how to tell if you're in a waverly sm novel

(after The Toast)

Jenny Holzer at the New York Botanical Gardens

• You have lost something vital, impossible to live without. You are somehow still living without it.

• You find yourself in an unfamiliar city.

• Reality is broken.

• You have just met someone who, despite your superficial differences, speaks your language more fluently than anyone ever has. You have never felt this way about another person before. If only you could communicate your affections without withering in shame.

• You are chronically, perhaps terminally online.

• In all things, omens.

• You lie down on your dust-soaked carpet and wait to decompose.

• You are hiding your despair behind a mask of hyperefficiency and composure. Alternately, the only thing more disastrous than your ongoing mental health crisis is your bedroom.

• You are miserably attuned to the ambient, everyday violence of living.

• The only real antagonists are people who refuse to act in sympathy with those unlike themselves, and (by extension) imperialist capitalism.

• You are so, so tired, all the time.

• There are forces at work which are far more powerful than you, and you cannot understand or know them. At best, they do not care about you. You do not have it in you to quietly let them win.

• You and your body are continually at odds.

• The terrible thing that is happening to you is hardly surprising, given the way of the world.

• Your trauma is played out on a cosmic scale, your alienation writ large on the fabric of reality itself. You may or may not be trapped inside a metaphor, or a Jenny Holzer truism.

• Within recent memory, you have made at least one major interpersonal mistake.

• You are in the process of telling somebody a story.

• Under suffocating pressure, you waver, but you do what you have to do.

congration! you done it

I’m beyond thrilled to tell you that I’m now represented by Claire Friedman at InkWell Management.

Claire read my entire manuscript in a single sitting, picked up everything I was hoping I’d put down, and was subsequently gracious enough to tolerate my cold-medicated self on a phone call during which I definitely spoke the words ‘reality vore.’ (Her reaction was to suggest that we could put it in the blurb, which told me definitively that I was placing myself in the right pair of hands.) I’m so fortunate to have her insight and her vision in my corner, I’m in love with the future she sees for my work, and I’m excited beyond words to start calling it into being.

The inevitable Pinterest mood board, feat. the Neon Genesis Evangelion title card generator.

I owe so many people a debt of gratitude — too many to list, really, but I’m going to make an attempt and hope that anyone I’ve neglected will forgive me. My thanks to A.K. Larkwood, Tamsyn Muir, Jennifer Giesbrecht, Arkady Martine, and A.M. Tuomala for industry wisdoms and vast professional generosity. My thanks to Talitha Kearey, Livali Wyle, Ariella Bouskila, and Frances Watson for sustained moral support; and to Margaret Crumb and Scout of the Woods for cheering me on as I dragged myself through the valley of the shadow of querying.

I am particularly indebted to the Lambda Literary Fellows of the YA class of 2019, and to Benjamin Alire Sáenz and William Johnson, without whom I would not be in a position to thank anyone.

I started working on the book I pitched to Claire, The Last Testament of Ethel Zhao, in January 2016. I don’t think the Waverly I was back then would have dared to imagine anything like this. Thankfully, the Waverly I am now is sharp enough and self-aware enough not only to imagine it, but to pursue it — and, evidently, to make it happen. I am proud of myself and I’m hopeful for the future, and that is just about all the holding-forth I wish to do on the subject. Forward momentum! Watch this space.

muffled sarah mclachlan playing in the distance

It’s probably really good SEO to give my blog posts titles like this, right? I don’t actually know if anyone else remembers when Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Fallen’ was on every single fanmix for every single morally complicated character, back in the 2000s when fanmixes were still on MegaUpload. Anyway: I write a lot about redemption, and I want to talk through why.

One of the four main characters of my book — Merle, specifically — was originally meant to be a villain. She was supposed to be an extremist who committed fully to the eldritch abomination that was riding the coattails of her trauma to victory. She was meant to come into direct conflict with the protagonists, and probably be neutralised somehow, and never particularly be taken seriously by the narrative. So what changed? I started to think about who she actually was.

This happens to me a lot. I can’t turn off the impulse that wants to understand, even if it also condemns. In real life, as you can imagine, this is not an easy impulse to negotiate — especially when it comes to my own pain, which is not exempt from the double-bind of compassion. I can recognise my trauma, and the source of my trauma, while being acutely aware that the source of my trauma was traumatised too. That’s a general statement. I’ll be angry if people hurt me, sure, but the anger will always be tied up tightly with a desire to see the whole picture.

I spoke to a friend about this recently, and their response was straightforward: very noble; can’t relate. They cut ties with their family years ago.

Not actually a prelude to a final boss fight.

Redemption isn’t necessarily in vogue right now. Steven Universe recently wrapped up a major redemption storyline, but the Extremely Online contingent of fans were split. Was it realistic? Was it fair that a eugenicist tyrant should get such an easy out, while those she oppressed barely got screentime at all? In the real world, the answer would probably be no — and that’s what I hear a lot, when people talk about redemption stories. This goes double for media meant for kids. What are we teaching our children?

