flight & anchor ARC giveaway!!
Friday, December 16th, 2022two copies up for grabs, international entries okay! sorry it’s on twitter–the idea of learning a new social media platform makes me want to tear all my skin off! enter here!!
two copies up for grabs, international entries okay! sorry it’s on twitter–the idea of learning a new social media platform makes me want to tear all my skin off! enter here!!
it’s another platonic love story because of course it is. it’s also the most overtly ace thing i’ve ever written. also it was a hell of a lot of fun to do. hope you like đ
those of you who follow my patreon may remember when i was drafting a story about twelve-year-old 06 and 22 and their daring escape from stellaxis to have a(n) (mis)adventure in a shipping container in a vacant lot, in blatant homage to the boxcar children, an extremely influential book of my very young childhood. (i’d still like to live in the woods in an old train car, if i’m honest.)
anyway, it ended up doing a lot more character work heavy lifting than expected, and it ties in stuff not only from firebreak, obviously, but also archivist wasp, latchkey, and jillian vs. parasite planet. (yes, even the middle-grade book. stop looking at me like that, it made sense in my head.)
anyway, it’s gonna be a book! and preorders are open!
i had a ton of fun with this one and i very much hope you enjoy. <3
I wrote a story (a novella really) and it’s totally free-to-read. This one means a lot to me and I hope you like it!
Just learned that FIREBREAK is on the Locus Recommended Reading List in extremely shiny company as usual. If you enjoyed it enough to vote for it in the readers’ poll, you can do so here!!
I’ve gotten a few messages lately like “I had no idea you had a patreon!” which just goes to show that mentioning something on social media every month or two only feels like spamming to you and nobody else notices. Anyway, yes I have one! It’s pay-what-you-want, no tiers, all access to everything for whatever you feel like tossing into the hat. I could definitely use, and absolutely appreciate, the support, but the most important thing to me is to make sure the stuff I put on there is as accessible as possible. I don’t want to hide all the goodies behind a series of paywalls.
Somehow I’ve had this thing running since the summer of 2018 and not run out of stuff to put on there! It’s where all my book extras and tie-ins and character/worldbuilding stuff I couldn’t fit into books live. There are deleted scenes and alternate endings and just an unholy mess of Easter eggs. I wrote up a bunch of the myths from the Archivist Wasp books on there, and am serializing a novella about 06 and 22 at age twelve running away from Stellaxis HQ and having an Adventure which is an homage to The Boxcar Children, a book I loved when I was five or so. And it’s got the first few chapters of the third and final Archivist Wasp book, tentatively titled Catchkeep, which will probably be drafted in its entirety on there eventually. It’s also where I put drafts of stories and chapters of books in progress and whatever randomness I’m working on at the time.
Anyway, thanks a ton for your support! It’s a source of constant amazement that anyone’s interested enough in my stuff to want to see it in its super messy in-progress form, but it’s also kinda neat. <3
I have way too many author copies of my books and a number of people have been asking me where they can buy signed copies for holiday gifts, so let’s make this simple! I haven’t really gone anywhere to sign anything since *gestures at 2021* but the good news is you can get them directly from me. đ
Here’s what I have! Email me at nicolekornherstace@gmail.com with what you’re interested in and I’ll get you a total with shipping + payment info. Thanks so much for helping me clear out these boxes!!
All prices include signing, I don’t charge extra for that. All are also a bit below retail because why not. <3
Domestic (US) shipping is $5 for the first book, $2 for each book after that.
I can ship internationally, just be aware that the shipping cost is going to suck. On the bright side, people who have bought signed books from me recently have consistently reported that international shipping is waaaaay faster than expected. Still expensive though. đ
——
FIREBREAK (hardcover) $20
JILLIAN VS. PARASITE PLANET (hardcover) $15 — SOLD OUT, THANK YOU <3
LATCHKEY (trade paperback) $15
ARCHIVIST WASP (audio CD) $20
ARCHIVIST WASP (trade paperback IN ROMANIAN ONLY–English language ones are gone, sorry!) $10
This never happens. Thanks to the several people who yelled at me to do one. đ Here’s the stuff I published in 2021:
Firebreak (adult SF novel) Simon & Schuster/Saga, May
Jillian vs. Parasite Planet (middle-grade SF novel) Tachyon Publications, July
“Pathfinding!” (novelette) in Issue 38 of Uncanny
I have no idea how this happened but here we are! If you enjoyed it, you can vote for it here!
