This week, I’m talking with YA and romance author Dahlia Adler. Dahlia shares her stories of editing for self-published and traditional works, plus the chaos of editing anthologies. She tells how she found her critique partner BFFs and and how she fits a billion hours of work into each week, somehow squeezing writing and blogging and editing all in while still remaining active and supportive in the writing community.
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
@MissDahlELama on Twitter and Instagram
dahliaadler.com
Buzzfeed
LGBTQ Reads
Tessera Editorial: https://www.tesseraeditorial.com/
Farrah Penn, copy editor at Buzzfeed
Rachel Strolle, helps with Dahlia’s blog
Don’t Hate the Player, Alexis Nedd: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54860246-don-t-hate-the-player
Candice Montgomery: Home and Away and By Any Means Necessary, https://www.candicemontgomery.com/books
Eric Smith: You Can Go Your Own Way, Don’t Read the Comments, @ericsmithrocks on Twitter
Episode 6: “The Why in YA” (Feat. Eric Smith): https://www.arieledits.com/edit-your-darlings/episode-6-eric-smith
Anna-Marie McLemore: The Mirror Season, Lake Lore, contributor to This Way Madness Lies, http://author.annamariemclemore.com/p/welcome.html
Katherine Locke: Second Position, Girl with the Red Balloon, Spy with the Red Balloon, What Are Your Words, https://www.katherinelockebooks.com/
Mark Oshiro: The Insiders, https://www.markoshiro.com/about/
Love and Other Natural Disasters: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49553169
Steven Rowley: The Guncle, https://www.stevenrowley.com/the-guncle
Leah Johnson: Rise to the Sun, You Should See Me in a Crown, https://www.byleahjohnson.com/
Marieke Nijkamp: Even If We Break, http://www.mariekenijkamp.com/musings/even-if-we-break/
Maggie Hall: The Conspiracy of Us trilogy, https://www.goodreads.com/series/144714-the-conspiracy-of-us
Transcript:
Ariel: Hi there and welcome to Edit Your Darlings, a podcast that tries to take the sting out of editing by talking with darling authors about their experiences.
I'm Ariel Anderson and today I'm joined by Dahlia Adler. Dahlia is an editor of mathematics by day, a Buzzfeed blogger and LGBTQReads overlord by night, and a young adult and romance author at every spare moment in between. Her novels include the Daylight Falls duology, Just Visiting, the Radleigh University trilogy, and the Cool for the Summer, out this year from Wednesday Books. She's the editor of the anthologies, His Hideous Heart (a Junior Library Guild selection), That Way Lies Madness, and At the Stroke of Midnight, coming from Flatiron Books in 2022. And her short stories can be found in the anthologies The Radical Element, All Out, And It's a Whole Spiel. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me, Dahlia.
Dahlia: Thank you for having me.
Ariel: So first let's talk about sort of in general how you found the team of people that you trust to look at your work, from critique partners to proofreaders. I know you've gotten to work with the folks at Tessera Editorial for Cool for the Summer, because your name came up in Episode 10 as I was talking with Whitney Hill about her experiences with Tessera. Where do you find your people, and what makes a good fit for your editing needs?
Dahlia: Tessera has actually also done my recent anthology That Way Madness Lies, and both That Way Madness Lies and Cool for the Summer are out with Macmillan, so I think Macmillan must have a good relationship with them. I don't have any part in that discovery, but I know that, especially the contributors to That Way Madness Lies were thrilled with Tessera. Whoever did the copy editing for that—and I'm sorry the name is escaping me right now, but I believe I was told it—was particularly good at noting casual ableism in people's stories and the contributors really, really appreciated it, like, a number of them. I mean, but in addition to writing notes you notes in response on the files, a bunch of them wrote in their emails back to me like, “This was an amazing copy editor.” So that was really cool and you know, definitely have to throw some love to Tessera for that.
Cool for the summer was, like, such a blur when I was editing it that I'm sorry I don't remember quite as much about that experienced, but it's... you know, for traditional publishing you just kind of have to have faith in whoever they're setting up for you.
