Tag Archives: reviews

It Takes A Village

Posted on by
1

I hope that you are all enjoying spooky season, ghouls and ghosts! I am so honoured today to have two guest posts to share! One is a brief review of Light from Uncommon Stars, the new SFF release from Ryka Aoki that just came out this past September. I know Aoki from her previous novel, He Mele a Hilo (A Hilo Song), but her new book is altogether a different animal. This review was generously provided to me by Marie Sotiriou, a member of my online book community, the Rogue Book Coven.

Cover of THE VOYAGE OF FREYDIS, by Tamara Goranson

After that, I have a post that addresses one of the topics that I get asked about the most as an agent: what is the role of editorial feedback to an author? My client, Tamara Goranson, author of the bestselling novel The Voyage of Freydis, graciously provided this post to me following a conversation that we had about the many people and professionals who helped Tamara bring her debut work to shelves all around the world. I am so proud and thankful to get to support Tamara and her work, and I hope that if you enjoy this post, you’ll check out her no-holds-barred feminist historical fiction as well!

Review by Marie Sotiriou

I listened to the audio of Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, and it’s very good! This is a science fantasy (blend of science fiction and fantasy) coming of age story of a young trans girl, written by Aoki, is a Japanese trans woman. The novel features three queer women. The first is Shizuka Satomi, the Queen of Hell. Satomi is looking for a violin player in order to complete her contract with the devil. She is the violin teacher from Hell with a heart of gold! Next: Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway girl who is also an excellent violin player. Finally, Lan Tran, an alien refugee retired starship captain who now owns a donut shoppe. The story is centered around Katrina, but there is also a romance between the female starship captain and the Queen of Hell. It’s very whimsical, quirky, funny, and there are strong Asian influences threaded thru the tale. Light From Uncommon Stars also exudes love for classical music AND donuts!! I know it sounds weird, but it strangely works. The narrative moves around a bit, but I didn’t think that took anything away from my enjoyment of the book. It is very tough to read at times, since we see the transphobia that Katrina experiences. You just want to wrap your arms around her and protect her from the world. There are heartbreaking and infuriating scenes that include transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, and racism, but there are many more feel-good moments of acceptance. Overall, I thought it was a very hopeful story that showed the power of community and found family. And it has a joyful ending!

The cover of LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS by Ryka Aoki

The Benefits of Working with Great Editors, by Tamara Goranson

Behind every great writer, there is a great editor.  Sounds cliché, but as a newly published author with one of the Big 5 houses, I know that my success is due to the help, support, and guidance of a truly amazing group of talented editors. 

My journey began approximately five years ago when I had the good fortune to be introduced to a panel of editors who were members of Canada’s leading editorial organization, Editors Canada.  After listening to them describe their interests and backgrounds, I hired one of them to review my work.    That was the turning point where a creative writing interest was honed into a craft.

My editor recognized that I was new to the world of publishing.  She patiently described the editorial process, outlining the differences between manuscript evaluations, substantive edits, stylistic editing, copy edits and proofreading edits.  At the time, I recall thinking it couldn’t be that complicated.  I convinced myself that I would have the edits done in no time at all.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

For me, the editing process takes much longer than finishing a first draft.  Just to read and process that first manuscript evaluation took me well over one month.  While I was thrilled to receive the feedback from someone who had actually read the draft from start to finish, the detailed analyses and new insights offered were truly mind boggling.  The editor asked me to think about the targeted audience, the narrative voice, plot issues, the character development (including major and peripheral characters), the setting, the pacing of the novel, and the timelines.  When inconsistencies were pointed out – sometimes with over 50 pages in between – I recall feeling amazed by her talent for tracking trivial details.  To give an example, one of my characters lost a baby mid-way through my first novel.  In the original draft, the mother was pregnant for “two” winter seasons before she miscarried, and the editor caught this timeline glitch even though the months of the year and the names of the seasons had been written in a different language!  I started wondering if I was paying her enough.

As an author, we immerse ourselves into the lives of our characters and the worlds we create.  We have so many pieces to weave together that if one thread gets lost, we sometimes don’t notice.  A good editor catches these threading errors.  A great editor might even ask you to rework whole sections, to discard threads and start again, to weave an even more intricate and beautiful piece.

For me, the first round of editing is usually the most difficult.  One has to be willing to part with favorite passages and make uncomfortable changes.  My editors invited considerations and prompted me to really think about my underlying motivations as a writer.  I like to think of the role of an editor as a lighthouse beam that helps the writer to avoid rough waters, to navigate problematic passages and to see new possibilities.   The writer chooses her own route, but the editors help inform the choice.  Great editors raise awareness, but they always leave the final editing decisions to the author.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

In order to secure a literary agent, I had to face another significant editorial challenge that felt insurmountable at the time.  When I was asked to discard the first fifty pages of my novel and use an “in medias res” strategy, I recall tearing up.  This was a big ask.  It had been time consuming to draft those pages, and in many ways, I felt protective.  My editor encouraged me to be flexible, to consider making the revisions, and to embrace the process in a noncommittal way.  After the change was made, I was shocked to discover that the opening of the novel was stronger.  Sometimes editors make big asks.  They usually know what they are doing.

Authors are profoundly fortunate if their agent has the time to offer editing workshops and editing services.  I would venture a guess that in the competitive world of publishing, most submissions only attract the attention of an agent after the manuscript has been reviewed by a professional editor.  Even so, an invested agent may choose to offer editing suggestions to make the manuscript more marketable. 

Once the rights to my book were sold, editors affiliated with the publishing house then went through the manuscript repeatedly.    In total, my manuscript was subjected to four edits: a copy edit from my primary editor, an indigenous sensitivity edit, another copy edit from a secondary editor, and a proofreading edit.  What a process!  With each editorial revision, the manuscript grew more readable, more polished, and more salable.

Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

Editors not only work side-by-side with the author on the manuscript, many of them also help writers monitor their expectations.  I recall one of my editors telling me that it is not uncommon for publishing houses to change the title of a manuscript. I have to honestly say that when this happened, I was able to relinquish the novel title with grace only because my editor had prepared me.  Editors know the industry.  They know what works and what doesn’t, and they can offer words of encouragement to help authors navigate the business side of selling books. 

Editors can also become a friends who walk alongside you, who celebrate your successes with genuine enthusiasm, who encourage you to keep writing when it is hard, and who can be as invested in us as people as they are in us as writers.  If one is fortunate, an editor can be someone who enjoys the subject matter of your book as much as you do, who enjoys delving into the depths of your book’s characters and plots, and who enjoys sharing creative ideas and conversations about the manuscript.  The enthusiasm of an editor can be catchy when they champion your books.  Good editors help new writers overcome insecurities while simultaneously offering honest and constructive feedback.  It takes such interpersonal skill to be able to do this gracefully.

I often wonder what it would be like to go back in time and re-read that first, unedited draft to see what was reworked and what was added, to see what was discovered, to see what small or large vanities were taken out to make the magic of the manuscript really pop.  I often wonder until I reflect on the fact that my work made it into publication.  Then I go back and re-read the acknowledgement section of my book and see the names of my brilliant editors who stood in the shadows — working diligently, reading deeply, noticing more than just the words.   

Photo by Microsoft Edge on Unsplash

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

(How) Do Authors Get Paid?

Posted on by
Reply

Listen. All I needed was ONE FRIEND to tell me that an industry-related post explaining royalties would be interesting, and I’m so ready to dive into this topic. The last time I wrote I post like this, I included this disclaimer, that is still true: I’ve been a little self-indulgent here. I love these details, but I hope that even if it’s not usually their jam, readers will be able to use this knowledge to support authors! This post is a massive info dump, but I hope that even if it’s long, it will contribute toward an ongoing goal of mine for more transparency in publishing.

BUT FIRST, before I dive headlong into how authors make their (very small amount of) money from the books that they publish in traditional publishing stream, I’m going to offer up a review of All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, written by our regular contributor Jack (thank you so much!!), and a short review of a simple and queer visual novel I completed recently.

Review of George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, by Jack

Cover of All Boys Aren’t Blue

The specificity in Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue makes this memoir a survival guide. Johnson explores carving part of themselves in their relationships, community and individual while simultaneously thriving off their duality. It’s the Black Queer joy, Black magic, is skipping rope with your girlfriends and playing football with your father. All Boys Aren’t Blue is an exploration of lived experiences, the linking and unlinking of one’s gender, sexuality, and favorite past times. Johnson’s work is meant to inspire, educate, illustrate, and challenge the stereotypical depictions of Black boys.

Johnson is an activist and writer based in New York who according to Macmillan publishers has written on race, gender, sex, and culture for numerous prominent publications. Their writing experience is evident in their memoir, which is an exploration of gender and sexuality intersecting with race and class; it’s a love letter to intergenerational relationships.

Johnson mentions interpreting their feelings for men as an indication of their gender identity rather than sexuality. Similarly, to how Sara Ahmed connects orientation and orientalism to explore how one physically orients themselves in space and identity, All Boys Aren’t Blue explores how in a world of social constructs, we use often use race and gender as tools of understanding our sexuality.

CW includes but is not limited to violence, misogyny SA, incest, transphobia, and homophobia.

Johnson’s memoir doesn’t shy away from acknowledging their healing journey and demonstrating what accountability looks like. Or how confusing it can be when those who are supposed to love you can harm you. All Boys Aren’t Blue, Johnson’s story, deserves to be heard both in the context of educational generalizations and a memoir. Too often are marginalized authors demonized for not representing or speaking for the collective.

***This is a note regarding representation: no Black Queer person needs to/can represent all our experiences when they write.***

I recommend this memoir to all boys who aren’t blue, to families and kinships who are trying to create communities, Black Queer kids, and adults who deserve to see versions of their story being told. 15+ and up.

All Boys Aren’t Blue is the warmth and comfort one feels when being hugged by someone they love, it’s the presence of community and visibility.

Review: A Hero and a Garden

The banner for the video game A Hero and a Garden

A while back, I posted about having discovered visual novels for the first time, through first buying a Switch Lite to play Animal Crossing in lockdown. Well, if 2020 taught me anything, it taught me that visual and interactive novels are masterful storytelling that’s just as powerful as any book I’ve ever read… and it can be just as super queer, too. A Hero and a Garden is an indie game by npckc available for Switch, PS 4, Android, Windows, Linux, Mac, and Xbox One. In it, you play Cyrus. He was a knight, born and sworn to protect a princess… until she ran away from home to live in a village of monsters. Cyrus went after her, and destroyed the town to save her – only to find that she was actually pretty content, and not in need of saving at all.

The game begins at this point – when Cyrus has been cursed by a local witch to tend a magical fruit garden until he has repaid his debt to the villagers, and helped rebuild their town. This game is super simple and light to play – literally zero pressure – but brings all the feels. As Cyrus helps the town, he learns about the villagers, their lives, their love, and himself. This game doesn’t play into normative expectations when it comes to gender, sexuality, or monogamy. If you’re indulging in a lot of baking shows and slice of life anime right now to get through this weird time in human history, maybe what you need is to pick some berries, and get to know the delightful cast of this very fluffy and sweet, LGBTQ2S+ celebratory game.

