What happens when a girl enters a city with no name, and a plan to change the future for all of its citizens? Dystopian fans who love mystery, action and a heroine who manages her own army will enjoy a journey Into the Unknown, the debut novel from German author Alice Reeds. The first in a series to come, Into the Unknown takes readers into the life of Bexx Kajan, a seemingly ordinary young woman who, as it turns out, isn’t so ordinary after all as she sets out on a dangerous mission to avenge the death of her sister and defeat enemies along the way.
Interviewer: Christy Campbell
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Tell us about yourself and how you decided to become an author.
My name is Alice Reeds, I’m from Europe and I started to write and read around the age of eight or nine. I started off with little, quite naïve stories, which mostly never got finished, but I somehow always knew that I wanted to do something with writing. Three years ago I wrote a twenty five page long novella as a Christmas gift for a friend of mine – more as a joke and not as serious novella – but now I think it was my first step into really getting into writing. I also wrote a story that has around one hundred seventeen pages in length but I never finished it as I came to the conclusion that it is too simple and too naïve. But as I started to write Into the Unknown, the dream of one day becoming a known author seemed real and so I decided that I really want to go down this road and prove myself in the writers’ world and show that my novels are worth reading.
Into the Unknown is your first novel. When did you come up with the idea to write it?
According to my first Word document that I created in order to write Into the Unknown, I started writing on the December 29th 2012. I remember that it was a gray day and I was walking down a street while listening to an electronic song by David Guetta and then it suddenly hit me. I had this whole picture in my head which in the end turned out to be the first scene in Chapter One. From that day on, the whole story started to come to life in my head and later also on paper.
Why did you decide to write a novel set in a dystopian world?
After I read Awaken by Katie Kacvinsky in 2011, I think, I started to really fall in love with the genre and this way of seeing the future, which just fascinated me from the beginning. I enjoy seeing how different authors see our future and how it all looks in their novels. This led me to think of my own vision of the future and as my ideas for Into the Unknown started to grow, a vision of a dystopian future in which my characters would live, started to form and develop.
In Into the Unknown you also talk about genetic engineering. How did you come up with the idea for that component of the story?
I would say people in general always had this idea of manipulating animals in order to clone them. During the Olympic Games there were all those news stories saying that athlete XY is much too good he/she has to be on steroids or be somehow genetically different. Besides that, people also always had this thing for superheroes, like Superman who’s incredibly strong and so on.
I came up with the idea to actually make gene manipulations a thing in my novel. Of course, as I came up with the idea I had totally no idea of genes and all that, as I actually don’t take biology in school, so I had to do some amount of research on the Internet to find what I could more or less understand.
Your blog was first written only in German and later on also in English. Why did you decide to write a novel in English?
That’s a good question. For years I’ve been writing in German, as I feel I can express myself better in German, but then I started to be around people who only spoke English. Slowly but steadily my preference changed and now I feel like English is my writing language. I knew that if I wrote my novel in English, I could reach a bigger audience as there are more people who speak English then German.
In one of your chapters you talk about a song by Queen and its meaning. Is there a particular reason why you chose Queen and not another band or singer?
For me it was important to choose a band that would really stand out, as they are the band that represents the culture of the past in my novel. So I was thinking about it and one day “I Want It All” was playing on the radio and that’s when I knew it had to be this song and this band. Queen comes from a time when music was made due to passion and not predominantly because labels wanted to make music and singers really had to be able to sing as they didn’t have auto tune back then (so lucky). Besides that, Freddy Mercury was a wonderful, one of a kind singer with a voice that no one will ever be able to imitate or “out sing” and so I felt that it was the right choice, instead of musicians that people listen to today, who mostly just sing about how they want to party or have sex with someone.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing a novel?
As a student I always had the problem of finding time for writing between school and homework, but another thing that was quite challenging was finding the determination to really sit down and simply write. The first 20,000 words took me around seven or eight months because I had very long periods where I couldn’t get myself to write. I just didn’t quite know where I wanted my story to go. Yet the last 25,000 words, more or less took me between three to five days, which I still cannot believe. Somehow inspiration just hit me together with the determination to really write this novel and have it done. So I just sat down and wrote it all.
As a new self-published author, what are the things you know now that you wish you would have known before?
For one, I wished I would have known just how expensive it is in terms of getting a professional editor/proofreader to go over your work. Another thing that I wished I would have known before is that if you want to get published the old fashioned way and you want to get published by the big ones like Katherine Tegen Books or Penguin, you need to have an agent. At first I thought okay that surely isn’t that hard, right? Wrong. The process is extremely long and nerve-racking and so it led me to self-publish because I decided that I just don’t want to go down that road. I wish I would have known that before in order to just save myself from all the sleepless nights and anxiety waiting for an answer.
Tell us about some German authors whose work you admire and why.
To be honest, I don’t read many German authors but the one I really love, and who is my favorite author of all, is Sebastian Fitzek. He’s a psycho-thriller author whose books always managed to surprise and fascinate me. I still remember the nights I read his book called Seelenbrecher (Soul Breaker would be the most accurate translation in English) and I was torn between I have to know what happens next and No, no, no! Put that book away, this is way too scary so you won’t be able to sleep. I was around fourteen years old when I read it and it’s quite a scary and gory book.
What genres do you enjoy reading?
Quite obviously I enjoy dystopian and post-apocalyptic books, but I also like to read books like The Fault in Our Stars by John Green or The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay, which are the type of books that will make you happy and cry and just give you this constant roller-coaster of emotions. I really love that.
When I was younger, I loved vampire books. I have a ton of those, but right now I cannot even look at them anymore as I’m just so fed up with vampire stories. They seem to be all the same, in a way.
You’re only nineteen years old! What are your plans for the future when it comes to writing?
Well, after high school I want to take a year off and just relax and give myself the time to write and do fun stuff. After that I’m planning to go to University in order to study journalism. My dream job would be to work as a journalist for one of the bigger music magazines, like Kerrang! I’ve always had a passion for music, and it’s also related to writing, so I could really picture myself in such a job. Besides that, I want to continue writing and maybe one day be able to call myself somewhat of a successful author. Right now, during NNWM (National Novel Writing Month) I’m trying to reach the goal of writing 50,000 words in less than thirty days, which I want to use in my second book for my Hunting Freedom-Trilogy, so we’ll see how that’ll go. Of course, I know that going down this road of being an author and publishing books will be a very long process, but I’m willing to take my chances and just see what will happen!
Into the Unknown is available for Kindle at Amazon.com
Visit Alice Reeds’ blog at http://www.alicereedsbettgeschichten.blogspot.de/
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