Hey guys! Super special post for you today! Today I’m happy to welcome Ms. Donna Freitas, author of the upcoming novel Unplugged, as a guest to this blog! Ms. Freitas is going to be telling us about what inspired the story of Unplugged. I’ll let her take it away now!
What inspired the story of Unplugged?
It was actually a conversation where I was with a group of friends and we were joking
around about the possibility of downloading “updates” to our personality—for example:
eventually maybe I’d become Donna 4.0 and you’d become Lila 5.5. And that idea of some
day being able to actually do this, to download updates to your personality, or even other
things like apps that might enhance your brain or your abilities or even change you
physically started rolling around in my head.
Then, at the same time, I started wondering what it would be like to be able to write a
character who’d never been in her body—who’d never really known what it was like to be
in the body—even as old as 17. I started imagining what conditions might allow for that,
which was when I came up with the worlds of Unplugged and its rules too:
The world has split into two—one real world, one virtual—and in the virtual world (called
the App World) people would plug in their bodies (many of them as early as birth) and in
this world there would be Apps that would function just like I’d imagined above—Apps
that you could download to yourself that would change you in various ways.
And I thought: how fun to think of all the Apps I’d love to be able to download to myself
for a while! And how scary to think of growing up not knowing the real world at all.
Then I developed the rules—that people could not cross the border between worlds (they
couldn’t unplug) until they turned 17. Then they would be able to unplug for a year, at the
end of which they’d have to make a choice: would they stay in the Real World and their
bodies for the rest of their lives, or would they choose to go back to the App Worl and live
for a virtual eternity?
And then I set my protagonist, Skylar, into this set of circumstances. I’ve loved writing her
both in the virtual world and when she wakes up in the Real World for the first time. I
hope your readers like it too!
Thanks for having me!
Read An Excerpt of Unplugged
More About Unplugged…
The first book in a provocative new series from acclaimed author Donna Freitas—Feed for a new generation.About Donna Freitas
Donna Freitas is an author of fiction, nonfiction, and articles that appear in newspapers, magazines, and on blogs. Born in Rhode Island, Donna now splits her time between New York City and Barcelona.
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