So over on Twitter I talk a lot about the need for non-romantic non-sexual relationships in fiction. Like, a lot a lot. I just think that this idea that we outgrow the desire for friendship-centering character arcs when we graduate from middle-grade to young adult & adult books is…really sad. And infuriating. And boring. And sad.
I wrote an essay about this a while ago, but something about it never really felt right to me? It’s the first essay I ever wrote with the idea of publication, so that’s probably part of it, but in writing it I felt like I was standing at some kind of remove from what I was saying. Later I realized that’s because I really, really suck at writing about myself personally. Which is hilarious, given that all of my fiction is outrageously personal.
Clearly the solution is to make it more personal. So here’s my whole story, right in time for Asexual Awareness Week (Oct 24-30). This is about how it took me nine million years to realize I was aromantic & asexual, due to the zero (0) examples of strong platonic M/F relationships I saw represented growing up, despite shoveling books, movies, and video games into my brain basically as aggressively as humanly possible. And it’s about how I set out to write the books I wanted to see and never did, and how that was a long weird road, and how now I make it my mission to help other writers doing the same.
(IMPORTANT NOTE that this essay is in second-person because it is the literal only way I could trick my brain into writing about Personal Shit (no I don’t know why I’m like this), not because I think everyone’s aspec experience is interchangeable or that I presume to speak for anyone but me, &c)
This ended up running, uh, several thousand words longer than intended, and it took me a solid week to put together. If you enjoy it, please consider dropping a tip in my ko-fi, joining my Patreon, or checking out my books!
When youâre two years old, your mom will teach you to read. This will be relevant soon.
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When youâre nine, youâll have your first crush. It wonât be like your friendsâ crushes. You wonât realize this until the interrogation begins. What will your wedding be like. How many kids will you have. Do you think heâll be a good kisser. What would your dream date be. While all youâll have imagined so far (though youâll have imagined this at length) is the absolutely killer treehouse you and he will build together once you get up the nerve to tell him how you feel (you wonât). The way youâll make this place between you, passing nails and hammers back and forth, the creation of your hands and his stretching up into the sky one vaguely pictured board at a time. (You wonât do that either. Heâll ask some other girl out and your friends will comfort you, misguidedly. On a scale of one to ten, theyâll ask, half schadenfreude half pity, how jealous are you? Zero, youâll think. Eleven. Neither. Both.)
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When youâre ten, youâll already be an established loner. Youâll get along with pretty much everyone, but youâre finding that your priorities are different from your friendsâ priorities. Youâll feel like thereâs something youâre searching for. You just have no idea what it is, not really. It wonât be a conscious effort toward escapism when you settle fully into a life suffused by fiction. In your spare time youâll read books, watch movies, play story-heavy video games. Youâll find thereâs a certain character dynamic youâre drawn to, that speaks directly to your heart, and youâll find that the depiction of it is always slightly off somehow, some kind of uncanny valley-esque sense of vague disquiet, and you wonât be able to make either of those things make sense to yourself, though you will spend the next two fucking decades trying. For now youâll find yourself watching war movies, a genre you wonât even really care about at face value, just because thatâs the only place you can find that pure clean hit of camaraderie that does not involve kissing. Youâll watch badasses fighting back-to-back against a sea of enemies, fall protecting each other, be slung over a shoulder and carried from the field of battle as bullets whiz overhead, to survive together or die in each otherâs arms. Youâll watch all this, and rewatch it, and analyze, and study, and think, inanely, helplessly: this is almost, almost it.
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When youâre eleven, your best friends will all be boys. Girls will ask you if youâre dating and side-eye each other knowingly when you say you arenât. Theyâll think youâre lying, of course, but will never be able to secure any proof, so eventually theyâll let it go. Meanwhile, youâll be a chronic daydreamer. Girls will assume youâre thinking about all those boys youâre allegedly not going out with. Sometimes you will be, but not in the way they mean. Youâll never have fantasized about a kiss in your life. When boys live in your head rent-free, itâs exclusively in contexts that the other girls will already deem childish, and the boys will all be fictional, because thatâs how you can always be sure to preserve those friendships, like beautiful insects in amber, where theyâll never have to either follow that prescribed evolution into either romance or devolve into just friends, romanceâs failure state. Youâll pilot spacecraft together, fight off zombies, go questing, pull off heists. These daydreams will blatantly rip off the plots of all your favorite action movies. A vague but pervasive sense of transgression will set in at this point: not in terms of copyright infringement but in the way these mental action movies are cast. Because yours will always have a male/female character pairing, and theyâll never kiss, and thereâll never be sexual tension, and theyâll just have each otherâs backs against whatever comes and never make it Weird. (Every time your family rents a weekend movie, youâll hope with every atom of fervency you possess that this will be the one to finally, magically, permanently make this kind of pairing real outside your head. It wonât be.)