The creator of this game has SO MANY OTHER COOL GAMES, and because I don’t usually play on my computer (I spend too much time with this machine as it is – they need a rest every now and then, and so do my eyes!!), I am just very very hopeful that Ratalaika Games will port more of them to Switch ASAP. Take my meagre dollars, I beg of you!!

Let’s Talk About Money

I have previously used this space to write industry-related posts about things like how to best use your purchasing power to support authors through choosing to support the best retail outlets for authors, but it’s been brought to my attention recently that some readers might be interested in a post about another aspect of how money flows from readers to authors in traditional publishing. Once the money goes into a bookshop’s coffers – how does that money make it from the bookshop, via the distributor, back to the publisher, through an agency, and then back to the original creator of the intellectual property that you’re ingesting: the author? One part of the answer to that question is through royalties.

Royalties are used in all kinds of industries, including traditional publishing. In basic terms, royalties are the percentage of money that an author gets from the sale of a book. Any time that a reader buys a new book – not a book that’s purchased second hand, and not a book that’s remaindered – but a brand new book, the book’s author generally gets a little bit of money from that sale. That applies to all formats: hardcover, paperback, mass market, special edition, eBook, and audio. The one notable exception to that (that I can think of) would be if the book was written on a Work For Hire contract, and that contract included a fixed rate, but no royalties. That happens most commonly, in my experience, in a licensed content situation, which you can learn more about by watching the video below, by Alexa Donne 👇🏼

A YouTube video called WHAT IS IP IN PUBLISHING?

The amount of royalties that an author will get depends on a LOT of different factors. Some of these might include the size of the publisher, the size of the imprint, the values of the publisher/imprint, the negotiating power that an author’s agent or agency has with a particular publisher, the author’s platform and their past publication history or track record, the economy in general – the list goes on and on.

From here, the information that you want to know may depend on your positionality a little bit – so I’m going to split the rest of this post into two sections. The section that follows is probably most relevant to authors. If you’re not interested in the back end of how royalties come together, but you are a reader who wants to know how to best spend their money to support creators, skip to the next section!

For authors…

Royalties are negotiated individually on every book deal between either an author or their agent, and the publisher, and are often based on what are called boilerplate contracts. These are standard template contracts that publishers have in place that serve as the starting point for negotiation – and they vary between agencies and publishers. If an author is lucky enough to be represented by an agency with a long history, their boilerplates with publishers will be well-established, and that often means that authors can receive more royalties than if they are unrepresented, or if they are part of a newer literary agency who has yet to establish standards with different imprints around the world.

That said, like most things, there are some industry standards. For a deep dive into these, I recommend checking out the Writers’ Union of Canada’s royalty math page, but the basic numbers are these: for hardcovers, 10% of the cover price on the first 5,000 copies sold, 12.5% on the next 5,000, and 15% thereafter; for paperback, 7.5% of the cover price, and for eBooks, 25% of the publisher’s net receipts. For more information on retail versus net royalties, check out this post from Alexander Field at the Bindery. It’s important to know that most publishers, while they will compete on advances, do not typically compete with each other on royalties.

If you want to know more about the publishing process and where contract negotiations fit into it, there are three resources I recommend: one from Bloomsbury, a guide to the publishing process; one from blogger Rachel Kent for Books&Such Literary Management, about the publishing timeline; and one from KN Literary Arts, a publishing timeline for first-time authors.

Photo by lucas Favre on Unsplash

The other big question that authors tend to have is when do I actually get my royalties? The answer is, as soon as you earn out your advance. It’s always a difficult balance to strike as an agent when you’re advocating for an author: do you negotiate for as high an advance as you can manage, or do you go more modestly on the advance so that the author starts getting royalties sooner? Royalties are a more sustainable form of income for an author, and the higher the advance payment they receive, the less likely it is that they will ever see those payments, in this economy. Let’s take a recent release as an example.

As I write this, Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo is #4 on the Barnes and Noble bestsellers list online, the first listed paperback, at $10.99 USD – which I’m going to call $10 for the sake of simplicity. From that $10, applying a standard royalty rate of 7.5%, Bardugo is entitled to $0.75. If you set aside hardcover sales and subrights sales, and you consider that most authors are printed straight to paperback, you can see how earning out a high five figure advance would take some time – and a huge number of sales. After the advance earns out, that’s when an author begins to see royalties – but not the full $0.75 per copy. From that, you need to also subtract the 15% of that royalty that would be collected by her literary agency, $0.11, bringing that amount down to $0.64 per copy sold.

There are, however, other ways to earn out your advance as an author that don’t involve royalties at all. For this part of my long-winded story, I consulted with BBB contributor, CeCe Lyra, who is also an agent for PS Literary. Since she gave such valuable insight here, and this section of this post is specifically for authors, you can see CeCe’s most recent MSWL here. This might get a little bit convoluted, but the TL;DR of this next paragraph is: any money that you earn for your publisher as an author before you have earned out your advance counts against your advance. The way that this most often happens is through subrights sales.

Photo by Mirza Babic on Unsplash

If you want to learn the basics of subrights, check out this blog post from Valerie Peterson for The Balance Careers. For the purposes of this post, the thing to understand is that any subrights that publishers retain for your book and sell generates income for the publisher. If this happens before you’ve earned out, it will also count against your advance. To illustrate this, let’s say that I write a great new book, and it is acquired by a publisher for $20K, but they negotiate with my agent, and manage to hold on to my international and translation rights. This book is getting a lot of good press, and the publisher has a super keen rights team, so they manage to sell it in four different countries before the book even goes on sale. A huge coup! Each of those rights sales generates a $5K advance – and, just like that, my advance is earned out before my book has even hit shelves. FANTASTIC, in so many ways – but as CeCe pointed out to me, this also comes with downsides. Some argue that if the publisher sold $20K worth of foreign rights and the author’s advance was already earned out, then they could lower their marketing budget for the book’s debut in its home market, since they’re not worried about losing money if the advance doesn’t get earned back. This is part of the reason why the best thing for authors is often for their agents to advocate to retain as many of their subrights as possible and sell them separately on the author’s behalf, rather than having that service be performed by the publisher.

Now – let’s say that an author has earned out their advance (yay!), and now their agency is receiving royalties statements, and cutting them a check for their earnings twice a year. I got a question from a reader over Twitter, and it’s a great one: how do returns get factored in? Royalties payouts and statements are anything but straightforward. If you really want to do a deep dive on this, you can check out the (slightly older, but still reliable) video below, from the Authors’ Guild. If you aren’t ready for the deep dive, though – and I don’t blame you, because unless you are an unrepresented author, understanding all of this is really your agent’s responsibility and not yours as an author – let me give you a wee primer on how book distribution works!

A YouTube video on Understanding Your Royalty Statements.

In this hypothetical world, your book birthday has passed, you have earned out your advance, and bookstores are steadily ordering new copies of your book to sell. In their retail outlets, booksellers put in their orders for merchandise to their distributors. These are companies that exist between publishers and retail outlets/wholesalers who organize book sales. Books flow from the publisher to the distributor, who then makes sure that all the retail outlets get their orders. The general rule in the industry is that book retailers have 90 days from the time that they receive the books from the distributor to either sell them or return them without any financial loss.

That allowance is essential for book retailers to stay afloat… but how does it affect authors? It means that when your royalties statement comes in, the publisher will hold back a small percentage of your royalties earned on “reserve” to safeguard against books that have been ordered by booksellers, but will be returned instead of sold. If you are an unrepresented author, you should always keep an eye on exactly how much of a reserve your publisher is holding, and be sure to ask them their policies around this. If you are represented, your agent should be reviewing your statements and verifying that they are being executed correctly on your behalf.

For readers…

If you are a reader who is lucky enough to have some money to spend on books, and you wonder what the best way to support an author is, the basic answer is a bit unfortunate, but also pretty simple: the more money you spend, the more the author gets. In general, authors make more money on hardcover sales than paperback, more on paperback than mass market, and if you buy at a store that gets special sales editions and pricing (like Costco or Target, or through a subscription like a book box), the author will get a little bit less than if you buy from a brick and mortar chain store or an indie.

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

There are two exceptions to these rules. One is that if you buy a book that’s on sale at a regular retail outlet, for example, a 30% off hardcover at Indigo, usually that loss in profit is absorbed by the store, or in rare cases by the publisher, and not by the author. The second is if you buy an eBook. Because eBook royalties are often calculated based on net profit rather than cover price, authors don’t always come out on top, but in general, they make a higher percentage of the cover price of the book than they do for physical books, and this can serve them well in the long run.

There are two red flags that you want to keep an eye out for if you’re wanting to make sure that an author is getting full royalties from your book purchase (aside from where you’re shopping). One, a sticker over the cover price of the book that advertises a lower price than the original. This generally means that the book was sold through special sales (explained in this post from Ingram Spark), and authors often get a lower royalty rate for these kinds of bulk sales. The second is a remainder mark, usually a mark made by a Sharpie or other permanent marker to the pages of a book, near the binding. While they may be sold at a more advantageous price for consumers, authors do not get royalties on remaindered book sales.

Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash

Last but not least, is there a way to support authors financially without having your own money to spend? Always our heroes, the libraries. Authors do get some financial benefit from library loans, although the format of the book and the location of your library both play a role in this – and unfortunately, my knowledge here is limited to North America, so if you live elsewhere, it pays to do your own research about this! Also, when it comes to libraries and eBooks, what I will say is that at best, things are complicated, and if you want to support an author to the best of your ability, consider purchasing a hard copy of a book for your personal collection or as a gift or donation if you read something from your library’s eBook collection and you love it.

In the United States, authors only get royalties from libraries on physical books when they are purchased for their collections, no matter how many times the book is borrowed. That said, if you are an American reader, make sure to request titles from your local library so that they get that support! In Canada, we are #blessed to have the Public Lending Right program, which means that your library loans mean more to Canadian authors, so keep borrowing all the Can Lit you can manage!

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Victories Greater than Death

Posted on by
Reply

I am always humbled by the connections that I get to make with incredible new authors and emerging artists through this platform. Once in a rare while, I also get to connect with authors who I have admired for a long time. This week, I am super excited – and still kind of in disbelief? – that I get to share an interview that I had the pleasure of conducting with the iconic Charlie Jane Anders.

Charlie Jane Anders, photo by Sarah Deragon.

If Charlie Jane Anders is a new name for any of you reading this, buckle in, because you are in for a wild ride. I was excited to get to chat with Charlie Jane about her upcoming YA debut, the first book in a trilogy, Victories Greater Than Death, which comes out TOMORROW with Tor Teen! You still have a little while to pre-order! Run! (And don’t stop running.) This book is (if I’m counting right), Charlie Jane’s ninth novel-length work, but she is prolific and has won an awe-inspiring number of awards for her longer works, but also her short fiction: the Emperor Norton Award, a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, a William H. Crawford Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Award, a Locus Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. Nbd. (Except, VERYbd).

