okay. this book is NA which means it's going to be inevitably marketed as YA were i to ever pursue publishing for it. do you think this sort of content belongs in YA spaces? do you think there's room for conversations about this with younger audiences, or does this belong in adult fiction?
(content on consent derived from ace by angela chen, a 10/10 read)
my new project is a very silly contemporary self indulgent NA novel and it’s about exes falling in love again or more accurately having to come to terms with never having fallen out of it in the first place
also it’s a sequel
alternate excerpt title: wyd when your ex girlfriend’s very mean lesbian best friend comes to tear you a new one and you cant even run away because you’re already running
(image id under the cut)
Somebody yanks one of my earbuds out.
“What the—jesus, what are you—Mayu?” I snatch the earbud back as Mayu falls into step next to me.
“Jonah.” She gives me a nod, matching my pace without missing a beat.
I’m almost tempted to start running faster. “What do you want?”
“Look, buddy.” Mayu’s not even breathing hard. “I know we’ve never had a lot of love to lose, but you are on my shit list.”
“What the—what am I supposed to have done?”
“You broke Aila’s heart,” Mayu says, like it wasn’t the other way around, like it’s supposed to be totally obvious. “And you never even had the decency to tell her why. I think there’s possibly something very, very wrong with you, and I need you to know that if you hurt her—no, if your presence even affects her—I will tear you limb from limb, and it will be horrible for you, scrotally speaking.”
“I’m not going to—scrotally speaking?”
“Did I stutter?”
I give my head a little shake. I actually have started running faster without even meaning to, but Mayu doesn’t even look like she notices. “I didn’t even know you were friends again.”
Mayu cuffs me upside the head.
“Ow!”
“Were you even listening to anything I was just saying? Did I not make my threats clear?”
“Yeah, I got it, I just—I guess I wasn’t expecting this from you.”
“Who were you expecting it from?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her truthfully, because I have been doing my damn best not to think about it. “Her boyfriend?”
“Sam is four and a half thousand kilometres away, or he would.” Mayu gives her head a shake. “And he’d have been way too fucking nice to you, because he’s an excellent fucking person, so I have to be the violent one.”
