Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 2

Being kinder to the memory of the kid I was

*record scratch, freeze frame*

Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation.

(Sorry, I’ve always wanted to do that.)

For some reason, this version of me has been on my mind a bit lately. Maybe that’s because I’m revising a young adult novel and trying to tap into the feeling I had at that time of life. Maybe it’s also because I’m reading Maggie & Me, a memoir by the wonderful Damian Barr about growing up in Scotland under Thatcher, and it reminds me of the time, if not the place, and it also reminds me of the feelings I have about that period in my life: nostalgia, sometimes, but mostly anxiety, and a lot of avoidance.

I don’t like thinking about that time because I wasn’t a happy kid. Growing up gay in the 1980s—well, it sucked, okay? Most of the time, I didn’t want to be there. And I figured I probably wouldn’t be there much longer and would either die in a nuclear war or get sick and die.

Somehow, neither of those things happened. That kid found somewhere else to be, things got worse, then he went somewhere else, then things got dull, then they got, kind of, better. He got through it.

Even though I’m talking about him as if he were a different person, I know that kid was me, is me. It’s still easy to think of me at that age as someone else, because so much has changed in the meantime. And to be completely uncomfortably honest (ugh, who does that on the internet?), thinking about who I was at that age is kind of embarrassing.

But.

I wouldn’t have gotten where I am now without him. He was the one who had to deal with the tough stuff that looks easy to me now precisely because he went through it. Far from being embarrassed by him, I owe almost everything to him.

Be kind to who you were back then. You’re not as different now as you think.

A Pride Month shout-out for The Unwanted

My friend and fellow author ’Nathan Burgoine has been offering up daily reading suggestions for Pride Month over on his blog, and he’s listed some real bangers so far, including Xeni by Rebekah Weatherspoon (bisexual fake marriage for the sake of an inheritance) and Soul’s Blood by Stephen Graham King (sci-fi found family). And this week, he gave a shout-out to one of my own:

From fame, we go to fate, and another YA book I loved where a kid finds himself in a very different sort of spotlight. If you’ve been around my blog for long, likely it will not surprise you I’m talking about Jeffrey Ricker’s The Unwanted. This one plays to my spec-fic loving heart, and features Jamie, who after a spectacularly bad day with bullies and school and just being done with it all, comes home to find his mother waiting for him.

Which, y’know, is kind of a big deal since his single-dad has told him his mother was dead. That’d be enough to deal with, but it turns out his mother is also an amazon—like, as in mythological amazon—which would be impossible to believe, if it weren’t for the freaking pegasus in the back yard she arrived on. She just didn’t bother being any part of his life because, well, he’s a boy.

But, by the way, Jaime’s fated to save her entire people, so would he mind coming along and doing that?

Yeah. Yeah he’d mind.

Go check out the rest of his post over here, and then be sure to check out his own YA novel, Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks, which features a randomly teleporting queer teen and does not disappoint.

What to read: Catfish Rolling, by Clara Kumagai

I’m always kind of envious of people who are able to read new releases immediately when they come out. Or, maybe envious isn’t the right word; more life baffled. How does anyone manage to keep up with all of the books they buy and have backlogged that they’re actually able to clear the decks and read something brand spanking new? I still have unread books on my shelf that I received for my 40th birthday. We won’t talk about how many years ago that was.

(OK, fine. It was 14 years ago. Almost 15. Happy now?)

Anyway, where was I? Right, reading. Surprisingly myself completely, my latest read was a book that came out in 2023. Practically yesterday! I’m glad I didn’t sleep on this any longer than I already have, because Catfish Rolling by Clara Kumagai (a friend and fellow UBC alum) is the best book I’ve read this year:

There’s a catfish under Japan, and when it rolls, the land rises and falls. At least, that’s what Sora was told after she lost her mother to an earthquake so powerful that it cracked time itself. Sora and her father are some of the few who still live near one of these “zones”—the places where time has been irrevocably sped up or slowed down.

Sora’s at a crossroads of her own in life: she’s just finished high school, her best friend is moving away, and her father, a time researcher, is increasingly plagued by memory problems and erratic behavior. When he goes missing, she embarks on a journey into the zones to find him, with the help of Maya, a new friend who could possibly be more.