I had the pleasure of reading an early copy of Victories, which was great, because I full-blown squealed when I heard that Charlie Jane was working on a YA project. Although I do love speculative work, for whatever reason I am a reader that struggles with worldbuilding – so, often, YA speculative is much easier for me to wrap my mind around. That said, though, I’m not an Epic Fantasy person… so sometimes, YA speculative that appeals to my interests can be a challenge to find. I was lucky, because (unsurprisingly to me at least) Victories delivered on everything that I wanted it to.

Like I told Charlie Jane before I interviewed her, I’m not usually an intergalactic-war person, but the characters and the voice of this novel were irresistible. Everything about this story is just fun. As an anxious and autistic person, the protagonist’s best friend, a character called Rachael, was highly relatable. Her needs were represented in ways that were charming and challenging and often not well-executed in fiction, and for me, it was a joy to follow her through this story. Still, the real beauty of this book for me was the absolutely bonkers diversity of the characters. The pub copy comps the book to Dr. Who meets Star Wars, and I grew up watching so much monster of the week TV that the levity of the worldbuilding really struck a chord with me as a reader, even though I’m not a science fiction buff. Suffice to say, I would recommend this book up and down to a wide variety of readers, and I’m thrilled that Charlie Jane agreed to chat with me about it in this space. Without further ado…


The cover of VICTORIES GREATER THAN DEATH.

You are becoming – if you’re not there already – a prolific author, and most of your work has speculative elements. This book is a bit of a departure, though, in that it is your first book intended explicitly for young readers. I have two questions about this. First, what came first – the story, or the intention to write for young readers?

I started thinking about writing a young adult book in spring 2016, around the time I quit my day job to write full time. I had been noticing for a while that YA fiction was getting more action-adventure-oriented, like there were more books being published like Warcross or Want or Illuminae. YA seemed to be taking a turn towards being a place where you could do something super fun and exhilarating. So I started to think about what I would like to do in a YA, and immediately started to remember all those times when I was a teenager, when I just wished a spaceship would swoop down out of the sky and come take me away from this planet. That led to imagining the story of a girl who’s actually the clone of an alien hero, and her efforts to reclaim her heritage and seize her destiny. 

Second, did you find it difficult to adapt your writing style to the voicey, confessional tone that is so characteristic of YA works right now (because I felt like you nailed it)?

In terms of the tone, that took a TON of work. I sat down with a huge pile of my fav YA books and paged through them, getting a sense of which were first person and which were third person, and how they worked on a sentence level. It took a ton of trial and error to get Tina’s voice right, and I had to keep coming back to the idea of her being snarky and funny, but not ironic or wry or self-mocking the way adults usually are. And once I handed in a complete draft, I worked a lot with my editor, Miriam Weinberg, to tighten the book and speed up the pace and boost the emotion in a lot of crucial places. 

Photo by Vincentiu Solomon on Unsplash

There is such a wide range of characters in this book, and it has a huge cast. Humans, clones, aliens, teens, and adults, all with very distinct aesthetics, cultures, bodies, identities, etc. Do you have an absolute favourite, or one who you relate to the most? What was the most enjoyable part about creating such a rich and diverse cast?

I had so much fun creating all of these different aliens and creatures. It was a total dream come true, and I spent hours and hours cooking up complicated histories and backstories for the different alien worlds and societies, as well as the galaxy as a whole. And then I also spent hours and hours doing research and talking to people for my human supporting cast, since they come from all over the world. I definitely had different characters on different days, but overall my favorite character probably ended up being Rachael — I love how she just wants to hide away and draw when she’s on an alien ship in the middle of a space battle. 

One of the norms in this book is that the characters consistently introduce themselves with their pronouns, and many of the characters use non-binary pronoun options or no pronouns at all. This isn’t prominent in many books. What was your rationale behind that choice, and did you struggle with it through the editorial process at all? 

I honestly can’t remember how I decided that everyone should introduce themselves with their pronouns. I was just thinking about the fact that all of these aliens are speaking their own languages and it’s being translated into English, and so it made sense to me that a translator could also give you other important information — like someone’s pronoun. And once I started doing it, it just made sense. I made sure to mention that not everybody actually “hears” the pronouns spoken out loud, the way Tina does. It works differently for different people. But this felt like a good way to be introducing a lot of human and alien characters, some of whom might not have genders or other identifiers that a human would be able to figure out at a glance. It also went along with the overall theme of the book, of respecting other people’s identities while you try to figure out your own.  

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

As a literary agent who represents speculative authors across age categories, I am constantly hearing from editors that sci fi in YA is a super tough sell, and that they have trouble getting these works approved by their acquisitions boards. In comparison to your other works, what was the process like finding a home for VICTORIES, and what made you choose to write sci fi for this age group? 

I always hear people say that science fiction is a hard sell in YA as well, but then you look at series like The Hunger Games, Illuminae, Divergent, the aforementioned Warcross, and a bunch of others, and it’s clearly not accurate. That said, I am very nervous about launching a YA science fiction book, just because I’m aware of that widespread misconception, and I’m worried it’ll keep people from offering the book to kids. I think especially right now, it’s super important to get young people (and everyone) fired up about science and exploration and discovery. Luckily, the folks at Tor Teen were super excited to delve into this space-opera universe—and I think the fact that it stands out a bit is not a bad thing. 

If an educator was going to teach your book in a high school or college creative writing class, what do you hope students would take away from that experience? Similarly, what do you wish you could tell educators who are going to choose this book to put in a young reader’s hands?

Wow, I can’t ever think about people teaching my books to creative-writing students, except as an example of what *not* to do. 🙂  In the case of Victories, I hope they’d be interested in the voice, like we talked about before, and the way I use humor and feels to add to the suspense. (Or at least, I hope I do that.) For high-school teachers generally, I would hope they’d talk about the themes of post-colonialism and what it means to be a hero. 

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Being a marginalized publishing professional can be super challenging once in a while. You have worked with a few different imprints and editors over the course of your career so far. What has your experience been like working with an agent and an editorial team at a big publishing house? What would you say the most fulfilling part of this process was, and what was the biggest challenge?

I’ve been so lucky with Russ Galen and with everyone at Tor, including Miriam Weinberg and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Everybody has been incredibly supportive and understanding, and nobody blinked when I said I wanted to include so many queer characters in my space opera universe. The most fulfilling part has probably just been talking to Miriam about the characters and the story and how to make them pop — and the biggest challenge has just been breaking in as a YA author, especially during a time when school visits and other in-person appearances are not possible. 

Last, but not least, when I’m covering a non-Black author, I ask them to recommend a book by a Black author to go alongside their post. Would you mind sharing a rec with me?

Three that I’ve read and loved recently come to mind: The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus, A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow, and Legendborn by Tracy Deonn. 

Covers of THE STARS AND THE BLACKNESS BETWEEN THEM, A SONG BELOW WATER, and LEGENDBORN.

Victories Greater Than Death comes out on April 13th, 2021 from Tor Teen. If you enjoyed this interview, you can find Charlie Jane Anders on her Hugo Award winning podcast with co-host Annalee Newitz, our opinions are correct.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

New Books by Genderqueer Breakouts

Posted on by
Reply

In this post, I am super lucky to be able to host A. E. Osworth, author of the breakout adult fiction novel We Are Watching Eliza Bright. This #MeToo era story about harassment in the gaming industry is told multiply and unreliably by users on Reddit, a novel that shatters the concept of form and narration completely. You’ll either love this one or you’ll hate it, but either way, you’ll probably emerge with huge admiration for this author.

But first, I have a guest review from a wonderful friend from my online book community, The Rogue Book Coven, and brilliant reader, Amanda Hamilton. Amanda has graciously penned a review for the highly-anticipated forthcoming title One Last Stop, from Casey McQuiston, whose adult LGBTQ2S+ romcom with crossover appeal, Red, White, and Royal Blue was an overnight sensation in 2019. Does their sapphic sophomore novel meet the high expectations set by the previous novel?

Review: One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston

By guest contributor Amanda Hamilton

Like so many people, I read and loved Casey McQuiston’s debut bestselling novel, Red, White & Royal Blue last year, so when I had the chance to read an ARC of their upcoming book, One Last Stop, I was over the moon. And I am so happy to report that there is no sophomore slump here.

One Last Stop follows August, newly arrived in New York City, as she settles into her new life, complete with too many roommates and a job at a local diner. It is not the most glamorous life, but for once, it is completely hers. Until she meets Jane, a criminally attractive and charming woman replete with a motorcycle jacket. August and Jane have the ultimate meet-cute on the subway, but Jane doesn’t seem to want to see August outside the station. Because Jane is stuck. Stuck in time, stuck in the station, stuck riding the train over and over. But when the chemistry is this strong and the girl of August’s dreams are right in front of her, what’s a little time loop between friends?

August, Jane and the myriad of characters in One Last Stop’s world are all fully developed, with their own motives, concerns and loves, and it’s a joy to watch them all bloom throughout the course of the novel. Romance novels are often dismissed as predictable and rote, but that is certainly not the case here. Jump into this lovely and surprising with August and Jane – you won’t regret it.

For readers who enjoy One Last Stop, Amanda also recommends The Princess Trap, by Black author Talia Hibbert.

We Are Watching Eliza Bright: Feature Interview with Author A. E. Osworth

In Chapter 10, you give a bit of a gaming history of one of your characters in the book, Lewis. I would love to hear your gaming history! Did you write this book based on a lifelong interest in gaming, are you completely new to the gaming world, or was this just an interesting world for you to explore through fiction

It might come as no surprise that all the characters who have a gaming history (I believe there are three and there were almost more!) just have pieces of my own gaming history. I love video games and board games and table top RPGs (though I do not happen to be very good at most video games—especially if they require a large amount of dexterity-based combat). We were a Nintendo family, and my brother and I spent mornings before school playing the Nintendo 64 (Super Mario! Star Fox!) or, if we’d been dropped off early, Pokemon on our Gameboys. I also played Ultima Online quite a bit in my teen years—until a member of my guild took advantage of my naiveté and slaughtered me in a PVP zone for all my stuff (I had a lot of cool stuff). It wasn’t as much fun after that! Not because I lost all my cool stuff (though that was a bummer) but because it made me feel like my weird little online friendships weren’t meaningful.

Two more gaming-related questions. 1, do you have a favourite game that has kept you busy during the pandemic? 2, what character alignment do you most relate to yourself?

Honestly? Dungeons and Dragons. My household plays a big outdoor game with two other households, all socially distanced and our DM painted a giant battle grid on a bed sheet and hand-stitched cute beanbags to use as “minis.” Right at the beginning of the pandemic, though, it was all Animal Crossing all the time. Could that game’s release have been timed more perfectly? I used to get my avatar all dressed up in pajamas and have them lay in bed, surrounded by aesthetically pleasing digital objects in a world where no one was sick. They closed their eyes and slept soundly while I watched and pretended I felt like that. That sounds a bit sad, now that I say it out. But it is how I spent the early days and it was instrumental.