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When youâre twelve, youâll start writing fanfiction, but you wonât know yet that this is a thing people do, or that thatâs what itâs called. All youâll know is that you live your life steeped in stories, and that they inform everything you do, and that yet theyâve always disappointed you in some fundamental, as-yet-nameless way. Your friends will know you like to readâitâll be obvious, youâll carry a book with you wherever you go, in school youâll get in trouble for clandestinely flipping through pages during classâso theyâll lend you books theyâve loved. You wonât want to offend them, so you borrow them dutifully, and you read. Thereâll be a lot of Anne Rice. Youâll be into the paranormal shit, but the romance and the sexiness will be wasted on you, and youâll feel, briefly, like a Bad Friend for not loving the books your friends loved, and more lastingly, like a Bad Human for not having your buttons pushed by these very basic universal human-button-pushing mechanisms. But youâll get over it, or youâll get around it anyway, and youâll start writing stories of your own. They will all be Adventures. Specifically they will all be Adventures full of ride-or-die strictly platonic camaraderie undertaken by a thinly-veiled self-insert of you and whatever fictional character youâve fixated on at the time. Because you will fixate. Hardcore. And this is the part that will confuse you for a while to come: itâll always be male characters who are the object of your fascination. (Specifically: male characters who are not in onscreen or on-page romantic or sexual relationships and show no canonical interest in either. If they start to, youâll either reverse-ship them out of those relationships or drop them altogether.) So youâll spend a great deal of time trying to convince yourself that your interest is romantic and/or sexual, and that something about your mode of expression of these things is just malfunctioning somehow. Because what else could it be? Youâll search (and search, and search) and never find, never once, never in the quarter century that will unfold between here and where youâll sit at a desk one night typing these words, anything in any book or any movie or any game or anywhere that reads the way you need it to, hits the way you need it to, to make you understand the way you are, the way you arenât, and the way youâll be eventually blessedly relieved to learn you never actually had to be.
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When youâre thirteen, you wonât be angry yet. Just confused. Thisâll be the 90s and youâll have never heard the words aromantic or asexual. Your options, as far as youâll be aware, will be Straight or Lesbian. Youâll be pretty sure youâre neither. Your interest in dating, in kissing, in the trappings of romance as youâve seen them depicted, will be nil. Your interest in sex will begin and end with a vague, nearly-academic clearly this is a big deal to everyone, it must be pretty neat sense of mild-to-moderate curiosity. But youâll be watching more adult movies now, reading exclusively adult books, so youâre getting it loud and clear from all sides that your failure to feel interest in these things is exactly that. Some kind of defect on your part. In school, kids will ask each other if theyâre straight or gay, but itâll be a trick question, because, again, thisâll be the 90s, where, at least in the shitty microcosm of your middle school, only one of these answers is acceptable. When pressed, youâll think back on your fictional-character fixations: all male. All right, youâll think. I guess Iâm straight. But youâll already know better. Whatever it is you really are, there are no words for. At least none you can see from where youâll stand.
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When youâre fourteen, youâll start seriously trying to publish. This will still be the 90s, so âtrying to publishâ will involve you, a dog-eared copy of Writerâs Market, a truly unholy amount of self-addressed stamped envelopes, and more patience than youâll heretofore have ever had to marshal in your life. All of your stories will be fairly dissimilarâyouâll be learning, trying to figure out what genre you want to work in, experimenting with your style, copying the styles of authors you admire, etc.âbut with a common thread running through them. Youâll be essentially drawing from the same deep fierce aching well of longing that had you writing those Platonic Adventures⢠fics a couple years ago. For all the thousands and thousands of stories youâll have consumed by this point, literally zero have scratched this itch that youâre beginning to think is unreachable, even though it will seem to you like the simplest thing in the world: take that zero-romance war-movie kill-and-die-for-each-other pairing and make one of them a woman. Thatâs all. So youâll set out to fill this void yourself. Youâll send out piles of short stories and get rejectionsâpersonalized rejections from pro markets, which you wonât understand the significance of until later but for now will feel like insult to injuryâand theyâll all say basically the same thing. I really enjoyed the story and the prose is vivid but the characterization is just too unrelatable.
