Discussing YA: How Queer Characters Make Your Book More Realistic

Look, queer people exist. You don't have to like us, you don't have to want to write about us. But we exist. And if your fictional world doesn't at least acknowledge that we exist, it's gonna feel unrealistic, and at least a third of your readership is going to think you have ingrained homophobic tendencies. Seriously.

I can not tell you how many times I've had the immersive experience of a book ruined simply because it felt so unrealistic that every character in it was heterosexual.

And the thing is, you don't even need to write queer main characters. I mean, you should, yeah. Representation is important, and a big chunk of getting over ingrained self-hatred and internalized homophobia is about seeing healthy, happy reflections of yourself represented in fiction. But that said, if you, for some reason, be it personal preference or publisher interference or just the fact that you're one of those trash human beings who really thinks queer people are evil, don't want to or can't, write queer main characters, you can still include them.

Stephanie Perkins included two gay dads in Lola and the Boy Next Door, which created valuable representation and added a note of realness to the novel, but they were still minor, background characters. Kiera Cass mentions that girls can like girls without ever introducing a lesbian character in her book The Heir, and Marie Lu show both minor and major characters having same sex attractions without it taking up the focus. Jessica shirvington had a gay couple develop as frenemies, to friends, to lovers in her Violet Eden series, while only confirming it as romantic in the last book.

You can include diverse depictions of humanity's interaction with sexuality and gender without it being all about that, or taking focus from other aspects of your work.

Look, I'm not here to argue that queer people aren't evil. Why? Because it's 2016, and I don't feel like I should have to defend us in that way. If you're still hanging onto those beliefs, you're delusional, and I can't cure mental illness and paranoia through a computer screen.

What I can do is reason with you, so here's some reasoning: ignoring the existence of queer people, no matter what you think about us, both marginalizes a chunk of potential readership and also makes your art suffer.

It doesn't feel realistic to read a book where every single character falls into a straight romance with a heteronormative bow wrapped around it.

It doesn't feel realistic to read a book where every single character is just presumed to be straight when we know so little about them.

It doesn't feel realistic (or entertaining) to read a book where characters so obviously fall into a storyline or situation where an exploration of their sexuality or deviation from the straight 'norm' would make for a better journey or story, and watch it not happen.

I can name a slew of YA books where queer people just ... don't exist. Readers can handle queer characters. What's more, we want them.

A large fraction of your readers, even if they aren't queer people themselves, know someone who is gay, have a relative who is lesbian, are in a club at school with a kid who's trans, are talking online with peers who are asexual - if you think they aren't ready for this representation, or that they aren't actively interested in reading it, you're dead wrong.

There is no end to the benefits of writing a queer character, or having these conversations. At the end of the day, the only one you really need is this, though: we exist. We exist in the real world, and our absence in your books is out of place, a glaring elephant in the proverbial room, and it hurts the quality and tone of your work.

If you're too afraid to write queer characters because you think it will somehow bog down or ruin the entire book to have a gay person in it, you should probably be worried about your writing skills as a hole. Just saying.

Discussing YA: sex & masturbation in YA novels.

So today we're gonna talk about sex. And masturbating. Why? It's important. That's right kids, it's time to talk about the birds and the bees. And I don't mean the ones who make you think oh fuck, not again, when they start chirping outside your window at four am to remind you you still haven't slept, yet.

Nope. I'm talking 'bout the ones you use to make babies. Or not, if you're me, and hate children, which I am, and do.

Moving on: kids and teens need to read about positive portrayals of sex and masturbation.

Teenagers need to be reading scenes where teenage characters engage in healthy, safe, consensual acts of sex and self-pleasure. They need to read these scenes with straight couples and queer couples, across spectrums of gender identity.

Why? Because if they don't we're opening them up for an intense whirlwind of unhealthy attitudes and experiences and harmful situations/

Teenagers are having sex. They're thinking about sex and talking about sex and engaging in it. They're touching themselves and exploring their bodies and often putting themselves in dangerous, unhealthy positions and relationships in order to do it.

Why is this important? Because we live in a society that commodifies people's bodies and the idea of sexual pleasure, in a world where a capitalistically informed version of sex and relationships, one governed by heteronormative ideals and harsh beauty standards. And it's fucking with kids heads.

So, my writing advice for this week is just this: let your characters have a good relationship with their bodies, let them have sex without feeling ashamed or being shamed by others.

Talk about sex in an honest, frank, healthy way. It's on your readers' minds and it's a part of their lives. Teenagers lives are not rated pg-13; they just aren't. They do drugs and have sex and witness violence, like any other humans do. We need to stop crafting stories for teenagers in which they see glorified, perfect versions of themselves that have no flaws and no disposition towards human behaviours.

