Writer Spotlight: Alexis Nedd

It’s New Release Tuesday! We caught up with Alexis Nedd (@alexisthenedd) to talk about her debut novel, Don’t Hate The Player, which is out today. Alexis is a Brooklyn-based pop culture “fanthropologist” who has only ever loved things in a big, obsessive way. As the Senior Entertainment Reporter at Mashable.com, she covers television, movies, and video games, focusing on sci-fi and fantasy universes like Game of Thrones and the MCU. When she’s not writing for money, Alexis is writing for no money on her socials, where her feeds consist of deep dives on weird history and analyzing pop culture as an artifact of society.

Don’t Hate The Player is a YA romance novel that follows two competitive eSports players as they navigate school, parents, and other IRL stuff, while preparing for their biggest (and only) tournament yet. As real life and online life collide, both find the boundaries between online and IRL slipping into each other.

Can you start by telling us a little bit about Don’t Hate The Player?

In one corner, we have Emilia Romero, a popular, high-achieving Puerto Rican girl who secretly plays Guardians League Online with the elite Team Fury. No one in her real life knows she games, and everything hinges on it staying that way. In the other corner is Jake Hooper, a quiet, detrimentally empathetic nerd who’s had a crush on Emilia for years. He plays GLO with Team Unity and thinks he’s otherwise invisible.

When Guardians League Online announces a huge tournament in their city, Jake is shocked to see Emilia competing. Jake is now the only person who knows her secret, and they have to work together to keep it…all while the tournament brings their teams closer and closer to an ultimate Fury vs. Unity showdown.

Outwardly, Jake is an awkward, suffering bundle of anxiety, quite successfully hiding his integrity and wit. What was enjoyable/difficult about writing a neurodivergent romantic lead?

I started working on DHTP around the same time I learned I had ADHD. Getting that diagnosis as an adult ushered in a really strange and painful period of reevaluating my childhood, knowing that I was neurodivergent and didn’t get the help I needed. I gave a lot of the traits I used to think made me “wrong” or “bad”—the anxiety, the spinning thoughts, the self-deprecating coping mechanisms—to Jake because writing them into a lovable character felt like correcting the narrative I had grown up writing about myself.

It was difficult to excavate all of that because that level of self-evaluation totally sucks and takes forever, but by the end, I could look at Jake and think, “if I can’t hate him for feeling this way, I have no business hating myself for having felt that way.”

DHTP comes alive in its use of online gaming maps and chatrooms. How did you approach getting those virtual places right?

I made my first internet friends when cameras on phones or laptops were still rare, so I got to know a lot of people through chatrooms and forums. People’s personalities, real or constructed, come off so strongly in those rapid-fire conversations. That solved one of the problems I knew I’d have coming into this book—how do I introduce the reader to a group of characters who aren’t going to show up until the end and make them seem like part of the story the whole time? Answer: Spy on their group chat.

It was so fun to play all five roles in those chapters and determine who uses acronyms or memes, who always punctuates, what their in-jokes say about them, and so on. Truly some of my favorite parts of DHTP are in those chats.

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Writer Spotlight: Amanda Foody & Christine Lynn Herman

Well, well, well. What’s this? A treat? For you? In Halloween week, its very self? You betcha. This week, we’re exploring the world of new @torteen release ALL OF US VILLAINS by asking its creators, Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman, all about the novel’s characters and themes. Click through to the end for writing advice, thoughts on the YA fantasy genre, and a linked sneak peek 👀

First off, can you describe the plot of ALL OF US VILLAINS?

All of Us Villains takes place in Ilvernath, a small, remote city that—up until the publication of a salacious tell-all book one year ago—was quite forgotten and overlooked. But now, its dark secret has been revealed. Every generation, seven of the city’s oldest families send a teenage champion to compete in a tournament to the death. The winner’s family gets to claim the most powerful type of magic in the world. Our four POV characters, each one of this generation’s seven champions, have to grapple with the dangers of the tournament in addition to their newfound but unwanted fame. The book has lots of plot twists, morally gray characters, and—as you’d probably guessed—blood.

Can you talk a bit about your inspiration for exploring themes of inherited family responsibility and community-sanctioned violence?