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When youâre fifteen, two of your friends will invite you to join them in a threesome. Youâll have to figure out how to say no thank you without a.) causing offense or b.) outing yourself as a person whoâs never had sex or so much as kissed anyone and has frankly zero real desire to do either. Youâll never be quite sure if you succeeded. After that youâll go home and work on the novel youâve been tinkering on all year, a big weird sprawling epic fantasy mess featuring a woman and a man in an allies-to-enemies-to-allies-to-queerplatonic-partners relationship, which is something you wonât have words for until much later. (The word queerplatonic alone will save you so much time and fumbling at explanations and helpless gesticulating, a decade hence when youâll finally learn it and wish you could dropkick it back through time to hit your teenage self upside the head.) All youâll know now is that to write it feels like how you imagine therapy to feel. Like youâre a boat full of holes traversing high seas and youâre bailing the water out, steadily, infinitesimally, one horribly inadequate word at a time.
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When youâre sixteen, your friends will start to wonder (or start to wonder out loud) why you arenât dating anyone. Theyâll try to set you up with boys. Youâll learn to feign enthusiasm when they tell you who secretly likes you but hasnât said anything because theyâre also a little bit scared of you. (At this age, your resting bitchface game will already be the stuff of legend.) Just ask him out, theyâll say. Heâs intimidated. Youâre intimidating. But heâll say yes if he sees youâre interested. Should I tell him for you? Youâll have gotten pretty good by now at turning down various offers. Youâre probably not as slick at it as you think you are, though. Youâll already be developing a pretty solid reputation for being a little odd. Youâll be exquisitely, painfully aware that high school girl is a kind of costume you have to put on every morning in order to pass as the thing youâre supposed to be. Youâll fall in with the fantasy nerds and anime kids, because theyâll be the first people youâll have ever met who understand the way that fictional characters can carve a niche into your fucking soul and live there uninvited. So youâll end up reading some of their fanfic, which will almost invariably be of the sexy kind, and itâll be well-written and well-thought-out and probably hot but you genuinely wonât be able to tell. Youâll make polite noises and attempt to write Sexy Fic of your own to share, as camouflage. Meanwhile youâll conveniently forget to bring in any of your original fiction, which is absent all sexiness and full of fight scenes, mainly, and Saving The World and Unlikely Alliances and Enemies-to-Besties and Platonic Longing, which by now you already know from your tidy stack of publication rejections is unrelatable and lacking development in its character relationships and better suited to a childrenâs book. (Youâll still be trying to publish, and, recalling all those war movies, youâll toy with the idea of rewriting one of your male/female ride-or-die platonic pairings to have two male characters instead, as an experiment. To see if thatâs more palatable to the industry. But you wonât. Youâll already know the answer.)
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When youâre seventeen, you wonât have outgrown any of this. Youâll wait to, and wait to, and wait to, and fail.
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When youâre eighteen: ditto.
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When youâre nineteen, you will meet a boy. Youâll tell yourself your feelings are romantic. Youâll bend the full spotlight of your focus on convincing yourself this is true. One day, a few months in, youâll realize you actually have no idea what romantic feelings feel like. Youâll sit with this for days, thinking back on romantic subplots in books and movies, remembering what youâve heard your friends say about being In Love, etc. Youâll conclude that romance is a function of marketing, invented to con people into buying Valentineâs Day crap. Nothing thatâs always felt so fake to you could possibly be real. Youâd know about it by now. Exhibit A: that boy you met. Heâs a boy, and youâre a girl, so either what you feel for him is romantic or itâs nothing. And itâs obviously not nothing, so what other option do you have? See, hereâs the other thing about you. Youâll always be this mix of introverted and analytical. The analytical will turn inward, self-examine. Youâve always known your heart quite well and always will. The introverted will mean that youâd rather punch yourself repeatedly in the face than talk about any of this to anyone. Besides, by this point youâll have been getting weird looks from your friends for a solid decade when they notice how adamantly you deflect anything having to do with romance, dating, sex. Youâll still be writing, though. For a minute youâll wonder if being In Love (?) as you obviously are (?) will seep into your stories, drip by drip, rusting all those forged-steel platonic bonds down to something more malleable, smoother-edged, easier for the publishing industry to swallow. Whether youâll finally climb down off that hill where youâve ill-advisedly decided to die and just concede and write a stupid fucking romance for once in your miserable life. (Spoiler: you wonât. Youâll stick to your mission. Your authordom niche will become: Battle Couples, But Platonic. Itâs a lonely hill to stand on, but you wonât budge.)