I.E. teenagers aren't perfect and often, writing perfect characters who never do a thing wrong or ignore emotions and experiences that aren't 'appropriate' can be harmful to your readers.

Does this mean cramming pointless sex into every scene or sacrificing substance or tone to include these scenes? No. But it does mean they should be considered and treated as a part of normal, daily, teenage life, which they are.

Blood of Midnight & Taking Things Apart (Book + Cover Reveal!)

Where the hell have I been? Writing a novella. And editing a book for publication. And turning twenty. And other things!

So, awhile back I posted the cover for Dreamseeker, along with a blurb. That book is now published, and you can get it here! But on top of that, I edited a novel I wrote about a year and a half ago, gave it a fresh round of edits, and published it as well! That book is a vampire novel called Blood of Midnight, and you can buy it here!

Here's a quote:

So, what's up with Blood of Midnight? Well, it's essentially what happens when I write a book just to dissect and deconstruct a bunch of YA vampire genre tropes. It has bicurious vampire soldier girls and plot twists galore. It blurs the line between young adult and new adult, but I'm calling it YA.

I would mainly call it a race against time mystery, about trying to root out a traitor in a vampire court before the future king's coronation. Also, there's a mysterious cult.

BOM is basically me taking apart the YA love triangle and the pointless girl hate trope, while also deconstructing or inverting the action girl archetype, along with a few others I can't give away for spoiler-y reasons.

I originally planned to scrap and rewrite this novel entirely, bringing it from fast-paced, slightly commercial mystery-adventure-romp thing to fully fledged dark urban fantasy, but frankly, I think it's a good book. It's not my best work, since I've finished 5 or 6 books since the time I wrote it, but at the same time it's fun and fast and I think it has enough merit to stand on its own. And honestly, as an introduction to this world, it works.

The book is standalone. This isn't a series. But it is a world, and it's one I plan to write in again. I'm calling it the Evernight Saga, but, I repeat, IT ISN'T A SERIES.

Characters from this will appear in future books set in this world, but they're more spiritual successors than direct sequels. Like an anthology series, I suppose. Yup, I'm going the Scream Queens route.

Anyway, I'll have more in the next few weeks - including posts about why casual sex is important in YA novels and starting a YA parody account on twitter!

This Is How It Happens (Short Fiction)

{AN: this is a short piece of a longer story I'm writing that I have no other info on, yet. I'm hoping to put it out this fall, though. It's gay romance, and it's, surprisingly, contemporary. Enjoy!}

I can’t believe that this is how it happens; this is where I finally give up. One in the morning, standing out in the cold, screaming at the top of my lungs, while I slam this huge boulder against a car again and again.

Inside, Santa is yelling and cursing and I can see him fumbling around. Ryan is screaming at me and trying to pull me away, and it makes me drop the boulder.

I shake him off and pick it up again. Go for the taillights. The paint job. The windows.

They’re built to withstand a crash, but the glass cracks, spiderwebs, and turns into a mosaic of violence and impact under the blows of a massive boulder wielded by an angry drunk bitch just about as well as it would upon kissing pavement during an accident, so I keep hitting it. I’m not hitting the car, though. I’m hitting the asshole in festive clothes who robbed me, sitting inside of it. I’m hitting my fuckhead friend who pretended she didn’t see me crying in that dark room with a red cup in her hand. I’m hitting my aunt for making me do this, making me keep going. I’m hitting Perry, again and again and again, for kicking me out of her party. Halfway around the world and she still knows how to make me feel two feet tall and caught in a lie, even when I haven’t told one.

My hands are so cold I can’t feel them anymore, but before they got like that I think they were hurting. There’s a flash of red, like I may have sliced myself open on all the broken glass, but I ignore it, and then-

Then Ryan is body-slamming me and I topple to the ground. There’s no time to rest though, because he’s pulling me back up by the collar. "Kaye, come on!"

His blond/brown/bronze/auburn/so-many-colors hair is plastered to his forehead and his dark eyes are full of nothing but panic. Over his shoulder, red.

Not blood. Santa. The Santa Suit - the asshole who robbed us dressed like Father Christmas is climbing out of the car.

Something flashes silver in his hand, and I think it’s a knife, and I think that’s why Ryan must be screaming at me that we have to go, but I don’t want to go. I want that drunk asshole to come over here so this drunk asshole can kill him, and then I want to take the knife from his corpse and just kill myself, but Ryan doesn’t know that because he doesn’t know me, and how can I convince a stranger who isn’t insane to leave me here like this after I just fantasized about how much I want to beat his girlfriend in the head with a big boulder?

It makes me angry that I feel guilty about that - Perry is awful to me, she’s always been awful to me.

