Dystopian December - P.J. Hoover!

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Guest post by P.J. Hoover!

HOW TO MAKE THE UNDERWORLD SIZZLE

Thanks so much for inviting me to guest blog over here! It’s always so great to connect with new readers! For those who don’t know, my debut young adult novel, SOLSTICE, will be released by Tor Teen on Jun18, 2013! I can’t wait!

What is SOLSTICE? It’s what happens when MATCHED meets THE LIGHTNING THIEF and is largely set in a future where global warming is destroying the earth. But parallel to this dystopic, melting earth there exists a world of mythology. And with this world of mythology comes the Underworld.

Let’s put our key elements on the table. Young Adults. Mythology. Global Warming. And, yes…Romance. I wanted each and every scene written in the Underworld to really sizzle, and to do this, I needed to tie together all these key elements. What this involved was tons of setting details, reading up on mythology, and *trying* to understand teenage hormones.

Here are five things I learned while writing scenes in the Underworld:

1)      Writing villains is fun. Tartarus is the worst place in the Underworld, and it’s filled with people who have committed the most heinous of crimes. When my main character, Piper, travels to Tartarus, she interacts with these villains, and creating each and every one of their personalities was fascinating for me.

2)      Paradise does not just involve green meadows. If the bad people go to Tartarus, then the good people go to the Elysian Fields which is as close to paradise as it gets. Yet if all anyone ever did in paradise was walk around and smell the flowers, they might be happy, but our readers would be bored stiff. Paradise needs to be a bit livelier.

3)      Hades, the god of the Underworld, has to live somewhere. I guess he could have just had a house in the Elysian Fields, but that might prove to be a bit on the biased side. So what Hades needs is a place where he can remain impartial. Sure, it can be nice. Why shouldn’t it be? He has a hard job, and he deserves some perks.

4)      Dark passageways make for great romantic settings. And there are plenty of dark passageways in the Underworld. Can you say sizzling romance?

5)      Just because something in mythology is linked to the Underworld, this doesn’t mean it needs to be incorporated into the novel. A novel, though lengthy in words, is actually a cozy little place. Introducing too many things will stifle what is really critical to the story. Save some of those mythological details for the future!

Thanks so much for reading!

SOLSTICE will be released by Tor Teen on June 18, 2013.

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Author Bio:

P. J. Hoover first fell in love with Greek mythology in sixth grade thanks to the book Mythology by Edith Hamilton. After a fifteen year bout as an electrical engineer designing computer chips for a living, P. J. decided to take her own stab at mythology and started writing books for kids and teens. When not writing, P. J. spends time with her husband and two kids and enjoys practicing kung fu, solving Rubik's cubes, and watching Star Trek. P. J. is also a member of THE TEXAS SWEETHEARTS & SCOUNDRELS and THE ENCHANTED INKPOT. Her first novel for teens, Solstice, takes place in a global warming future and explores the parallel world of mythology beside our own and will be published by Tor Children's in June 2013. She is also the author of The Forgotten Worlds trilogy and the upcoming Tut (Tor Children’s, Winter 2014). For more information about P. J. (Tricia) Hoover, please visit her website www.pjhoover.com.

Author Links:

- Website - Blog - Twitter - Facebook - Goodreads -

Solstice - 
P.J. Hoover
Released: June 18, 2013
Publisher: Tor Teen

Synopsis: Piper's world is dying. 

Each day brings hotter temperatures and heat bubbles that threaten to destroy the earth. Amid this global heating crisis, Piper lives under the oppressive rule of her mother, who suffocates her even more than the weather does. Everything changes on her eighteenth birthday, when her mother is called away on a mysterious errand and Piper seizes her first opportunity for freedom.

Piper discovers a universe she never knew existed—a sphere of gods and monsters—and realizes that her world is not the only one in crisis. While gods battle for control of the Underworld, Piper’s life spirals out of control as she struggles to find the answer to the secret that has been kept from her since birth.

An imaginative melding of mythology and dystopia, Solstice is the first YA novel by talented newcomer P. J. Hoover.

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