And that second question—like most folks I talk to, I wish desperately that I were Chaotic Good. When I play said Dungeons and Dragons, that’s usually what I go for. But the reality is that I’m Lawful Good. Which is to say, I am a giant weenie of a rule follower. I don’t make illegal u-turns and I get to airports a full two hours before my flight. I comfort myself only with the knowledge that I am not the worst alignment: Lawful Neutral. Law for the sake of law, rules for the sake of rules. Fuck that alignment!

You use gender neutral pronouns and have written a lot of non-fiction about queerness and technology. Did your experiences of gender and queerness impact the way that you approached writing this book? If so, how?

So when I wrote this book (or at least, the first several drafts of it), I didn’t know I was trans. I could’ve sworn up and down that I was a cis woman, and I wrote a story that centered on one. In that respect, my experience of gender has been with this book throughout. And queerness was always a part of it, too, in the character of Suzanne.

After coming out as trans, I had the opportunity to add and revise the second collective narrator, The Sixsterhood. This queer and trans art commune is inspired by a real group of people and a real place—the former Octagon in San Francisco, as well as other queer communities of which I am a part. That voice is explicitly queer and trans (and there are a lot of in-jokes there that are specifically for my queer and trans folks).

The cover of WE ARE WATCHING ELIZA BRIGHT

One of the things that is super unique about your book is the narrative style. Rather than having a single POV character, your book is narrated by a group of online fans of a popular MMORPG. For me as a reader, it created a sort of distance between me and the titular character, Eliza Bright. As a literary agent, I would say that this is a super risky choice in a competitive literary market. Why did you make that choice, and what do you hope it adds to your story?

I heard it again and again: cut the narrators, just tell the story. So many people in graduate school were of the opinion that I should do away with the book being narrated by Reddit, and they said the same things you’ve just said. I knew they were wrong because the whole point of the book is the Reddit narrator. The point is the antagonistic collective; the point is the parasocial relationship they have with the group of protagonists; the point is the feeling of being watched. I am so very lucky that I found an agent, and then an editor, whose whole mission was not to simply tell me to cut the narrator, but to ask the right questions and make the right comments to help me make the narrator really, really work. And I think it does; I think they do.

In addition to being a novelist, you also do a lot of teaching (you are so busy!). If an educator was going to teach your book in a high school or college creative writing class, what do you hope students would take away from that experience? Similarly, what do you wish you could tell educators who are going to choose this book to put in a young reader’s hands?

I think what I hope students take away depends on what this is being used to teach. If it’s being taught in the context of writing, I hope students try their own collective narrators. It’s really fun to consider how the collective knows what they know, how they share information with each other, whether or not they all agree, what they all sound like as one. There’s so much delight in working with this point of view, and there are so many good examples that all do it drastically differently (The Virgin Suicides, And Then We Came to the End, We Ride Upon Sticks).

If it’s being used to teach current events or internet culture or any number of other things, I hope students are taught the book beside the headlines that inspired it, because in the end I did make it up. The psychological and emotional underpinning of the book is as true as I could render it, but it’s a work of fiction. The narrators’ voices are accurate, but imagined. A good place to start with that is The New York Times’s Everything Is Gamergate.

A. E. Osworth, author of WE ARE WATCHING ELIZA BRIGHT

Being a marginalized publishing professional can be super challenging once in a while. Your book is with a Big 5 publisher – one of the Hachette imprints – and that’s a really big deal! What has your experience been like working with an agent and an editorial team at a big publishing house? What would you say the most fulfilling part of this process was, and what was the biggest challenge?

I have loved nearly every moment of working with my team at Grand Central. Seema Mahanian, my editor, has made this book the very best version of itself that it could possibly be. I was a little nervous that any editor at a Big Five publisher would look at my weirdo narrators and try to tone them down; Seema helped me turn the dial up on the narrators, and it was actually her idea to add the second collective (my beloved Sixsterhood). When I did two sample pages of the Sixsterhood and there were no periods at the end of the sentences, she said bring it on. I have felt not only artistically free, but artistically encouraged to find my very strangest ideas and let them play.

The biggest challenge for me is something that I truly think would be a problem no matter if I was working with a Big Five or not, and that’s the feeling of at-sea-ness that comes from We Are Watching Eliza Bright being my very first foray into publishing a book. The process is really opaque to me—as my book’s launch date approaches, I don’t know what I should be doing or what’s working or what’s not. My agent, Christopher Hermelin, is truly amazing though. And he’s been able to contextualize and guide and clarify for me. That I remain confused at times is a shortcoming of mine and not anyone else’s.

Last, but not least, when I’m covering a non-Black author, I ask them to recommend a book by a Black author to go alongside their post. Would you mind sharing a rec with me?

Oh oh oh! One of my year-mates from my MFA program at The New School (we graduated in 2016!) is publishing something I’m REALLY excited about. Zakiya Dalila Harris’s book The Other Black Girl is coming out in June and I am AMPED.

The cover of THE OTHER BLACK GIRL, by Zakiya Dalila Harris.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

The Longest Shortest Month of the Year

Posted on by
Reply

Theydies and gentlethems, the first thing I need to do in this post is apologize for the sometimes sporadic timing of posts over the last several months. I am personally, officially more than one year into lockdown, more than one year into working as a literary agent, and I am doing my best to be mindful of my abilities and limitations during this weird part of our collective history. As such, there have been times when I’ve had to step back from some obligations in order to fulfill others, and at times the regularity of the blog schedule has suffered.

Today, however, I have a great post in store. First, I want to review a super exciting picture book, Jamie and Bubbie, by Afsaneh Moradian and illustrated by Maria Bogade. Then, I have a very exciting interview from author Zak Salih, whose gay literary fiction Let’s Get Back to the Party comes out THIS TUESDAY (!!!) from Algonquin books.

Before I dive into those, I have a VERY COOL resource to share for all of you who maybe didn’t get as much reading done in 2020 as usual. I’m super, super lucky to be part of a great online book community, called the Rogue Book Coven. This year, some of our incredible and skilled members put together this great resource featuring the best books read by our members in 2020 – across age categories, genres, and release periods. Check it out, and find something great that maybe you missed. I think of it like the front table at your favourite indie bookshop at the end of a long year.

Jamie and Bubbie

The cover of Jamie and Bubbie, A Book About People’s Pronouns

I have written about Afsaneh Moradian’s first children’s book, Jamie is Jamie, in this space before. I am a huge supporter of Moradian’s work, and so I was thrilled when she reached out to me to ask if I would review her newest offering. Moradian is an educator, and her expertise and familiarity with children really shines through in her picture books.

This book features illustrations of a diverse population that extends beyond racial inclusion, including wheelchair users, and a broad range of ages. It addresses an important topic – the use of pronouns – and it fills a huge gap in resources created on this topic by non-white creators. The book handles the topic with great sensitivity, allowing the young character to be the hero of the story, educating their elders in new and different ways to use language, while maintaining a sense of gentleness, positivity, and humility throughout.

This is a great 101 resource, and a lovely story. The only criticism that I could offer is that it is limited in the sense that there is no discussion of neopronouns. That said, for most people living in North America, this book is a great, accessible starting point for learning, that is expertly executed. It also includes resources for teachers and caregivers in the back of the book.

While you’re checking out Jamie and Bubbie, check out another one of my favourite picture books, Saturday, by Black author Oge Mora.

The cover of Saturday by Oge Mora.

Feature Interview: Zak Salih

Debut author Zak Salih’s novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party, will drop this Tuesday, February 16th. It’s been hailed as “iconic” by the Gay Times, was one of this month’s most anticipated books from Lambda Literary, and Michelle Hart, the assistant editor of books at O Magazine, said that it was among the titles that would change the literary landscape this year. I am honoured to have gotten the chance to interview Salih, and I hope that you enjoy reading as much as I did!

Cover of Let’s Get Back to the Party, by Zak Salih.

I can remember the exact moment that I heard that the US had legalized gay marriage – it wasn’t so long ago, after all. Do you remember that moment in your life? What did it mean for you?

I was working in the marketing department at The Washington Post at the time, so I was at my desk and saw the news on the website as soon as it broke. The next morning, I went down to the lobby and picked up a copy of the paper; I still have the front page here somewhere in my office. While marriage equality hasn’t been a social panacea for the LGBTQ2S+ community, it’s a powerful symbol and its legalization was a powerful moment. I’m glad I was alive to witness it.

You write a lot about art in this book, which is in itself a very artistic, literary work. Is art something that you feel passionate about, or was it just something that you researched for your novel? What role has it played in your life? Do you have a favourite artist or particular work that you wish all of your readers could experience?

I’ve always enjoyed art—flipping through art catalogs, walking through art museums, reading novels about artists—so those sections of the novel were relatively delightful to write. When it’s safe, the National Gallery of Art here in D.C. is the first indoor place I plan on going post-pandemic. I highly recommend it to everyone, especially because you’ll find John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark there, a painting that’s fascinated me since I was a young boy.

Watson and the Shark

For me, your book felt very nostalgic. I think that it really hearkens back to a tone and type of iconic gay literature that we don’t see as much of these days, but it grapples with very contemporary material. I wonder what books you would recommend for readers of your book, and what works you would say influenced you when you were working on it?

I’d recommend all of the LGBTQ2S+ books that inspire me— as a member of an incredibly diverse and wonderful community, as a writer, and as a human being. At the moment, I’m thinking in particular of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Elusive Embrace, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Andrew Holleran’s The Beauty of Men.

From my experience, particularly for LGBTQ2S+ “elders” (feel free to interpret that in whatever way you wish!), childhood memories of grappling with sexuality and complex relationships with peers are often poignant, and linger throughout our lives. This is a theme that comes up in your book, and I’m curious what that was like to explore through your writing. 

While I don’t share the specific childhood memories of Sebastian and Oscar, I do dwell on the past a little more than is healthy. But I think that’s true of most people, queer or otherwise. The past always tends to pop up in the most unlikely of places: the face of a stranger, a painting in an art gallery, a line in a poem. I find stories that focus on the past, or in which characters cannot get over the past, to be the most rewarding types of stories. They teach me about navigating my own relationship with memory and experience.

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

Obviously, as creatives, we all carry different parts of our identities into our work with us. How did your identities direct what you wanted to do with this novel, and to what extent do you feel your various identities define you as a writer?

In an obvious sense, my identity as a gay man informed what I tried to do with this novel, and the complexities of what it means to be part of a generation strung between a traumatic past and a more hopeful future. But when I sit down to write, I’m nothing thinking (at least consciously) about my identities. I don’t care to label myself a “gay writer” any more than I would label myself a “biracial writer” or a “cis-gender writer.” These identifiers and descriptors, I feel, are more for other people to make sense of me than for me to make sense of myself.

One of the characters in your book is a high school teacher. If an educator was going to teach your book to a group of young adults, what do you hope students would take away from that experience? Similarly, what do you wish you could tell educators who are going to choose this book to put in a younger reader’s hands?