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When youâre twenty, youâll be putting the final polish on the first draft of whatâll end up being your first published novel. (Youâll have written most of the first draft after busting both of your ankles falling down the stairs the summer after you graduated high school, and spending months stuck in bed with your laptop because that same ridiculous stubbornness that kept you up on that hill to die also, it turns out, keeps you from seeing a doctor.) Itâll have an ensemble cast, but the two main characters will be a woman and a man in an Unlikely Alliance that never turns romantic. (You will however make the concession of putting some minor characters in token romantic relationships because ârealism.â This will be the first and last book where you make yourself do this.) Meanwhile, in the real world, you still wonât have figured out how to convince yourself that you have any idea what romantic feelings, well, feel like. Youâll have sex, because thatâs what people in relationships do. Youâll initiate sex, because thatâs what thoughtful caring people in relationships do. And itâll be fine and good and objectively enjoyable, but itâll always be something you could take or leave no problem. Certainly miles from the universal pinnacle of human relationships youâve been led to expect. The itch youâre really trying to scratch will always run deeper, or farther off. In any case, elsewhere.
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When youâre twenty-one, youâll start answering the dreaded question so what do you write about? with friendships, but more so. Thereâs not a word for it that I can find. Usually the reply will be laughing, predictable: youâve never heard of âmore than friends?â Thatâs called a couple. And itâll feel like the two of you are speaking different languages, like youâve asked for coffee, but more so, expecting espresso, and they handed you a cup of tea. Around this time, or maybe a few years earlier, youâll receive a short story rejection that youâll realize, fifteen years later, you still have, taped into an old journal which otherwise contains mostly dreams. It will read, in part: Well, I just finished the story and am left completely speechless. I am still not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Yes itâs interesting and a little gruesome, but inaccessible. That last wordâinaccessibleâwill be, by now, by far, your most commonly-received complaint. Often they will go on to specify that the thing that was so hard to wrap their minds around was the relationship between the characters. Is it romantic or isnât it? you will be asked, like it matters. The loyalty and devotion between them is admirable but itâs a little bewildering to me that they stay friends. I expected their relationship to evolve. Which will infuriate you. How can an I-would-kill-or-die-for-you partnership be bewildering, or insufficient? When all those war movies you grew up on exist? Surely it canât be only because one of the characters is a woman and that you outright reject the expected trajectory of that narrative setup. Except it can be, and it will be, and it always was. Each one of these you receive, and by now there are hundreds, will only strengthen your resolve, which by this point is fairly fucking adamant, even if itâs only your own head getting beaten against it.
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When youâre twenty-two, the predominant emotion in your arsenal will be despair.
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When youâre twenty-three, youâll realize youâre pregnant. This will be funnier in hindsight. Youâll debate whether to keep the pregnancy and conclude it might be kinda fun to try something new. After all, nothing else youâre doing is working. (This will be an objectively terrible reason to decide this, which you will realize later once the depression isnât leaning on you quite so hard, with quite so many elbows. But youâll be incredibly lucky in that your kid will be stone-cold fucking awesome.)
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When youâre twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, you will be everything you ever swore you wouldnât. You will be married, with a kid, a house, a mortgage. The costume you put on daily will become indistinguishable from yourself. Youâll write a whole strange novel about a thwarted lady explorer and an airship thatâs possessed by some kind of amoral entity from beyond the veil, and the Adventures they go on together. Itâll almost land you an agent, and then lose them when they decide the book is Just Too Weird and the relationship between the two main characters too Unrelatable. Still you wonât give up, or give in, or write something just a bit more palatable, as requested of you many, many times by now. Youâve drawn a line; now youâre fucking well going to hold it. Even if nobody ever notices but you. When you think of publishing, the mental image you have is something from a scary story you read, once, as a kid: a woman accidentally buried alive, only to be disinterred days later, nails peeled back, fingertips pulp on the bone, coffin-lid unmoved. But when you write, it will feel like reaching back toward yourself through a succession of mirrors, each of which reflects nothing you recognize. Like being exhumed.
