A Little Bit Dangerous, But Baby That's How I Want It

Did the new Ariana Grande song nearly kill anyone else?

Aside from listening to this on repeat I'm getting ready to go to my cousin's house and planning Shadows Of Ourselves release stuff. Because I'm really excited for it to come out this month.

I'm going into workaholic overdrive trying to finalize everything. I wanna get paperbacks out within a few days of putting out the ebook because I want to host a few giveaways. I still need to sort out royalty info with the paperback distributor first, so I'm gonna stop by the bank today and deal with that.

Overall I'm just excited to have a longer book out. The longer the book, a better. I love really big stories, and Shadows of Ourselves is the longest book I've written to date. Blood of Midnight (which is free today!) and SOSAS are both novel-length, but they're still short books.

Also I genuinely think Shadows of Ourselves is the best book I've written, yet. I think it's got a nice flow and it's a pretty exciting adventure.

Plus, there's hot boys.

It's also set in my home town, Saint John, because it's a pretty magikal city, and because we need more books (especially hot New Adult romance books) set in Canada. The book is set in November, 2016, and it's a big romp through the city and a bunch of magikal landscapes.

It's also got a really diverse cast, because I wrote the book I wanted to read, and I'm sick of reading a book where everyone is cisgender and white and able-bodied. I want to write diverse characters in a way that they're not just coming out stories or coming of age or learning to cope with being othered by mainstream society - I think we should be able to see ourselves in books about werewolves and superheroes and detectives. Genre fiction where diverse characters are allowed to just exist and have stories and go on adventures.

I really loved City of Bones when I was fifteen because it was the first book I'd ever read like that with gay characters in it - not even just gay main characters, but gay characters period - and I think there's something wrong with that.

I really adore Amanda Sun's Ink trilogy because it has a gay character in its main cast, and I devoured half of the House of Night series in one week when I was sixteen because there were gay characters. (Token-ish ones, albeit, but still).

Rainbow Rowell's Carry On is (in my opinion) a masterpiece and Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is brilliant. 

In real life, non-white teens and kids in wheelchairs and queer youth, they all do extraordinary things and there are so many facets to their lives - they deserve diversity that isn't shoe-horned in or gimmicky, and those are the books I want to write. Books where genderfluid kids get to take on super villains and teens in wheelchairs embrace their magical bad-assery and save the day, just like their counterparts do in other ya and na genre books like these. Because if stuff like giant robots and evil mermaids really existed, that's exactly what would happen.

It also deals with some pretty dark stuff like mental illness and substance abuse and, you know, death and murder.

I just didn't want to write a perfect, well-adjusted main character with a good attitude. I feel like there's so many young adults and college aged kids who are sick of seeing perfectionists who never mess up in their books. So many of us deal with mental illness or trauma or abuse, and even aside from those things, so many of us are a bit jaded and bitter, or emotional withdrawn. I wanted to write about and deal with those issues. Sky is pretty damaged.

I'm really fond of the book, though, and I'm hoping some other people like it, too. I'm just excited, in general.