Not because I’m faulty, but because she doesn’t know me and she thinks that what she sees on the surface is all there is.

But I feel guilty. Fuck, this guy.

Ryan’s fingers twine through mine, rough and cold and bony. He starts to tug on my arm. I let him pull me away, and when he starts to run, I do too.

“This way!” he shouts, the wind stealing half his words.

I follow him when he careens around the corner, feet pounding on cobblestones, and we keep running long after we’ve ditched the robber. Just two blurs of black with pink cheeks and wild eyes, running through frozen streets until all the world knows how to be is a blur of color in the corners of our eyes.

If this is dying, it feels better than I ever expected.

Dreamseeker Book + Cover Reveal (Free book!)

Dreamseeker is my new novella, and it's got best friends falling in love and pretty alternate worlds and teenagers hunting monsters in small Maine towns. What more could you ask for?

Dreamseeker is going to be up on the Kindle store in a few days for 99 cents, but it's also free to read on Wattpad here!

Here's a quote, to entice you:

Desperation Book + Cover Reveal

I feel bad for dropping the blogging ball there for a while. It's going to happen again, and I can't avoid it, because when it comes to book vs. blog post, I choose book every time.

Right now I'm stretched pretty thin, and I just started serializing a new book on Wattpad.

When seventeen year old Valentino ‘Val’ Crenshaw’s father dies, he’s sent to live with his estranged grandmother, a reclusive novelist holed up in the decaying family manor in a tiny town called Bronzewood.

But what Val doesn’t know is that the town he left behind at birth has been waiting for him, that his father took him away to keep him safe. Now, as Val attempts to settle into his new life, a vicious world of courtly intrigue, dangerous immortals, and ancient magic that lurks in the forest, waiting and watching, begins to emerge from the shadows. . .

As Val starts to unearth family secrets that might be better off kept hidden, and discovers a secret world that could cost him his life. When Rowan, a faerie knight with a dangerous past, and Malcolm, a Sightwielder wise beyond his years, both vow to protect him, Val realizes that he has more to worry about than being accepted in his new home; both of the faerie courts are after him and they will stop at nothing to claim him.

The forest is alive with the world of the fey, and they all want the same thing. . .Val’s life.

Make of that what you will. It's a boyxboy romance with court faeries and magic flowers and small towns and fancy mansions. It's got sass and hot boys and all of my favorite paranormal romance things.

Did I mention it's gay romance?

I'm really excited to be back to my favorite genre. Writing about straight people tires me out sometimes. There's just. . .so much of it out there. It's hard to feel like I'm doing anything original or interesting writing about those relationships, and while I don't mind the extra challenge, I just have more fun writing about queer people.

So, boys kissing, daggers flying, butterfly and spider imagery, ancient forests, and more!

And I'm serializing it on Wattpad. Read it here!

On Self-Publishing. . .

Look, being a self-publisher is not easy. There are resources that aren't available to you and no marketing department with skilled agents to get your book into people's hands - people assume your book is going to be awful without glancing at it and other people assume you self-publish because you weren't good enough at writing to snag an agent and publisher, even though that's probably not an option/route you even considered or tried.

Indie authors are our own agents and handlers, we're often our own cover designers and site builders and we have to pull twice the weight our traditional counterparts do.

But it's worth it. It's worth it because when you do make a profit, you get to keep more of said profit. It's worth it because you don't have a publisher forcing you to remove queer characters and romance from your book, because you don't have the chance of getting stuck with a cover you don't personally like or have to jeopardize your artistic integrity to please an in-house marketing agent.

I would never say don't go for traditional publishing - I plan to be a hybrid author someday, I understand the draw and benefits of that position - but don't eschew the indie route as a non-valid option. I didn't consider trying to traditionally publish when I started putting out books, this is not my backup route or my only option - it's what I wanted and what I went for because it worked best for me, and if you dismiss the fact that there are midlist and upper level authors turning down 6 and 9 figure deals to go it their own, then you haven't been listening.

40% of book sales today are ebooks, there are dozens upon dozens upon dozens of beloved writers with devoted fanbases self-publishing, there are amazing resources and a close-knit, intelligent community. Beth Revis wrote the Across the Universe trilogy and then chose to self-pub The Body Electric, and it was arguably her best work yet. (IMO - I highly recommend reading them all though.) Look at what Joe Konrath is doing, and what Amanda Hocking achieved. Look at Nenia Campbell who have close-knit fanbases and erotica authors like Selena Kitt who have basically built an empire. And then tell me this isn't a valid option.

Stop chasing dreams that revolve around gatekeepers and massive slush piles and rejection after rejection because you're letting valuable, good books go to waste because one agent didn't like it or one house didn't think it was a great fit for their imprint and take matters into your own hands.