Both of these themes came about organically as we developed the initial concept of a death tournament novel. By linking the tournament to seven families, each required to put forth a champion, we created an inherited trauma that each of our main characters grapples with differently. It was important to us that we explore the nuances of how they were raised, their coping mechanisms within such an extreme situation, and the tournament’s impact on the wider community. Because for all that these teenagers are fighting for power, there is also a question of responsibility. Is the blood they’ve shed on their own hands, the hands of the people who sent them off to die, or something else entirely? In a world of spells and curses, how do these people allocate blame? All of this is tied up in the stories our characters tell themselves and in those the world tells about them; their roles as heroes or villains develop from that.

What made you want to write a story about the villain instead of the hero? And do you believe in that binary, or is it more complicated than that?

We both firmly believe that all people—and thus all interesting characters—are composed of good and bad traits. We chose to write about characters whose bad traits are especially villainous because it felt appropriate for the story. These are teenagers who have been raised for this death tournament, who have been taught that the reward of power is more important than the lives taken to achieve it. That takes a certain type of person…and not necessarily a straightforwardly good one.

Can you give us any hints as to what to expect from the next book in the series?

You can expect a lot of romance and a lot of betrayal. Perhaps they even go hand in hand?

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Happy 1st of Halloween, Booklr! 

Do you love vampires, witches, monsters, and ghosts? Do you have a favorite scary book you think everyone should read? We want to hear about it! 

Post your recommendations using the tag #TumblrHalloween, and we’ll share them throughout the month!

Originally posted by butteryplanet

Ryan North (@ryannorth) is a New York Times-bestselling and Eisner-winning writer who once messed up walking his dog so badly it made the news. His recent work includes the nonfiction How To Invent Everything, the semi-fictional graphic novel adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and the so-far-fictional Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series for Marvel. Ryan lives in Toronto, where he writes for video games, television, and his long-running webcomic Dinosaur Comics. We chatted with him about his new book, How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain. Be sure to click through to the end for dinosaurs.

So, what made you want to create a guide to taking over the world? What makes you qualified to be taking on this very important public service?

I’ve been writing superhero comics for Marvel and DC for years, and part of the job is coming up with these big ambitious charismatic plots for the villains to pull off (throwing your enemies into the sun, digging a hole to the Earth’s core, becoming immortal, that sort of thing). I thought it would be fun to explore how credible they are here in the real world, where we don’t have things like shrink rays and mind-control helmets. So really, it’s a book exploring the edges of science and technology through the lens of comic book supervillainy.

That, and I think having a book in your house with “HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD” on the spine is inarguably awesome.

Who is this book for? What makes an aspiring supervillain?

One thing I kept in mind when writing the book is that I always wanted to talk about super-crime, big huge heists that have never been done before, rather than the stuff that happens routinely here in the real world. Robbing a bank is normal crime. Stealing a bank is when you get into the fun space of super-crime.

There are a couple reasons for that: real-world villainy is horrible and dehumanizing, and I’m absolutely not qualified to write about it, but the idea of trying to pull off comic book super-crime in the real world is interesting and fun, and I am absolutely willing and able to think those plots through to their logical conclusions. You want a secret base? Terrific, but you’re going to need a way to keep it secret—so let’s look at the challenges of living long-term at sea, or underground, or underwater, or in space, or on Mars, etc. And henchpeople require air and food and water—so now we need to think about farming in these conditions and generating power to support all of that. But really, the biggest challenge is that people also get weird and sad when locked alone together, so let’s lock eight people in a room together for two years and see what happens, by which I mean, let’s study the IRL Biosphere 2 experiment where they did precisely that, and everyone went more than a little crazy. As soon as you take these plots seriously and start thinking things through to their logical conclusions, a lot of really interesting science and history and sociology falls out.

In the book, I define supervillainy as when someone outside existing power structures accomplishes something that’s not getting done on its own. The fun thing about that is that the exact same definition applies to superheroes. So really, it’s for anyone who wants to learn more about the world around them through this fun fictional lens, and especially those who have read the news and thought, “You know what? I could do it better.”

Given a choice, which scheme would be your preferred mode of world domination, and why?

