WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Lauren Smyth: Warsafe

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Lauren Smyth is the author of the new book Warsafe, available May 6, 2025. She joined Erike Kyba on WRFH to discuss the novel.Lauren is an economics and journalism student at Hillsdale College. Since signing her first publishing contract at age 13, she has written four young adult action/adventure novels, coded two story-based video games, and started a blog enjoyed by readers and writers around the world. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her flying right seat in a Piper PA-30 aircraft, recording episodes of her Grammar Minute writing podcast, or heading upriver on her paddleboard.

You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. This is Erica Kaiba, and I'm here interviewing Lauren Smith, who if you don't recognize her voice from the station already, most notably from the Grammar Minute and the Astro Minute, you might know her as the author of some action-packed young adult novels, such as, with love from the past, made for mercy, and now, War Safe. How are you doing, Lauren? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me in the studio. This is way more fun than going to class on a Friday morning. I'm so glad you joined us and are not in a classroom right now, but in the radio station.

So if we just jump right into it, tell us a little bit about WarSafe. Yes, so WarSafe is my fourth book and the most recent one. It comes out May 6th of this year. So we're coming up on the date when it'll finally be on shelves, which will be a fantastic feeling. But the way I like to describe the plot to people who don't know anything about it is essentially it's about a video game. and the characters in the video game are real people. But the people outside the game who are playing it have no idea that this is true.

And the characters inside the game don't realize that they're trapped inside a video game. And so WarSafe is essentially this story of these two groups of people coming together realizing what's happened to them and trying to figure out, is it worth keeping the status quo or should we fight against this system

that keeps us trapped here? And you actually have a fair bit of experience with video games from the past. worked on actually writing two story-based video games. Operation 9 is one of them. How has that influenced your writing process? Yes. So the process for coding Operation 9 was very difficult. When I started working on it, I knew nothing about computer code, had done a little bit of JavaScript and HTML off Khan Academy for fun. If you don't know, you cannot code a video game in JavaScript or HTML. HTML isn't even really considered code, so I'm going to start a fight by saying that,

but it is what it is. So when I started working on Op 9, I had been playing video games in this style, very story-based, dialogue-driven, not a lot of, you know, reflexive actions from the player, but you just have to think through your strategy and play through to the end. And I really wanted to make something like that. So I was like, well, can't be that hard. I'm just going to learn how to do it. So I threw myself very much into the deep end and started working on this game. And as I went through it, I learned two things. One is I kind of learned the structure of a video game, what needs to be true in order for the game to work and to be fun to play and just kind of how you would expect to set something like that up. The other thing I learned is that I do not have the attention to detail to code really long video games like that.

Op 9 was about a six to nine hour play-through time and it was more than 120,000 lines of code. So there was no way I was doing that again after I finished Op 9. I mean, that definitely took some years off my life. And so I decided, well, I have this interest in video games and I kind of have this knowledge of how they're supposed to be set up, maybe instead of coding a video game, I could just write it into a book. And that's what I ended up doing with WarSafe. It combined a couple different interests of mine, and I haven't really seen a lot of things that cross that barrier between video games and books, even though I feel like there are two things that go really well together.

And I want to go back to what you said about, you know, the structure now of video games and what makes them work? What does make them work? And does WarSafe work? That's a good question. So if WarSafe were a video game, it would work. And I actually have thought about coding the video game because, you know, once you do it, but I'm telling myself, I can't go back and do that again. We're safe as a game. The video game inside the story is not super well described because it's not central to the plot exactly what the characters are doing when they're playing. But I think it would work as a video game because there's enough random generation in it that even though the play-through for each round would be short, it would still work because you'd have something different every single time. There are inside the video game in WarSafe, there are guards that patrol around. So if you were really coding that as a video game, you would make those AI.

So they would be adaptive. They would respond to you differently every time. And again, the central plot of the game, if you would. is that you're trapped in the bottom floor of a house that has eight floors. You're working your way up to the top floor while trying to dodge these guards. There are lots of different ways you can do that. In the book, you typically would try to climb through the air ducts. But you could also go up the outside of the house,

or you can fight your way through and try to go up the main staircase, all kinds of things like that. So I think it would work as a game. It probably wouldn't be a very expensive game, like Call of Duty that has millions of different possible things you can do and all kinds of stories and all kinds of campaigns. But it would be fun, I think. And you asked what it takes to make a video game work.

