Which befits fight scenes, I think, especially ones that you want to feel brutal and surprising: they're going to unfold unexpectedly and it helps to kind of put yourself into that moment and see how it plays out. The bar scene, for instance, was very much that – you pause, consider the next action beat, put it into play, pause, consider the next action beat, and so on. Consequence tumbling after consequence with every knuckle-busting fist thrown or bottle broken.

Of course, like any scene, the fights are really forged in the rewrite.

When we were talking about my book Empire State, you asked me a very difficult question – what makes Empire State an Adam Christopher novel. Reading Blackbirds, I'm struck by the fact that this cannot possibly have been written by anyone other than yourself, and I'm sure readers familiar with your work – including your blog at Terribleminds.com – will feel the same way. So let me throw that question back at you: what makes Blackbird a Chuck Wendig novel?

I knew you were going to ask this, and yet, I don't have a good answer.

Voice is a tricky thing for a writer. If you work to develop a voice, you'll never have one. If you just… well, as the saying goes, lie back and think of England, the voice will come to you. Meaning, you write how you're going to write and do so to the best of your technical abilities and somewhere therein – in the smashing together of word choice, linguistic style, character, dialogue, story, plot – a book ends up being indelibly yours as an author. You claim ownership by not claiming ownership.

How is this book mine specifically? Well. Part of it has to be Miriam. We're nothing alike, she and I, and yet I can hear her stomping around my brain sometimes, chain-smoking and cursing her fate, your fate, everybody's fate, the fate of the soda machine that doesn't have any orange Fanta in it, and so on.

The other part of it has to be the profanity.

Because, ahh, as many of my readers know, I'm fond of profanity. Creative profanity in particular. (If I recall correctly, Miriam calls someone a "fuckpie" in this book. Which sounds like the most undelicious pastry one could find. What's in a fuckpie, exactly? Lubefroth and used condoms, topped with a latticework of pubic hairs?)

My love of profanity comes from my father. His ghost, rattling around in my head, too. See? More death. The motif ever-present! Death and birds and bad words and all that good stuff. We authors are who we authors are, built from our obsessions.

You've written a series of YA novellas, beginning with Shotgun Gravy. Blackbirds is very much not a YA book – so how do you switch between one "voice" and another.

I guess that's the nature of being a writer, right? Just as actors must hop from persona to persona, writers must ease into and out of dozens if not hundreds of characters.