The blurb:
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When Jed unlocks a secret buried deep inside himself, he discovers he’s more (and less) than he ever imagined he could be — and time is running out. Now Jed must race for his life through the dangerous junkyard in search of answers to the haunting questions that plague his mind.
Where is his mother? Who is his father? What is he? And . . . is there anyone he can trust? Strange realities, unexpected twists, and powerful revelations unfold as Jed confronts his past and grapples with his future. Meanwhile, an explosive war threatens to destroy the junkyard for good as enemy factions collide in an epic battle to the end. Can Jed stop the war — and start a new life — before it’s too late? |
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The story behind Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion:
At the end of Jed and the Junkyard War, Jed loses his entire identity. At the time I wrote his story, I didn’t know what that was like. Before long, though, I would find out.
After signing my two-book deal with Disney in 2014, I was on top of the world. Jed and the Junkyard War was my first book to be published, and it was the culmination of years of working to get to that point. My wife and I were embarking on a brand new adventure where I transitioned into writing full-time and we built a fantastic life on that.
Until that didn’t happen.
See, in October 2016, my three-part identity — husband, father, and writer — fell apart. That was when I learned that my wife was having an affair with her Crossfit coach.
I lost a third of my identity that day. And the months-long effort of trying to save my marriage also led me to miss much of the celebration that should’ve followed the publication of Jed. There I was, in December 2016, trying to launch a book while simultaneously pretending that my wife wasn’t telling me about her pre-mortal marriage to her Crossfit coach and that I could never hope to live up to her soul connection with her affair partner. And then she left for good in April 2017, walking away from almost 10 years of marriage, me, and our two children.
All of that, you might imagine, affected my writing to the extreme.
I sent off my first draft of Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion to my editor at Disney, and… it didn’t take her long to recognize that something wasn’t right. Apparently you can’t write a middle grade book full of misery and torture without raising some questions.
I ended up telling her the whole story — about my newfound single fatherhood, about the loss of my identity as a husband, and about the daily struggle that writing became as I battled with depression. My editor, out of the goodness of her heart (and probably fearful of reading more of my dark writings), told me to take a year off.
So I did. I stopped writing. I stopped thinking about writing. I started to fear the computer; staring at a blank Microsoft Word page was terrifying. My life as an author became one of questions: Would I be able to fill my Disney contract? Why couldn’t I put down words on a page? Would I ever be able to write again? Did I even want to write again?
My wife’s affair led to the loss of another third of my identity. I was no longer a husband, and I was no longer a writer.
And here’s where I — Jackie, the non-affair wife — will take over the story.
Steven and I met in June 2017. He had been taking care of his two daughters full-time since mid-April, and the ex-wife was still floating on the periphery of his life, stopping by to occasionally intimidate him, rifle through the cupboards of the house, and take the girls to the park for an hour. He doesn’t like to think of himself like this, but Steven was a cowed puppy. I remember sitting on the staircase inside the house while she yelled at him on the porch, then having him come inside and curl up on my lap in the fetal position just to recover from the encounter. Every day became about survival first, and repair second. Writing was a distant third… or fourth… or sixty-seventh...
It was during this stretch that Steven also learned a hard lesson about the book world: if you vanish for a year, the book world forgets about you. He went from being feted as a hot new up-and-coming author to being a go-between for dozens of messages from the writing community, each saying something along the lines of, “Hey, we know you know Brandon Sanderson, so can you put us in contact with him? We don’t want you, but we want him.”
Ouch, writing community. Ouch.
But, as movies and books are so fond of saying, after a storm comes the sunlight, and the clouds eventually began to break for poor Steven. He set himself on the recovery process post-divorce, and bit by bit, he climbed out of the hole he had been left in and began taking control of his destiny.
We got married in December 2017, and then, not long after that, Disney came knocking. Steven had a contract to fulfill. It was time to revisit Jed.
What followed was a painful start-from-scratch rewrite of his gritty, depressing version of Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion. And you know what happened?
Disney told him to try again.
Jed 2, take 2, was another failure.
Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion was an excruciating book for Steven to write, not just because of the divorce it followed, but also because it meant he had to really decide — I mean, really decide — if he wanted to write at all. The siren songs of video game designer, full-time artist, and professional coder all seemed easier than putting words on a blank white page, and he chased each of those in his own time. But as months passed, he kept coming back to the realization that he was a storyteller at heart, and that he would continue to build worlds despite himself. He couldn’t escape his career, so he had to re-learn how to do it.
Thus, Jed II was born. The story crawled, word by word, out his fingers. It was dragged, sometimes, painfully and slowly, from his mind. There were times when I wrote for him. There were times when he had to walk away from the computer for hours-long stretches. There were times when we had to talk through every word before he could look at the computer, just so something could make it on the page. It was an agonizing process, and there are times where that comes across in the finished book itself. Maybe it isn’t evident to everyone, but it is to me.
The turning point, in my opinion, came when Steven wrote the scene about Jed finding the Gold City. He wrote that section, and in reading it, I felt his joy, his enthusiasm, his humor, and his storytelling abilities reawaken. Each addition to the section — the giant lawnmower mountain, the comically stupid guards, the looming airship battle — expressed his love of writing as it hadn’t been expressed since 2014. It was almost as if he was starting to believe he was a writer again, and it was as much a personal victory as Jed’s climactic battle at the end of the book itself.
Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion came from struggle. It came from pain. But it was also a crucial book in Steven’s story, because it convinced him that he IS a writer. It’s one thing to produce a beautiful story when everything in life is perfect and your identity is solid in your own mind, but it’s an entirely different process when your life is in shambles and you’re sweeping together broken bits of a story in the hope of crafting something worth reading. In that sense, Jed 2 is an epic triumph for Steven, even if he won’t say it quite so, er, hyperbolically.
Jed both rediscovers and reinvents his identity by the end of Book 2, and so did Steven.
After signing my two-book deal with Disney in 2014, I was on top of the world. Jed and the Junkyard War was my first book to be published, and it was the culmination of years of working to get to that point. My wife and I were embarking on a brand new adventure where I transitioned into writing full-time and we built a fantastic life on that.
Until that didn’t happen.
See, in October 2016, my three-part identity — husband, father, and writer — fell apart. That was when I learned that my wife was having an affair with her Crossfit coach.
I lost a third of my identity that day. And the months-long effort of trying to save my marriage also led me to miss much of the celebration that should’ve followed the publication of Jed. There I was, in December 2016, trying to launch a book while simultaneously pretending that my wife wasn’t telling me about her pre-mortal marriage to her Crossfit coach and that I could never hope to live up to her soul connection with her affair partner. And then she left for good in April 2017, walking away from almost 10 years of marriage, me, and our two children.
All of that, you might imagine, affected my writing to the extreme.
I sent off my first draft of Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion to my editor at Disney, and… it didn’t take her long to recognize that something wasn’t right. Apparently you can’t write a middle grade book full of misery and torture without raising some questions.
I ended up telling her the whole story — about my newfound single fatherhood, about the loss of my identity as a husband, and about the daily struggle that writing became as I battled with depression. My editor, out of the goodness of her heart (and probably fearful of reading more of my dark writings), told me to take a year off.
So I did. I stopped writing. I stopped thinking about writing. I started to fear the computer; staring at a blank Microsoft Word page was terrifying. My life as an author became one of questions: Would I be able to fill my Disney contract? Why couldn’t I put down words on a page? Would I ever be able to write again? Did I even want to write again?
My wife’s affair led to the loss of another third of my identity. I was no longer a husband, and I was no longer a writer.
And here’s where I — Jackie, the non-affair wife — will take over the story.
Steven and I met in June 2017. He had been taking care of his two daughters full-time since mid-April, and the ex-wife was still floating on the periphery of his life, stopping by to occasionally intimidate him, rifle through the cupboards of the house, and take the girls to the park for an hour. He doesn’t like to think of himself like this, but Steven was a cowed puppy. I remember sitting on the staircase inside the house while she yelled at him on the porch, then having him come inside and curl up on my lap in the fetal position just to recover from the encounter. Every day became about survival first, and repair second. Writing was a distant third… or fourth… or sixty-seventh...
It was during this stretch that Steven also learned a hard lesson about the book world: if you vanish for a year, the book world forgets about you. He went from being feted as a hot new up-and-coming author to being a go-between for dozens of messages from the writing community, each saying something along the lines of, “Hey, we know you know Brandon Sanderson, so can you put us in contact with him? We don’t want you, but we want him.”
Ouch, writing community. Ouch.
But, as movies and books are so fond of saying, after a storm comes the sunlight, and the clouds eventually began to break for poor Steven. He set himself on the recovery process post-divorce, and bit by bit, he climbed out of the hole he had been left in and began taking control of his destiny.
We got married in December 2017, and then, not long after that, Disney came knocking. Steven had a contract to fulfill. It was time to revisit Jed.
What followed was a painful start-from-scratch rewrite of his gritty, depressing version of Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion. And you know what happened?
Disney told him to try again.
Jed 2, take 2, was another failure.
Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion was an excruciating book for Steven to write, not just because of the divorce it followed, but also because it meant he had to really decide — I mean, really decide — if he wanted to write at all. The siren songs of video game designer, full-time artist, and professional coder all seemed easier than putting words on a blank white page, and he chased each of those in his own time. But as months passed, he kept coming back to the realization that he was a storyteller at heart, and that he would continue to build worlds despite himself. He couldn’t escape his career, so he had to re-learn how to do it.
Thus, Jed II was born. The story crawled, word by word, out his fingers. It was dragged, sometimes, painfully and slowly, from his mind. There were times when I wrote for him. There were times when he had to walk away from the computer for hours-long stretches. There were times when we had to talk through every word before he could look at the computer, just so something could make it on the page. It was an agonizing process, and there are times where that comes across in the finished book itself. Maybe it isn’t evident to everyone, but it is to me.
The turning point, in my opinion, came when Steven wrote the scene about Jed finding the Gold City. He wrote that section, and in reading it, I felt his joy, his enthusiasm, his humor, and his storytelling abilities reawaken. Each addition to the section — the giant lawnmower mountain, the comically stupid guards, the looming airship battle — expressed his love of writing as it hadn’t been expressed since 2014. It was almost as if he was starting to believe he was a writer again, and it was as much a personal victory as Jed’s climactic battle at the end of the book itself.
Jed and the Junkyard Rebellion came from struggle. It came from pain. But it was also a crucial book in Steven’s story, because it convinced him that he IS a writer. It’s one thing to produce a beautiful story when everything in life is perfect and your identity is solid in your own mind, but it’s an entirely different process when your life is in shambles and you’re sweeping together broken bits of a story in the hope of crafting something worth reading. In that sense, Jed 2 is an epic triumph for Steven, even if he won’t say it quite so, er, hyperbolically.
Jed both rediscovers and reinvents his identity by the end of Book 2, and so did Steven.
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