I have also self-published. This was way back, 2014 and 2015 are when my self-published books the Radleigh University series came out, and the copy editor on those was... you know what, now I can't—Sarah Henning and Rebecca Coffindaffer were both copy editors with me at Spencer Hill Contemporary, who published my first YAs. I think I was a copy editor there before I got published there; pretty sure I was. Kind of unbelievable to me now that I can't remember the finer details of these things but the truth is, like, coming up on a decade from it.
Ariel: Oh yeah, no.
Dahlia: But they were doing work there, and Sarah Henning, I believe, did the copy editing for those books because I felt like having viewed both of their works, because seeing the two of us would be employed with the same manuscript, I felt like Becks and I did... found more of the same kinds of errors, and Sarah found things that are, you know, are tougher things for me to spot, more like timeline errors that are just not my skill. So I wanted somebody who was more of a complement to it, but then Becks is somebody else that I just also recommended a lot.
And then developmental editing for that, I used Katherine Locke, who doesn't really do developmental editing for full manuscripts anymore but sometimes does query packages because they're very busy with their own work at this... their own books at this point. We're friends and they did editing and I desperately needed somebody and it turned out to be a really good fit. So for developmental editing, I need somebody who, you know, asks the right questions, pins the right thoughts in my head. But I prefer to be led in a “here are the questions I had. You think about how you want to answer them.”
Ariel: Rather than like “here's what I see and here's how I think you could improve it.”
Dahlia: Yes, yes, it's, you know, a more macro approach is definitely better for me. I mean, the micro is also helpful, but I find I can usually kind of figure it out myself more with prompts.
Ariel: Do you remember any of those questions that came up?
Dahlia: You know what was a good question? And I don't remember if it was my agents or editor who asked it, it might have actually been both of them. Like in Cool for the Summer, Laura has this best friend who is kind of terrible, and it's, you know, why is she friends with her? And I knew that she was. I know we're all friends with people who are questionable sometimes especially in high school. That's an example of a question that I just really wanted to be able to answer in my revision, and that's a really helpful thing to keep poking at me to discuss.
Ariel: Yeah. So then, when you were self-publishing, who accepted those changes? Were you reviewing them and then telling your copy editor, “stet this,” and “that's a great suggestion,” or were you in control of it yourself?
Dahlia: Just me because, you know, it doesn't go back for a second round unless you want it to go back for a second round.
Ariel: Right.
Dahlia: Coming from a copy editing background myself, and I had been copy editing for years. It's my choices, and I have to stand by my choices, and the same thing stands true whether you're self-publishing or traditionally publishing, is you have to stand by those choices because you're the one who has to answer them when people call them out or have questions. So, you know, I'm not asking permission unless I absolutely 1,000% have to ask permission.
Ariel: Ooh, that's a lot of power.
Dahlia: It is! And not everybody feels ownership with that power, so people have really different relationships with using the stet command, and sometimes you have to recognize when you are holding on to something that you shouldn't or somebody else knows better than you. As a general rule like I wouldn't exercise that power if somebody was like, “By the way this is offensive in that culture, don't do it.” Or my impression—you know, “the impression you're getting from this is negative in a way I don't think you mean to be,” and that's something that you definitely want to address. Calling out ableism and your work that's not there intentionally, for example, is something that I could miss and that I want to address.
There are definitely those notes that that you want to hear. And take. And sometimes there’s ones that you don't, and you have to stand by what you want to own and get across how you want to get it across. Traditional publishing, you know, you have to tell somebody you're doing that, and copy editing for self-publishing, unless you're sending it back, you don't. You go through it yourself and the stet is implicit. And you just move forward with your choices.
Ariel: And you don't feel like it sort of rubs it in the copy editor’s face? I think a lot of self-publishing authors are worried about that, like they are so worried about offending their own copy editors by not accepting those changes.
Dahia: That's so interesting, I've never heard that before. I mean I trust myself on matters of grammar. And that may be something that separates me from other self-published authors, if they have not also been copy editors. But those choices, I don't know, they're your story choices. You don't owe it to anybody to take their edits. You pay them to make them, to point them out, to draw your eye to how you could do something differently, how maybe you should do something differently. But you don't owe them to take your notes.
Your publisher, which is, you know, is putting money into you is a different story. You owe them to meet them at some point in the middle, because they're also putting money into this, they also have their name on it. But your copy editor, you know, can take your check and go.
