Interview with Jessica Meats

About a month ago, I was contacted by Jess, a science fiction and fantasy writer who was interested in learning more about Queer Book List. Over the course of several emails we learned more about each other and the work that we do. Below you will find an interview that I conducted with Jess to learn more about her writing, her work and her opinions on queer representation. You can also head over to her site to read her interview of me.

Can you start by introducing yourself?

I’m Jessica Meats, also known as Jess. I’m biromantic asexual. In my day job, I work as an IT consultant, helping companies implement various types of collaboration software. That’s what keeps the lights on and a roof over my head, but I also write science fiction and fantasy novels. I also very much enjoy hands-on crafts so I do a lot of sewing, beadwork, and things like that.

Can you talk a little about your experience becoming a published author?

My first book, Child of the Hive, came out in 2009. That was a book several years in the making and it took three drafts and a lot of rejection letters to get it in a state fit for publication. When I sent the first draft out, I got my first rejection letter back by return of post – a little pre-printed slip with a space for them to write my name. That was very disheartening. But after a few weeks, I got a rejection letter from someone who’d actually read my submission and who gave me some feedback on how to improve. There were two rejection letters with real advice in that round, so I went back and did another draft and then sent it out again. After a few more letters with helpful comments, I wrote draft three in the gap between graduating university and starting my first full-time job. I went to the post office with a huge pile of submissions because this was before most publishing houses started letting you do electronic submissions, and thankfully one of them said yes.

I think to get traditionally published you have to either get very lucky or develop very thick skin to deal with the rejections.

I did learn a lot from the rejection process though and I’ve been able to bring that into my other books, so I don’t regret having received all those letters saying no. I think it’s made me a better writer.

Why did you begin to include queer content in your writing?

It took me a while. Shortly after Child of the Hive was accepted, I started writing another book that had a romance plotline between two teenage boys. That book didn’t go very far because there were a lot of structural problems and plot issues, but someone whose advice I trusted read my opening chapters and warned me that I would never find a mainstream publisher if I had a book featuring two boys in love. The reasoning was that this book would be aimed at the young adult market and parents had a lot of sway in what succeeded in that market and that more conservative parents wouldn’t want their kids reading stuff with gay characters front and centre. I was new to being a published author at the time and accepted this advice that if I wanted to succeed, I would have to write “inoffensive” (yes, that was the word she used) straight people as my characters.

So for my next few books, the queer characters are in the background. There are some, but they’re not the focus of the book.

But then I realised I was asexual. I hadn’t come across the concept before and the realisation that there was a word for how I felt (or didn’t feel) was incredible. I spoke to other people about being asexual and I had a conversation with a woman in her fifties who told me, “I always just assumed I was broken.” This woman had lived more than five decades believing she was broken because she’d never come across the concept of asexuality.

That was when it struck me how important representation was. We need representation of all types of queer people so that no one has to wait decades to find out that they’re not alone. Representation, particularly of less well-known identities, is critical so that people can see themselves reflected on the page and know that there’s a word for how they feel, so that they have a word to google and find a community to connect to.

It’s taking me a while for my writing to catch up to my decision, because writing a book and getting it published takes such a long time, and I had a couple of series with established characters so it would have been difficult to switch their sexualities part-way through, but I’m getting there. My most recent book has a bisexual protagonist, there’s one currently with a publisher that features a romance between a gay and a bisexual man, and I have a couple of stories I’m working through first drafts for that have asexual protagonists.

Why do you think the field of Sci-fi/Fantasy has been so slow to adopt more queer stories?

I’m not sure if the problem is specific to the SF&F genres or if this problem is prevalent in a lot of genres. Publishing is a very risky business in general. Publishing companies have to put in a lot of time, effort, and money during the process of bringing a book to market and I think that has led to an environment where people play things safe. It’s basically impossible to know which book will take off and become the next big thing, so publishers are more likely to go for tried and true, sticking to formulae that they can at least be reasonably sure will enable them to recoup their losses.

It takes someone taking a chance and having a success for the other companies to decide that there is money to be made in queer books. Even once that decision is made, because of the timescales involved, it still seems to take a long time for anything to change in a visible way.

We are seeing books in SF&F, even books aimed at younger readers like the Rick Riordan books, doing really well with a diverse mix of characters and trends like #weneeddiversebooks have proved that there is a market. The readers have proved wrong that advice I was given all those years ago about how writers can’t succeed if they insist on writing about queer characters.

We’ve got a long way to go and we’ve got to keep pushing to keep momentum going, but things are improving.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers, especially queer sci-fi/fantasy novels?

