Wolf and the Robots Who Ate the World

Robots from the far reaches of space who eat childhood dreams have invaded Earth, and it’s up to Wolfgang Benjamin Zuttliburg Mullenbottom IV, the most imaginative boy to ever live, and the mysterious robot girl Mira to stop them.  Well-spoken dinosaur thieves, sentient pirate ships, cowardly bedmonsters, secret robot Moon palaces, mad astronaut scientists, grizzled hummingbird commandos, rocketship mountains, spelunking dragonslayers, baseball-playing skeletons, deep space Krakens, and the true power of a boy’s imagination are only some of the wonders awaiting them on this madcap journey.

HISTORY

My favorite books growing up were the crazy imaginative ones that were almost too ridiculous to believe.  The Phantom Tollbooth, Harry Newberry and the Raiders of the Red Drink–these were the ones that I loved to read and re-enact later with a collection of LEGO minifigs, army men, and cushions stolen from our disgusting, very ’80s couch.  I remember how vivid the stories were, that even today I can visualize the Everpresent Wordsnatcher or Pete Zaminsky and his day-old pizza shop.  Hell, I still shout “SEVENTEEN!” as a nonsensical solution like the Humbug.  So it wasn’t really that surprising that after finishing Noise and wanting to cleanse my brain, I wrote an adventure story about a boy was has to save the world from hungry robots.

There’s a collective sorrow to childhood.  It’s a gauntlet everyone has to pass through– a simple time of the world on training wheels and right as you start to understand how good you have it, bam, it’s gone.  If I was feeling particularly poetic and philosophical, I’d say the moment we grow up is the moment of first death.  Not that everything afterward is one slow slide into final death (that’s much too depressing), but this is the first time we come to grips with what it means to be separated from something, forever.  Consider the classic story of first death, the boy holding a goldfish bowl with his beloved pet bellyup in it.  What is it about this scene that conjures such emotion for us?  I mean, I never even had a goldfish for a pet (just guppies, some snails, and a rather unfortunate catfish) and never flushed any of them down the toilet.  So why is the little boy so identifiable, so vivid in our minds?  Because we know what it’s like to be yanked from one world where everything lives forever and we’re all best friends to one where you are alone and your friend is rotting in scummy water.  Because we’ve all grown up.

This was my first work where I didn’t have some hulking ghost of a manuscript lying around to rework, and I don’t think it would have worked as well as it did if that had been the case.  I knew that the only way I’d keep writing would be to keep making interesting problems happen, so that’s what I did.  Page after page after page, I threw Wolf into the most bizarre messes and thought of stranger ways to escape them.  The result was that it only took me about three months of solid writing to pound out a rough draft, and another few weeks to fix glaring continuity problems that I had originally just written over and swore to get back to when the draft was done.