Like many aspiring novelists, Katharine McGee “dreamed of becoming a writer,” but graduated from college with a degree in English (and French), unsure of whether she was ready to undertake the Great American Novel.
Unlike most writers, McGee is about to make a very high-flying splash with the novel she did eventually write. HarperTeen will launch The Thousandth Floor on August 30 at a party in New York City’s Times Square, where the book’s trailer will play on the Jumbotron outside the Forever 21 clothing store and a fashion show inspired by McGee’s characters will take place inside it. The debut novel – billed as a “futuristic Gossip Girl” – follows the glamorous but scandalous lives of five teens who live in 22nd-century Manhattan. ABC Studios has already optioned the television rights; foreign rights have been sold into 25 territories.
“What’s been big in YA lately is stories with a big bad villain in a world that needs to be saved,” McGee said. “This is just a story about people who hurt and betray and love one another, encased in a big world full of tech. I hope the market’s ready for that.”
After graduating from Princeton in 2010, McGee (who goes by Katie) worked in editorial at HarperCollins and then at Alloy Entertainment, the book packager and television production company, where she edited the last volumes in the Vampire Diaries series and the final installment of Pretty Little Liars. The idea for The Thousandth Floor came while she was at Alloy and sprang, at least in part, from reading submissions.
“I love books like The Hunger Games and Divergent,” McGee said, “but I was feeling an overwhelming frustration that every depiction of life in America we were seeing was incredibly dim. I finally got to the point where I thought, why don’t I just write a different vision of the future myself?”
The inspiration she needed to get started came from an unusual place: China. She read a story about Sky City, a proposal for a building in Hunan Province that would be hundreds of stories tall and offer a self-contained world. In addition to apartments, a single, soaring tower would house hotels, office space, schools, hospitals, parks, swimming pools, tennis and basketball courts – even interior farmland. Residents would access all of it via high-speed elevators. (Construction has not started.)
McGee, who grew up in Texas, admits that her post-college years spent living in New York apartment buildings had affected her thinking: she’d already been daydreaming about skyscrapers when she learned about Sky City. “The idea of a vertical city was such an interesting hook,” she said. “It was the kick that got me to actually start writing.”
Space Age Gossip Girls?
The story that spilled out is set in the year 2118, and focuses on the familiar problems of rich teens with too much time and money on their retinal scanners. There’s an element of economic tension: status in The Thousandth Floor is measured by how far you live above street level: the higher the floor, the more rarefied the air. Falling in love with someone from a much higher or lower floor is inherently problematic.
Told in alternating perspectives among the five main characters, the novel opens with a tantalizing prologue in which an unnamed character falls to her death from the tower’s roof. McGee then backtracks several months to let each character share their own problems, heartaches, and secrets. The author loves the comparison to Gossip Girl, another Alloy title. “I’d love to have the success that Gossip Girl has had,” she said. Her Princeton education notwithstanding, McGee says it was at Alloy that she began to understand the requirements of novel-writing. “I learned so much there. I had never had a class where we actually sat down and discussed ‘here’s how you break a story into pieces,’ and I got that in the first week at Alloy,” she said.
Once she got her own story underway, McGee took the idea to her then-boss, Josh Bank, executive v-p at Alloy, who encouraged her to keep writing. A year later, Alloy acquired the planned trilogy, based on seven completed chapters, and sold North American rights to HarperTeen in a preempt. TV rights went to producer Greg Berlanti (Dawson’s Creek; Everwood), who is adapting it with scriptwriter Maggie Friedman for ABC.
Foreign sales have been, well, sky-high. Allison Hellegers, rights director at Rights People, went out with the book in spring 2015, a month before the Bologna Book Fair. Interest was strong initially and has continued to build. As of press time, McGee’s trilogy had sold into 25 territories.
“I think what really spoke to foreign publishers is that the story was not dystopic. People were looking for something escapist rather than dark,” said Hellegers. “And once the rights started to sell, a lot of it was momentum. Other scouts started hearing about it and everyone wanted this book.”
Meanwhile, the author has kept busy. On August 18, she tweeted that she had turned in the manuscript for book two, as yet untitled. That accomplishment came just two months after receiving an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, a degree she’s not really sure she needs anymore. “I went to school thinking I would found my own content development company in the vein of Alloy,” she said. She interned with a mobile gaming company last summer and came away realizing, “There’s a huge space that needs to be developed with writers and storytellers, making their work multimedia – books, television, virtual reality, games on your phone.”
But, for now, with a fall wedding planned and book three still to write, McGee is happy to share the copyright with Alloy and call herself a novelist. “I have nothing to say but good things about Alloy,” she said. “They really made my book splash in a way I could not have done on my own.”
The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee. HarperCollins, $18.99, Aug. 30 978-0-06-241859-3