I would hope students came away from the book with a sense of enlargement about their relationships with other people—the idea that they’re part of a larger community with a past, a present, and a future. I suppose I’d caution educators (and all readers to remember that Sebastian and Oscar represent no one but themselves; their messiness is not what makes them queer, it’s what makes them human.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Being a marginalized publishing professional can be super challenging once in a while. What has your experience been like working with the editorial team at Algonquin, which is a large independent publisher? What would you say the most fulfilling part of this process was, and what was the biggest challenge?

I honestly have nothing but kind words for everyone at Algonquin Books. Since they first acquired the novel, everyone from my editor to the marketing team has been entirely supportive not just of my writing but of the inherent queerness of the book itself. Perhaps other writers have horror stories to share, but in my relationship with Algonquin, I was never once asked to tone down or make more “cis-hereto-friendly” the story I was trying to tell.

Last, but not least, when I’m covering a non-Black author, I ask them to recommend a book by a Black author to go alongside their post. Would you mind sharing a rec with me?

Season of Migration to the North, by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih. A fascinating, and occasionally disturbing novel about reverse colonization, whose enigmatic central character is a Western-educated Sudanese man who resolves to “liberate Africa with [his] penis.”

Cover of Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih.

New year, who dis?

Posted on by
Reply

Happy 2021, theydies and gentlethems! A quick personal note to start this post: Books Beyond Binaries may look slightly different this year, in terms of content. Part of the reason for that is because I have recently transitioned my Twitter account to announcements-only for the foreseeable future. I’ve come to accept that posting my updates and checking my mentions through Hootsuite is a lot better for my mental health and time management than reading my feed every day, even if it does mean that I miss out on content sometimes. If you see anything on Twitter that you think should be featured in this space, feel free to tag me or send it my way via DM or the contact page!

Now, on to the good stuff. I’m thrilled that for the first post of a new year, I have some super special content to share. CeCe Lyra has reviewed Susan Mihalic’s novel Dark Horses. This one holds a special place in my heart, because I grew up horseback riding every chance I got, competing, and devouring “horse girl” books. Not only are these coming back in MG and YA literature lately, which is a welcome trend over here, but I am hype for the books coming out for former horse girls turned reading adults.

I am also super excited to welcome an author who I’ve been following for a few years now for his first feature post in this space, Sam J. Miller. I first discovered Sam through his acclaimed YA novel, Destroy All Monsters, which I featured in a post back in 2019. At the time, this poignant and bizarre novel had become a staff favourite at Another Story, the local indie where I worked as a bookseller.

Sam’s fourth novel, The Blade Between, recently dropped, and I’m honoured that he was willing to put together a super cool post for us about some of the research that he did when writing the book. Sam’s books are spooky and fascinating and, in his words, “gay as heck.” If you’re new to his writing, I hope that this post will encourage you to dive in, because you’ve been missing it in your life. I promise.

Review of Susan Mihalic’s DARK HORSES, by Cecilia Lyra

The cover of Dark Horses.

Fifteen-year-old Roan Montgomery is a competitor in the exclusive, high-stakes equestrian world with a goal of becoming an Olympian. She has good reason to think she’ll get there: Roan is talented, hard-working, and genuinely passionate about riding. She’s also pedigreed—her father has several Olympic medals of his own and wrote the book on eventing. It’s no surprise then that he is Roan’s coach, publicist, and agent. What is a surprise: he’s been raping her since she was six years old. A greater surprise still: Roan’s mother knows.

An image of a chestnut horse wearing a harness eating hay.
Photo by Emmy Nordstrom Higdon; Cape Breton, 2011. Taken on Portra 160 VC; Minolta.

To survive (a word Roan would undoubtedly resent), she compartmentalizes. She tells herself it’s not all bad. That staying silent is her choice. That she would rather be complicit than a victim. That what really matters are her riding ambitions. As with all emotions, perhaps a lot of it true, or perhaps all (or none) of it is. But truth in emotions is beside the point. What is the point: Roan’s indomitable, clear-eyed strength. It is this strength that guides her as she struggles to comprehend and navigate her circumstances, not just the conflicting emotions she feels towards her father, but also the role she feels she plays in their relationship. Throughout the novel, we watch Roan’s sense of self grow stronger, which in turn causes her father to tighten his grip on her. This is exacerbated by the fact that Roan’s mother leaves, taking with her what little protection she could offer, and that Roan falls in love with Will, a classmate at her exclusive prep school. Although she is, without a doubt, a victim of abuse, Roan does not come across as a victim. She’s a fighter—has been from page one, and as the story unfolds, we watch her battle with growing fortitude.

Set against the backdrop of competitive riding, DARK HORSES moves along nimbly, with explosive stretches that made my pulse race. Typically, when I’m reading a book that I know I will later review, I make notes as I turn the pages. I jot down my impressions on the narrative flow, themes examined, and characters I meet along the way, pausing to reflect on their fatal flaws (I have a thing about flaws). I’m a natural note-taker and, more to the point, I find it helps with my reviews. I couldn’t do that with this novel. Its pull was all-consuming, like being sucked in by a tidal wave. I had no time—or headspace—to make notes. It’s quite a feat for any novelist, holding a reader’s attention like that. But given the disturbing nature of the subject matter it’s even more impressive.

A black Newfoundland pony, wearing a harness, grazing, seen through a white fence.
Photo by Emmy Nordstrom Higdon; Newfoundland, 2011. Taken on Portra 160 NC; Minolta.

DARK HORSES had everything to be a story of privilege. A poor-little-rich girl narrative with a horsey twist. Instead, it’s an exploration of power, control, and desire as told through the lenses of a girl who refused to be broken. It’s a powerful novel—in more ways than one.

Along with Dark Horses, CeCe recommends readers check out Aftershocks, by skillful Black author Nadia Owusu. It comes out on the 21st of this month.

The cover of Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu

Feature Post: Author Sam J. Miller on THE BLADE BETWEEN

Hudson is a weird distinctive haunted looking town, and so I had a huge assortment of creepy fascinating spaces at my disposal when I started writing my gentrification ghost story The Blade Between. And while I hope I succeeded in rendering those locations vividly enough on the page, the reality of the city is worth sharing. 

The cover of The Blade Between.

Here are eight of the locations where key events take place, along with a quote from the book describing each. If you’ve already read THE BLADE BETWEEN, I hope they help you compare the space as it really is to the way you imagined it. And if you haven’t read it, I hope they spark your interest enough to want to visit Hudson… even if it’s only on the page. 

A brown brick building against a blue sky with dry greenery in front and bare trees. Text reads, Every building on that block looked like something out of Meet Me in St. Louis, great gingerbread monstrosities of nineteenth-century wealth, ;wide, deep porches and Tiffany glass, ; porticos and gables and other words I never knew before I started researching Hudson home prices - the better to burn them all down.
A bridge covered in faded graffiti over a worn concrete road. Text reads, A set of rusted black trestles carried the train tracks over Power Avenue.
An American diner on the corner of a street, red and white with silver metallic accents. Text reads, The familiar sooty chrome exterior of the Columbia Diner caught my eye, sucked me inside by awakened twenty-year-old instinct - an entire childhood's worth of Saturday morning breakfasts with my dad, on our walk to work at the butcher shop...
A road on a tree-lined street in winter, after the leaves have all fallen. A new-looking house sits on the corner. Text reads, Walking south on Second Street, up the steep block that fell away to a ravine on either side, where the rain still fell from the trees and the air smelled like rot and wilderness, I heard a voice say: Why so glum, glummy?
Twilight, a street with train tracks embedded in it, lined on one side with run-down buildings, and on the other side with parked cars. Text reads, Freight train tracks run right through upper Hudson, along sixth street, right below the park.
An evening sky with a streetlight on in the foreground, over a quiet back alley. Text reads, He puts a brown paper bag on the hood of her car, and stalks off into the alley dark. She hollers at him to wait - even turns on her cell phone's flashlight function and hurries after him - but he's already gone.
A bridge over the Hudson River. The sun shines through the clouds, reflecting off the water. Text reads, I was kneeling on the pedestrian walkway of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Staring down into the same dizzying dark, the same twenty-story fall that swallowed up my mother.
The inside of a library with marble floors and white-painted shelves. Text reads, ...the Hudson Library, which before being a library had been a mental institution and before that a foundlings' home, and both of those establishments had been in need of a cell in the basement for their most recalcitrant occupants.

In addition to The Blade Between, Sam J. Miller (and I!!!) recommends that readers check out A Spectral Hue, by Black author Craig Laurance Gidney. Sam writes: A gorgeous, creepy, rapturous story, told in incredible prose, and if there was any justice it would have already won ALL THE AWARDS. 

The cover of A Spectral Hue.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Wounded

Posted on by
Reply

2020 is drawing to a close, and as arbitrary as time is, this is our last post of the year here on Books Beyond Binaries! First things first: if you’re here, that means that you’re seeking our new banner! I could not be more thrilled with the result of this year’s refresh, thanks to Oaky, a non-binary, Latino, concept artist and illustrator, who created this awesome new look for the blog going into 2021!

https://twitter.com/afaeprince/status/1337885225477607426?s=20

In today’s post, lots of new resources to share (as you can see) for books to read from trans and/or non-binary authors from 2020 and going into 2021, including this list of 2020 debuts from trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming authors from the Chicago Review of Books.

Otherwise, this post is all about the Big Feels, which seems appropriate for the end of 2020. I review a new poetry collection called Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, by torrin a. greathouse, and we are super excited to host a post from #SpineSquad author A. J. Vrana on writing for emotional impact.

As always, when we feature books by non-Black authors in this space, we also offer recs of books by Black authors to accompany them. For my part, I want to recommend my favourite book that I read this year, Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi.

The cover of Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi.

A personal request for support…

Before I kick off this post, I’m going to use this space to make a small ask for support. For those of you who don’t know, I’m completing my PhD studies right now. I was supposed to have defended my dissertation in December, but due to an administrative error at the School of Graduate Studies at my institution, and delays within my committee caused by COVID, I am being forced to take an extra term in order to be able to complete my studies. All of this, despite my having met every deadline and requirement thrown at me in 2020, has been really challenging to come to terms with. In addition, this situation comes with a whopping, unexpected, $2300 price tag that I am completely unable to afford. As a new agent and having lost my bookstore income due to the pandemic, I am just making enough money with freelancing and agenting to stay out of debt, and my department is not offering me any financial support for this extra semester of studies. If you are interested and able, there are three ways you can support me, a disabled trans student trying my best to have my work over the past seven years of study recognized. One, I have a crowdfunding campaign that you can donate to, two, you can hire me to edit your work or the work of an aspiring writer in your life, three, you can share these links (and the blog!) within your networks. Thank you in advance! 💜

Review: WOUND FROM THE MOUTH OF A WOUND, by torrin a. greathouse

A few months ago, I was approached by Claire Laine, a publicist of Milkweed Editions, one of my favourite independent publishers, to review the poetry collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, by torrin a. greathouse, which comes out tomorrow: December 22nd, 2020. torrin’s online bios describe her as a transgender cripple-punk and poet.