This book is so beautifully and vividly written, and the gorgeous language is combined with a page-turning plot that kept me devouring the story to see what was going to happen. And it has the kind of ending that encouraged me to sit with it and contemplate it after I was finished, letting it settle, hopefully like the restless catfish.

But enough of my rambling. Go out and get it! Meanwhile, I have to decide what to read next….

Slow progress is still progress

Have you ever finished a book and been so excited for the writer’s next one that you go look up when their next one is coming out… and it’s two years from now? Or worse, they don’t have a new release scheduled at all? And do you ever want to just, I don’t know, call them up and ask them if they’re working on another book and can they please hurry because you need it now?

Yeah, I know that feeling. Which brings me to the novel I’m working on revising.

Now, I’m not saying anyone’s waiting on pins and needles for me to write something new. What I am saying is that some writers write like the wind, the words just pouring off their fingers, and my hat is off to them! Some writers write like each word is pulled out of sludge, refusing to come loose.

You can probably guess which kind of writer I am. But my hat is off to them, too!

If I’ve learned anything from my own process, it’s that there’s no one right way to be a writer.

Sometimes progress doesn’t look like a whole lot from the outside. This time of year, when I’m teaching in addition to the day job, it usually goes slowly. 

So. Slowly. 

Out of 316 manuscript pages, I’ve revised 75. Some days, I’ll be honest, I don’t work on it.

One thing I do try to do at least every day is touch the manuscript. Yes, literally. I pick up the stack of papers and look at it. Maybe I read down the first page, which is the one I last worked on. Maybe I flip through a few pages and look at the notes I’ve scrawled in the margins.

What I’m doing is trying to keep myself in the story until I do have time to devote to it more intensively. Hopefully, that will be next week, which is Spring Break at the university where I teach and so I’ll be faced with a little more free time.

I was listening to a podcast the other morning called The Publishing Rodeo, and they were interviewing a writer who’d started as a bookseller and later worked in publishing before turning to his own stories. Something he said stuck with me for the rest of the morning, and I kept thinking back on it (I’m paraphrasing): if you’re going to be a writer, learn to love the process. So much of everything else is out of your control.

I can relate to this feeling, and yet I also think there’s a lot that is in my control. And if I don’t like the things that are out of my control, then I’ll do what I can to change my situation.

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When I’m 54, or “Yours Sincerely, Wasting Away”

I wrote a guest post for Scott McGlothlen at his blog. It was inspired by an eye procedure I had done last year, not long after my 54th birthday. The confluence of those two events got me thinking about getting older and my relationship to time. (And, no big surprise, there’s a Star Trek reference tucked in there, too.) Here’s a bit of it:

Time is written on my body not just in wrinkles and gray hair, but in scars both visible and concealed: The imperfection in my retina, soon to be scarred over. The knee that still aches after the meniscus was repaired at 50. The scar on the back of my leg where the dog pulled me off my bike at 44, and the scar along my left middle finger where I pried its jaw off my shoe. The tightness in my lower back from herniating a disc at 33. Cumulatively, these things serve as a reminder: of the need to adapt, to not do things the same way I did when I was younger.

They also remind me that I’m not going to be here forever.

You can read it here.

Why does ‘productivity’ feel like a trap?

How is it August already? And why do I feel like I wasted my entire summer?

I know that feeling’s an illusion. Or rather, the feeling is real (I’m feeling it, after all), but the facts behind it are not. I didn’t waste my summer: I finished the first draft of a novel, I did a bunch of revisions to my website, and I started writing a queer holiday romance novella. I also helped my friend Lynn edit her book.

So, that sounds like a lot to me. And yet, my brain keeps muttering slacker.

And anyway, what if I had wasted my summer? And what does that mean, anyway: wasting time? That I should be doing something productive instead?

Contradictory as it may seem, this sense that I need to be productive all the time could be why I feel like I’m always running behind. Maybe you can relate.

And yet, that implies that there’s always something up ahead that I’m running toward: the next book published, the next good review, the next raise, the next promotion.