Ariel: There’s the door, it’s right over there.
Dahlia: And if you made a choice that they don't like—unless they sign some NDA for you or something—they're pretty free if somebody calls something out in your book to be like, “Yeah, I advised against that, and she did it anyway.” I mean, do that to me. If I override you and people call me out on it, and you're like, “I don't want to be associated with that,” by all means. But my books tend not to get that heavily copyedited, so that's also a big difference.
Ariel: That’s a flex.
Dahlia: You're not seeing whether or not I accepted where you moved the apostrophe. You're not finding entire pages where you had to be like this is a wild inconsistency and I'm ignoring that. You know, I'm not that author.
Ariel: So you write both young adult, which I love, and romance, which I also love. Are there big differences in the way that you approach the editing for those different genres?
Dahlia: It's more that one’s self-published and the other one is traditionally published. Young adults I've only done traditionally and romance I have only done—romance that's not young adult—I have only done self-published.
So for my first romance, which was Last Will and Testament, yeah, I didn't use a developmental editor all because I didn't feel I was having developmental issues with coming up with the book I did use a copy editor, but I felt I could determine I didn't need a developmental editor for that one. Then the next one, Right of First Refusal, I literally couldn't finish without hiring an editor and being like, “please read it thus far and just tell me your thoughts so I can figure out how to move forward,” and that's what happened. Katherine Locke read, you know, a portion of the manuscript whatever I had done, and I’m sure I have the edit letter here somewhere from 2015 that, you know, it asked the questions I needed asked and discussed where the manuscript could go, and that was how I was able to finish it.
And in traditional publishing, I have never provided half a manuscript before. I've actually never sold a novel on proposal. The only novels I have sold without having written them first, are books that were book two on a contract. But even then nobody's seeing it in the middle. I'm turning in the full project after I finished it.
That's the process I'm in now. I'm revising a book two that, literally, not one person has seen besides me, which is super weird. And if I were self-publishing it, I might have sent it to somebody along the way, but because this is going to ultimately have my editor at Wednesday looking at it, I'm not having somebody else work on it in the middle unless I’m struggling to finish it.
I did have a good conversation with somebody who did really help me finish it. Anna-Marie Mclemore is a seriously brilliant author. Also a great friend, who was able to ask me the questions I needed to help move forward on this one. In case you see a key theme! I really needed to be asked certain questions to be able to figure out how to finish books, and I honestly, like, feel like I would not have finished this book without them, so I am very, very grateful for that.
Ariel: Yeah, so that's sort of like the critique partner role.
Dahlia: Yeah, that's a newer relationship for me in that regard. I did read The Mirror Season early, and Anna-Marie read Cool for the Summer early, and we gave each other a couple of notes, but they were pretty close to done by that point. My critique partners who I've had for a decade now are Marieke Nijkamp and Maggie Hall, who I met... I think it was 2011. It was like this whole, not that everybody was in this contest called the Writer’s Voice but it was sort of how I made my inroads into making friends in YA. Everyone was sort of tangentially involved in that. So a lot of my friends date back to this one writing contest that they don't have anymore but was a really big Twitter thing. It wasn't like pitch wars but it was that sort of community. So Maggie and Merieke are the ones who read pretty much all my books early, including Cool for the Summer. And then as I go I have different people who kind of read my books early sometimes to give me notes, often not. You know, kind of depends if I think it's their sort of book or not.
Ariel: Let's talk about how editing an anthology even works. This is something I know so little
about.
Dahlia: Anthologies are incredibly complicated. So the ones that I have done so far are both reimaginings, which means the first step after you do your proposal—and if you want to find an example of a proposal you can look at my blog, DailyDahlia.wordpress.com. I have an article, a blog post called “So You Want to Edit a YA Anthology” that has my actual proposal for His Hideous Heart, my first anthology, on it, so that's where you can go to see what that looks like. So the first thing you do is you write up this proposal and it has a lineup. Find the lineup, I guess is really your first thing after the idea, is the lineup.
And then because these are retelling anthologies, one thing you have to do is, you know, talk to your authors about which stories do you want to do, give me your top three choices. Then see, you know, where that butts heads against other people's top three choices and then you know eventually work it out. You got to make sure that kind of the most important works are chosen or at least do your best to make sure. You can't do a Shakespeare reimagining anthology that doesn't have Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and Macbeth.
