a writer, I’ve been drawn to extreme environments–the desert setting of SURVIVAL COLONY 9 and SCAVENGER OF SOULS, the dead planet of FREEFALL, etc. So the thought popped into my head one day, “What if I set a story in a world where the environment wasn’t just threatening but was actually aware, and angry, and out to get human beings?” That led to other questions: “How would people survive in such a world? How did it come into existence?” And once I started asking those questions, I couldn’t stop until I had all the answers!

I don’t want to give too much away about the science of ECOSYSTEM, but I did do some research into the emerging field of genetically engineering natural systems. It’s kind of JURASSIC PARK territory, but not for entertainment; it’s more a matter of trying to restore ecosystems that have been critically damaged by human activities. I also had to do lots of research about existing organisms and habitats, because in the Ecosystem, lots of plants and animals that exist today have changed in ways that make them dangerous to human beings. I’d say the most surprising thing I discovered had to do with the medicinal properties of certain plants. I tweaked things for the purposes of fiction, but it was really fascinating to learn about traditional methods of healing.

Would it be safe to say that I don’t? 🙂 No, seriously, this semester is a good example of how crazy things get: I have four classes, all of which involve significant amounts of student writing, so there literally isn’t a day that I’m not grading papers. What I try to do is write during the morning before classes, because I tend to be most productive as a writer in the morning. Then, at night, when I’m less creative, I focus on the more mechanical tasks of grading and preparing for class. But even with this schedule, I don’t get much writing done until the summer, when I can look forward to three months of solid writing time!

I tend not to plot things out much, because I find that my stories feel most natural and real to me when I’m discovering things while I write them. A perfect example of this occurred in another manuscript I’m working on, where one of the characters is restrained for reasons I won’t go into right now, and he asks a character who’s watching him for some water, and as she’s rather inexperienced, she removes the restraints to let him drink. Later, when she’s out of the room for a moment, he escapes, and she feels so guilty and angry about being tricked, she pursues him. I didn’t plan that scene at all; in fact, when I was writing it, I didn’t really know what the relationships were between the characters. But the very natural action of removing the restraints so the person could take a drink led me to think, “well, maybe now he’ll try to get away,” which made me think, “why WOULD he try to get away?”, which led me to think about who he was and what he was running from. And then, when she follows him, the book veers in yet another direction I hadn’t foreseen. I guess I could have worked the other way around, planning it all out beforehand, but I don’t think I’d have come up with that particular sequence of events if I had.