We perceive faster/sooner/earlier/more as virtuous, and later/slower/taking our time as laziness. What if I just be where I am right now?

A few years ago, I listened to an episode of the podcast Hurry Slowly by Jocelyn K. Glei titled “Who Are You Without the Doing?” The question is one that a healer posed to the host and that, at the time, she couldn’t answer. When I listened to this episode, back in 2018, I didn’t think I could answer it, either.

It came back to mind when I read this article in Time magazine about always feeling behind, “There’s No Such Thing As Getting Ahead.” It made me consider other questions, like: “If I fixate on this one thing I’m running toward, what else am I missing?” I don’t mean that in a FOMO way, more of a “what if I changed my focus” kind of way. Which made me consider also: “What am I avoiding by committing to this path so single-mindedly? Am I trying to avoid not facing something more difficult?”

The more I thought about all of that, the more I thought “who are you without the doing?” is not the right question (for me, at least [sorry, Jocelyn]). It’s still a valid question and one that I keep thinking about. But it’s also kind of sitting right next to the more relevant question, which is, “Can you just be here now?”

I spend so much time fixated on the future: thinking about retirement, thinking about all the things I’ll be able to do when I reach that point. If I were to focus on my present circumstances, though, what would I see? What would I see lacking? What warrants more attention, and what needs less?

I finished the first draft of my novel. So why am I so angry?

Now that LGBTQ+ Pride month is over, we’re in July, which I like to call LGBTQ+ Rage month. And we have a lot to be furious about.

I won’t go into chapter and verse about all of the ways society has tried to marginalize us, dismiss us, and make it generally more dangerous for us to exist in this country/world/elaborate simulation being run on some alien’s desktop. Because if you’ve paid attention you already know what those things are. And if you’re not paying attention, I really can’t help you.

Here’s the other thing: holding all that fury is exhausting.

Some of you are well acquainted with this, but for those who aren’t, let me ask you to imagine: You go through the day surrounded by all these things—some little, some huge—that just get to you. They needle at you, from being treated like you and your partner are not together or being asked, every single goddamn time you go out to eat, “Separate checks?” Luckily, it hasn’t come down to being denied admission to an emergency room or something life threatening (yet). But each of those needly things keeps you constantly on guard, in a state of low-level vigilance for the next jab. And they make you question yourself. All the time. And they make you angry. So angry, like it’s bad enough being needled all the time from the outside, but then that anger sits in the back of your mind poking at you from the other side, and it kind of makes you want to go full M’Lynn Eatenton at Shelby’s funeral.

(Me too, M’Lynn.)

So what’s a person to do with all that stuff, especially when Clairee Belcher isn’t around to urge you to hit Ouiser Boudreaux? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please watch Steel Magnolias, because it’s a wonderful movie. Also, hitting people is bad and M’Lynn does not hit Ouiser, although half of Chiquapin Parish would give their eyeteeth to take a whack at Ouiser.)

If you’re me, what you do is you channel it onto the page.

All of which is to say, I finally finished the first draft of my latest novel.

How long did it take me? I was going to say I wish I knew, but it turns out the program I’m using keeps track of your writing history, and apparently I began typing this on June 15, 2020. I wrote 2,247 words that day, mostly in the novel’s outline. I may have mentioned this before, but for this book I made an insanely detailed outline, essentially a fifty-page-plus synopsis of everything I wanted to happen (along with quite a lot of “I don’t know what’s going to happen here, so let’s skip ahead to the part that I do know” sprinkled throughout).

The novel itself began with an idea I had in 2017, when Michael and I were driving to the gym for a yoga class and we passed one of those self-storage places called LifeStorage, and it got me wondering, what if you could store not just your stuff, but yourself? Who would do that and why? Which is how I wound up writing about a distraught 18-year-old high school grad who cashes in all his college tuition savings and puts himself on ice. Things don’t turn out exactly as he expected.

This isn’t what I expected to write about this month, but it kind of feels like what I needed to write about. Anger can be all-consuming and can lead you to do destructive things, but it can also be an energy motivating you to take actions to stop the things that are making you angry. Does writing a story change things? Maybe not right away, and maybe this story won’t change anything, but it’s the best I can do.

