Chelsea Campbell, author of
The Rise of Renegade X, stopped by to by to talk about the thought that spurred her to write Damien's story, the world she created in Golden City, and whether she'd rather be a hero or a villain. Her debut novel releases next month and was optioned for a movie earlier this year. One lucky reader will win a signed copy of her book and three others will win RRX Swag.
Release Date: May 11, 2010
Publisher: Egmont USA
Pages: 352
Description:
Sixteen-year-old Damien Locke has a plan: major in messing with people at the local supervillain university and become a professional evil genius, just like his supervillain mom. But when he discovers the shameful secret she's been hiding all these years, that the one-night stand that spawned him was actually with a superhero, everything gets messed up. His father's too moral for his own good, so when he finds out Damien exists, he actually wants him to come live with him and his goody-goody superhero family. Damien gets shipped off to stay with them in their suburban hellhole, and he has only six weeks to prove he's not a hero in any way, or else he's stuck living with them for the rest of his life, or until he turns eighteen, whichever comes first.
To get out of this mess, Damien has to survive his dad's "flying lessons" that involve throwing him off the tallest building in the city--despite his nearly debilitating fear of heights--thwarting the eccentric teen scientist who insists she's his sidekick, and keeping his supervillain girlfriend from finding out the truth. But when Damien uncovers a dastardly plot to turn all the superheroes into mindless zombie slaves, a plan hatched by his own mom, he discovers he cares about his new family more than he thought. Now he has to choose: go back to his life of villainy and let his family become zombies, or stand up to his mom and become a real hero.
About the author:
Chelsea Campbell grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where it rains a lot. And then rains some more. She finished her first novel when she was twelve, sent it out, and promptly got rejected. Since then she’s written many more novels, earned a degree in Latin and Ancient Greek, become an obsessive knitter and fiber artist, and started a collection of glass grapes. Chelsea is a pop culture fangirl at heart and can often be found rewatching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, leveling up in World of Warcraft, or spending way too much time on Livejournal and Facebook.
By the Numbers
Time it took to write The Rise of Renegade X: 28 days. Though it took me a year and a half to find a publisher, and another year and a half for it to hit the shelves.
Number of revisions: Two. I added about 20k for an editor during the submission process, and then I added another 5k when I did edits with Egmont.
Final word count: 85K
Interview
Did Damien or the story of The Rise of Renegade X pop into your head first? How did it evolve from there?
The idea that originally spawned the book was that I wanted to have a bad guy who had to save people, and as I played around with that and the idea evolved, I knew I had this supervillain kid, who I wanted to be scheming and funny, and this story where his life gets turned upside down after finding out his dad's a superhero. So I guess you could say they came together at the same time.
