Feedback, by Robison Wells
Benson Fisher escaped from Maxfield Academy's deadly rules and brutal gangs. The worst was over.
Or so he thought.
But now he's trapped on the other side of the wall, in a different kind of prison. A town filled with familiar faces. People from Maxfield who Benson had seen die. Friends he was afraid he had killed.
They are all pawns in the school's twisted experiment, held captive and controlled by an unseen force. And while Benson struggles to figure out who, if anyone, can be trusted, he discovers that Maxfield Academy's plans are darker than anything he imagined - and they may be impossible to stop.
Feedback Trivia:
**NON-SPOILERS**
There aren’t a lot of non-spoiler things I can include in trivia for a sequel, but here’s a thing I get asked from time to time:
The location of Maxfield Academy, on a map, is in the Carson National Forest, which is about as remote as you can get in Northern New Mexico. It’s north of Espanola and west of Taos, in a place where there is very little.
BUT: that’s where it is on a map. What it actually looks like, in my brain, is the Zuni Mountains, which are in between Grants and Gallup. This is because I know the Zuni Mountains very well, and have hiked and driven all through there, but they’re not remote enough for this school to be hidden there. They COULD have worked, but they weren’t where I wanted it.
But when I describe the forest and the rocks and the pinon pines, that’s all the Zuni Mountains.
**SPOILERS**
I wrote Feedback under duress. I don't mean that in that I did it against my will, but I did it in incredibly difficult conditions. At the same time that Variant launched, I began to get sick with what I would eventually come to learn was schizophrenia. So I suddenly had the biggest book deal of my life--a book deal that was my sole income because I had been laid off--and I was dealing with the horrors of schizophrenia, all while have to write a sequel.
And, sequels are hard anyway. I made a couple of errors at the end of Variant. Here's the deal about the end of Variant: I was trying to sell a book, and you don't sell books as series (usually, especially if you're breaking in). You sell them as standalones. So I wrote Variant as a standalone. They get over the wall, they get chased, they get away.
But then I did two things: I added the stinger chapter on the end with Jane. That was on purpose, to whet the reader's appetite for the potential of a Book 2, should a Book 2 ever happen. And then I injured Becky REALLY BAD.
So I started to write Feedback, and I knew I had to start with Jane, but I also had to deal with the fact that I had given a debilitating injury to one of the lead characters. And I hadn't planned for that, but the book was already in print. I just had to deal with it.
So that was hard.
The other hard thing is that I suddenly had to make SO MANY SPREADSHEETS. To write Feedback I had to have a name and gang assignment for everyone in Variant, including a separate note as to whether they were an android. And then I had to have another spreadsheet of everyone in the Feedback settlement, including whether they were dupes or whether they had EVER BEEN DUPES. Because the whole reason you're in that settlement was because you'd been a dupe at one point.
Seriously, I had floorplans knowing where everyone slept. I literally had pictures (taken from a talent agency website) of EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE VARIANT & FEEDBACK WORLD, whether they were mentioned in Feedback or not.
Anyway, I like this book a lot. It gets some hate because people don't like how it ends, and I can see that up to a point. I purposely left some things ambiguous. Some BIG things. But I also rushed the ending. And I rushed the ending because I was missing deadlines because I was so sick with schizophrenia. So it ISN'T what I want it to be.
But I don't have plans for a Book 3. What I would like is to tack four more chapters onto the end of Feedback.