There’s a chapter where we look at the problem of immortality, which sounds like complete fantasy until you look at all these tech bros who desperately don’t want to die and are spending fabulous amounts of money on trying to delay it for as long as possible, or even indefinitely. We look at the actual science of aging and the technologies people are trying to develop to stop it, but for me, the most interesting part happens when you say, “okay, so assume any of this works. What then?”

Put aside the fact that very few people would look at our planet with seven billion people on it and say, “You know what? This world needs more people. Oh, and they should never die.” Also, put aside the fact that death is a safety valve on human civilization, where even the worst people we’ve ever produced can’t hang on to power forever because they too will die. The real issue is whether you put your chips on cryonics or uploading your brain to a computer or cloning or telomere extension or whatever. These are all medical or technological interventions, which means they all cost money—and the second you have an immortality scheme that costs money, you’ve created this almost cartoonish dystopia where rich people get to live forever, and poor people don’t. I don’t see a way around it—immortality is something that would absolutely be horrible for both the planet and for us as a civilization.

But!

If you’re the only one who’s immortal—if you discover it and hide it from the world and never share your technology, then all those issues just disappear. Now immortality is just this fun thing you’re doing, and the rest of the world doesn’t have to suffer. You get all the benefits of living indefinitely, learning more than the rest of us ever will, and nobody else has to suffer! For me, that’s the peak supervillain mindset: wanting to make the world a better place but ending up helping only yourself. That’s the scheme in the book I’d do. Not take over the place, but just…stick around and watch it for a lot longer.

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Writer Spotlight: Tamsyn Muir

Tamsyn Muir probably doesn’t need a lot of introduction here on Tumblr, but for those who aren’t yet familiar with her work: Tamsyn Muir is the bestselling author of the Locked Tomb Series. Her fiction has won the Locus and Crawford awards. It has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Dragon Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. A Kiwi, she has spent most of her life in Howick, New Zealand, with time living in Waiuku and central Wellington. She currently lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom. 

We asked Tamsyn some questions about Nona the Ninth, the next installment of the Locked Tomb series, which comes out on September 13. (Mild spoilers ahead. You have been warned!)

Can you tell us about Nona the Ninth? How would you contextualize it alongside the previous Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth?

The Locked Tomb has always followed a concrete set of rules about whose point of view we’re in—there’s a priority list and a hard if-and-else-if set of codes about who is telling the tale. The priority character is always Gideon Nav herself, but after Gideon the Ninth, in many ways, she gets knocked out of the ring.

Nona is the next rule on the priority list—the next storyteller. Except there are also a bunch of other storytellers popping up in the priority list as she lets her guard down. That’s kind of one curtain I wanted to pull back on The Locked Tomb as a whole. Who’s telling this story? What is the truth as someone else understands it? Which is why, where the last two books have been told very much from the perspectives of the Nine Houses, we’re finally in a setting where the Houses have pulled back, and the truth told is completely different.

You have a knack for approaching the next part of the story from a completely different vantage point, which is deliciously frustrating for the reader. Why do you think this works so well (when really, it sort of shouldn’t)?

Oh, but it does, and it’s been proved to work—just play an RPG! One thing I passionately loved in Final Fantasy IX, my very favourite Final Fantasy at the end of the day, is that one moment you’re with the thief-turned-thespian Zidane and a wonderfully dashing attempt to kidnap a princess in the middle of a theater performance—then you’re with…some very bizarre kid called Vivi…who has lost his ticket and is getting negged by a horrifying rat child. You’re given a completely different lens on a completely different situation in what’s basically a completely different genre. In the same game! There’s a risk of getting too comfortable in someone’s truth—you might want to settle down in a character whom you have learned to understand. But then you have to practice a very radical empathy in settling down in Nona, who just absolutely does not give a shit about swords or empire and, at her worst, can be quite an irritating, materialistic babe in the woods who is WAY too into dogs. Of course it’s alienating. If the experience of being in Gideon’s head was the same as being in Harrow’s as being in Nona’s, there wouldn’t be any point. If different vantage points didn’t work, A Song of Ice and Fire would never have gotten off the ground. Hell, neither would The Iliad. I just sit longer with my vantage point.

After writing foul-mouthed and horny Gideon and acerbic, memory-challenged, and also horny Harrow, how did you approach writing Nona’s character, and what did you enjoy most about the process?

