WHAT AN INCREDIBLE HONOR to be named one of the BEST YA BOOKS of 2025 by YALSA...the Young Adult Library Services Association, part of the ALA-- American Library Association.
With so many great books being published every year, to be distinguished as a top ten YA novel means a great deal.
I have had the opportunity to speak a lot about this book recently. About how it touches on themes of fascism, community, leadership and political narrative. I think these are all incredibly relevant topics which have only grown in relevance since I wrote this book in 2020.
I will say, this book is flopping hard as a product. Less than 200 goodreads reviews. Very low sales. I reach out to libraries and bloggers as much as I am able but...I work a full time job that is unrelated to promotion so my kid can eat. There are machines that write for us now. Writing is just thinking clearly, we keep being told to let someone else think for us. To give up & surrender, it is our job to consume and not question. It is certainly not our job to think, let alone witness another's thoughts. And everything has to be a job, right.
I am trying not to succumb to how dark this moment in time feels. I prefer to think this is the valley of despair moment that leads to the climb up into some higher mastery.
I was thinking last night about LLMs & more copywriting work-- the sort of thing I used to do for money in my twenties-- and eventually more fiction writing getting replaced with AI slop. If late stage capitalism makes all paid art impossible for artists, I think there is a way this is good news. Art existed before money and it will exist long after. Art under the leash of commodity is market-serving and tame, it is advertising. Art before was a ladder to the gods. It was transcendent, and primeval, and scary. Immersive and holy. If all paid writing goes away, what comes next will unleash an ancient god into this world that has slept too long. That is what I believe.
I used to write to succeed, now I will write to be free, and to free every mind I can reach.