First Draft Episode #254: L.C. Rosen
MAY 26, 2020
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Lev A.C. Rosen, author of Depth and Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts), talks about his latest young adult novel, Camp.
Sarah Enni: This episode is brought to you by HIGHLAND 2 the writing software made by writers for writers from acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter and novelist John August, writer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish, Aladdin and the Arlo Finch middle-grade series. Though it started as a screenwriting software, Highland 2 is capable of handling anything from blog posts to dissertations and yes, even novels.
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Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Lev A.C. Rosen, author of Depth and Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) to talk about his latest young adult novel Camp. I loved what Lev had to say about how publishers can act like governments, his 100 page rule, and queer code-switching and letting your hair down. Everything Lev and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes.
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I hope you're listening to the Track Changes episodes that have been dropping in this feed. Track Changes is a spinoff series from First Draft that's getting into everything you don't know you don't know about the traditional publishing process in the U. S.
So far we've outlined the big five publishers, we've talked to agents, and we've heard from the agent/author side about a book sale. The next episode, which will drop May 28th, goes behind the scenes of what a book sale looks like from the editor side.
If you want to get even more in-depth about publishing. I've also created the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday I share more of the information I gathered in my research, as well as links to other articles, podcasts, and resources that I hope will empower every author to think of their art as their career. Track Changes is a $5 a month newsletter, but you can get a 30 day free trial and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Lev A.C. Rosen.
Sarah Enni: All right. Hi, Lev. How are you?
Lev A.C. Rosen: Hi, I'm great. How are you?
Sarah Enni: I'm good. I'm so excited to chat with you today.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, I'm very excited and a little nervous, like I said, I recommend this podcast to my students a lot, so I'm like, "Now I'm on it! What is happening?"
Sarah Enni: Ah! That is so sweet. Now they're definitely gonna listen to it and get back to you with notes.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, exactly. This is a fear.
[Both laugh]
Sarah Enni: I love that. Well, let's build to that. I like to start at the beginning, as you know. Which is, where were you born and raised?
Lev A.C. Rosen: I was born and raised right here in New York City.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask about growing up in the city. How was reading and writing a part of your childhood?
Lev A.C. Rosen: Okay, so my mother switches, I have a younger brother, and sometimes she says my first word was book and his was cat. And sometimes she says mine was cat and his was book. So I'm not really sure.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] There's no losers there.
Lev A.C. Rosen: But yeah, exactly. Cats, books, they're both excellent. But reading was a huge part of my life from day one. My mother has a master's in English. It's just always been there, essentially. And I went to a, I don't want to say experimental, but a private K through 8 school. It was very small. It had just started when I started going. It was only like five years old when I started going there. And it believes in holistic learning, it's Village Community School. They were very big on reading and writing and it's only a K through 8.
I remember by the time I graduated, cause there were only eighteen kids in my whole grade, they do this little graduating ceremony where they give each kid graduating a diploma, and a teacher comes forward and says something to remember. And mine was about writing like, "You're a wizard with words!" And she gave me this little wizard statute, which I still have.
Sarah Enni: That's so cute. I love that. Oh, that's special.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah. So it's just always been there to the point where I can't even remember like, "Yeah, I've always been a writer." Like literally.
Sarah Enni: What kinds of things were the early writings, like genre?
Lev A.C. Rosen: No, when I was younger, I read essentially just fantasy, like epic fantasy, a lot of epic fantasy. And that's what I wrote too to the point that, and I don't know if this was her prejudice or she just wanted me to shake loose, but she was like, "You cannot write fantasy anymore." Like, "I'm not allowing it. You need to write..." see, this is where I think it was more of a prejudice... "You need to write adult stuff." Or something like that. "You need to write something more contemporary."
And I wrote something that was called The Crystal Ball and it was contemporary, but there was still magic in it. It was like what we'd call urban magic or urban fantasy these days. And she was displeased.
Sarah Enni: Who is this?
Lev A.C. Rosen: Oh, this is my sixth grade homeroom teacher, who also taught English for sixth grade and I think eighth grade. But she was this very stern British woman who I sort of adored and also deeply feared, just like I think everyone else in school. But she definitely felt I needed to not be writing fantasy.
Sarah Enni: That's really interesting.
Lev A.C. Rosen: I know it's kind of weird.
Sarah Enni: But it seems like you had a lot of encouragement to write as a young person.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Oh yeah, writing was a huge part of the curriculum there too. And even if it wasn't storytelling writing, it was like, "You have to learn how to write essays, et cetera, et cetera." But I was always writing stories like always. I was trying to think about it when I was prepping for this cause I knew you'd asked me, and I was like, "I don't remember the first story I ever wrote." Like, "It's just always been there." Even when I sort of was like, "Maybe I want to be an artist." It was like, "I want to do comics. I want to still tell stories."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. When you say that you went to high school in Manhattan? I just picture Gossip Girl.
