THE THING I DIDN’T KNOW I DIDN’T KNOW (my latest book) is Officially Released!
So my latest book, The Thing I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know (about a gay 23-year-old exploring life and life in Seattle in 2014), is officially released! Check it out here.
Or see below for more info:
Why this book?
Brent Hartinger: Well, it’s 2014, and I’m gay and I live in Seattle. And both Seattle and being gay are undergoing these incredible, massive changes right now. With LGBT rights, historians say the pace of social change in the U.S. is basically unprecedented. And in Seattle, economists say that very few cities have ever become so prosperous and so influential so fast.
How could I not write about these things? And it made for a fantastic juxtaposition: Russel, my main character, is living in the Seattle boom-times, but he still has to deal with all the crap that comes from being just out of college and not having any real direction. And while it’s an era of marriage equality, it’s also a time of hook-up apps and HIV and PrEP.
In some ways, the incredible changes going on around him make things even more difficult for him.
This is your first “adult” book. Why?
BH: Technically, I guess it’s “new adult,” although I’m already tired of that term. But yeah all my previous published novels were either for kids or young adults.
The problem with writing for teens is that they don’t stay teens very long. Your fan base grows up! But I’m hoping that my fans will happily “grow up” along with my books. And of course the dirty little secret of young adult publishing is that half or more of your readers are adults anyway.
But mostly I just wanted to do something really different. I’ve always felt about my projects that if it doesn’t feel very different in some way, there’s no point in writing it.
(The truth is, that’s probably stupid advice for a career in publishing. Plenty of authors make a great living writing the same thing over and over. And more power to them! We all gotta eat.)
Was it hard to write explicit sex?
BH: It was remarkably easy, which I guess means it fit the project. Although the book really isn’t that graphic. I was hoping for “sexy,” not “prurient.” Not that a little prurience ever hurt anyone!
I did open with a sort of edgy scene where my main character is meeting someone for a hook-up. I guess the point was to declare: no, you’re not in Kansas anymore. I mean what I say when I say this isn’t a YA book.
How is this project is related to your previous books?
BH: The main character is Russel Middlebrook, the star a series of four previous books called the Russel Middlebrook Series, and also the lead character in the movie version of the first book, Geography Club.
But it’s really not part of that series—it’s not YA, Russel is no longer sixteen years old, and this is an entirely “stand-alone” book. You absolutely don’t need to have read the earlier books for it to make sense.
You could call it a “reboot,” but I’m sick of that term too. The plan is for it to be the start of a whole new series, about this character in his twenties.
So will each decade in Russel’s life be a whole new series?
BH: It’s very possible! The Russel Middlebrook Series has plenty of fans, which is extremely gratifying as a writer. But it was also exciting to me to have the freedom to jump genres—from YA to adult. I’m sure that’s been done before, but I can’t think of any examples.
There is one other change between my earlier YA books and this one, one I’m really excited about. The first three books were originally written for HarperCollins, but that meant they had to be written three years before they were finally published—and then readers had to wait another year for the paperback. It was great to have the imprimatur of HarperCollins, but that meant it was impossible to be very timely. And with LGBT issues changing so quickly, that was always frustrating. I think I was pretty cutting edge at the time—writing about bisexual and non-white and disabled LGBT characters before most other people were, and also writing humor-based gay teen books at a time when other gay stories were mostly doom-and-gloom. But you can only be so forward-looking with that kind of time-lag.
With this book, I had a much faster turn-around. Maybe it’s a little like Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City books, which were originally written in serial form in the city newspaper.
Anyway, The Thing I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know is set in the summer of 2014. And it was also written (at least in part) in the summer of 2014.
That means I got to write about things that were happening that summer, including all kinds of things that were and still are on the minds of young gay people in Seattle and elsewhere.
A film version of your first book Geography Club was released last year. What was that experience like?
BH: It was fantastic. I highly recommend it for every writer! The producers treated me great, and I feel like I made a bunch of new friends.
And it was easily the best thing that’s ever happened to my career. It brought me a whole new level of legitimacy and visibility. If people liked the movie, I benefited, because I had written the source material. And if they didn’t like it, I got to listen to them say how the book was so much better than the movie. So it was sort of win-win for me.
One interesting thing I didn’t expect. The books got a whole flurry of attention when the movie was released into theaters and VOD, what with the movie reviews and everything. But the single best burst of PR came when the movie was released on Netflix. That was something like sixty million potential viewers, all able to watch the movie for free.
I have a couple more movie projects in development now. Here’s hoping that was just the first of many film projects!
So what is the thing your character doesn’t know he doesn’t know?
BH: If I told you that, I’d have to kill you!
But rest assured, it is an actual “thing,” and it’s something of particular interest to people in their early twenties. I told some potential readers that title, and they said, “That’s a great title, but it needs to be an actual thing the main character discovers, and it can’t be disappointing!”
And I completely agree. When you promise something like that in a title, you really have to deliver. I’m pretty sure I did.
ORDER THE BOOK HERE
THE THING I DIDN’T KNOW I DIDN’T KNOW
By Brent Hartinger
New Adult
Paperback, $14, 978-0-9846794-8-5
E-book, $5.99, 978-0-9846794-7-8
December 15, 2014
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