What I’m working on and reading now:

I’m transcribing some handwritten portions of the aforementioned novel, and once those are done, it’ll be revision time. That starts with printing out the whole thing and reading it. There will be a lot of cringing, probably.

I’m reading A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. It’s a sequel to A Memory Called Empire, which I read a few years ago, so I couldn’t exactly remember what the story was thus far when I picked it up. But familiar names appeared and it all started coming back to me, about the interstellar Teixcalaan Empire and an ambassador from a distant space station on the edge of explored space. In this book, the rumors of something alien and dangerous from beyond that edge are becoming manifest in a truly terrifying enemy. I’m only a couple chapters in and it’s already really good.

And that’s all for this month. Rage on, everyone!

Happy Ninth Birthday to The Unwanted

I was an awkward nine-year-old. This probably comes as no surprise, right? I was a nerdy kid with thick glasses and a bad haircut—and let’s face it, not much has changed in the 44 years since, except the glasses are contacts and the hair is gray. I’m still a big nerd, and most days my hair won’t do what I want it to. Somehow, I survived being nine, though—and ten, eleven, twelve, and somehow made it to thirteen, and eventually, somewhere along the way, I managed to find my footing and figure out who I was. Although that process of discovery is still a work in progress, and probably always will be.

I’ve been thinking about age nine because, hard to believe as it is, my first YA novel, The Unwanted, came out nine years ago this month. And so far, yes, it’s my only YA novel that’s been published, if we don’t count “Roadside Assistance,” which was a novella published as part of Three Left Turns to Nowhere last year. This is not to say that I haven’t written a few more, which are now taking up space in my hard drive. More about those later.

The Unwanted was my awkward second novel. It never really found its footing among readers, but I had a blast writing it. I’ve often heard the advice, Don’t expect writing a novel to change your life, but in this case, it really did, although not in the way you might expect.

The Unwanted marked a significant shift in my own reading habits. While I’d read quite a few young adult novels before that, I really went all in on the YA genre after that, to the point where it was most of what I read (and still read). I’ve tried to put my finger on what it is about YA that appeals to me so much as a reader and a writer, especially as I get older and time puts more distance between me and my own young adulthood.

Maybe you’ve heard other writers say that they write the books they want to read. And maybe you’ve also heard YA writers in particular say they write the books they wish they could have read when they were teenagers. I think both of those apply to me. Here’s the thing about the latter, though: a lot of times, I’ve heard writers say that those books weren’t out there when they were that age. I’ve said the same thing myself. But they totally were out there. I just didn’t know how to find them. They were hidden from us; people made it difficult for us to find and get our hands on them. That’s why I never saw books with people like me in them. Makes it easy to believe that you’re the only one like you in the world.

Maybe that isn’t why I started writing YA, but it’s a big part of the reason I keep writing YA. Because people deserve to see stories about people like them. And the more stories there are that have visibly queer teenagers (and adults) in them, the harder it is for them to say we don’t exist.

But having a mission like that probably wouldn’t be enough to sustain my writing if I also didn’t just plain love it. I get a lot of joy out of writing the stories and books I write, and as long as that continues, I’ll keep writing them. And hopefully some of them will find their way to readers who see in them something they needed to see.

Why do we say “we” or “you” when we mean “I”?

I tend to seek out a lot of advice about the writing process from other writers, which explains why I subscribe to a lot of writers’ email newsletters. I’m a huge process nerd. I’m always interested in hearing how people get their writing done: where, when, which tools they use, what they do when they get stuck.

Sometimes, people even ask me for advice, and that always gives me pause. Yes, imposter syndrome, feeling like a fraud, I don’t have it all figured out myself, etc. etc.  Which is why, when giving advice, I usually offer the caution: “Look, this worked for me, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. Heck, just because it worked for me in the past doesn’t mean it’ll keep working for me. So if you try it out and it doesn’t work for you, don’t think that’s because you’re doing something wrong. It just means maybe try something else instead.”

All advice is suspect, including mine. (Especially mine.)