Lev A.C. Rosen: So technically my high school, cause that was different than the grade school and it was much larger, was in the Bronx. And it is, for all intents and purposes, the school in Jack of Hearts.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, it's very similar. I went to Fieldston Ethical Culture School. I remember the first year I went there, we were on the cover of New York Magazine as the best high school in the city. There were celebritie's kids there. It was, in many ways, Gossip Girl. And you are not the first to have asked me if it was Gossip Girl.
I remember for some reason, right out of college, every guy I dated the first thing they asked when I said I grew up in the city, "Was it like Gossip Girl?
Sarah Enni: There was something delicious about that.
Lev A.C. Rosen: I mean it wasn't that, I don't want to date myself, but grunge was in [chuckles]. So it wasn't as preppy as a Gossip Girl or anything. But it was definitely a lot of very wealthy kids in a confined space. And a lot of them were great people and still are. And a lot of them were not great people at the time, and I don't know how they are now.
But yeah, I went to high school with the guy who runs the New York Times now. I'm trying to remember. But Phylicia Rashad's kid, I remember she visited on parent teacher day and me and all my friends were like, just watching her.
Sarah Enni: Holy….!
Lev A.C. Rosen: We were so excited, but we didn't do anything. So there was that level of like, "Oh, this is New York, who's who?" But I was not part of that particular... I mean, my parents grew up in East New York. My mom grew up in the projects. My dad grew up down the street from the projects. And they came of age in a time where pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was still viable. So I was still raised with a lot of those values and had not been a part of that world.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. The interesting thing about it though, and I hear this when I talk to friends of mine that grew up in LA and went to private schools in Los Angeles. I wonder this, I'm not sure how this will strike you, but being adjacent to people who are achieving at the highest level of a creative field too though, right? Like if you meet Felicia Rashad and her kid, then you're like, "I can be an actor. I've met an actor." Like, "That's a viable thing to do."
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah. I mean, we all definitely felt like we could do whatever we want. That was a hundred percent part of being in this. Like even me who had felt, in many ways, like I just sort of snuck in, there was, "The sky's the limit." Like, "Do whatever you want." Like, "Look at these people around you." Interestingly, for some people, it almost felt like because of who they were as some of the really upper tier people, it almost felt like their whole lives were mapped out and they had no choice in the matter.
They were gonna be this. And those are the people I almost felt sorry for at the time. But for a lot of us, I think, there was a sense of limitlessness which is nice to have in high school even if it goes away soon there after.
Sarah Enni: Well speaking of that, I'd love to hear you talk about what you decided to go on and study in school and when did writing go from something that you did to express yourself to taking it a little bit more seriously?
Lev A.C. Rosen: I went to Oberlin in Ohio. I wanted a college town experience and it also has one of the most exclusive undergraduate creative writing programs in the country. And I had to apply twice, but I got in. And my mentor there was Dan Chaon. He is an adult writer who wrote Among the Missing and You Remind Me of Me. New York Times best seller, yada yada yada. He is extremely good, you should read his books. He is a wonderful strange man. We still talk sometimes,
And originally everyone thought I was gonna be a play-writing person. I had a theater minor, I directed a lot of shows and I did dialogue very well. And then junior year, cause you're supposed to choose your focus and you have to do two semesters of private study in this particular field, which is one-on-one work. And originally I was play-writing and I worked with a man named David Walker who I liked very much, but at the same time I was taking a fiction workshop with Dan and I wrote this short story that just kept getting longer.
And he was like, "Alright, do you want to make this a novel and move your focus?" And I was like, "Yeah, that feels right." And so I did. And I finished this whole novel before I graduated, I finished my first novel. And, I don't know if I should be saying this, he's left Oberlin so I can say it now. But he was not supposed to do this, but he was like, "Here are agents, we're gonna send it out."
Sarah Enni: That's great!
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, it was pretty awesome. I had my first agent by the time I was 22.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, we never sold that book.
Sarah Enni: Ah, well. That's also not an uncommon story, but at least you had someone that's encouraging you and connecting you with people who can make it happen. I love also that your first novel was written with help and feedback.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Oh yeah. Every week we met for lunch at this, I can't remember the name of the restaurant, Oberlin's a small town. But we met for lunch. I had given him pages and we would just talk about the pages and where I was going or what I was gonna do. And he would be like, "Well, think about this. Think about that." Like, he was never like, "I think you should do this." But he was like, "Consider this. Consider that."