I think primarily what it takes is it has to be unexpected, but intuitive. So when you first start playing, it needs to be relatively easy for you to pick up what's going on, what you're trying to do. But at the same time, it needs to hold your attention by throwing stuff at you that you wouldn't expect. And the part of War Safe that makes that work is the fact that the guards are doing different things on every floor and every time you encounter them. That's interesting because it's kind of what the book does. us with your expectations, I feel like, where it's like, okay, I understand the setup. They're in a video game. These people aren't. But like the closer they start to get and like the, where you approach the point of convergence, I'm like, wait, what? What's happening? So it's always kind of

funny to me, having written it, obviously I knew exactly the whole time. I knew exactly what was going to happen. And when I started writing the plot summaries for the book, my editor told me I'm pretty sure this is a spoiler because I don't think somebody who's reading this for the first time would have put the pieces together in this way. And that was a huge. surprise for me, everybody who read the book saw the moment of convergence as a surprise and had lots of different theories about what was going to happen that I hadn't even thought of as the writer. And so it's always fun to me to see people get surprised by that because obviously I love that people are surprised. That's exactly what I was going for. But I thought it would be too obvious.

And I haven't seen people take the exact direction that you did in Warsafe without any spoilers on the concept of the video game characters versus the developers and everything like. that. But you mentioned that there isn't a huge video game slash storytelling space. Like, were those two meet? Have you been influenced by any of those books that kind of approach that? Like, Ready Player 1 is, well, it's not quite like War Safe, but it's kind of in that genre. So when I brought War Safe to beta readers for the first time, which was the Hillsdale College Creative Writing Club, they're amazing. I still have the notes that they gave me for this book. When I brought the book to them for the first time, they were talking to me about comp titles

because they only saw the first chapter, so they didn't know where the story was going. But they could already see, hey, there's some similarity and genre between you mentioned Ready Player 1. Ender's Game was another one that they mentioned. And I had not read any of those books prior to writing Worsafe. So while I was writing it, while I was finishing it up, I wanted to make sure, you know, A, that it wasn't too similar, but B, that it took the things that made these books good. and put them firmly in their genre and use those same things. So I read Ender's Game. I read Ready Player 1 and Ready Player 2.

One is better than 2. In case you're thinking about reading that series. I read the Lunar Chronicles and I read some books by Marie Lou. And all of those are kind of in the, if not necessarily, directly video games slash reality arena. They're in the virtual reality, high technology, people going into a different world type of space. So that kind of defined the genre that I was trying to write in. But then I would say I wasn't as much inspired by those books as grateful to find that they existed and that I wasn't doing something totally off the walls.

Because in book publishing, one of the things you're asked to provide when you submit your book to a publisher is a list of comp titles to prove that the market will actually accept what you're doing. So I was very relieved actually to find that somebody was doing it. Nice. And then as far as the storytelling perspective, what made you decide to start the story through the eyes of an NPC, a non-player character? Yes, this is a good question. I don't remember exactly why I wrote the first scene the way I did. This was quite a while ago. I was working on War Safe before I came to college. So this was five or six years ago. But I do remember that I rewrote that scene so many times. And it just always seemed to stick because it threw you right into the middle. of the action. Basically what we have is the girl who's going to end up narrating the rest of the story. She's a non-player character. Her name is Hallie. She's living her best life, just hanging out, doing her normal stuff that she does as a non-player character. And suddenly something unexpected happens. And, you know, she's supposed to be code inside of a video game. She's not supposed to have

anything unexpected happen to her. She knows exactly what daily life is supposed to look like. but this very upsetting event occurs, and from then on, she can't live her life the same way. She can't live expecting that things will just immediately go back to normal. And that's kind of the catalyst for the rest of the story. I think the reason that has to be the first chapter is because the rest of the story really couldn't happen without that. And so it takes the reader, puts them straight into the middle of the action, and helps them kind of share the uncertainty that Hallie is feeling,

because they too are going about their normal lives reading a book, and all of a sudden this really weird and unexplainable event happens. So like Hallie, the reader wants to know where that's going. Yes, but then it's not just Hallie that narrates, or I mean, she's the narrator, but then it's like you also give us these other perspectives, like from the developers and there's like this fun other character that slowly becomes more involved, Andy. What was it like to juggle all those different perspectives? Do you usually write that way?

I don't usually write that way. And I will say I have tried to write that way again since, and it's much harder the second time. It just came naturally the first time. I think the thing with Worsave is you essentially have three different worlds within Worsafe. You have the video game world. You have the world of people who are playing the game trying to figure out what's going on, who don't know what's going on. And then you have the world of the developers who do know what's going on. And in each case, there's kind of one character who's the liaison between the different worlds.

