This Week in YA — Issue #77
Welcome to the Voyage newsletter!
It’s another new week and another installment of this newsletter for you this week, my fellow YA enthusiasts. But in fact, we also need to let you know that this is the last week of this newsletter! All good things must come to an end, including TWIYA. Voyage YA is of course continuing as part of Uncharted magazine, but as things slow down for summer, the end of June seemed like a perfect point to wrap everything up with a nice bow and bid our newsletter readers adieu.
News and Resources
In this week’s award news, Horn Book is Presenting the 2023 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winners, including a fabulous winner for YA!
Danika at The Lesbrary has The Best Sapphic Books of 2023 (So Far). Some of these titles are in the adult space, but there are several great YA picks too.
Dahlia at LGBTQ Reads recently shared her Most Anticipated Young Adult Fiction: July-December 2023. Lots of fantastic books to get on your radar for sure!
Rachel at Book Riot will make you Fall in Love with these 14 Swoony Bisexual YA Romcoms.
I found The Iron Rule of Home Bookshelves over on Publishers Weekly pretty interesting (especially as someone with too many piles of books around the house).
Finally, Writers Don’t Need to Suffer to Make Art, as Haley shares on LitHub. Well worth a read!
The 5 Questions Interview Series
Each week, this newsletter will include interviews with industry professionals sharing insight about the who, what, where, when, why in YA today.
Today we’ve got an interview with author Amelia Diane Coombs, whose next YA novel, All Alone With You, releases next month (on 7/25/2023). Amelia is the author of several other YA novels, so you might be familiar with her work already, but this one promises to be particularly fun—love the concept! Check it out and get your pre-orders in now.
5 Questions Interview with Amelia Diane Coombs, YA author
ABOUT ALL ALONE WITH YOU
HBO Max’s Hacks gets a romantic twist in the vein of Jenn Bennett in this swoon-worthy novel about a standoffish teen girl whose loner status gets challenged by a dynamic elderly woman and a perpetually cheerful boy.
Eloise Deane is the worst and doesn’t care who knows it. She’s grumpy, prefers to be alone, and is just slogging through senior year with one goal: get accepted to USC and move to California. So when her guidance counselor drops the bombshell that to score a scholarship she’ll desperately need, her applications require volunteer hours, Eloise is up for the challenge. Until she’s paired with LifeCare, a volunteer agency that offers social support to lonely seniors through phone calls and visits. Basically, it’s a total nightmare for Eloise’s anxiety.
Eloise realizes she’s made a huge mistake—especially when she’s paired with Austin, the fellow volunteer who’s the sunshine to her cloudy day. But as Eloise and Austin work together to keep Marianne Landis—the mysterious former frontwoman of the 1970s band the Laundromats—company, something strange happens. She actually…likes Marianne and Austin? Eloise isn’t sure what to do with that, especially when her feelings toward Austin begin to blur into more-than-friends territory.
And when ex-girlfriends, long-buried wounds, and insecurities reappear, Eloise will have a choice to make: go all in with Marianne and Austin or get out before she gets hurt.
ABOUT AMELIA DIANE COOMBS
Amelia Diane Coombs is the author of Keep My Heart in San Francisco; Between You, Me, and the Honeybees; Exactly Where You Need to Be; and All Alone With You. She’s a Northern California transplant living in Seattle, Washington, with her spouse and their Siberian cat. When she isn’t writing or reading, Amelia spends her time playing video and tabletop games, road-tripping, and hiking the Pacific Northwest.
1. Who: Who are your instabuy, go-to YA authors? And which new talent have you discovered recently?
I’ve been quite behind on recent YA releases, but I had the immense pleasure of reading an early copy of The Borrow a Boyfriend Club by Page Powars, which releases on September 12th of this year! Powars is a debut young adult author that I have no doubt will become an instabuy for anyone who reads The Borrow a Boyfriend Club. TBABC is a heartwarming YA romance about a trans boy who joins his school’s secretive borrow a boyfriend club to prove he’s “boy enough” to his new classmates—and falls for the club’s prickly president in the process.
2. What: What was the most joyful moment in preparing to bring All Alone With You into the world?
This is tied between dedicating the novel and seeing my cover for the first time! The themes in All Alone With You focus on social connection and how people need people, and I chose to dedicate the book to the friends I made over the last few years. I moved to Seattle (where AAWY is set) a few months before the pandemic, and it was a really lonely time. The friends I’ve made over the last few years mean the world to me, and choosing to dedicate this book to them was so joyful. Also, this cover is my absolute favorite, and it warms my heart whenever I look at it!
3. Where: Where is the state of YA right now, from where you sit? Where do you hope to see it go next?
I’d really love to see debut authors—especially those writing quieter books—receive the support they deserve from their publishers so their careers can flourish! There are so many fantastic new YA authors on the scene, but the market is very congested right now. I think it’s becoming harder and harder for teens to find new YA releases, and harder for debuts to break out.
4. When: Looking ahead to next year (or beyond), what exciting things are next on the horizon for you?
All Alone With You is my last YA release for the foreseeable future. I’m not quite sure what’s next for me, but I’ve been working on a new project with my agent over the last few months, and I’m extremely excited to see where it might take me.
5. Why: Why YA? What drew you to writing this book for this age group?
I’ve really loved writing for teens because I think they’re the most discerning, passionate, and engaged readers.
Writing Inspiration from Kip
As mentioned above, this is the last TWIYA newsletter. I’ve really enjoyed spending the past two years jumping into your inboxes with the latest YA news and interviews. And I hope my offerings of writing inspiration have been helpful!
So now that the time has come for my last bit of writing advice, I decided that I wanted to focus my advice on changing things up—because when it comes to creating anything, often one of the best things you can do is try something new. Getting nowhere with a manuscript after scores of revisions and/or passes? Set it aside and start a new project! (You can obviously come back to it down the road—something I’ve done multiple times.)
Most creatives are used to trying new things out. We constantly have to brainstorm new approaches, try different ways to solve problems, and see what sticks. The same is definitely true in finding a way to earn a living as a creative. Very few authors actually manage to support themselves from writing full-time. Instead, we tend to cobble together our own support systems with various gigs—hopefully one of them with health insurance. And sometimes the greatest freedom to create comes with a more permanent, full-time job instead, so that’s what I’m personally trying next (in a high school library, no less, woot!). So however you manage to pull your own creative lives together, I salute you and wish you all the best!
Thank you for joining me on this voyage!