It was a real sense of camaraderie and this idea of just getting to chat with someone about your work, who understands your work and wants to help you. And it's real mentor-ship. And it was, in many ways, genuinely life-changing.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That sounds like it would be.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, and he was so good at it too, cause he's a great teacher and he's a very smart man, obviously, a great writer. And he just was so good at helping me figure out why I was trying to do something. Like I was like, "I want to do this." And he would focus in on what I was doing and what that meant going forward for the book. And he would help me think about not just character, but structure and the way things would unravel. And that was always what was really helpful for me.
Sarah Enni: Okay. I love that. Did you go to grad school as well?
Lev A.C. Rosen: I did. I came back and I was like, "Dear God, I'm not leaving the city again." And I applied for graduate schools only within city limits and I ended up at Sarah Lawrence, and I had a great time there. I don't think anyone ever took over sort of a mentor role for me. Dan really sort of remained that. But yeah Sarah Lawrence was really great.
I teach now, I teach creative writing. I teach for Gotham Writers'.
Sarah Enni: Oh, yeah.
Lev A.C. Rosen: So it's sort of a postgraduate, not graduate school, but they offer like a bazillion creative writing classes all over the city. And a lot of my students will be like, "Do you recommend grad school?" And I'm like, "It really depends. That's a lot of money. And the question is, can you create what you think you're gonna get in grad school without spending that much money?"
And a lot of people can and a lot of people can't. And a lot of people find it's worth the money to have that experience of graduate school. And I think what that experience really is, is constant feedback. A community, it's a regular schedule, it's forcing writing to be a part of your life. It's forcing you into a community.
And for some people, I think that that's exactly what they need. Because otherwise they're not people who can generate their own structure, or can put themselves out there into a new community. And so grad school provides all that for you. And that can be really great, but I think you don't need it.
Sarah Enni: I want to lead to All Men of Genius.
Lev A.C. Rosen: All Men of Genius, my first novel that was published. So in graduate school I had to write a thesis, which was another novel. My agent, at that point we'd gotten a fair amount of rejections on my first novel, and she was like, "It's really similar. I don't want to put you out there with the same thing and get the same rejections." And like, "Then people aren't even gonna read you the third time around."
I was like, "Alright, that's fair." Meanwhile, I'd been half working on this steampunk, screwball sex comedy. Which in my mind, was a thing where I was like, "No, no. You're not doing that Lev." In fact to the point where I didn't even have a Word document. I literally just sent myself emails with scenes. I had one long email chain that was literally hundreds of emails back and forth, just from myself.
Because I was like, "No, no, no. This is just a fun thing. And when a scene pops into my head, I'm just gonna write it, send it off, and we're not gonna... cause I have to finish my thesis, which is serious literature." And so, yeah, it was weird. I still don't know what really informed that decision. But it was this steampunk, sex comedy based on Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. And I wrote it, in this email essentially, and then I was like, "Alright, you know what? I'm gonna... it's here. Let's do this thing."
And so I took all the emails, I assembled it into a very long novel, and I sent it to my agent and I was like, "I have no idea if you're gonna like this, cause this is not why you signed on. You signed on for some literary sort of quasi magical, but much more serious." And this is like, "There's a rabbit who swears and a woman who uses a vibrator as a weapon." Like, "That's what this one is. And it's like 500 pages."
And she was like, "No, I get this. This is different, but I'm into it." And I was like, "Awesome!" And she's like, "Let's see where we can send it." Because she was a young agent too, and I was not her first fiction client, but I was up there. She's still my agent.
Sarah Enni: That's so great!
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah. We've known each other longer than we've known our respective husbands. I'm gonna see her next week. It's exciting. So we sent it out and we got a lot of people being like, "This is too long. Can you cut this in half, maybe make it two?" And one person asked me, "Maybe cut it in a half."
And we were looking at that and trying to figure out where an ending could go, which was very strange. Meanwhile in the background there was this one editor at Tor, Liz Gorinsky who kept being like, "I'm reading it! Don't accept any offers before you talk to me. I'm just so busy."
And we keep hearing that from her as we're sending it out to new people for eleven months or so before she finally was like, "I love it! I'm making an offer." And we were like, "Oh cool!" And she made the offer and bought it and that was my first experience. And it was pretty wild cause Tor does not operate like a lot of other houses in my experience.
I like to compare the way editorial houses work to like government styles.
Sarah Enni: Oh yeah, tell me!
Lev A.C. Rosen: And so I think of like, Little Brown here, everyone does things by committee. Everything has to be approved by a committee. And it's very committee-based. At Tor, my understanding is it's much more like feudalism. Like if an editor likes a thing, they just sort of are like, "I like this!" Then they go to the boss and if they're passionate enough, the boss is like, "You go for it!" And I don't know if it still works there, but my understanding is that's how it worked then.