Which is why I think I’ve been taking notice more lately when I read writers’ newsletters, and how often that advice is presented in terms of “we” and “you” when, really, how can those writers know what I need? How can they be certain that “we,” they and I (or they and anyone reading their newsletter), are of the same mind about writing process, or what it even means to be a writer, or what the best course of action for a writing career (if you want to call it that) should be? Can I even say what a writing career “should” look like? I’m still trying to figure out what mine looks like.

As a result, I know the advice I give can sometimes sound wishy-washy, like I’m hedging my bets. Oh well. It’s what I got.

Do I say “we” because I’m trying to tell myself the advice I need to hear, and maybe by pretending it’s advice someone else needs, I’ll more easily accept it myself?

I don’t know. But, something in writer Jami Attenberg’s newsletter (hers is one of my favorites; you can sign up here: https://1000wordsofsummer.substack.com/) resonated with me and speaks to this thing about writing advice that’s been bothering me:

The unknown audience. It is a one-sided conversation, technically, but on the other hand is it weird to say that I do feel like we are speaking together every week? Still, I will never really know what you all need to hear. It is impossible. But still I will try to write something meaningful.

Sincerely, all I can fucking do is try to write something meaningful.

That’s all I can do, too.In addition to Jami Attenberg, here are a few other writers’ newsletters that I find either particularly helpful for me, or just plain fun. You have one that you always read all the way through to the end? Let me know.

Sonal Champsee: Writer Therapy

Matt Bell: No Failure, Only Practice

Charlie Jane Anders: Happy Dancing

Amanda Leduc: Notes from a Small Planet

Work in progress: The Ghost in You and a queer holiday romcom

I feel like every December I ask myself, “Where did the year go?” So I won’t do that this time. Instead, I’m trying to take stock of everything I managed to get done during our latest turn around the sun and think of everything I didn’t get to as opportunities for the future. Is it working? I’ll let you know in January.

Probably the biggest deal was that I finally had something published after a long fallow period: Three Left Turns to Nowhere with my colleagues ’Nathan Burgoine and J. Marshall Freeman. I’m pretty pleased with how my contribution turned out, and I was happy that I even got to talk about it on a podcast. I’ve only done that a couple times, so it’s still a novel experience—and no, that pun was completely unintentional.

The thing I’m most pleased with, though, is that I managed to get halfway through the first draft of a new novel, a near-future YA story whose working title is The Ghost in You. I’m excited about where it’s going, even when I get to a tricky part in the storyline (which is where I am at the moment, as it happens). I suspect that tricky bit may be part of the reason I’ve also started a side project, which is a holiday-themed queer romantic comedy, and if you like tropes…



It’s got opposites attract, a road trip, forced proximity, and my favorite:

Only. One. Bed.

I’d be lying if I said the other part of the reason I started writing it wasn’t because Candace Cameron Bure shot her dumb mouth off about only making Christmas movies that “keep traditional marriage at the core,” i.e., not the ones with the gayz. Needless to say, her comments didn’t sit well with a lot of people including her former co-stars and the entire LGBTQ+ community (of which I’m a member; you may have noticed?).

Anyway, instead of brushing it off, I thought, nuts to her, I’m writing my own damn queer holiday romantic comedy. Because a) queer joy deserves expression, and b) nothing fuels a Ricker quite like pure spite.

Also? It’s just so darn fun. I love reading these stories, and I don’t think there’ll ever be enough of them out in the world during my lifetime. Same with YA novels that have queer kids at the center of them. It was tough for me to find stories like that when I was a teenager—oh, they were out there, but I didn’t know where to begin to look for them. It wasn’t like the high school library was about to carry them, and was there even an LGBTQ+ fiction section at the B. Dalton? Doubt it. I don’t think I read a YA book with a queer character who had a happy ending before I was an adult, and now I read as many of them as I can.

I should say, though, the one I’m writing has plenty of angst to spare, and my main character, who is bi, will get put through the wringer—but not because he’s bi. (No, he’ll put himself through the wringer by making awful choices and running from his problems instead of facing them head on, which only leads to even bigger problems.)

Now, here’s the part where I make a plug for my newsletter. If you’re signed up, you’ll be getting a sneak peak at Chapter 1 of The Ghost in You today. If you’re not signed up, well, go ahead and take care of that below:

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