Neal Shusterman deals in dark fictional visions — but he never forgets to give readers a reason to hope. His Unwind dystology centered on a dystopia in which children can be retroactively aborted, or "unwound," and harvested for their organs. In his ongoing Scythe series, death by disease or accident have been rendered obsolete, and mortality is in the hands of an elite group of professional killers known as scythes. He won the 2015 National Book Award for Challenger Deep, in which a young man's descent into mental illness is rendered as a surreal sea journey into the depths of the Marianas Trench. Now in his latest novel, Dry, Neal has paired up with son Jarrod Shusterman to tell the story of a California drought turned deadly. The two of them joined us to talk about water zombies, what to do when a great idea comes to you when you're driving, and why great writing is best done on a boat.  And yep, there's a lightning round.