Sarah Enni: That's so funny. It's like Little Brown's like the UN.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, exactly. Like, "We're gonna do everything by committee." I know how the meetings work here and it's fascinating cause it's like every department head has to be like, "Here are the pros and cons of buying this book." And the woman in charge listens to everyone. And it seems so smart to me, but I also wonder, "But what if a book really inspires enough passion in one person?" Like, "What does that mean? A book via committee verses the book that speaks to that one person."
I think about that a lot. My editor here, Alvina, who is brilliant, has this thing she says. She says, "Not every book is for every person, but there is a book for every person." And I think about that a lot, especially when we're sending stuff out and we're looking at the way editorial houses work. Or I have editors come in and talk to my students, cause I think it's important to learn about the business.
I think about that a lot and the difference between having everyone say, "Alright, we think this book is good business." Versus one person saying, "This book spoke to me on a personal level." And it's not like that's not taken into account at Little Brown. Definitely I know if editors are passionate enough they can really push something through.
But I think about what that means for the business and how the business works. You know?
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I'm doing a lot of talking to editors and agents right now for a mini series that by the time this is out hopefully will be public. I've been doing a lot of talking to industry professionals about how it works behind the scenes, learning about P&L sheets, and acquisitions meetings, and all of this very detailed stuff that I kind of knew before. But now I'm like, "Whoa!"
Lev A.C. Rosen: It's so important to learn about that stuff too if you're gonna be in the industry. When I was in graduate school, I already had an agent, so I didn't go to a lot of the agent talks and stuff. But a lot of my friends did and they didn't necessarily come out with an understanding of the way the business works beyond getting the agent.
Sarah Enni: Right. Yes.
Lev A.C. Rosen: And so that's why when I teach now, I bring in an editor, I bring in an agent, I bring in someone from publicity. I'm like, "This is how your book's life-cycle looks. And these are the people who shepherd it during those times. You need to understand what attracts their interest, how you can work with them." And I feel like a lot of schools just don't teach that.
Sarah Enni: No! Yeah, not at all.
Lev A.C. Rosen: I remember we had a senior colloquium at Oberlin for creative writing people, and it was more about teaching you how to read out loud, and performance, and stuff like that, which is absolutely valuable. But I don't remember anyone coming in and being like, "Alright, here's what a P& L is and this is how they make decisions. This is why comp titles are important." And like, "Never compare your book to Harry Potter!"
Sarah Enni: I know! Cause you hear that all the time. Like, "Don't compare your book to Harry Potter." But I'm like, "But why?" It's actually useful to know.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they need something reasonable to compare your book too.
Sarah Enni: There's some parts of publishing that think, you know, as the author half the time you're hearing people be like, "Well don't worry about it." I'm like, "You know what? Let me worry about it. It's my livelihood."
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, worry about it. I don't understand that. And what's hilarious is, I'm sure you've had this experience too, but one of the other things is even when you think you understand it, you do not understand it cause it is so weird out there.
Sarah Enni: Everyone does it different.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Everyone does it different. Like I said, Tor, Little Brown, that's just two houses. There are so many different ways that each house works. In like committees, or maybe it's three people you have to get it by. Maybe you just need three other editors to come with you to say yes. You have to like form a gang, essentially.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, totally! Oh my god, that's a good way to think about it. Like street fighting West Side Story style. That's amazing.
Lev A.C. Rosen: That's how I'm gonna picture all editorial meetings from now on.
Sarah Enni: Yeah! The Sharks!
Lev A.C. Rosen: [Sings with a tune from West Side Story] "Book, book, real good book!"
[Both laughing]
Sarah Enni: You know what? That would probably work. In some rooms, that would probably work. Okay. I'm not going to take up all of your time asking you about that. But thank you for getting into it a little bit and I'm really glad for your students.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Oh no, I love talking about the business cause I think it's so important for writers to know about. And it's not just about how good your book is. And that's one of those things that is so horrible to hear on some level. Cause there are a lot of good books out there! There are a lot of great books. Just cause you wrote a great book does not mean you're gonna get published.
It's about understanding how everything works after that. And you write a great book and then you send an email to an agent. I have some agent friends and one of them, I will not say her name, but she got a query letter that was also a personals ad. Yeah, yeah.
Sarah Enni: Oh boy.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Where it was like, "Hey, here's my book. I'd love it if you represent me. And by the way I saw your picture, you're really hot. Here's a picture of me."
Sarah Enni: [Gasp!]
Lev A.C. Rosen: And I was like, "What the F...! Who thinks that's appropriate?"