And those characters ended up being important to the narration. So they all kind of deserve their own points of view, I thought. And it's really fun writing a different points of view, trying to get different tones for each character because they're very different personalities and they're living completely different lives. So that was just a fun challenge, honestly, which is probably partly why I chose that in the first place. But really, I don't think it would be possible to tell the story from just one perspective. you would just miss so much of the background and so much would have to be told to you versus you getting to see it through the character's eyes,

which I think is a lot more fun. Who was your favorite perspective to write from? If you had one. That's a good question. I think Andy has to be one of my favorites. Andy's struggling on his way through life. But he's great. He's a very relatable figure, I think, to many of us.

He's graduated college, so I'll be there soon, not quite there yet. But he's graduated college and he has no idea what he wants to do with the rest of his life. He trained as a radio astronomer and now in this world of war safe, radios are illegal because they're a threat to public health. And so he can't do the thing that he's been trained for. He's applying to all these jobs, writing all these application essays about things he doesn't believe in. And he just all of a sudden gets thrown into this huge controversy about this video game. He knows nothing about video games, has no idea what's happening. But all of a sudden, he's right in the thick of it.

And he just, he doesn't really know what to do. And he handles it in kind of this rye, sarcastic, funny way where he's just like, well, I guess I'm in this now. And just, it was, it was always fun trying to think of, okay, if I were super stressed, super confused, super caffeinated and super sleepy, how would I react to this situation? And, you know, I've been there, done that. So that was always, that was always a very fun one to write. Like channeling your past experience. I'm channeling exam day feeling. into this character.

Oh my God. Andy is just the night before when you have to cram. Absolutely, yes. He's living in a constant state of chaos, which just makes him entertaining. He's not even one of the real primary characters of the story,

but he's a lovable side slash main-ish character. Yeah, we love Andy. Exactly. And they're just the most fun. This is a related question, but did you have a favorite character dynamic to write?

So it's like you had relationships between the video game characters, there was also the NPC, and then there's the developers, and then there's Andy thrown into that mix. So who do you feel like had the most chemistry, whether that's friendship or romantic? That's a good question. I really liked the dynamic between Kazimi, who's the head developer, and Roscoe, who is the first to realize that something nefarious is going on with this video game.

Previously, she worked with him, and once she figures out, hey, there's something going on here that's unsavory, she ends up leaving the company. And Roscoe and Cosmi, initially they had kind of this pseudo-romantic relationship where they were moving towards having a romantic relationship, but they never quite got there. And then Roscoe realized what was going on, freaked out completely. And obviously, that was completely out the window at that point. That was a really interesting dynamic to write because for the first half of the story, it all kind of looks one-sided on Rosco's side. And then you realize after Roscoe has left that Cosmi was also part of it, that he liked her too. and that now he has very conflicted feelings about what he's doing with this video game,

not just because of his own morality, but because he's afraid of hurting Rosco. That was a really interesting dynamic to uncover. That was not something I had planned in the initial draft. But as I was thinking about it, it makes sense that he would have some more human motivations than just, I know I'm doing a bad thing. I should stop doing it. And so that dynamic was really interesting to uncover. And it doesn't play a central role in the story, but it's there and you can feel it.

And it's, you know, it's kind of sad. In a more cheerful note, one that was really fun to uncover was probably Halley and Andy. They both have similar personalities in that they're in there again, they're in a constant state of chaos. They're running up against all kinds of hard situations. And they don't know how to deal with it, so they deal with it with humor. And putting the two of them together, the chaos that ensues, is just so fun. They're great friends. And I think, too, I mentioned this recently to some writer friends, but there's a huge shortage of platonic male-female friendships.

in writing. And so War Safe has no shortage of romance. Obviously, I just talked about one of the two key romances in the plot. But the relationship between Hallie and Andy is nothing but pure friendship. And it's so good and so entertaining. And I think it can be a good

reminder for people that these types of friendships are really healthy and can exist and that people can learn to depend on each other in totally platonic but still really meaningful ways. I want to go back to your use of the word uncover. Because it's interesting.

I've heard writers talk about this before where sometimes their own story will surprise them. And the characters will just present themselves to them and be like, actually, I have this other motivation. Do you feel like that happens to you a lot when you're writing? Oh, yeah. So War Safe is a great example of this. I do plan out a little bit more now because when I wrote War Safe, I had no outline, no plan, no idea where the story was going. I just wrote it chapter by chapter. and the number of plot holes that got involved in this story was insane.