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When youâre thirty, youâll start work on what will become the first of your books that more than five people will actually read. Itâll be about a far-future post-apocalyptic ghosthunter, the ghost of a near-future supersoldier, and their Adventure into the Underworld to find the ghostâs long-dead partner. It will center not one but two zero-romance male/female relationships, one of which will be a Battle Couple, But Platonic, the other of which will be Enemies to Besties. Itâll deal with themes and images and characters youâve carried around in your head and heart for quite some time, unwritten into anything, like a heavy weight youâre unsure quite how to put down. Itâll be weird and raw and wholly imperfect, and you wonât ever really polish it to a shine the way you did your past efforts. Itâll feel like something that just came reeling out of you, just on the periphery of your control. This book is, you will recognize at the time, your last fucking stand. It will be a declaration of war that you fully expect to go unanswered.
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When youâre thirty-one, this book will get you a book deal. But not after youâve gotten rejections from every single agent you query. Theyâll express interest, and ask for partials, then full manuscripts, and eventually come back to you with things like a YA book needs a romance in order to be viable and teens will find nothing to relate to in a friendship between male and female characters that does not evolve into something more and, once, memorably: you know, thereâs a reason why people say sex sells. Occasionally, attached to these will be offers of representation contingent on a revise/resubmit. If you can just see your way through to making this one tiny little compromise. Youâll turn them down, every fucking one.
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When youâre thirty-two, itâll be published. Youâll expect it to vanish instantly, a rock dropped in a lake. It wonât. For the first time in your life, youâll start hearing from total strangers who a.) spent time with characters whoâve lived in your head for so many years and b.) liked them enough to let them into their heads too. The lack of romance is so refreshing, theyâll say. I loved the character relationships. Iâve never seen anything like them in a book before. It meant so much to me to see friendships treated with that level of importance outside of a kidsâ book. Peopleâagain, total and complete strangers who owe you nothingâwill take time out of their day to thank you for writing the exact things you’ve been told for twenty years now would appeal to absolutely no one. Others will reach out to tell you about the zero-romance, zero-sexiness, platonic-relationship-centering books theyâve written, and the rejections theyâve received, all of which will look painfully, horribly familiar. Youâll have no way to help them, though youâll wish you would. Youâll tell them that itâs hard, but itâs possible. That there will be people who donât get it but there will be other people who have been waiting for their exact story their whole life. That they may have to be stubbornâbreathtakingly, pigheadedly, irascibly stubbornâand walk away from offers contingent upon the demolition of all the load-bearing structures of the architecture of their whole storyâs soul. They will have to draw a line, in short, and fucking hold it. And they may well fail. After all, you almost did. And probably will again. This wonât keep you from going immediately to work on a sequel, though. Itâs not that you think itâll be any kind of wild successâa sequel to a weird little small press book is no kind of money grab and you know itâbut thatâs not really the point. Your mission now is as it always was: to write the books youâve needed all your life. And your mission now is different: you want to give future new writers a whole pile of precedents to point to when they write this type of book and then have to go to war for it, which they will. You are giving them ammunition. Thatâs your job now. At one point youâll see a review of your book on a trade review blog, and youâll just have to sit with it a minute. Itâll say, in part: there was no romance and yet this is the deepest love story Iâve ever read.
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When youâre thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, you still wonât quite have figured your shit out yet, not really. Youâll still be this super awkward combination of: intensely self-analytical, hilariously awful at accepting what you find there. By now youâll have heard the words asexual and aromantic for a few years, here and there on social media, but still be just a little bit too dense to think to apply them to yourself. Youâll say things in book-promo interviews like hereâs the thing about preteen- and teenage-me. I didnât give a shit about romance. I still donât. Itâs just not who I am. And the concept of sex will still hit you in the same way as a super-popular movie or book whose hype you never remotely understood. Like a joke that everyone finds hilarious, whose punchline you cannot for the life of you comprehend. And yet: youâre in a relationship! You have a kid! You canât possibly be aro enough to be aro, ace enough to be ace. Surely what plagues you is some bespoke malady, some other kind of curse, some kind of brokenness or mistranslation that feels like driving the wrong way down a one-way street, realizing your error, and just fucking flooring it anyway. Somewhere in here youâll go through a period of maybe if you just have more sex, itâll click eventually and youâll understand. This will end as youâd expect.