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh.
Lev A.C. Rosen: But a lot of people do. Or there was, I saw someone tweet about this, and I almost... oh man... if I hadn't had an appointment. I almost canceled an appointment to go fix it. There was a nice lady who'd driven up to New York for the day, telling no one beforehand, cause she had her novel and she wanted to meet with agents.
She was calling around and being like, "Can I come in and meet with you today?" And they were like, "That's not how it works." And she apparently was just like sitting in Washington Square Park, or something, really sad. And I really wanted to cancel my appointment and just go to Washington Square Park and be like, "Let's talk about business for awhile."
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh.
Lev A.C. Rosen: But yeah, no, my mom would've killed me if I had canceled it. So people with the best of intentions even, if you don't understand -- like the best intentions, the best book -- if you don't get the process of how all of this is gonna work, then you're not gonna get published. Or you're gonna quit. I have friends who went to graduate school and they got an agent, they get five rejections, and they're like, "I'm out." And I'm like, "Five? Whatever!"
Sarah Enni: Yeah! Multiply that by quite a few.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah. Like, "Whatever!" And this is why I always come back to Alvina saying, "Not every book is for every person, but there is a book for every person and you just have to find that person."
Sarah Enni: I want to lead up to the YA, but your second book was Depth.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Which is also very genre bending.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah. It's noir/sci fi. I really wanted to do something very Blade Runner-y, and I wanted to do something very New York-y. But I felt like what you were talking about before, the sort of gentrification of New York didn't allow a contemporary gritty noir to take place in the same way.
And so part of me wanted to like go back, but then another part of me was like, "What if we just went to the future and flooded New York and made it essentially this city of boats, decommissioned boats and bridges, far away from the mainland where all the criminal activity happens now?"
Sarah Enni: You were on the cutting edge of like climate genre.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah. It was pretty early. And now you see several people, much more famous than me, have books that take place in New York after global warming. And I'm like, "Wait a second." But it's fine. I'm sure they never heard of me or my book. But I really love that book too, and it's got such a great cover. It's such a great cover.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to ask about the shift from adult genre and contemp, or genre bendy kind of stuff, to then you went and tried a middle-grade book.
Lev A.C. Rosen: So the middle-grade, which is heavily illustrated by my brother was sort of a family affair. We all came up with it together over I think Passover, maybe Thanksgiving.
Sarah Enni: Oh, that's so fun!
Lev A.C. Rosen: Cause my brother is very talented, and we talked about wanting to do something together. We thought it'd be fun. And yeah, we literally came up with a plot with the whole family, essentially. And then I had met Alvina, my editor here, through my husband who's a librarian and he used to be a YA specialist. And I emailed her and I was like, "Hey, would you mind just looking at this?"
And we went through my agent and she was like, "Alright. So there's something good here, but you need to read some middle-grades. Like a lot more of them. The contemporary ones, not the ones you're thinking of." Originally I thought it was a chapter book cause it was so heavily illustrated.
And so she sent me a list of books to read, she gave me a little crash course. I read all of them, I revised the book, and then she bought it. And it was a lot of fun. And it's one of those books where it's a young middle-grade and that's sort of difficult to talk about sometimes.
I think middle-grade is one of those things where people have very distinct ideas about what a middle-grade is. But for me it was a very political book. It was about trying to help people understand change isn't a bad thing even if it's painful.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Do you mind, we're talking about Woundabout, do you want to pitch that story for us real quick?
Lev A.C. Rosen: Oh man, it's been awhile. It's about a brother and sister and their pet capybara who, after the death of their fathers, go to stay with their aunt in Woundabout. A town where nothing ever changes, to the point where there are rules about it. And there's sort of a supernatural element that keeps everything from changing. And as they explore the town, and they're like the only two children allowed in it, because children are trouble if you don't want change. They stumble across the things that are keeping the town from changing and they start to undo the locks, essentially.
And they realize that the reason they want to do this is because, if nothing ever changes, they'll never get over the grief of the death of their fathers. Meanwhile, it turns out everyone has come to this town essentially to avoid grief in some form or another. And so change coming back to the town means they all have to sort of deal with stuff.
And so they try to stop the kids. And chasing a capybara... It's cute. It's a sweet book. It's very like, I don't if I can say this cause I'm not a Buddhist, but in my mind it's very Buddhist. In this very sort of like, "Change is inevitable and you have to let it happen and then let go."
