Trivia / Michael Grant

• Approval of God: Responds well to fanart, fan-movies and fan-websites of his works, and has an account on Gaiaphage.com, the site for Gone and BZRK fans.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The Midas Touch, which he advises anyone who comes across a copy to burn.
  • Also, he's stated that he doesn't really like Making Out.
• Creator Couple: With his wife, K. A. Applegate.
• Dear Negative Reader: A review of BZRK on GoodReads criticized the book for its excessive violence, linking violence in the media to actual violence. Grant commented on the review responding thusly:
  Was there something about the title BZRK that led you to expect a romance novel?
  Linking books or for that matter the video games everyone loves to hate on to school shootings is nonsense. There is not a single tiny shred of empirical evidence of a connection. None. The Dutch and Japanese for example consume more video games than we do and have no crime problem worth mentioning. Canada consumes exactly the same media we do, including books, and yet has a fraction of our murder rate. As we've seen the rise of a more "adult" YA literature have we seen violent crime go up? No, actually, it's gone down. I am not claiming causation, just pointing out that there is no reason to link media with gun violence, and every reason to link guns with gun violence. In fact, the correlation is obviously 100%
  If you don't like violent stories don't read them. But don't start randomly assigning blame. That monster in Sandy Hook was not armed with a book, he was armed with a gun.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: He has said on his Facebook page that he thinks BZRK is even better than Gone, citing one of the characters are being even scarier than Drake Merwin. Which isn't a light statement.
• Shrug of God: His response to all questions regarding loose ends in the finale of the Gone series are to make your own interpretations and guesses at the more ambiguous elements.
  • One word: Remnants. He's made it perfectly clear that, when it comes to all the questions that were left unanswered, he's just as clueless as we are.
• Write Who You Know: The characters of Astrid and Diana from Gone are according to him based on the two sides of his wife's personality.
  • Brianna and Jack were originally going to be based off his kids... until he realized that he had hooked them up romantically.