I am a person with Big Feelings, so sometimes I struggle to read poetry, because when it is done well, it feels like every syllable is an emotional gut-punch. That said, I love poetry for the same reason. Two of my favourite books of all time are a place called NO HOMELAND by Kai Cheng Thom, and Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Both of these collections absolutely gutted me. The blurb for torrin’s collection calls it, “A versatile missive written from the intersections of gender, disability, trauma, and survival.” I felt confident when I accepted the offer to review that this book would soon join Kai and Leah’s in my heart.

Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, and has already received many glowing reviews and recommendations from Refinery29, NBC Out, Book Marks, Lambda, and the Chicago Review of Books. I’m afraid that Books Beyond Binaries won’t be the source of a dissenting opinion in this case. I do feel that I should, however, note that I am not a poetry expert, so I come to this review purely as a reader. If my thoughts in this post lack precision or technicality, I apologize in advance for that.

The collection opens with six verses inspired by a 2008 sculpture of Medusa carved by Luciano Garbati. The statue itself is fairly unadorned, a rendition in bronze of the woman with hair of snakes, unapologetically holding in one hand a blade, and in the other hand the severed head of a man. This sculpture is a response and inversion of another work that resides in Garbati’s hometown in Italy, near Florence, a statue by Benvenuto Cellini, called Perseus with the head of Medusa. In torrin’s collection, they use accessible, but poignant, imagery to write about this sculpture as a symbol of rape culture, and how that culture bleeds into the lives of children who are the product of traumatic experiences. Garbati’s sculpture has been reinterpreted again as the stunning cover art for this collection.

The cover of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse.

The first formal section of this book begins with a quote. I was charmed by this, because coincidentally, shortly before reading Wound, I connected with queer Palestinian poet George Abraham after the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, in the hopes of featuring them and their poetry in this space soon. His collection, Birthright, is available now.

Wound is a collection of short works in verse, prose, and essay formats. There are five sections total. I am amazed by the efficiency of torrin’s collection. This is writing that works hard. In the first section, she tackles themes including motherhood, infant loss, and parentage; a relatable yet brief critique of the medical model of disability; the sterile experience of medical transition and the scientific fragility of physiological gender; sex and trauma; finally, and most resonant for me in this section, the radiant, emotional impact of medical transition. These themes unravel at a pace that is perfectly possible to keep up with, and with moments of startlingly beautiful imagery. Often, I find myself lost in poetry, but in this section, I rather found myself awash in it.

Mirroring the first section, the second begins with a quote (this time from Jillian Weiss), and a section of prose. The themes from the first section thrum throughout this book, with occasional meditations on body image and eating disorders, morality, addiction and blackouts, etymology, fear… torrin pulls absolutely zero punches in unraveling what I can only assume are their reflections on personal experiences on the page.

My personal favourite piece in this collection, and one that I am eager to share with the world, is the poem That’s So Lame, which addresses the casual violence of ableist language. It is searing, relatable, and communicates so much that is difficult to articulate in such a short space. It is both beautiful, and functional, and such a valuable tool, I think, for social justice and for literature.

Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse launches tomorrow, and if you are able to purchase it from an independent bookstore, you have the opportunity to support a trans, disabled author, an independent not-for-profit press, and an independent small business, all at the same time. This collection, despite dealing with impactful themes, is not a chore to read. It is accessible and easy to follow, overflowing with evocative imagery, and it filled me with the sense of empowerment that one might get from watching a beautiful flower emerge from a crack in the concrete. Works like these are how the light gets in. I’m very grateful for Claire and torrin sharing this book with me, and with Books Beyond Binaries, and I hope that many of our readers will indulge in this incredible collection this winter.

Writing for Emotional Impact, by A. J. Vrana

A. J. Vrana’s recommendation for a book by a Black author to read alongside this post is from non-binary author Rivers Solomon, The Deep.

The cover of The Deep, by Rivers Solomon.

As a reader, there is no better experience than being emotionally moved while devouring a good book. The written word is, after all, intended for communication, and more often than not, what writers want is to make their readers think and feel a certain way. This is especially true in the world of fiction and memoire writing, where readers expect to be drawn into the story and to grow attached to the characters.

However, if you’re an author, you know that it’s not easy getting people to notice your book, and it can be even harder to get them invested. The world is full of different kinds of people, which means not everyone will pick up what you put down. Nonetheless, at the heart of authorial passion is the desire to have your story emotionally resonate with as many people as possible.

Okay, great, but how does one convey emotion through writing? We know beautiful prose when we see it, but how do we emulate it? How do we communicate the rawest parts of ourselves authentically and effectively? This is no small or easy task, but there are techniques that can help. In this piece, I will share four tricks I’ve picked up.

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

Sentence Structure

The very structure of a sentence—its length, syntax, and punctuation—can impact the way it is received be a reader. The way writing flows from word to word, sentence to sentence, conveys a lot about the writer’s intentions. For example, short, choppy sentences can be great for communicating strong, sudden emotions like distress, confusion, and pain (in the negative) or excitement, anticipation, and joy (in the positive). Although I am generally not an advocate of using sentence fragments, the occasional fragment can be very effective in communicating a strong emotion—the caveat being that it’s used occasionally. Let’s look at a few examples:

            It came from within, this furious, bone-deep itch. Thousands of tiny needle-point legs, trampling on nerves. They burned and screeched, demanding nails on flesh.

In the above example, I’m describing someone in distress. I would assume that a person experiencing this level of discomfort wouldn’t be able to think or narrate in fully formed, complex sentences because of their emotional state, so their thoughts would come out choppy and somewhat fragmented. Keeping the sentences short ensures a snappy, urgent pace that puts the reader on edge. Now let’s look at another example:

            She stood there—a ghost returned from the grave. Only she wasn’t a ghost. She was flesh and blood. She was family, and she was alive.

 In this example, we have someone seeing a loved one they thought was dead. Although this is definitely a happier occasion, it is nonetheless riddled with complex emotions. Seeing someone you’ve grieved over is still quite traumatic and stressful, even if you are happy to see them! Similar to the previous example, I would assume that the person in question wouldn’t really have it in them to form long, eloquent sentences when first seeing a family member who is presumed dead. The short sentences mimic their tattered emotional state: shocked, confused, uncertain, but ultimately relieved or happy.

However, short sentences aren’t the only ones that can convey emotion. Longer, occasionally even rambling sentences can communicate scrambled thoughts, worry, or exasperation. For example, someone trying to recount a highly stressful or exciting event might narrate in run-on sentences. The same could be said of someone who is overstimulated or has had too much caffeine! Here’s an example:

            I put the key in the ignition, then turned it—the key, I mean—and then the engine revved like usual, but as soon as I switched the gear, I heard this noise like someone had dropped a glass from the roof, and then there was this bang and a sputter, and I could smell smoke, so I panicked and hit the breaks even though the car wasn’t moving because I was scared, you know?

The sentence above is narrated in the first person from someone who is frazzled after their car broke down (and who knows what happened before then!). The sentence is longer than any sentence should be, frankly, but the use of punctuation makes it manageable to read/ However, occasionally, using sentences like this is fine because they can effectively convey the person’s emotional state.

Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash

Word Choice

Be methodical about word choice. Sometimes, the right words can go a long way in creating a specific emotion. For example, if I say someone is ‘angry,’ it doesn’t really evoke much of an image, but it I say someone is ‘seething,’ my brain conjures a specific image of a pot about to boil over. It gives me the distinct sense that something bad is about to happen—like someone might lose their temper and lash out. In comparison, the adjective ‘angry’ has very little impact.

Here is another example: if someone is drunk, rather than describing their gait as ‘clumsy’ or ‘uncoordinated,’ you can describe them as ‘shambling.’

“They shambled down the hill” is far more evocative than, “They walked clumsily down the hill,” or, “Their gait was uncoordinated as they walked.”

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

Metaphors and Similes

Perhaps one of my favourite techniques for evoking emotion is using similes and metaphors to conjure a specific image in the reader’s mind. The fact is, direct, simple language often does not create emotional impact the same way that abstract images do. When we write about something directly, it may engender intellectual understanding, but it rarely provokes empathy from the reader.

Metaphors and similes are a great way to communicate how something feels without saying it directly. Because direct and clinical descriptions are so endemic to how we communicate on a daily basis, we are desensitized to their impact. For example, when a friend has a bad day at work, they might say, “I was so annoyed,” and then go on to explain why. We hear this so often that it has almost no meaning and falls flat when encountered in prose.

However, metaphors and similes give us a tool for creative expression for emotions we all experience; they defamiliarize us from the simplicity of loaded terms like ‘anger’ and ‘happiness.’ They offer us a specific and tangible image with which we can better understand the power of what is being conveyed.

For example, saying someone is “unpredictable” doesn’t really evoke any particular emotional response from me as a reader. However, if we say that someone is “like a tornado in the middle of the night,” we can insinuate that they are unpredictable based on culturally shared knowledge and symbolism around tornados: they are highly unpredictable and destructive storms with an erratic path, and the idea of one dropping from the sky after dark is especially terrifying because everything is less visible and less certain when the sun goes down. In other words, it’s the image, not the adjective, that evokes feelings of uncertainty, unpredictability, and anxiety. Through the image, we create an empathic connection with the subject of the writing. As a result, we genuinely feel that the person being written about is unpredictable.

Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

Bodies Talk

Ah yes, the mind-body dualism. Whoever came up with it did some serious damage to how we think of ourselves. In reality, the border between mind and body is paper thin, and anyone who has ever had anxiety (aka all of us) can confirm this. Our emotions manifest through our bodies, and more often than not, bodies speak what we cannot.

For this exact reason, using the body as a tool to convey emotion is far more effective than direct, clinical description. Many of you will have encountered this advice in the form of “show, don’t tell.” For example, rather than telling your reader that someone is grief-stricken, show them through body language.

Does their face twist with realization? Do they curl in on themselves, seeking comfort and safety? Do they flee their immediate surroundings? Do they grab a drink or light a cigarette with a trembling hand? What does their voice sound like? Does it come out rough like sandpaper? Are they swallowing rapidly, mouth parched? Are their eyes red from tears and sleeplessness? Do shadows cling beneath them?

When you find yourself writing a scene that demands emotional impact, try to make those emotions visceral by focusing on the body. Embodied experience is the most tangible way we relate to the world, and it is also one of the best tools for communicating what lies beneath the skin.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

A Delicious #SpineSquad Addition

Posted on by
Reply

Happy Monday, theydies and gentlethems! I’ve got a full roster this week for you on BBB… first up, I’m going to give a little nod (both sad and happy) to Trans Week and TDOR, there’s some rad trans books in the news that deserve a little shoutout, I’ve got a tip to make you smile, a new author (and some delicious snacks) to introduce you to, AND a review of The Harpy, by Megan Hunter, written by contributor CeCe Lyra. Stick with us, there’s lots to see!

First, I’ll give a quick shout out to Téa Mutonji’s short story collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty, which is a kickass collection that totally drew me in when I encountered it at the Toronto launch of Vivek Shraya’s VS. Books, an imprint of Arsenal Pulp Press. Mutonji’s collection is CeCe’s recommendation of a book by a Black author to check out alongside The Harpy.