And that's how you move on from grief, which is what this story is about for the kids. And how you move on from trauma, which is what all the adults in the town have experienced. Then I did another middle-grade, which we talked about earlier, with the kid playing the fantasy game and how it's sort of an epic fantasy in there.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And just my kind of transition question, or when I was looking at the arc of your career, that is like a high fantasy, but it's also a very contemporary story.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah. It's extremely contemporary, and I always tell people it's a laugh riot. It's about a kid whose mother has early-onset Alzheimer's and he's convinced she's been misdiagnosed. And there's this video game they used to play together that has online capabilities, but you have to stay in character. And that was an older middle-grade. So I generally started moving up.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And a little bit more into contemporary spaces.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah. I think of Woundabout as being contemporary too. Like there's smartphones in it and stuff, but it's very much a fable, you know, that was the intention with it. And The Memory Wall was the first like, "Oh yeah, this is a solidly contemporary novel." Even if there's also this high fantasy novel in it.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. Which I love.
Lev A.C. Rosen: So it was definitely a movement into the contemporary. It's funny, I hadn't really thought about it that much.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Well, my favorite thing to do is look at... you rarely walk through your career like this, which is the unique thing about this show. And I like pointing out trends to people. Cause, of course, we're so in our work that we don't always see that. But I was like, "Oh, and then Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) comes out as this fully blown contemporary, very personal sounding story.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, it was. Jack of Hearts is a weird story too.
Sarah Enni: Yeah! Tell me.
Lev A.C. Rosen: So I have a rule for myself that if I write a hundred pages, I have to finish the book.
Sarah Enni: I love this role.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Just gotta finish it.
Sarah Enni: It's such a good idea.
Lev A.C. Rosen: But otherwise, I have so many ideas, otherwise it's just like, "Alright... and I'm gonna stop here and move on to that other idea cause it's shiny now." And a hundred pages is usually when it starts getting hard, you know? And so I wrote 99 pages of this book, I swear in a week. It was like in a mad fury.
It definitely came from a place of anger cause I was tired of gay men and YA being sort of de-sexualized, especially by straight readers. And I was like, "You know what I should write? I should just write this book about a super slutty gay kid who has no interest in a relationship and never ends up in one." And so I wrote 99 pages in this mad fury and then I was like, "This could be the worst idea I've ever had."
And I'd worked with Alvina on Memory Wall and we were friends. And so I was like, "Alright, just as a friend, we're not gonna involve the agent. As a friend, can I show this to you? And you can just tell me if it's worth continuing on with." And she was like, "Alright, sure. When I have time." And I was like, "That's fine. I'm gonna work on something else."
So she read it, and halfway through she was like, "Yeah, you should keep working on this. And I think there's an editor who I can think of who would like it." Who wasn't her. And then she got to the end of it and she was like, "Yeah, you should submit this to me right now." [Laughs] And we teased that one editor who works down the hall from her now, Jimmy, about how he almost had it.
But yeah. So we submitted it, and she bought it, and then I finished it. It just sort of happened. It was one of those things where I was like, "What is even happening? What's going on? I'm writing YA contemporary now that's also a sex advice book."
Sarah Enni: Do you want to pitch the book really quick?
Lev A.C. Rosen: So yeah, Jack of Hearts, like I said, it's about an un-apologetically slutty gay teen at a private high school in New York City, similar to the one I went to. And there's a lot of gossip about his sex life. And his friend convinces him to try to take control of that gossip by writing a sex advice column for her blog. And he does. And around the same time, he suddenly gets a stalker.
And the stalker sort of leaves him these notes that, at first, read like love notes. But then become more controlling and black-mail-y and they are essentially trying to make him into this sort of adorable, sexless, gay male that I felt was all I was seeing in a lot of YA. Not all of it, but a lot of it. And that's what I saw in popular gay YA a lot.
And so it becomes about the way the straight narrative tries to control queer people. And straight people try to tell queer people the right way to be queer. And the actual sex column is throughout the book. Several of the questions came from actual teenagers. I rewrote them and made them more stylized, but I reached out to people who have teenagers and I was like, "If any of them are comfortable just sending me some questions, names aren't gonna show up anywhere." And so yeah, it covers a wide range.
Sarah Enni: That's really very cool. That it's reflective of the curiosity of actual teens.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah, it was really rewarding to do too. And the paperback of that is coming out on May 26th, the same day as Camp. And it has some new questions in the back. I added some new questions which I'm pretty proud of. I'm pretty pleased with. And it's about Jack trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to be while this sort of Damocles hangs over him, essentially.
Jack of Hearts is a staying-out book, not a coming-out book. And the reason I say that is because I feel like, at the time - it's different now - but at the time a lot of gay YA that we were seeing was essentially coming-out stories, or sort of incidental queerness. Almost always soft, romantic, and written by a straight woman.