Ariel: You could try.
Dahlia: You could try. People are honestly already disappointed about what stories this doesn't have, and I feel the same way. There are stories I really wanted in it that aren't there, but like there's just no room. Especially, and 15 people made their choices.
But so that's the first part, and then once, then everybody has a deadline and they submit stories and I kind of do it on a rolling basis where they do have a deadline, but I'm kind of like, “Just get it to me when you have it.” If it's early I'll edit it early. If you need more time, just let me know. So I have these stories that are continuously coming in, and I do a round of editing on them. And then I send them along to Sarah Barley, who's the publishing editor of Flatiron, and then she's the next one to go through them. And then once we've both edited, then the story goes back to the author and then the author makes the revisions and sends them back to me. If there was anything left to go through, you know, then I’ll do one more round, but that's, it's rare. There's usually like a couple of stories in each collection that gets more than one round.
Ariel: And you know that those stories are going to be viable because you chose the authors that you knew had those stories in them, right?
Dahlia: Yeah, it's tricky because you do want to have new voices in there but you also want to have authors that you know can absolutely respect deadlines and deliver short fiction. Sometimes it's a guessing game who's going to be able to do this and sometimes you use people who are really reliable. And so that's part of why the same people end up in collections, over and over again. I mentioned on Anna-Marie McLemore, they're in like 10 YA anthologies, but the thing is, they always make deadline, they always write a fantastically beautiful story they’re really easy to work with. So you're gonna want somebody like that in your collections all the time. You can take a chance on a few people, but I always think of it that way
For me it, you know, was so wonderful the first time I was asked to be in an anthology, and I had never been in one, but it was really, really nerve racking. So, and then I was really happy I did it, and clearly it's been kind of a life changer. So I want to give people that same opportunity that I had to do that work, to push through it, to see if they love it. And that's for the most part, really paid off, but it is definitely a gamble.
Ariel: So then it goes through the different rounds of developmental and revisions, and then just the whole anthology you get copy edited in one fell swoop and what happens if some authors have super preferences that don't match what other authors are doing?
Dahlia: What do you mean “super preferences”? In terms of what?
Ariel: Like spelling or ways that they italicize things or like little stylistic choices.
Dahlia: I mean, I don't want to speak for every publisher. That doesn't necessarily have to be uniform across the board from story to story as much as it does within your story. If somebody felt strongly about it, I would fight for them is generally how I feel about it. You know, if one author's like, “I want foreign language italicized in my story” and another one said they didn't, you know, what you want. I try to fight for my authors as much as possible and in general I find Flatiron to be amazing about that, and it's, you know, “fight” is really a misnomer there.
Ariel: It’s more like a pillow and less like a sword.
Dahlia: I mean, but houses also have their own style guide, so you're going in knowing MacMillan is the house that's publishing this and Flatiron is the imprint that's publishing this, and this is the way that they do everything and if you don't—you know, we all know our work is probably going to be changed to suit the house style. So unless there's something that you feel really strongly about. I mean like I've never had anybody fight me when I'm like, “Don't italicize my foreign languages. You know, except where I do.
Ariel: Like maybe Latin.
Dahlia: Yeah, if it's not, you know, if it's not a foreign language to the narrator, is a different story from where it is a foreign language to the narrator.
Ariel: For sure.
Dahlia: Yeah, so it's complicated, so then it goes in and it can get, you know, line edited, copy edited, and what happens is they send me back the entire document. And there's no great way to pull it out story by story and send it to the author, so what often happens is you send the whole document and you tell everybody, just look at you know your name and the Table of Contents your name on the copyright page, your story and send it back to me. So you get 15 documents of the full manuscript, with only one story edited, and then my job is to take the edits off each and every one of those documents and transfer them onto a main document.
Ariel: So you definitely have 28 hours in every single day.
Dahlia: That part is a nightmare. I’m not gonna lie.
Ariel: There's got to be like a macro to compile all of those.
