We welcome you to My Bookish Pleasures! Can you tell us how you
got started writing fiction?
Thank you for having me!
Whether writing LGBT young adult spy novels like No Good About
Goodbye or journaling for my travel & opinion newsletter,
The Bag May Not
Inflate, writing gives
structure to the clanging, banging thoughts in my head.
My late father, the son of a night-shift steelworker in
Pittsburgh, was a gifted storyteller. He never wrote a novel, but he had an
innate sense that the way a story was told was as important as the story
itself. At bedtime he’d sit between me and my brother, drag out all our stuffed
animals, and improvise stories. They never had a plot or made sense, but they
were magnificent, and even a little edgy.
I would practice storytelling with my friends at school in rural
West Virginia and discovered fiction had power. Fiction could frame ideas and
feelings as idiotic or saintly, help me empathize with people unlike me, or
chew over problems.
Of course, this concept is as old as homo erectus, the
advent of fire, and cave wall paintings, but it was new to me at the time. It
helped to have parents who not only encouraged creativity, but were creative
role-models, themselves.
Describe your writing process. Do you plot or write by the seat of
your pants? When and where do you write?
When I write by the seat of my pants, I can come up with amazing
scenarios not unlike my dad’s stuffed animal puppet shows. I can’t combine them
into a coherent narrative, however. For that, I need to outline.
Many people hate outlining. I find it to be like any other
creative endeavor. It takes about 20 minutes to settle into a rhythm before the
creative gates open. Then, it’s as enjoyable as anything else.
One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t develop a story Bible
for No Good About Goodbye and its potential sequels. I have great ideas
for a second book in a series of young adult spy thrillers, but no idea what
I’ll do for a third. That isn’t good.
Look at the Star Wars trilogy that started with The Force
Awakens, or the Daniel Craig James Bond series. They’d have been stronger
if the writers knew where they were going from jump. Instead, they’re like
grade-school progressive stories with awkward transitions and retconned facts.
As far as where I like to write, I like to write as I travel the
world—to find a coffee house with WiFi at some far-flung location, and settle
in.
Can you tell us about your most recent release?
I mixed the tropes of LGBTQ+ YA books with a teen & young
adult spy story. 15-year-old Ian Racalmuto loses his mom, a vodka-drunk spy, in
a coup overseas. He relocates against his will to his grandfather’s house in
Philly, where he has 7 days to find a top-secret smartphone as his mom’s
killers resurface. Fear of death, however, doesn’t come close to Ian’s fear of
his best friend finding out he has a crush on him.
As I tell my 9-year-old nephew while having him pour two fingers
of Johnny Walker Black in my morning coffee, “it’s gay as hell and funny as
f**k.”
I’m kidding. I prefer Grand Marnier in my coffee. I pour Johnnie
Walker Black on my cornflakes. Plan your purchase accordingly—especially if
you’re a middle school librarian.
What do you think teen and young adult readers want from a book?
Who’s your audience?
I don’t see teen and YA readers as a homogenous group. They all
want different things.
The readership of teen fiction from traditional publishers will
look like the people selecting and editing the books. Highly educated mostly
white progressive women clustered in the Northeast comprise 75% of publishing. I’d
therefore surmise most YA fiction readers are women and girls who share those
values. What surprises me is that something like 50% of YA readers are adults
in their 20s and 30s.
Adventure and YA spy books for boys drop off after mid-grade,
while the YA readers and writers who remain have massive Twitter arguments
about who should write about whom and how. It fascinates me,
because when someone like Scott McEwan pops up with a blimpish conservative YA
book for boys like Camp Valor, nobody in the liberal YA ecosystem even
acknowledges it. Instead, they eviscerate Amélie Wen Zhao on Goodreads for
using the words “tawny” and “bronze” in a book that’s better written and more
thoughtful.
The future of publishing may well be micropublishing—writing to
very specific niche market segments that exist in isolation.
I wrote No Good About Goodbye at mid-life to my 14 year-old
self and anybody else who wants to come along for the ride, rather than to a
broad audience. “Who’s going to read it?” Who knows? Who’s going to read Amish
romance?
Where does your book fit with other LGBT YA books?
Women write most MM YA books for audiences of women and girls—a
fact I find both disappointing and confusing. The prototypical gay boy many of
them write about is de-fanged: non-toxic, plucky, sensitive, scared, and
emotional. Either that or he’s troubled, homeless, beaten, and ignored, and in
need of a platonic girlfriend.
Maybe women who read LGBT YA books centering gay boys are sick of
cishet boys with their toxic masculinity and love of sports. Or, maybe
fist-throwing gay boys are playing Gears of War and don’t buy LGBTQ+
young adult novels.
Either way, it’s a strange dynamic. Why are young women and girls
so fascinated by stories of boys becoming lovers? And where does it leave gay
kids who go deer hunting with their dads, or dream of winning a Super Bowl
ring? As a rural teen, I learned how to shoot guns and fly Cessnas. I had an offensive
sense of humor, an abundance of self-confidence, and good friends, but I didn’t
know what the hell to do about being gay, or where it might carry me. It was
scary, but hardly the same experience as an at-risk gay kid living in the
margins and teetering on homelessness, or a sassy sasspot wanting an
enemies-to-lovers romance with Prince William.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing your book? Do you
have any advice for young writers?
When you begin writing, especially teen and young adult fiction,
you’re inundated with missives and screeds and tweets about who has license to
write and how people need to “stay in their lanes.” It’s often tied to a
judgment about whether a person is good or bad, enemy or ally.
Most of us want to be good, fair people—or at least seen that way.
It’s not uncommon to ask, “why should I bother writing?” or worse, “should I
cancel my project so someone else can write?”
As Kwame Anthony Appiah once said, however, “you can’t predict the effect of a self-denying
ordinance.” Just because you step
aside doesn’t mean someone more deserving will step in.
I realized with rapidity that I wasn’t simply outside my lane, but
upside-down in a ditch, waiting for someone to extricate me with the jaws of
life. It didn’t stop me.
So, write! Write whatever you want as often as you want, however
you can. You may not get things right, but simply trying to understand people
and situations different from you and yours generates a higher level of empathy
than sitting in your bedroom restricting yourself to autofiction.
Finally, a quick plug: if you’re concerned about what people will
say about writing “outside your lane,” grab a copy of Writing the Other
by Cynthia Ward and Nisi Shawl. It’s an old-but-wonderful introduction to help
writers write more fairly and a fearlessly.
What are your hopes for NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE?
They aren’t super-high, to be honest. It’s been fairly-well
ignored on the galley services and has received few giveaway requests compared
to the books surrounding it. Traditional YA readers hate the cover, and the
giveaways haven’t generated tons of engagement, so it’s hardly buzz-worthy. I’m
glad I have a day job.
But, whatever. I love the way the book turned out. The people who
like it seem to like it for all the right reasons, and I don’t mind upsetting
the people who don’t like it. I hope it ruins their day, in fact. Maybe it will
be a slow burn. And, if it reaches just one person who connects with it as I
would have at 14, I’ll have done my job.