Keep writing, and write the books that make you happy. Tell the stories you have to tell. Don’t make the mistake I did of letting someone tell me to not write something that mattered to me. If you want to write about a particular theme or have characters of a particular sexuality, race, gender identity, body type, or whatever else matters to you, go for it. Chances are, there is someone out there desperate to read a character like that.

Why did you start interviewing authors and creating a queer reading list on your website?

I’ve done author interviews since I first started blogging, nearly a decade ago, but the focus on queer authors and promoting queer stories started because of the revelation I mentioned above about being asexual. I realised that I might have had that moment a lot sooner if I’d read more books with queer characters, or where queer identities were discussed openly. I was also aware from my own conversations how many people were still struggling in the dark about their own identities, so I made the decision to start searching out more books with LGBTQ+ characters and by LGBTQ+ authors and to do what I could to help promote them.

The reading list started very small. I created a page on my blog and just started listing SF&F books I’d read and enjoyed that had strong queer representation. I thought other people might like the recommendations. The problem with this approach though was that I could only add books as fast as I could read them and the list wasn’t particularly searchable. If someone was looking for specific representation, it wasn’t particularly helpful, so I decided to give my reading list an overhaul. I built up a list of books and carefully marked each one according to the type of representation they contained so that I could build the report that’s on the website today, where you can click a few filters or navigate between pages to find books that specifically have a trans protagonist or an asexual major character, etc. While I was at it, I built a mechanism for other people to suggest books to go onto it, because if this list is to be successful, it can’t rely on one person’s reading speed. I want it to be a useful resource for anyone looking for queer book recommendations.

I’ve stuck with the sci-fi and fantasy genres to keep my goals manageable, at least for now.

Do you have any books on your Queer Reading List that you would especially recommend? Or any that you would say are especially teachable?

I’m not sure what makes a book teachable. There are books on that list that I absolutely love as a reader and would highly recommend.

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan is a thoroughly enjoyable book, really funny in parts but which made me cry in others. The main character is bisexual, but he treats this as an almost incidental part of his personality. There are a few gay characters including one of the main love interests. None of these characters are stereotyped, they all feel like real people. The book also looks critically at the gender binary but in a very entertaining way. In the world of the story, elves have strongly defined gender roles but they’re flipped from the ones we’d normally see in these sort of stories – men are the delicate ones who stay home doing embroidery and looking after the children, while women go off fighting battles. This conflicts with the gender roles more traditional in the human society of the fantasy world, leading to a lot of amusing exchanges, with the main character all in favour of abolishing the strict gender binary.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers and its sequel A Closed and Common Orbit were really interesting and well written. I especially liked that the way sex, gender, family dynamics, and relationships are portrayed for the different alien species is widely varied. There are species with multiple genders, or where people change sex as they get older. Gender neutral terms are the default when meeting someone new because of all this variation. Beyond that though, the stories feature queer human characters without any judgement or questions.

A really heart-wrenching one is On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis. The protagonist of this book is straight, but there is a major trans character and other queer characters, so I still included it on the list and I highly recommend it as a book. It’s a young adult story with an autistic protagonist about how people cope in the face of the end of the world. A comet is about to hit the Earth, causing massive devastation, and a few people are lucky enough to be able to leave on generation ships. A chance occurrence leads to the protagonist and her mother being taken on board one of the generation ships just before the impact, but they haven’t got permission to stay and the protagonist wants to find a way for her and her family to be taken on the ship but between her autism and her mother’s drug addiction, she’s not sure she’ll be welcomed. There’s a lot in there about the conflict between needing to protect the people you personally care about versus protecting the general population, especially when there’s only a limited amount of space and resources. That conflict is played out in a really interesting and sensitive way.

Do you have any upcoming projects that we should know about?

I’ve had a novella accepted by Less Than Three Press. It should be published sometime this year. This is a fantasy romance between two male characters, one of whom turns into a monstrous beast each night.

I’m working on the final book in my Shadows of Tomorrow trilogy, which I should be sending to the publisher soon.

On top of that, I always have a few first drafts on the go. One, that has the working title of Ridiculously Long and Complicated Urban Fantasy Thing, includes a lesbian witch, an asexual werewolf, and the pansexual daughter of a star, along with various other characters including a dragon. I don’t think anyone’s brave enough to ask the dragon about her sexual preferences.

How can people follow you and find out more?

My website is http://plot-twister.co.uk and I also have a YouTube channel where I post writing advice and author interviews and things like that. The YouTube channel is very new and can be found https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTNkMHdRuYyUmucnVydGpvQ?view_as=subscriber.

I have a mailing list which you can subscribe to from my website and there are a couple of options. You can subscribe to updates about my books and publication news, or you can subscribe to updates about new books added to the queer reading list, or both.