The amount of editing that I had to go back and do because nothing made sense was just so time-consuming and a waste. So I do outline a little bit better now. But with Worsafe, pretty much everything that came out of it came completely by surprise. The alternating points of view, that was a surprise. That just happened because it seemed like the best way to tell the story as I was going along. Cosami was never supposed to have his own point of view. he was, this is a little bit of a spoiler, so close your ears if you want to read the book, but he was never supposed to have any positive motivations whatsoever.

He was supposed to be purely the bad guy. Another interesting one, and this is a major spoiler, so again, close your ears if you don't want to hear this, but Cal, who is one of the players inside the video game, was also supposed to be a villain the entire time. I had no intention of making him the good guy. In fact, he actually, he was one of those characters that I just meant to, to have in the story to kind of take all the negatives out on. He was going to be the bad guy that everyone came to hate. And now he's a pretty likable character by the end, I think. He does a lot of

really great things, but that caught me totally by surprise. That basically wrote itself. So I always, I feel weird about saying the story wrote itself, because obviously as the writer, you have agency over it. If you want it to go in a certain direction, it will go that direction. But at the same time, I think when you're planning something as long as a book, you really have to be open to the fact that the story may change completely as you're writing. And I find that if I outline too much in advance, it just feels so rigid and uncreative, and there's not room for those random ideas to just pop into your head and show up on the page. So all that to say, I've kind of come up with a mix now that, you know, reduces some of the editing,

keeps track of where there might end up being potential plot holes. But just being spontaneous is honestly, it makes the process a lot more fun. and it makes it feel less like work. Okay, but that's so interesting what you said about like Cal and Kazumi and how they were originally supposed to be just the pure bad guys. Because I actually had wanted to ask you how you handled giving the story the nuance that it has. Because I felt like the antagonists were shown a lot of grace. And I wasn't expecting that, but I was really interested in it.

Yes. I honestly don't know how that happened other than I remember with Cosmi. Again, it was convenient to the plot. and it made sense that he wouldn't be a completely evil person. The other thing that may have played into this a little bit was I didn't want to make it look like Roscoe was completely gullible in the beginning. She sees something good in Cosmi, and I wanted there to actually be something good to find inside of him. Plus, I think that redemption arcs are a lot more interesting than just staying at the same level of evilness the entire time. You know, if you're, you want to have some kind of character development.

So if you're dealing with a bad character, you either need to make them worse or you need to make them better. And in the case of the characters in Worsave, quite honestly, they couldn't get a whole lot worse. They were doing all kinds of terrible things already. And so I didn't want to make them worse people. I wanted them to kind of reflect on their actions and see what they're doing. The other more meta reason to have the antagonists become better people and be forgiven by their associates is that war safe is more about getting the reader to ask questions about their reality than it is. about just telling a story that they then leave and never think about again. WarSafe's central

question is one that we ask a lot in economics and politics. It is essentially, you know, are you willing to hurt a lot of people to save one person or are you willing to hurt one person to save a lot of people? It's basically the trolley problem. And is there any framework in which we can consciously make that choice and say we've done the right thing? That's a really hard question. I can't answer that in a young adult novel. But I want readers to think about it and think about situations in their life where they might have to apply those criteria. In that case, when you have characters who have made the wrong decision in the past, it's a good idea to give them a chance to re-address that question, realize they were wrong, and change their minds, because that's what

people do in real life. The point of the book isn't to say, you know, if you do this once, you've done an irreversibly bad thing. But instead it's to say, you know, if you do this once, maybe don't do that again, reconsider and change, and there is possibility to grow as a human by considering these questions. What was the particular catalyst, if there was one for you wanting to write about this theme? Because that was another thing that I'd really wanted to ask you about the theme of, like, okay, is it actually worth it to sacrifice a few lives for the many? So was there something in the news, or is it just kind of a consequence of, like, you're studying economics, you have to face this question a lot? That's a good question. I came up with the plot before I

came up with the moral dilemma. And so the plot kind of led me to this central moral dilemma. But once I realized that the characters were going to have to answer this question, I thought it was really interesting. I had not heard of at the time. Again, this was pre-college. So I hadn't really heard of the trolley problem, quote unquote. I hadn't really heard this formalized. But it turns out, and I just discovered this semester, there's a fantastic book called Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozic, which the central theme of the book is this question. Can we can we violate some people's rights to protect some other people's rights? Is that okay? So it is, it turns out it is a question that economics and politics deals with a lot and it's one that I've