Trans Week and Trans Day of Remembrance

CW: death, police violence, ableism

Full disclosure: I don’t typically mark Transgender Visibility or Awareness Week, or the Trans Day of Remembrance. There’s a lot that’s complicated and difficult for me about these events, and I do my best to affirm trans voices all the time, and not just these couple of days a year. Despite that, I know that they are meaningful to many people, and so I do want to mark them in this space this year, both with a heavy heart, and also with a celebratory spirit for all the amazing things that trans folks are doing out in the world.

There are two members of my communities that I do want to use this space to recognize and remember. First, Coco, a Black trans sex worker who died in police custody in my local community recently. As many who were close to Coco have said better than I can, Black lives matter, Black trans lives matter, and Coco deserves to be remembered and her communities deserve justice. If you are able to participate or support that cause, check out the links below.

Second, Corey Alexander passed away a few months ago. They were a disabled trans person (like me), who had to balance a lot of factors and considerations when seeking medical support and treatment. Corey was one of the first people to support this blog, and me as a content creator, and for that, I will always be grateful. They left behind an archive of incredible work, including their own books and blog, that are still available to appreciate.

I also want to use this space to share some great resources that other content creators have put together to lift up trans voices right now, and always. First, if you haven’t checked out the Transathon, an ongoing reading challenge to celebrate trans authors and books, you absolutely should. They are sharing AWESOME book lists, like this thread of books by trans authors being released in 2021, some trans books by Orca publishers, and this list from author C.G. Drews. For further reading about the Transathon, I would also recommend reading this wrap up post by participant Daniela, from The Booksnom.

One last book list that I want to share is by bookstagrammer @anyaemilie, which you can check out below:

Trans Books in the News

Quick shoutout to trans YA author Aiden Thomas, whose book Cemetery Boys is currently a finalist in the Best Debut Novel category for the Goodreads Choice Award, but also HUGE congratulations to Kacen Callendar, whose middle grade novel King and the Dragonflies won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature last week! 🎉

#DrawYourBookstore

If you need an uncomplicated bookish something to brighten your days right now, might I suggest checking out the #DrawYourBookstore hashtag, hosted by the SelfMadeHero graphic novel publisher? I discovered it earlier this week when illustrator Mariel Ashlinn Kelly posted her drawing of the bookstore of my heart, Another Story Bookshop, here in Toronto. For safety reasons, I haven’t been able to go there since April, and this drawing made my day.

https://twitter.com/MarielAshlinn/status/1329022817782947840?s=20

New Addition to my List of Authors, the #SpineSquad

For those of you who follow this blog but who aren’t in the professional publishing world, you may not know that I am a literary agent. I don’t usually use this space to make personal announcements, but I’m making a delicious exception, just this once…

I discovered Abi Balingit’s blog, the Dusky Kitchen, when one of her recipes popped up on my Twitter timeline. It was for lao gan ma spicy chili crisp cupcakes. My partner loves that flavour that kind of makes your face go numb a little(??) and sweets, so I was immediately excited and started scrolling Abi’s feed and eating with my eyes. Not long afterward, I started chatting with Abi about working on a cookbook together – something that captures her incredible cultural experiences and translates the diasporic identity through food.

When Abi signed on to work with me, I was thrilled… but as with any agenting project, I also had some major research to do. Abi’s work is largely based on her Filipino-American experiences, and although there is a big Filipinx community in Toronto where I live now, I grew up in Newfoundland, and I had never experienced the flavours in Abi’s recipes before.

I dove into Abi’s blog. First things first, I realized that I had no idea where I was going to get the ingredients needed to make any of these recipes with the flavours that Abi was so passionate about. I did a quick Google for stores in or around Toronto that might have Filipinx products and be offering delivery, since we’re still in COVID quarantine in these parts. I was super hype when I found Sunshine Grocery. This little shop opened because of the pandemic, ships all over, and has a huge range of Filipinx products to choose from. Abi was super helpful and sent me all kinds of recommendations for stuff that my partner and I should try. Really not sure what we were getting into, we went for it…

Our grocery haul from Sunshine Kitchen.

My partner and I are both white, and when the folks from Sunshine showed up to drop off this big order we had made, they were a little confused. And honestly, so were we. Like – I wanted to trust that banana ketchup would make for good pasta sauce, but I just had zero frame of reference, you know? And listen, my partner’s face when ze first tried Filipino spaghetti? Was hilarious. But we’re both hooked on it now, so Sunshine is going to have to get used to seeing our faces! I’m super glad that we trusted Abi, because my partner and I have had a wild delicious week trying out all of the food that we got from that order – and trying Abi’s recipes!

In the spirit of the project that Abi and I will be working on together, my partner and I wanted to pick something that was nostalgic for us, and that was decidedly Filipinx, to test bake from Abi’s blog to welcome her to my author list! I had grown up eating ginger crinkle cookies at Christmastime, and my partner, sen, had grown up with a chocolate version, so we thought that Abi’s ube crinkle cookies would be the perfect place to start.

I can take no credit for the baking this time around – that was all sen – but this recipe was a simple, beautiful adventure… even though we veganized the recipe, and made it in our postage stamp sized kitchen. The cookies were completely irresistible, even though I have never tried ube in my life before this past week, and I can’t wait to try more of Abi’s recipes. Horchata bibingka is next on our list!

I am SO excited to welcome Abi to the #SpineSquad, and I’m so happy to get to learn about all this delicious food! It’s going to be so much fun.

In celebration of all of these delicious flavours that Abi has introduced me to, my partner and I also donated this week to one of the relief efforts in the Philippines following the recent typhoon. If you can donate, please do. There is a Twitter thread linked below of places that are easy and worthwhile to donate to. If you aren’t sure what the situation is in the Philippines right now, and you would like to know more, there are threads linked that summarize recent events as well.

Review of Megan Hunter’s THE HARPY, by CeCe Lyra

Married couple Lucy and Jake each have a role to play. His: reliable and successful breadwinner. Hers: loving wife and mother. It is a familiar set-up—his life is his; hers is theirs. Jake’s career takes center stage. Lucy’s part-time freelance work is barely worth noting, even to herself. They are a family. Never mind that Lucy is bored, that her sharp intellect is wasting away against a backdrop of bourgeois domesticity.

Then one day Lucy gets a call. A man is on the other end of the line. He has news: his wife, Vanessa, has been having an affair with Jake. Lucy has met Vanessa—Vanessa and Jake work together. The two couples have socialized. The betrayal cuts Lucy. Jake does not deny the adultery. He begs Lucy for forgiveness. Lucy wants to hurt Jake. (I wanted to hurt Jake, too.) And she does—a brush of her fingernail against his skin. An accident. But it is satisfying, comforting. To keep their family together, they come up with an arrangement: Lucy will hurt Jake three times, and then they will be even.

What unfolds is a dance of reckoning and retribution, one that leads Lucy down a dark path. Slowly, quietly, she succumbs to her violent impulses. Through it all, Lucy feels the push and pull of guilt (how can she unravel when she is the mother of two children?) and desire (Jake deserves this—he hurt her first). And we feel for her. After all, it is a familiar urge—inside every woman lives a question: what would happen I didn’t behave? By bearing witness to Lucy’s yielding we allow ourselves to do more than wonder.

Written in a musical prose that is both delicate and sharp, THE HARPY examines the darkness that inhabits all love stories. It reads like a fairy tale, but not of the Disney variety. It is a story about a woman succumbing to primal urges: shredding her societal self, eschewing domesticity, and allowing destructiveness to take over. It is a meditation on metamorphosis. It is a story about a woman’s unravelling. But—strangely enough—is it also the opposite. It is the story of a woman coming home to herself.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Just Me!

Posted on by
1

Hey friends! This week on the blog, I’m doing something a little different than the massive, exciting guest posts I’ve been throwing around lately. This week… it’s JUST ME. I’m going to tell you, 1, about this rad video game I played this weekend, and 2, I’m FINALLY going to let this post that I wrote in 2018 and for some reason NEVER POSTED go LIVE! Be free, ye olde blog post! Tell the world now VERY belatedly about the brilliant book Jonny Appleseed, by Joshua Whitehead.

Before we dive in, a quick plug that NEXT WEEKEND is the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) Kids Book Fest, which is free, live, and online this year. Don’t miss it! It’s one of my favourite events of the year. Photo evidence below.

https://twitter.com/AmandaLeduc/status/1178480434247798784?s=20

Visual Novel: Neo Cab

I think probably more than I should about what “reading” means. The perennial question of, is listening to audiobooks reading? Semantically, maybe not, but practically, of course, especially in a world where visually perceiving words on a page isn’t accessible to all readers. In my house, we do a lot of reading. My partner reads braille, and I use a text-to-voice app to give my eyes a break from sensory overload, we both have eReaders, we have an impressive stash of audiobooks, and predictably, our physical bookshelves are full to bursting.

When I was a kid, I devoured Choose Your Own Adventure books. The series was immensely popular, selling over 250 million copies in the 1980’s and 90’s alone. It still continues to this day – the latest series is Choose Your Own Adventure: Spies, based on non-fiction stories. The next title in the series, Mary Bowser, written by Black author Kyandreia Jones, comes out in October. Later, I discovered interactive text games, and recently, I decided to try out a visual novel on Nintendo Switch.

Visual novels are otherwise known as point and click narrative games, and are distinct from adventure games, which incorporate narrative and other gameplay aspects, for example, puzzle-solving. Visual novels are text-based stories that integrate animation with interactive elements. I honestly didn’t know how I’d feel about this. I love slice of life anime, which seemed to have some of the same flavours as visual novels, but I wondered if they would just feel like really boring action adventure games. I’m not a … super patient person.

Turns out? I love them. They absolutely incorporate aspects of slice of life, and also simulation games, in ways that feel organic and engaging. When partnered with really stunning visuals, they are a really great way to spend an afternoon.

Neo Cab is described as an “emotional survival game”, and it’s available for Switch, Linux, Mac, iOS, and PC. In it, you play Lina, a WOC who is basically a near-future Uber driver, who just moved to the city to be with her (toxic) best friend, Savy. The game is queer-coded, heartwarming, anti-capitalist, AND has really skillful non-binary rep. It checked every box for me… and taught me weirdly uncomfortable truths about myself. (Are video games allowed to do that??) If you’re having trouble getting into conventional reading these days, for whatever reason, or you’re just looking for a new way to experience storytelling, this game is a great place to start.

Jonny Appleseed: Written December, 2018

Listen, yall. I wrote this piece around the time I created this blog. I didn’t know back then if I was going to really be able to commit to this thing, and it felt like A Lot. Also, the launch it’s about… fully changed my life. It was when I got to really meet the incredible Alicia Elliott, who continues to inspire me to this day. I had a lot going on at the time. Somehow, this fell down in my drafts and never got posted. So, consider this a time capsule, because Jonny Appleseed seriously deserves the air time.