And the reason that I really wanted to write it is I wanted to show that after you come out, it's not all rainbows and butterflies. It's not going to make your life easier. This stuff still exists. And yes, you get to be more powerful out, you get to be more yourself out. But the closet is always gonna haunt you in some way. And the violence of living in a patriarchal, heterosexual world is essentially always gonna be trying to confine your queerness in some way.
And so Jack of Hearts is about that, where it dealt very much with sexuality or sex really. And the presentation of your own sexual desires. And Camp is much more commercial, but it's about the way society can say, "Oh yeah, it's okay that you are gay as long as you still conform to the standards of the patriarchy. As long as you are still masculine."
It deals with masc for masc culture. In fact, the title was originally 'Mask for Masc" and sometimes with one mask with a K. But they felt that that was a term that not many readers would know. So we went with Camp. But Camp is about a teen boy, Randy, who has been going to a queer summer camp for four years and all four years he's had a crush on Hudson Aaronson-Lim who is masc for masc.
And the reason he's had a crush is because Hudson just makes him feel like he can do anything and be anyone. I thought of Hudson as sort of like the romantic version of a life coach in many ways. Like, "Yeah, you can do it! I believe in you!"
And so this summer Randy comes back as 'Del', the other half of Randall. And he's remade himself, cause he's an actor, he's a theater kid. He's remade himself in the ultimate part as a masc kid. And immediately has sort of a "meet cute" cause Hudson doesn't recognize him. And sort of couples off with Hudson. And his plan seems to be working perfectly except for that whole, "Oh yeah. You're not being yourself though. You're not participating in theater, which you love every summer. You've given up your unicorn sheets, you've given up your sparkly nail polish." Like, "All the things that made you you, on some level." And he's like, "I'm just gonna reveal those to him gradually."
But is Hudson in love with you? Or is he in love with this part? And who are you if you give up the things that you feel are important to yourself? And so it deals with really similar issues from Jack of Hearts. Jack of Hearts was about presentation of your sex. It's about sluttiness, essentially. And being okay with sluttiness, and being okay with the fact that you're someone who enjoys sex and doesn't want a boyfriend. Even if you are told that that's what being a bad gay is.
And Camp is about being okay with the fact that you're a gay man who wears nail polish and acts and talks with his hands and has sparkly, glittery unicorn, whatever. And all these things that I feel like we're told you're not supposed to be. You know, you're a bad example for queerness. I talk about the glass closet a lot, which is this idea that once you're out, you will find a lot of people who are like, "I love gay people. Gay people are great! So happy. I'm pro gay marriage."
Like, "I'm really happy that you get to be yourself around me, but here's what you are supposed to be as a gay person. And if you step out of that closet, then you are a bad gay, and I don't want to be a part of your life. You're being too in your face about it. You are dancing on a pride float in your underwear. And you're making everything about your sexuality." Anything like that. And that's the sort of homophobia that I grew up with growing up in a liberal New York private school environment.
And so that's really what I wanted to take on in both books. In Jack, it focuses differently for sure. I think Camp tends to be about the way gay people can be recruited to police other gay people. As opposed to just being harassed by a straight person in Jack. Cause Camp takes place at this queer summer camp. There shouldn't be that sense of what the outside world wants you to do, essentially. And yet there it is. Where's that coming from?
Sarah Enni: Yeah, internalized homophobia.
Lev A.C. Rosen: And so I won't lie, it's a similar theme, but I think it's a different variation. Also the point was something that wasn't like [pauses and chuckles], the 100th word of Jack of Hearts is the word forgy. So something that was gonna be a little more palatable to gatekeeper types. Something a bit more commercial. I used to feel a little like ashamed saying, "Yeah, it was a little more commercial version of Camp." But I don't anymore. I'm like, "No, I want to get this out to as many people as possible."
And the truth of the matter is, queer books, especially queer books with sex tend to be sort of quietly banned, you know, the silent banning. And so I was just like, "Yeah, I'm gonna write it. It's going to be fun." And it was fun.
Sarah Enni: Well, I was gonns say it's kind of bringing back some of those farce elements. It's so visual. While I was reading it, I really was picturing it and was really having fun with those characters. And for some reason, I associate this with plays, but it was just like I was seeing them move through space in this way that felt very theatrical.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Thank you.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I mean, it was a blast.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Well, thank you very much then!
Sarah Enni: It was very funny too. I'm struck by your genre doesn't always get the opportunity to be funny, but when you moved into this YA contemp space, it feels like you got the freedom to really, that dialogue you were talking about earlier, really having fun with that.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Oh yeah. It's funny, I've been talking with the person who did the audio book for Jack and is doing the audio book for Camp, named Drew Kayden although they also go by Virgin Xtravaganzah. They are a drag queen in the UK. and you should absolutely check out their Instagram account. Their looks, they always look sort of like a campier, fetishy Virgin Mary vibe. It's amazing. It's amazing.
