SUGAR SKULL book deal!

I’ve been sitting oh-so-patiently on this news for a month, but now I can fire off the confetti cannons, because Skyscape is going to publish SUGAR SKULL, my near-future YA/NA collaboration with fellow scribbler and smartarse Glenn Dallas.

Author of TICKER and the THEATRE ILLUMINATA trilogy, Lisa Mantchev’s and debut author Glenn Dallas’s YA SUGAR SKULL, about the lead singer of an all-girl band and a renegade living in the shadows, whose intense connection stirs up their troubled pasts and the dark underbelly of the seductive, electric, fragile world they inhabit, to Miriam Juskowicz at Skyscape, by Laura Rennert at Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (World)

And here’s how we pitched it:

Welcome to Cyrene, a prototype city where energy is currency. Thrum-collectors gather energy generated by 16 to 21 year olds, and the residents of the world’s largest maglie calcio poco prezzo playground are encouraged to pursue every physical and emotional pleasure imaginable:

Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll.

Vee is the lead singer of the Sugar Skulls, an all-girl band that’s Corporate’s newest pet project for harnessing thrum. Micah is a former denizen who glitched off the grid after an overdose of applejack. Their troubled pasts and Cyrene’s future collide when Micah and Vee forge an immediate connection that threatens the carefully laid plans of ruthless and ambitious men.

And before the show is done, they’ll bring the city to its knees to save each other.

This project was written and edited (oftentimes in real time) in Google Documents. Glenn wrote Micah’s voice, I did Vee’s, and it cuts between their viewpoints in first-person present tense not by chapter, but within pages—and sometimes within paragraphs—of each other. Very, very different tone and style from what you’ve seen in the theater and steampunk books, and very exciting for me as an author!

And you don’t have long to wait, either, because currently it is slotted for publication this November!

If you want even more of an idea of what it is going to be like, check out the Pinterest Board I’ve been decorating with all the goth girls, sexy tattooed boys, and neon ever. And because pictures make everything better, get an eyeload of this snazzy painting I commissioned for Glenn the year we finished writing the novel.

“Sugar Skull” by Celine Chapus