Queer boys loving each other at sixteen is the easiest thing in the world. And even if they don't, who gives a fuck? I have a character here that can fly. And maybe they do meet the loves of their lives.
They are the future, and they are taking up arms in a fight I wish they never had to face. Teenagers these days (sometimes not even by their own choice) are more self-aware than I ever was, or even might be now. I decided I wanted to write a book I wished I could read at that age.Īnd I was wrong, of course, to think that YA (specifically romance) is unrealistic, to have that chip on my shoulder. Queers existed in fiction (and still do, honestly) as tragic figures or background characters that didn't revel in their queerness. The late 90s/early 2000s were a different time. He was showing me all the books he's read, and I thought back to when I was his age, and what I would have given to have happy queer characters in books. People can meet the loves of their lives as a teenager, but how often does that really happen?īut I was spending some time with my teenage nephew, who is a voracious reader. (Remember the whole I'll never write werewolves thing? Yeah.) I like writing romance, and I thought YA romance was unrealistic. I had this idea that'd been percolating for a while, a story about a boy named Nick who idolizes (a bit obsessively) the superheroes (called Extraordinaries) that protect his city, to the point he writes self-insert fan fiction about them, and more specifically, the Extraordinary known as Shadow Star.Īnd it was going to be Young Adult (YA), something I told myself I was never going to write.īecause I had a dumb chip on my shoulder. I wanted to go back to writing something funny.
Last year, I had just come off finishing writing Ravensong, a book that turned out to be one of the hardest to write (not because of content, but because it fucking took forever-more on that in the coming months). LAMBDA award-winning author TJ Klune's LGBT #ownvoices teen series, THE EXTRAORDINARIES, pitched as a smartly funny, romantic tale of teen superheroes and the everyday geek boy who follows them, to Ali Fisher at Tor Teen, in a six figure deal, at auction, for publication winter 2020, by Deidre Knight at The Knight Agency, and to Sam Bradbury at Hodder & Stoughton, in a very good deal, for simultaneous UK publication (NA/UK)Īnd now that I've had time to settle with it, let's discuss, shall we?
From the Publisher's Weekly announcement:
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