When I began this book, it wasn't a period piece. At least not explicitly. It was a thought experiment really — I wondered what it would look like to become a Jersey transplant in high school, since I was an adult by the time I made the switch from West to East Coast. I'd heard countless stories about my friends' experience in high school and it was so different from my own that I started cataloguing those tales in the back of my mind. Yes, those were mid-2000s anecdotes, because most (if not all?) my friends are millennials, but that wasn't the point of the story.
Then I spent more time in my setting and realized that technology has changed the way we live way too much for me to try to pretend this could take place any time. Several times (without any real spoilers) characters don't know where another character is, and with the social media and location tracking of today, I just don't see that being likely.
It wasn't just that though. This story has a lot of teen debauchery. Urban exploring. Ditching school. Sneaking out. Nowadays, half of everything is getting filmed. You can't just break into abandoned asylums without security nailing you. You can't just sneak out of the house if your mom has a Ring camera.
There's an entire way of life that was killed stone dead by technological advances, and I'd like to take those of us that were there back to that era just as much as I want to show it to people who weren't there.
And I'm not trying to romanticize it too much here, cuz obviously the mid-2000s weren't a super awesome time to be queer — and on Monday I'm gonna talk a bit about what I did about that. Even the characters calling themselves queer is just a bit ahead of the curve for 2007, which is why I'd call the setting of this book almost-reality. With one noteable exception.
Devil On My Shoulder
—queer tales from the garden state—
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