How it began…

It all started one blazingly hot summer evening. Two line cooks were talking about the Jurassic Park series while sweating over a 400 degree grill.

Conor Stevens had just graduated Lenape High School a few weeks prior. He already knew corporate life wasn’t for him and he wasn’t afraid of hard work, and was starting an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker (in addition to six other jobs he was already working).

Brian Wiggins graduated high school when flannel was still a thing, and was in his fourth year as a professional voice actor after leaving two decades of corporate work in his rearview mirror.

The twenty-six-year age difference didn’t stop them from having hours-long conversations about Star Wars, Marvel movies, anime, other geek-adjacent subjects, and the art of storytelling while frying up hot dogs and grilling burgers at the Moondog Grill.

And that Jurassic Park conversation somehow morphed into them bouncing an idea off of each other: what would happen if people could modify their genes the same way they do their bodies with plastic surgery?

The idle conversation became some notes written in Sharpie on the back of a completed order ticket. Which became a sketch of a world and backstory on an old Grub Hub order. Which became an outline on a Google spreadsheet.

And amidst these conversations and bouncing ideas off of each other (and dreaming of when Amazon Studios or Netflix Originals optioned the book for their next dystopian sci-fi series), they started plotting out the next two books of an ambitious tale examining the nature of the obsession with power, the duties of a society, and the consequences of delayed action, set against the backdrop of a world on the verge of ecological disaster and a war against a new drug ravaging the streets: splice.

On August 1, 2022, they began writing the first novel of the eponymous series, The Fall.