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When youâre thirty-six, thirty-seven, your sequel will have been out a while. Enough people will have read bothâespecially the first oneâby this point that youâll have received a wide range of responses. Some will have misinterpreted one or both of the main character pairings as romantic, which of course they have. Youâll have expected that. This conditioning is insidious, and it runs deep. You wonât mind their misreads on principle but at the same time you want to make sure that people are aware that intense relationships do actually come in more than the one flavor. So youâll start to talk about this stuff on social media. A lot. You are allergic to social media, talking about yourself gives you hives (a couple years down the line you will write a whole essay in second-person just to trick your brain into letting the words out. The essay will break five thousand words, so maybe that trick works too well?), but youâll learn to make it work as best you can. Itâll put you in direct contact with the kind of readers who were emailing you years ago, and youâll start hearing from a whole lot more of them. Years will have passed since those first sporadic emails landed in your inbox, but the refrain of these messages is much the same. Please please please tell me how you managed to find publishers for books like those without having to rewrite the main relationship. You still wonât have a good answer. A lot of it was luck, as a lot of all publishing is luck, and a lot of it was sheer fucking you-will-die-holding-this-line-with-joy-in-your-heart feral intractability, but not in a way that you want to ever come across as Just Work Harder Like I Did⢠because it isnât that at all and never was. But you will hear such horror stories, and youâll offer what support you can, and youâll know every time itâs not enough. Meanwhile, youâll be busy writing what will become your first book published with a big-5 publisher. The larger advance is helpful, of course, but your real master plan here will be to take the same type of story youâve always told and bring it to a wider audience, in the hopes of normalizing it further. Youâll write the main character as aromantic asexual, because youâve finally concluded that this is what you are, and writing a character whose feelings are your feelings is a lot of how youâll process that (although, if youâre honest, your charactersâ feelings have always reflected yours, and yours have never, ever changed).
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When youâre thirty-eight, your latest book will come out. Itâs been derailed a year by a literal fucking pandemic, because thatâs the world youâll live in now. A pandemic which, among so many other larger problems it causes, will chew up book launches and spit them back out. Itâll feel petty, being upset by this in the grand scheme of things. But this book was what you viewed as your one chance to bring your shit mainstream and clear a path for all those other writers in your inbox asking youâyou, of all the fuckups on earthâfor advice. Youâll get emails about how your book is âonly selling modestlyâ and read reviews about, first, how âunderappreciatedâ and âobscureâ you are as a writer, and second, how if youâd just stop writing such ânicheâ relationship types youâd be better known; and other reviews about how âunrelatableâ and âcreepyâ and âweirdâ your protagonist is for having a platonic crush instead of a romantic one, and youâll get, if youâre honest, a little despairy there for a minute. Youâll console yourself by yelling your head off on Twitter about other peopleâs zero-romance books and aromantic/asexual books and friendship-centering books, asking people about classic romance tropes they want to see flipped platonically, etc. Just so you can prove, with hard evidence, that there is demand for these things. On the other hand, youâll start getting a new kind of email and Twitter message. These ones will say things like I just wanted to thank you for writing the exact kind of relationships you write. They helped me realize that I donât have to write romances into my books if I donât want to. Sometimes theyâll even say Your books helped me realize that Iâm definitely somewhere on the asexual spectrum, which I never really considered before but which explains pretty much my entire life up until now. I wish Iâd seen it represented like this in books when I was growing up. Me too, friend, youâll think. Me too. And, of course, youâll start writing another book. And another one. Youâll actually have three in progress, simultaneously, which is two more than youâve ever had in progress before. And, unlike when you were growing up, thereâll be a small but growing array of books out there that reflect at least a little bit of what you feel when you feel things. All you can hope is that your books do the same for others, and that someday, between all of your stories and everyoneâs, someone, somewhere, will be able to patchwork together a reflection that shows them their heart perfectly.