Dahlia: Yeah, I mean, there might be technologically a better way to do it, but honestly, every time I’ve thought I found it I've been wrong. And then I was just like, never mind, please ignore what I sent you, here's the whole document. And then you do it again, because you know everything's copy edited and you send it in and then they do the layout and they send you proofs, and that works exactly the same way you send it back to people and they send you their corrections and the same thing I'm taking 15 different sets of proofs. These parts are really hard. Yeah.
Ariel: My goodness. Yeah. And then you also edit mathematics? What? What does that look like?
Dahlia: Yeah. They don’t call us acquisitions editors like as a title, but that's really what it is. That's more finding mathematicians to write books for us. Our manuscripts come in and we take care of having them peer reviewed. That's more the kind of thing I do. You know, I might be the appearance at a math conference you can talk to you about how to publish, or you send me your manuscript and I try to place it in a series and place it with reviewers and help you through your revisions. I don't actually have to know math, it's a really misleading job title for sure. I'm not in any way a developmental editor. I might, you know, give you some ideas for how to organize your book if you need them. The closer it is to a trade book, the more I can help you with on that front, but it's... you know, it's largely just about acquiring the book and then getting it through the production process but the developmental editing, the peer reviewing, that's math experts.
Ariel: So in any given day you might swing from working on your own stuff, to editing other people's stuff in anthologies, to then acquiring mathematics books. Which one do you love the most?
Dahlia: Who's listening to this? Is my boss listening to this? You're also forgetting the blogging, blogging takes up most part of each—not the most; day job obviously takes up the most. I don't usually get to write during the week, or edit during the week, I pretty much do those things on Sundays, maybe during my lunch break, unless I'm on deadline deeply enough that I'm working at nights, but because I have kids, I can't really do evenings either. There's just, there isn't the time.
So my day job is most of the day and then I squeeze in blogging around that: before work, lunch breaks, right after work. It's really tricky. I blog post BuzzFeed and I run this website LGBTQ Reads for five years now. And those things are a lot of work. So you know, everything, I think, sort of pings a different part of me. It's hard to say what I love the most, because I love them in different ways, and I think that they do different things for me.
But you know, books are... are so much work, and you can't do it unless you love it. You can write because you love writing and reading and whatever, but you can't publish because of that. Publishing is a totally different thing.
When I was on maternity leave, which was this past fall, I had to really take advantage of the time to write this book two and do all this, these copy edits and everything. I was doing a ton of publishing stuff and I was like, oh my god, with my day job out of the way, author stuff has become my full-time job and it is really taking up full-time-job kind of hours. How am I going to go back to my day job and do all of this in one day? Yeah, life is really hard. It's a lot of fulfilling and wonderful things, but it's really hard, I’m not gonna lie.
Ariel: Yeah, how much editing work goes into the blog?
Dahlia: A lot, a lot. I don't think it's less than 10 hours a week.
Ariel: So you're writing posts, or are you editing other people's posts?
Dahlia: I'm not really editing post, but the truth is it's mostly formatting and just putting in information. If I'm doing a new releases post, I'm looking for, you know, what is there coming out that month? And, you know, putting all those books into a post and looking up the buy links, tracking down the covers and saving the covers and inputting that. Stuff like that takes a really long time.
When I'm making posts, they're usually not so heavy on the content. You know, like “Fav Five Queer Muslim YA,” is like when I have coming up, or queer Appalachian fiction. And those are things that I put together and they do require some research, but the whole post is five titles that are linked and highlighted with a little graphic on the bottom. So it doesn't sound like that much work, different posts are different amounts of work. It's like content creation more than writing what I'm doing for it for LGBTQ Reads. It is writing involved when I do it for Buzzfeed because I have to kind of write up blurbs for each book.
Ariel: And then is there also somebody coming in behind you and copy editing your work for that?
Dahlia: At BuzzFeed, yes. Farrah Pen is the editor for YA books at BuzzFeed. LGBTQ reads, no.
Ariel: So your typos are all your own.
Dahlia: They are. I... I edit things throughout the day, honestly. Like I'll spot them and I'll just go in and make the change and there's no one to tell it to.
Wordpress has been really tricky for me in that I haven’t even been able to bring on any assistance. So the only person who's there to help me is Rachel Stroley, who's amazing, and does a lot of the graphics and stuff. But like, also has her own absurdly packed schedule. So now I'm back to doing a lot of the content by myself. And it's a lot. It's a lot.