Given that I have in my time written a YA book, albeit largely by accident, I feel vaguely qualified to comment on this: we’re teaching them that there’s a way forward that doesn’t end with a Disney villain getting pushed to their death from a great height (the actual death, of course, conveniently left out of frame; we wouldn’t want to think too hard about the ethics of heroic murder). Of course we are not literally saying to children that if they should ever encounter a space alien empress who may or may not have personally victimised their mum, they should leap headlong into forgiveness and disregard the consequences. We’re saying: here’s a way out of stories about revenge. Here’s why that’s rewarding and important. Here’s why compassion is hard, and worth striving for.

Because that’s the thing that gets lost in the conversation, I think. I’m talking about redemption stories, not redemption moments. It’s a process. And Steven Universe takes pains to show Steven working through that process — dealing with his moments of very comprehensible anger, reckoning with his desire to fight alongside the Crystal Gems, examining how his friends handle and mishandle conflicts large and small, and coming to terms with the fact that compassion needs to be thought-through and well-judged. That’s literally his whole story arc.

The furrowed brow of complicated forgiveness.

What are we teaching our children? We’re teaching them care, and empathy, and good judgment. Of course some oppressors, some abusers, some straight-up mean people won’t respond to those things, and it’s okay to let them go! But there is value in trying to understand before condemning outright.

I would certainly never insist that anyone who has ever been hurt take the time to consider the circumstances of the person who hurt them; society does enough of that without my help, and even for myself, I know there are people who I find difficult to forgive. Likewise, for a multitude of reasons, I am not going to smear my introspecting about restorative justice all over Twitter while everyone is trying to talk about patterns of abuse or oppression. I see the value of anger, and I know when it’s more appropriate to sit and listen than to wade blithely in.

But for myself, I don’t think it’s productive to see monstrous things and not try to look at what’s behind them. In all things, I want to be asking questions: where did you come from? What created you? Who would you be if your circumstances had been different? Fiction is a space for asking questions. More to the point, fiction is a space for trying to write your way to the answers — not for creating a definitive formula of what morality should look like, but for showing your working as you start to define your terms. It shows, and I think any given story is lesser for it, when an antagonist is nothing more to an author than their wrongdoing.

I’ve been burned, in reality, by trusting too readily; I think we all have. But I don’t want it to be a mistake, in the stories I tell, to believe people can be better than they were. I want kindness to prevail. I have that power, when I write; it’s about the only time when I do. So there are people who believe in Merle, and who see her as a whole person in terrible pain. She gets to recognise her mistakes, and become a protagonist, and stand with people who believe in her potential to create a kinder world. She gets to set things right. I can’t imagine a better way to be redeemed.

learning to write outward at lambda

It's been hard to write about the Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat after the fact. Part of this is simply down to jetlag; I'm pretty sure I lost the Tuesday after my return somewhere in the muddle of daytime naps and biochemical time travel. The remainder is my own inability to get sincere about something that brought me so much joy without, like, crying? On internet? We do not cry on internet, guys; this only invites opprobrium and bullshit.

That said, I want to say this: I spent my time in California exactly where I was meant to be. The stars aligned. I don't know how else to explain it. I had a brief encounter with my friend Cat in West Hollywood, halfway through the week, on the night I read from my manuscript in public; I got all tearful and soft-focus at her because the universe simply felt right. Of course, then a strange man tried to tell us at length about his upcoming reality TV show with Madonna 'Madonna' Ciccone and we had to flee to sample some frozen yoghurt, but this only added to the authenticity of that Los Angeles experience (I have already written a short story about it).

The YA Fiction cohort, featuring the author’s irrepressible moon face.

More than once during the course of the retreat, I tried to explain why I'm not typically a “community” sort of person. I am cagey and ornery and I love nuance more than the adrenaline hit of In vs Out; I'm allergic to earnestness that can't back itself up and I basically just love to lurk by myself 90% of the time. This is not me saying I retract that stance. This is me saying that there's “community” and there's community, and I found a community that genuinely cared about me at Lambda. More to the point, I found a community that I genuinely cared about, and didn't feel afraid to be seen by. I talked to strangers, you guys. I went up to people who read some of the most devastating, searingly brilliant work I've ever encountered, and I told them I thought they were cool. And then people did the same back to me, which is objectively insane and I'm still fairly sure the accent had a lot to do with it -- but then, these are people I admire, and I am trying to trust their judgement, even when it entails thinking I am worth their time.

And workshop! Oh my god, workshop. Benjamin Alire Saenz read my words back to me approvingly and I nearly died in my chair. We talked about queerness and transness and apocalypse and hope in the face of the merciless, abnegating reality we inhabit. Hannah showed up with a perfect ten-page short story about intergenerational care and support between queer people like it was nothing! Jazlyn and Joseph dropped some of the tenderest babygay love stories in the world! Charlie Prime's self-proclaimed mythic bitch protagonist Cecil pretty much owned us all! Naseem undertook history's most powerful notetaking exercise (there were gifs) (there were subfolders) and kept us all in line! I would shout out all of you if I could but the length of this post is making my browser lag! I have never ever ever been in a space that felt so kind and so in tune with itself. We were speaking the same language. Until you're there, until you're speaking it together, you don't understand how rare and special that feels.

So: if you helped to get me to Lambda then thank you, again. If you were part of my Lambda adventure then thank you forever. And this isn't me crying, okay, I'm just allergic to goodbye, keep your opprobrium far away from me.