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A Letter From My Younger Self

By |2020-09-16T22:48:55-05:00September 17th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Writers on Writing|Tags: , , , |

For today's blogathon post, we're so excited to share this video from Aaron H. Aceves, author of the forthcoming THIS IS WHY THEY HATE US. In this video, he talks about reading a letter from his younger self, and how his journey towards being published has been eighteen years in the making! -- Aaron H. Aceves is a Mexican-American writer born and raised in East L.A. He graduated in 2015 from Harvard, where he received the Le Baron Russell Briggs Award after being nominated by Jamaica Kincaid. His work has appeared in Germ Magazine, Raspa [...]

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Finding My Queer Self Through Books

By |2020-09-16T01:18:15-05:00September 16th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: , |

by Adrienne Tooley I didn’t come out until 24. I didn’t even start questioning until 23. I was a late bloomer in many senses, furthered by my own obliviousness. I didn’t see queer women in the books I read, the media I consumed, or even, really, in the world around me. I knew they existed, but I didn’t know them, or their feelings, or their journeys. And I was worse off for it. When I met the woman who is now my wife, once I’d done a deep dive and examined myself [...]

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The Importance of Being Earnest

By |2020-09-14T00:02:25-05:00September 15th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, New Releases, Writers on Writing|Tags: , |

by Ciara Smyth I am a terrible person to write about queer joy because I am cranky and when I smile people think I’m being sarcastic. An anecdote I like to tell, in outraged tones, is about the time my oldest friend read my first ever manuscript and said with genuine surprise, ‘This is funny. Which is weird, because you’re…not.” I am yet to recover from this mortal wound. I’m one of those people who cannot really appreciate anything for longer than two seconds because as soon as I achieve something I [...]

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An Abundance of Serendipities

By |2020-09-13T19:51:32-05:00September 14th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, New Releases, Writers on Writing|Tags: , , |

by Lucas Rocha Hi, guys! YA Pride invited me to write something about bookish queer joy, and that’s a subject that makes me so happy because, to me, books + queer = joy. I know that we are not especially joyful right now with all that’s happening in the world, so I want to spark a little smile on your face by sharing one of the most exciting moments in my bookish life: my first international book deal. Okay, let’s start from the beginning: my name is Lucas Rocha, and I’m a [...]

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A Rainbow Will Literally Save

By |2020-09-12T20:59:20-05:00September 13th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Writers on Writing|Tags: |

by NoNieqa Ramos  If one were to place the reviews of the DISTURBED GIRL’S DICTIONARY into a word cloud generator, one would see words like brutal, raw, gritty, unflinching ... and one of my personal favorites “move over dead white guys.” What you won’t find is joy, and certainly not queer joy. Yet to me, first and foremost, TDGD, was a love story and Macy’s indefatigable devotion for Alma accelerates like George’s motorcycle past the explosive ending into hope and possibility. THE TRUTH IS is a different creature entirely. In that word [...]

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Joy/Pain

By |2020-09-10T06:32:56-05:00September 10th, 2020|Categories: Archive|

by Adam Sass  Holy cow, what is the author of queer oppression book Surrender Your Sons doing talking about queer joy? On what PLANET? What BUSINESS do I even have here? In my upcoming debut Surrender Your Sons, Connor Major is sent to a mysterious island conversion therapy camp, where he befriends the other captive teens and plots the camp’s destruction. Joyous, right? Well, this queer joy is actually probably closer to queer catharsis. The joy of breaking a cycle of trauma. The joy of righting a wrong. Big arms held up [...]

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There’s Magic Out There For All of Us

By |2020-09-08T18:18:16-05:00September 9th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: , , , |

by Emery Lee I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of moments of queer bookish joy since first joining the book community in 2015. Queer books have become such a prevalent part of the YA community, and they’ve been given a lot more spotlight, opening up more opportunities for queer authors and readers alike.  Of course, when I think about an instance of queer joy tied to some of my favorite books, one that always comes to mind is a story about the book What if It’s Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera. In [...]

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Our well deserved happy endings / Nossos tão merecidos finais felizes

By |2020-09-07T15:03:12-05:00September 8th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Writers on Writing|Tags: , , , , |

by Vitor Martins  In 2016 I was unemployed, binge watching Grey's Anatomy and living through a really dark phase of my life. Then I decided to write a book to make me forget about everything else. A book with a very self conscious gay kid who, just like me, needed to know that he was loved. That's when Here the Whole Time started to exist. The book was published in Brazil the following year and is hitting the US bookstores on November 10th this year. I may sound chill when I talk [...]

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Queer Bookish Joy

By |2020-09-05T13:32:04-05:00September 7th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Writers on Writing|Tags: , , |

by L.C. Rosen Queer Bookish Joy.  That’s quite a thing to ask for these days.  The whole point of these posts is to lift people up and make them cheerful so I don’t want to get into how I’ve been, but I will say this – most moments of queer joy, in my opinion, come about because of queer rage.  Our power comes from anger. My story of queer bookish joy came about because of some rage.   The rage I felt was about how I felt queer boys were being portrayed in [...]

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Finding My Way to Queer Fairytales and a Book Deal

By |2020-09-03T21:56:36-05:00September 6th, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Writers on Writing|Tags: , |

by Leslie Vedder I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  This has taken a lot of different forms for me over the years.  Illustrator/author of stapled together grade-school masterpieces. Closet fanfiction writer. (Only in the sense that I wrote from the closet; my fanfiction was always slash!) Then I got into original work, learning to put the worlds and characters I’d imagined in my head down on paper.  My first attempts were mostly epic fantasy stories that hit all the familiar beats I’d read so many times—you know, nine guys go on a [...]

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