Ariel: Well, let's go over the questions that I ask every author I talk to. First, what do you hate about the editing process? What's the worst?
Dahlia: You know, it's not the worst when you can't figure out how to do something, because ultimately, you're gonna figure it out. And you have to have faith in that process. That stretch of time where you're like, I know what needs to happen here. And it's not even just that you can't figure it out. But you just have no desire to do the work that goes into it, like you feel dead inside at the thought of trying to do that part. That's the worst. Inside moments, but I have dead inside moments about editing.
Ariel: And then what's the most common bit of feedback you receive on your writing,
from editors or from readers?
Ariel: From editors.
Dahlia: I don't know that there's such a commonality. But the truth is that I have done very different things over time. So Cool for the Summer is the first novel that I've published in five years. And Out of the Behavior of Right of First Refusal were the two before that and didn't really have didn't have editing, didn't have developmental editing, on full manuscripts. So yeah, we're talking going back to a book published in November 2015, was my last published novel that had developmental editing the whole way through it. So I can't really think of a consistency if I'm being honest. Sometimes I don't... I don't give enough information in the beginning, I guess is what I would do with, maybe.
Ariel: Sort of that telepathy problem.
Dahlia: Yeah, I guess, I don't know. I don't know how consistent that is. But I’ve definitely had to put on new first chapters more than once. I don't necessarily start in the right place.
Ariel: Often, it's like, people want you to chop that first chapter off. So you're saying that you're adding to the beginning?
Dahlia: Yes, but not a prologue. It's just whatever I wrote as Chapter One needs to become chapter two. I was solicited to submit a proposal for something. They just kept asking for revisions on it until finally I said no. They did ask me to put a front chapter on that and just visiting I remember, I had to add on to the front chapter of that. So yeah, not the first time I have received that. So at least twice I have added to the very, very front of the book.
Ariel: Do you have any last words of advice?
Dahlia: Always, always—I mean, this is not literally for everyone. I feel like I need to preface with that. But always write forward. And don't try to do major edits until you finish the book. Can't edit a blank page. And if you keep editing as you go, you're going to have so many blank pages. What I do is I keep a document as I go with things I want to make sure to revise later. You know, or you can even leave notes in document, like highlight it or add comments or whatever. And then I write the rest of the story as if I had made that revision. So like I decided on this big change and one of the main character’s living situations kind of halfway through the book I'm writing now. So from when I decided that onward, I write it as if she's already in that new situation. And now going back and making all the changes to make the first half catch up to the second half.
Ariel: My brain can't even... I just got stuck. I'm just, I'm, I'm thinking about you're writing it and writing it and then you go back to the beginning and read it and it makes absolutely no sense until you get to that big change.
Dahlia: But in your head, the story's already changed. So it doesn't make sense on paper. And it makes it easier to scrap because you're like, I already know this doesn't belong with where the characters end up, or where the story is going to go. So I find it easier to make changes. First of all, I don't get distracted by editing on the way. And then second of all when you do it after the book is already done, you're doing it with the confidence that this change worked. And I find that that's really, really helpful for me, whereas if you go halfway through, you go to the back, like, what if you're wrong, and you want to... you keep going, and you're like, oh, there's a reason I had it that way the first time! So this way, you know that the way you've had had a plan that works?
Ariel: I'll have to try that sometime. It a certain amount of self-control to not go back and revise.
Dahlia: Yes. It is definitely not how I was in the beginning. And it was definitely a learned tactic. But I found... I was doing this, I was seeing everyone around me do it too, when we were all like newbie authors: it almost becomes an excuse not to finish. And you just need to take that excuse away from yourself. You can have the changes somewhere else, but you can't have it stop you from finishing. It's how I feel.
Ariel: Yeah. So the last portion of my program is a Hot and Wholesome Gossip Corner. Are there any other writers or creators doing something you're excited about? Any shoutouts you want to give or people you want to lift up?
Dahia: Oh, my God. Yes. Like 8 billion. Can I have 20 minutes for this?
Ariel: Yes.