heard a lot at college. But initially with Worsafe, it was more just, this is a natural question they have to ask and I needed to answer it as the author, otherwise I couldn't progress with the plot. And I found it surprisingly hard to answer. And as I started thinking more about it, I realized this is something we have to consider as citizens when we're voting or even when we're, we're just making certain everyday decisions. We know that we're going to have some negative impacts on other people. Is that okay? And how do we decide? So it just seemed like the type of question that was, a, interesting, you know, complicated questions are interesting. Things that we can argue about and discuss are interesting. But also it seemed like something that was genuinely

worth considering. So that's how it ended up being central to the plot. But I honestly couldn't tell you exactly how I came up with it. Fair enough. So what was the process like for writing this book? I know we've touched on it a little bit, but you just mentioned that you started writing it at high school, actually, and you've had to go back a number of times to alter plot holes, etc. Yes. So the creation process of Worseaf, I think, was probably one of the longest I've had for any of my books. It was just the longest time from initially coming up with the idea to actually getting it to the publisher. And there are a lot of crazy small stories in between along that journey. Do you have a craziest story that you want to share? Oh, man. Well, I think quite simply,

the craziest story is I wrote the book and I pretty much came to college with the book more or less finished. I had to take some time. There's like a 30-page document that you write explaining, oh, this is a good book and you should buy it from me, that you send to publishers. So I had to take time and write that and write the synopsis and do all the editing and stuff. But by the end of freshman year I had a book. So I sent it off to a publisher, Enclave Publishing. I love Enclave Publishing. They're absolutely incredible. Sent it off to them. Didn't hear anything back from them for nine and a half months. Assumed, obviously, that they weren't going to ever get back to me at that point, because typically most publishers will say, if we don't get back to you

an X amount of time, take that as a no. So I wasn't even, you know, I wasn't even really worried about it anymore. But then nine and a half months in, I got an email saying, we really liked this book. We'll get back to you on this. another 12 months go by. And, you know, again, this is, this is fairly typical in the publishing industry, but it's stressful when you're sitting there as the author and you're waiting for a response. So all this time goes by. And finally, I get an email from the publisher saying, hey, we'll publish your book. And again, at this point, from time of finishing the book to to now, two years has gone by, I don't remember what the book is about. And so the publisher

said, you mentioned in your letter that you sent us that there's going to be a sequel for this book. I was like, I did. And they said, yeah, what are your plans for writing that sequel? And I said, I don't have any. I honestly don't remember how the book ends. And so the sequel was ditched. There will not be a sequel to WarSafe because it had been so long since I finished it to the time that the publisher took it. But that actually ended up working out well because I'm not really a series person anyway. I like standalone books. I like to read them. I like to write them. And then I like to move on to new things. So that worked out well. But that is, I mean, again, that's fairly typical in the publishing industry for things to take that long. I just hadn't experienced it before. And so I remember

sitting outside my French class getting the first email saying, we're interested in this book and like getting up and dancing around and then being very confused for 12 more months. What kind of research went into the composition? Yes. So there was a little bit of research done. I didn't mention this before, but Andy, well, I did actually. Andy's a rating. astronomer. So I know nothing about radio astronomy. My mom does. She was an astronomer. So she was able to give me some pointers. But some of the technology that he uses, I kind of had to research slash invent. He uses a locator to trace radio signals. That's technically possible, but there's a lot of caveats to that. So I had to do a little research to make it semi-plausible. He talks about some of the

parts that he puts in his radios, that type of thing I knew nothing about. At the end of the book, he engineers basically a house fire. And I did not know how to engineer a house fire. So I flipped through a bunch of news articles looking at how other people had accidentally engineered housefires and found a way for him to do it. So little stuff like that, research along the way. But the thing with Worsafe is that it's primarily just an imaginative story. Lots of it takes place in this fictional location that doesn't actually exist. So I had full creative liberty to make anything I wanted happen there. The rest of it takes place at Seattle, which I used to live there when I was 12, 13.

So I have memories of, you know, the streets smelling like coffee and some of the architecture styles and the beaches and was able to just kind of describe that without really having to do a ton of research. Yeah, I was actually going to ask more about the world that the characters of Worsay find themselves in because there's some interesting things going on with the government. Some interesting things, yes. Radio's being illegal is one of them. Yes. How do we think about the timeline that these characters are in?