Harrow would hate that you described her as horny. Gideon would be fine with being described as horny. Nona would love to sit you down and talk about all the things that make her horny, at the end of which you are 50% worried that she doesn’t honestly understand ‘horny,’ and 50% worried that she DOES understand ‘horny.’

Nona is my character who doesn’t give a fuck. Gideon and Harrow both give too many. It was fun to write a character who sincerely seeks out love as she understands it, who has a large collection of friends and interests, and has no ambition. And yet what I really enjoyed is that Nona is easily also the most terrifying POV character of the series. 

We meet some old friends in a new place in Nona. What aspect of the familiar characters meeting the unfamiliar world was the most fun to write?

Honestly, the fact that they’re in such a different milieu was fun enough. One is a woman completely out of time, trying to find something to live for; two are dyed-in-the-wool Housers forced to re-examine values they’ve always taken for granted and what the next part of life after death is going to look like for them. All three are fish out of water. And then there’s actually the reader meeting the familiar after two long books about the unfamiliar, and all the ways I hope that’s entirely weird and recontextualizing. And then, for Nona, what’s familiar to us is entirely unfamiliar to her. Writing Nona was like one long experiment with jamais vu.

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Writer Spotlight: Rose Sutherland

Rose Sutherland @rosesutherlandwrites is a Toronto-based writer who grew up a voracious reader with an overactive imagination in Nova Scotia (where she once fell off a roof trying to re-enact Anne of Green Gables!). She’s been to theatre school in NYC, apprenticed at a pâtisserie in rural France, and currently moonlights as an usher and bartender—in between writing queer folktales, practicing yoga, dancing, singing, searching out amazing coffee and croissants, and making niche jokes about Victor Hugo on the internet. She’s mildly obsessed with the idea of one day owning a large dog, several chickens, and maybe a goat. A Sweet Sting of Salt is her debut novel.

Keep reading for more about character arcs in A Sweet Sting of Salt, Rose’s favorite fanfic tropes, and some excellent reading recs 👀

Can you tell us about A Sweet Sting of Salt and how you came to write it?

A Sweet Sting of Salt is a queer (f/f) historical reimagining of the classic folktale of the selkie wife, set in 1830’s Nova Scotia. I call it a “reimagining” because while it draws on the folktale, it’s not a retelling of that tale so much as a story playing out in relation to that mythology. I’d wanted to write something centering a love story between two women for a while, but the initial spark came from a Tumblr post! It suggested the idea of selkies testifying before the UN as victims of human trafficking, which reminded me of all the things I disliked about the original folktale and its inherent darkness that is generally glossed over, starting me down the rabbit hole toward finding my own story.

How did you approach research for A Sweet Sting of Salt, and what is a favorite historical fact you learned?

I joke that I did a lot of research by osmosis: I already had a lot of base knowledge about the location, having grown up in Nova Scotia, and then set the story in a period that I’ve been absorbing information about in a low-key way for ages—1832 is also the year of the student rebellion in Les Mis, so I’ve been gleaning tidbits about this era since I first got into the musical and book back in high school. However, I had to do more specific research into things like British divorce law, period midwifery, and animal husbandry. I also visited some small, hyper-local museums on the South Shore that gave me an invaluable glimpse into daily life. I also did some fun practical research into things like “How long does it take to walk from x to y?” and “How cold IS a plunge into this body of water in March?” (Spoiler: Very.) 

A fact that fascinated me but didn’t make it into the book was that some early European settlers in the area were granted lands by luck of the draw, pulling from a deck of playing cards: Each card was assigned to a specific 50-acre lot, and whatever you pulled, you were stuck with it.

When we meet them, Jean and Muirin are isolated for different reasons. What do you hope readers still searching for their people take away from A Sweet Sting of Salt?

That there’s always hope. It’s valuable and important to keep reaching out to the world around you, to be open, and not cut yourself off—the biggest reason for Jean’s loneliness at the beginning of this story is the way she has come to keep everyone around her at arm’s length, shutting herself away out of fear, and refusing to let anyone truly get to know her because she thinks that’s the best way to protect herself from being hurt again. Reaching out to others can take a real act of courage, especially if you’ve had bad experiences in the past, but “your people” will reach back to you.

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