Dahlia: If we’re doing a “last book I read that I loved,” it’s Don't Hate the Player by Alexis Nedd. And it's a gamer romance between like two gamers who met over an arcade game as like tweens, or maybe even younger than tweens. And then they end up competing against each other in this huge thing. She's trying to keep her worlds separate. And it's just really great. The romance is so sweet. The voice is so good. I described the vibe as “Candice Montgomery writing Eric Smith.” They're just like two of my favorite people in YA, also. I will definitely shout them out. Candice Montgomery is the author of Home and Away and By Any Means Necessary, which are both great YAs. And she has an anthology coming out in 2022 with two other editors called Signs Point to Yes, or maybe All Signs Point to Yes, with each story is based on a different astrological sign. And I know nothing about astrology, so I'm really looking forward to learning about it there. And Eric Smith is an author, agent, and general great human who has Go Your Own Way coming out in November, which is a pinball romance.
Ariel: Yeah, we had Eric on, I think he was episode six or seven. One of my absolute favorites, for sure.
Dahlia: Yes, I mean, super great person.
Ariel: And Don’t Read the Comments was so much fun.
Dahlia: Yeah. They also both have main characters of color, which, you know, is not a perspective you always see in things like gaming, so.
And then I mentioned Anna-Marie McLemore and Katherine Locke, who are just both fabulous. Anna-Marie just released The Mirror Season and has another book coming in 2022 called Lake Lore, and also contributed to That Way Madness Lies and will also be contributing to my next anthology, because even though I try not to use contributors twice, the anthology was actually their idea. That is called At the Stroke of Midnight, and that's an anthology of fairy tale reimaginings.
And Katherine Locke does everything. Like, romance with Second Position, which is a ballet romance, and then YA historical fantasy Girl with the Red Balloon and Spy with the Red Balloon, and their next book is What Are Your Words, which is a picture book about pronouns, and then they have more YA coming, oh and a middle grade anthology that they're co-editing with Nicole Melody, which is really exciting to me because it was my idea and I paired them together because I don't know middle grade at all. And it's an all queer middle grade anthology, which I'm really, really looking forward to.
In terms of something I'm really excited about a creator doing in terms of premise, The Insiders by Mark Oshiro has to be the coolest sounding middle grade novel that I have ever heard. I literally cried on hearing the premise, which is basically like, a little Narnia for closeted kids at schools. Like they hide in the closets and actually meet each other, despite them all living in different places. They go to like the special place all together that's accepting.
Ariel: That sounds so wholesome.
Dahlia: Yeah. I also really loved Love and Other Natural Disasters is a really fun one that I read recently, and in adult gay contemporary fiction, I just read The Guncle by Steven Rowley. And that was really fun. Something I'm really looking forward to: Rise to the Sun by Leah Johnson, which comes out July 6. So that's the next book by the author of You Should See Me in A Crown, which was one of my absolute favorites of 2020. I can really talk about people forever.
And of course, shout out back to my critique partners Marieke Kneikampf, whose most recent—you know, I can't even keep up with what their most recent is because every time there's like another goosebumps novel, or graphic novel, and whatever I think is the most recent isn't even—but Even If We Break is their really intense gaming-centric thriller that came out in September. And Maggie Hall is the author of The Conspiracy of Us trilogy, which is this really fun, like, global adventure. Likely speculative fantasy, like, very cool adventure trilogy. Yeah.
Ariel: Oh my gosh, that's such an incredible list.
Dahlia: I feel like I barely tapped anything. But I blog for Buzzfeed and I blog for LGBTQ Reads. And I tweet as MissDahlELlama. And you can find plenty of my book recommendations and authors I love mentioned in those places.
Ariel: Yeah, and you can also head over to her website, DahliaAdler.com, and be sure to check out her latest anthology That Way Madness Lies releasing—oh, it was already released! March 16.
When we recorded this episode, Cool for the Summer was already in preorders, but since then it’s been released, and I’m so glad that I preordered because it came with this super cute sticker sheet and a little bookplate that said “XOXO, Dahlia.” So be sure to pick up a copy from your favorite indie store.
Thank you again for talking with me, Dahlia. I know that you have like a million things going on. So I really appreciate your time.
Dahlia: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
Ariel: If you loved this episode of Edit Your Darlings, why not share it with a friend? Remember to rate and review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast fix. For show notes go to edityourdarlings. com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @editpodcast, or I'm @arielcopyedits. Until next week, cheers!