They were saying what they love so much is the dialogue and the way it feels like the conversations queer people have. Which maybe straight people aren't always privy to when we talk about stuff like gender presentation. And we do, and I think queer teens do, because we're very aware that it's always sort of over our heads. And so that made me very happy that another queer person responded so well to it.
So the idea was I wanted to do like one of those old Rock Hudson/Doris Day... Where it's like a romantic comedy, but someone's pretending to be someone they're not. And they're doing it to seduce someone. But maybe they actually fall in love! And that vibe. But you can't do Battle of the Sexes when everyone's male. So it became sort of Battle of Gender Presentation.
Sarah Enni: Right. Right. And what you're describing too, I mean, I'm relating to it from being told, "You're too much. You're too loud. Be quiet. Conform." What we're talking about is toxic masculinity at the root of all of this. Which speaks to certain queer presenting people, and women, and minorities of all kinds, and wants to tamp them down and fit them into a white male CIS mold. Which is quite boring.
Lev A.C. Rosen: The only way you can be taken seriously is if you behave in the following way. There's this old boys club, even no matter how talented you are, if you're gay, you don't get to be in that old boys club, unless you are really under the radar gay. Like unless you talk about your husband like, I don't want to [pauses with an indrawn breath], what the hell, I'll go for it.
Unless you're Pete Buttigieg, that's the sort of vibe. And this is why I think what he did was inspiring and I don't loathe him the way a lot of people do. Although, he never had my vote. But yeah, I think that the way a lot of straight people want gay people to be, is that. And I think that's why a lot of gay people responded negatively to him as well.
And on some level there's a lot of gay people who can do both.
Sarah Enni: Code-switching of a kind.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Oh yeah, a hundred percent code-switch. In the office, you become this one. And then, I always say letting your hair down. It's a very old gay expression that I love. When you let your hair down, that's when, all of a sudden, you get to be campier. You get to lip sync, you get to talk about stuff. But the fact that you have to put your hair up, essentially, to get ahead in business, to get ahead in the world, to be taken seriously. Or in the case of Camp, to get a man. Becomes deeply problematic and so stressful and weird.
And this is what kids today are still dealing with. We love to say, "Oh yeah, it's great now." And maybe where I went to high school it is, but you know, middle of Ohio, there's plenty of kids who are like, "Alright, I'm gay but I can't act gay."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And the last question I'm gonna have for you, I'm sorry, we could talk about this all day.
Lev A.C. Rosen: I know! I'm so sad.
Sarah Enni: And hopefully we can talk again soon. As you know, I wrap up with advice. And I would just love to hear advice you give to young queer storytellers who want to tell their story.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Ooh, queer specifically?
Sarah Enni: Yeah.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Well the advice I was gonna give when I just thought it was general advice, that I'm gonna give anyway right now.
Sarah Enni: Yes, please!
Lev A.C. Rosen: Is cover page. Do a cover page. I know people talk about playlists... there's nothing that gets me more in the head space of a book than opening it up and having a cover that like download some free fonts, make it amazing. That just speaks to the vibe of the book. I tell my students that one all the time.
Sarah Enni: Oooh! I love that.
Lev A.C. Rosen: It's underrated. They'll have the Times New Roman underline. But for queer storytellers specifically, I think what I would say is, "Don't be afraid of the straight audience. In fact, don't even care about the straight audience. Write your books for essentially teenage you. Or for your friends when you were a teenager. Write your books for other queer teens because those are the ones who are gonna be reading this and seeing themselves in a page."
When I talk about the importance of own voices and authenticity, I always say, "If you're not gonna be writing from your perspective, which I've done absolutely, you have to be asking yourself why? What are you doing? And you have to be taking into account, especially with kids, who's gonna be reading it and seeing themselves on the page. And if you're fetishizing that person, if you're seeing this character because of their sexuality, race, gender as sort of an object, then the kids who read that book who identify, are gonna see themselves as objects too."
And that's what I don't want. So I think what's most important, if you are queer, is to tell your story or tell the story you needed. Which feels deeply generic, so let's talk about the cover pages.
Sarah Enni: I love that. Oh my gosh, that's wonderful advice. And thank you so much for taking all this time to talk to me today.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Oh my go, thank you. This was a delight.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Same. Okay. We'll talk to you soon.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: Bye.
Lev A.C. Rosen: Bye.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Lev. You can find him online @Levacrosen.com and @levacrosen (Twitter and Instagram). And you can follow me on both Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni, and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
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