When did you decide to write Chosen Spirits (Simon&Schuster)? Was there any trigger or inspiration?

I wanted to do near-future stories for a while: we've been seeing a lot of dystopian news and fiction, but nothing that deals with our corner of the planet, that is more dystopian in reality than any fiction. There are multiple-choice apocalypses that are threatening our planet, most of them of human origin, so I started reading about them. Before I knew what was happening, three years had passed, and I had a mountain of notes for the next 50 years. I wanted to start with a decade from now, which is not so starkly different from today's world, and imagine two young people try to lead 'normal' lives and fail.