Is this like a future dark dystopia? Is it like right now but like a darker version of right now? Yes. This is a more nonsense going on. Yes. This is a good question. So initially with War Safe, well, so the way it's currently set up if you read the book, there's this supernational organization called Safe, S-A-F-E.

And that stands for something that I honestly don't even remember. It's this long government style acronym. And what this organization basically has done is they act as a peacekeeper for the entire world. They are in control of the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. So that's essentially their bargaining chip when they need the countries underneath them to do something. And then for countries in the organization who want to fight, who have some dispute that they need to solve, safe has a way of them hashing it out that doesn't involve. fully going to war. That's a spoiler for the story, but I'll leave you with that. So that's kind

of how the government works in this scenario. And one of the things that SAFE has done is they try to make the world safe for the people who are living underneath their regime. And so anything that poses a threat to public health is either made completely illegal or is limited. One of the things they find posing a threat to public health is radio frequency radiation. They've decided that this is a huge problem and they don't know exactly what the dose limit should. be, so they've made the dose limit zero. No one can operate a radio. No one can transmit. No one can receive. And this is a little bit of a cover-up because actually they just don't want people using radio frequencies because radio frequencies are quite useful and SAFE would like to have those

private for themselves. So SAFE is fully using radio frequencies while not allowing anyone else to do it. And yes, this is, this is a great setup. This explains a lot of stuff that's going on in the story. However, SAFE is not original to the first draft of the story. Safe was an addition by my editors to kind of explain why the world operates this way. And I think what they had in mind was maybe a European Union NATO-type organization. I was going to ask if it was related to that. Yes. I have nothing against NATO or the EU, but this organization is kind of modeled on that concept taken to an extreme. What if essentially all the countries underneath this heading were kind of federal states in the sense that safe is making all the real rules,

and these countries have only a very limited amount of autonomy within their own borders. That's kind of the idea. I would say nothing like that really exists in the real world, and more, it's less like the European Union and honestly more like the federal government of the United States, the way this organization is set up. And, yes, it's meant to be a little bit of a cautionary tale. this is what happens when you give an organization unlimited power, even if the goal for them is to make you safer, to make things better for you. You know, there's room for all sorts of arbitrary rules like you can't build a radio transmitter.

And finally, this is getting more to the Christian themes in the story. How do you approach handling that in YA fiction? Because it's not primarily like a Christian allegory by any means, but like that presence is still very much. So how do you integrate that into the story? Yes. Again, WarSafe is very much intended to encourage people to think about these hard questions. And from my perspective, as a Christian, you really can't approach any challenging questions of morality without factoring in the divine. And so for me, with these books, it's not so much that I want you to take religion out of the books and go, like, this is good for my soul.

I need this. It's more that the characters have this pre-built religious framework and they have to deal with it when they're confronting these questions. For me, honestly, including Christianity in the books, is more about making it realistic than it is about saying, you should be a Christian, you should read this book and you should take this away from it. So, for example, one of the characters in the end, he has to deal with all the things he's done over the course of the story. He has to live with a lot of guilt and he has to fix a lot of things. And so for him, it's very natural that religion would be something he has to at least consider. He has to deal with the fact that if there is a God, which a lot of people are telling him there is, he's seeing signs, he's walking past churches, he's having all these experiences. If he's going to say there is a God, then he has to deal with the fact that he's been a horrible person and he needs to get right with God somehow. So, yeah, so for me, for me, I love seeing these themes in books because I don't think that young adult fiction deals with them enough. I think it's a very real part of life that people are afraid to confront from any perspective. But I love it when I see religion, Christianity,

dealt with in books because you have to think about it. And it's just not done enough. People are afraid to talk about it because they don't want it to come off as proselytizing. But it's not proselytizing. It's making people think about something that quite honestly they probably are already thinking about. And finally, where can people buy the book? Yes, so WarSafe comes out May 6th, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. And if you visit my website, there will be links there. My website is Lauren Smithbooks.com, and that is Smith spelled with a why.

And do you want to give listeners a teaser for your next book, or is that a secret? Oh, okay, I can give you a little bit of a teaser. Okay, yes. So another place that I lived growing up was Death Valley, California. This book is set in Death Valley, California, on an old Air Force base, and there's a fence around this Air Force base that everybody thinks is meant to keep the apocalypse out. Plot twist, it might actually be meant to keep the characters in. Ooh, interesting. Okay, thank you so much for joining us, Lauren.

Once again, this has been Lauren Smith, author of War Safe. You can pre-order her book right now, and you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.