When I found out that my book shop would be hosting the (belated) Toronto launch of Joshua Whitehead’s debut novel Jonny Appleseed, I was so excited that I immediately messaged my managers to ask if I could work the event. Whitehead had been on my radar since spring of 2018. He was nominated for a Lambda award in the Trans Poetry category for his previous publication, full-metal indigiqueer, a collection that propels Two-Spirit (among other) identities out of a Eurocentric-imposed past and into an anti-colonial future.  I read and admired the clear and generous letter that Whitehead wrote when he turned down the nomination, calling for space to be made to celebrate Two-Spirit identities within (colonial) literary award frameworks. Then, I encountered Whitehead himself at the FOLD last spring, where his books sold out completely, and customers who had attended his panels raved about how well-spoken and spellbinding he was on stage. Jonny is one of the only books I’ve ever found myself searching through boxes for in the middle of the night at the book shop.

After all of this exposition, I was hungry for the months-late launch of Jonny Appleseed… and I hadn’t even peeled open the cover of the book yet. Ultimately, I didn’t manage to start Jonny Appleseed until five days before the event, which meant that I finally finished the book only a few hours before Whitehead would take the stage. I was still wiping tears off my cheeks when I headed out for work that day, as I sent a text to my partner to say that I was sobbing in our living room over the end of the book – in a good way.

The blurbs and press copy on the back of Jonny Appleseed describe it as a fever dream that centres on a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer glitter princess, who is returning home to attend his stepfather’s funeral. I cannot emphasize enough that even with all the hype that I experienced around this book, so much was still completely unexpected for me.

The non-linear novel is peppered with nostalgic and evocative anecdotes about Jonny’s close relationship with his kokum (grandmother), and I hadn’t anticipated that being such poignant part of the book. I was raised in a small rural city by my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother all under one roof. Although my relationship and memories of my familial matriarchs looked very different from Jonny’s in some cases, there were striking similarities, and I found these sections of the text to be heart wrenching. Whitehead has what seems to be a careful willingness to delve into the complexities of the relationships that exist between people who exchange caretaking; a tactful ability not to shy from the grittiness in these relationships, but to describe them in such a way that they don’t lose sweetness in the process.

Jonny Appleseed also wrestles with the reconciliation of identities with the environments that the character inhabits. On the rez (reservation) where Jonny was raised, he struggles to find space to safely express the queer and gender-defying aspects of his Two-Spirit identity. After moving to the city, he struggles instead to find space for his Indigineity. For a reader like me, the experience of this theme was twofold. While carving out space for a complex identity is relatable, it was also educational, and any white settler reader would do well to learn from this book.

Perhaps most unexpectedly? I laughed. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I have trouble laughing. Whitehead cleverly weaves pop culture references into this book, and through them had me chuckling and reading passages aloud to other people. 

I’ve already passed on my copy and an additional two copies of Jonny Appleseed to friends and family. It was released in paperback, and it’s well worth the investment required to check it out.

Also, check out Joshua Whitehead’s new collection, Love After the End, a young adult anthology of stories by Indigenous authors, featuring Two Spirit and queer heroes in utopian and dystopian settings.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Trans (P)review and FOLD Kids

Posted on by
Reply

Books Beyond Binaries Editorial Services

A little shameless self-promotion to start off this post, before I get to the good stuff!

https://twitter.com/FrostFireSky/status/1298661284385349636?s=20

As most of you know, as well as being a full time student, I am also a fledgling literary agent and a bookseller. I make most of my living in my student life, taking on freelance research projects, and I’ve usually had the comfort of a small but reliable paycheque from the bookshop where I work part time to fall back on. Unfortunately, because of COVID, both of these sources of income have all but disappeared from my life these days. As such, I’ve decided to start offering book doctor services to writers alongside my agenting career. I’m putting my experience of 3 years as a bookseller, nearly a decade in academic publishing, and my first year in traditional publishing to work with competitive rates to support writers at all stages of their careers. You can check out my Fiverr page here if you’re interested. While I am available for bigger contracts, I love offering thorough first pages critiques to strengthen longer projects and pitch packages.

FOLD Kids

Before I jump in to this week’s feature, I want to highlight an amazing event coming up TOMORROW for educators, supported by The Festival of Literary Diversity’s Kids Book Fest. Details for Decolonizing Education and the Role of Restorative Justice in Schools is a free webinar, and details can be found below. While you’re looking, registration opens on September 2nd for the Kids Book Fest being held in October that is not to be missed if you’re a supporter of diverse literature for young readers, a parent, an educator, or a young reader yourself!

Register on Eventbrite

Kit Mayquist’s Review of FIRST, BECOME ASHES, by K. M. Szpara

I cannot say enough how excited I am to host this review, written by up and coming #SpineSquad author, Kit Mayquist, who recently celebrated the sale of his debut novel, Tripping Arcadia, to Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

There is nothing I love more than trans stories being reviewed by trans readers. While Kit is just beginning a promising literary career of his own, K. M. Szpara made waves with his debut Docile, and his sophmore release First, Become Ashes is expected in April of 2021 and is available for pre-order now.

To readers of First, Become Ashes, Kit would also like to recommend one of my favourite haunted house books of all time, The Good House, by Tananarive Due. Tananarive Due is an epic horror author who I didn’t learn about until way too recently. If you’ve been sleeping on her work, definitely check it out. It will give you chills, no matter how hot this summer is getting.

There is magic in the world, though it depends on who you ask.

Being raised in a cult of Baltimore-based, monster-hunting wizards, the main character Lark is awaiting his 25th birthday where he will undertake his mission as one of The Anointed, and fulfill his oath to rid the corrupted world of monsters. When we begin, he is bidding his partner and lover Kane goodbye, watching him leave the guarded gates of Druid Hill and venture into the world to complete his own mission, but for Lark, this ending is the largest beginning he could imagine, as Kane betrays them and reports the Fellowship of the Anointed to the FBI, resulting in a sting operation and their arrest.

It is rare to find a story where two realities can exist simultaneously and still seem rooted in our own, present day. First, Become Ashes deals with many topics that readers will find familiar, topics such as growing up and discovering your own beliefs versus those you were raised in, and the rocky path of wrestling with belief when everyone seems to have a different opinion on it. Much like in Szpara’s debut novel, Docile, First Become Ashes is a story of a man discovering who he is in the world as he undergoes a deprogramming. In fact, for many readers of Docile, the themes in First, Become Ashes will seem very familiar. Our protagonist, Lark has an inner narrative and voice that is strong-headed and yet, gives the reader full insight into the unraveling (and lack thereof) of his beliefs and of his identity as he wrestles with what it means to exist beyond life as a chosen one for a cult that the world is all too happy to condemn. Much like how Docile followed Elisha as he lost sense of himself and struggled to regain it, our protagonist takes the reader on a journey full of bravado and surety, with his fingernails clinging so hard to his beliefs that he practically bleeds. His is a story of agreement with his cult’s beliefs and a resistance to the efforts of those around him to tell him otherwise. Along his journey Lark meets a cosplayer, Calvin and in him he finds companionship as well as another soul desperate to believe there is magic in the world.

 From a meet-cute beside the dumpsters in cosplay (relatable for many of us, I’m sure), to unashamed enthusiasm for the 21st century nerd and fan culture (so many references, so many!), Calvin is just like any one of us. Eager to go on a quest, and above all else, eager to believe that the rumors about The Fellowship of the Anointed’s ability to wield magic is genuine. For Calvin, Lark’s presence in his life is a much awaited turning point, and a choice he makes to find out for once and for all if he can live the life of the characters he dresses up as, and possibly find love in the process. What he does not expect, is to go on a road trip with a bag of BDSM toys in the trunk, and to discover that for some, magic does not come from a loving, joyous space, but from something darker.

 First Become Ashes comes with a warning of sadomasochism, and it is a warning well-deserved if that is not your thing. If it is your thing, you will be well rewarded. Much like in Docile, themes surrounding consent, and what it means for our protagonist, develop through a narrative that makes such lessons poetic and extremely grounded in the story’s plot and world-building. For Lark, there is no question magic is real, he feels it in his body, becoming weak when he is drained of it. It is a very real thing. It is also something that requires a partner to hurt him in order to produce, and it is a process his scar-marked body enjoys arguably more than any other member of The Fellowship.

 As his bond with Lark develops, it is revealed Calvin is no stranger to BDSM and the world of kink, though Lark’s approach to it, and his relationship to a life where pain is a necessity and not something pleasurable, is concerning. This raises an internal debate throughout the book for Calvin and Lark’s Fellowship partner, Kane, about if Lark is even aware of his own kinks, and if he can come to understand his own enjoyment and embrace pleasure in his life aside from shoving down any positives for the sake of self-discipline. One final note on the BDSM link to magic and ritual in the book is that there are two major instances of sexual abuse and rape on the page as we learn about the actions of The Fellowship and their leader. Though not glorified, the scenes highlight the link between spiritual and sexual abuse in a way that may be extremely triggering for some readers, so please be advised.

However as serious as the themes discussed in First, Become Ashes are, it is not without humor. References to protein shakes as ‘potions’ and glow sticks from your classic convention rave being used as evidence of magic come with a nod and a wink that feels like that assignment I had once in Anthropology 101 to discuss current items as if they were being discovered 100 years from now. That being said, the humor serves a dual purpose in showing us just how isolated Lark and the other Fellowship member’s lives have been, and while some pick up the intricacies of modern day objects like hotel key cards and Google Maps with ease, for others, it is a reminder of just how much they’ve been denied, and a challenge to avoid a deep seeded fear of spiritual corruption.

It is no shock that the beliefs of First, Become Ashes feel so rooted and real, knowing that Szpara himself has a Theology degree. What was perhaps most refreshing to me was seeing a classic ‘Doomsday cult’ without the Christian lens. Instead the Fellowship reminded me most of my own childhood spent in metaphysical circles and having soul paintings done and being taught to bend spoons with my mind when all I wanted to do was play Pokémon. I think this is why for myself especially, the experiences of the various Fellowship members in the book feel truer to life than anything else. In First, Become Ashes we see all sides of the belief debate. The one who chose to leave, the one who was abused, the one who was never chosen, the shunned Preacher’s Kid, and the outsiders who want to believe, as well as those who hate them. Seemingly every perspective on The Fellowship and their actions is explored at least briefly, and readers are likewise taken on the journey of whether the magic is real or not, bouncing between proof for both sides, and unexplainable instances that will continuously leave you guessing yourself, just how much is fact or fiction.

Last though certainly not least, as a member of the LGBTQ2S+ community myself, First, Become Ashes is full of inclusive language and gender identities (one of the best things about The Fellowship is the normalized greeting of “What are your pronouns?” ) making it as comforting a read as it is a challenging one in terms of themes. Queerness is on the page in a celebratory way, as are discussions of polyamory and different types of love; something I’d personally like to see much more of from publishing. Ultimately First, Become Ashes is an excellent, well-awaited sophomore novel to Szpara’s Docile, while treading equally in familiar territory as well as new. Szpara’s ability to connect sex and identity to the plot in an inseparable way are what make his writing memorable long beyond the last page, and what make this novel shine.

Starred Rating: 5/5

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!