Team Human was great fun for me and Sarah Rees Brennan to write. Partly because it was so much easier than a solo novel. Overnight, like magic, the next chapter would appear in our inbox! I live in Sydney & New York City. Sarah is Irish and lives in Dublin. The different time zones was a big contributor to the magic of chapters being written while we slept. In fact, we didn’t get to see each other at all while we were writing the book: we met again after we’d finished and were able to toast the book with Japanese cocktails in London!1
The book sprang out of our shared love of vampire stories. As we started writing we gave each other reading lists to round out our vampire education. Both had read Camilla, Varney the Vampire and, of course, Dracula, not to mention Anne Rice. But Sarah had not read Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry or Tanith Lee’s Sabella and Justine had never read L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries. That had to be corrected! The ensuing discussions shaped Team Human in a plethora2 of ways.
Sarah writes like the wind so she kept me on my toes.3 Some days I would send off a chapter before going to bed only to wake up to a new chapter. I’d read it, go online to discuss with Sarah the rewrites and what should go in the next chapter. Then I’d spend the next many, many hours doing those rewrites and writing the next chapter, then send it off, thinking I could relax until the next morning. But, oh no, Sarah-who-never-sleeps would be ready to discuss that chapter and write the next one before I’d even gotten up from my desk.4
Team Human, like the Beautiful Creatures series, is written in one voice. At this point neither of us remembers anymore which bit was whose. And even when we know whose funny line it was, the joke is dependent on the other’s setup. The novel is like a game of pick-up-sticks: if you tried to tease one of our words from the other’s, the whole thing would collapse.
Writing Team Human was the most fun either one of us has ever had writing a novel. We were never alone with it! We can totally see why writers love to write and readers love to read books like Will Grayson, Will Grayson, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and the aforementioned Beautiful Creatures. We can only hope you will have as much fun reading it as we did writing it.5