one identity crisis at a time, baby

Spoilers ahead (as much as you can spoil a lighthearted romcom, I guess). Want to get acquainted with the source material? Here’s a link!

Alright, so I’ve been locked into various states of ennui for… months. I don’t know, what even is time. I need to write about something fun without actually working on anything, because working on anything hasn’t been, y’know, working, thanks to the aforementioned ennui, so, welcome to the behind-the-scenes inauguration of the most fun I’ve ever had (aka I’m revisiting What’s Your Vibe? in a desperate bid to recapture some goddamn joie de vivre or whatever).

Before Covid-19 shut us down like a mob of alarmed/aghast/angry PTA parents, I worked at a sex shop in Indiana. I could have gone back after the initial shutdown, but by then I’d found a remote freelancing gig and kept myself away from the general public because gross, right?

But anyway.

Of all the shock-and-awe stories about my time at the shop, nothing captures the essence like our business casual employee dress code. That is to say, working there wasn’t much of the seedy experience your average Midwesterner tends to think. It was retail that just so happened to cater to the prank calls because, yes, junior high boys everywhere, we actually do sell ten-inch dildos, save your bad jokes for Target (another job I had, and a worse one than hawking lubes).

I was an aspiring romance novelist at this point, so I knew I wanted to write a book based on this job experience. At first I thought it would be good research, products I could integrate into my work, because at the time my aspirations were to write high steam and erotic romance. If you’ve read WYV… well, obviously I’ve changed direction.

It took me something like two years after the fact to decide what kind of book, exactly, this would be. Maybe it was the general state of what-is-going-on-with-my-humanity that was the whole Covid-19 mood back when we took the pandemic seriously, or maybe it was because I was finally, mercifully, fresh out of my twenties, but any way you slice it I was in the midst of one of my many periods of transformation.

(That’s all life really is—just one period of transformation after the next. I said to my friend Siren of the Witch Bitches Review podcast on one of our many inebriated phone calls, “I thought it was all gonna be epiphanies, but instead it’s like, a journey or whatever.”

(I am, as you can see, very deep.)

Figuring out what I wanted to write and how I wanted to write it hinged on me accepting/embracing/celebrating my demisexuality, which, after a decade of knowing but pointedly not accepting/embracing/celebrating, I finally did. I got there, and then I got to the heart of this book, which begins like so:

The last thing Milo wants to do at ten-thirty in the morning is explain, repeatedly, why you shouldn’t try to stick an anal vibrator up your girlfriend’s vag.

But, well… Man plans, God laughs.

…Based on real events! More on that in the next fun facts post.

Chapter 1’s opener has remained the same since I first envisioned the story, but throughout most of my brainstorming I’d assumed the sex store character would be a woman. But then, through a series of fanfiction-related events in those intermittent two years between the idea and the execution, I realized that, no, let’s flip that script and give the part to a demisexual dude. After all, I already had one on deck.

Milo was a character that had been knocking around my head for something like eight years and I never quite knew what to do with him. He was always involved in some kind of not-even-half-cocked plot about gender and sexuality, but I could never nail any of that down. I was still learning so much about those subjects, about my own relationship to them, that I couldn’t make anything stick. 

But, hey, that’s what your twenties are for—unlearning and learning, and then you move on to your thirties and things start falling into place a little better. I was on the verge of thirty-four when I published WYV, and I’m eternally grateful that I didn’t try to write this book before that because there’s no way I could have made it land as well as I can now.

Supplemental fun fact: when I was choosing a last name for Milo, I wanted something that translated to “love,” which is how I landed on “Lamoree,” despite my nonsensical aversion to France (I’d explain it if I could, but it’s just a feeling in my bones, probably because I’m American and it’s not like we know anything anyway). Imagine my dumbass surprise when, post-publication, I Googled “Milo” out of curiosity, only to find out it means “beloved.” 

Beloved love. 

So. That was an accident that I have to live with. I’m choosing to blame the French and, thus, my world has been righted once again.

*This section waxes poetic on fandom culture, so you can skip ahead to the next graphic if you don’t know what that means, or if you would otherwise rather live your life in peace. Which? Fair and valid.

The aforementioned series of fanfiction-related events also put me in the orbit of some very cool people who were thanked in the acknowledgements—particularly Alie, May, and Haley (also, Meg and Lindsey, who were the ones who tricked me into this ship in the first place—and it occurs to me now that I did not include Linds in my acknowledgements, which is fucking criminal of me and now she’ll get a whole book dedicated to her, just wait for it). All of them were integral to the evolution of my writing and what I want to do with it. I really cannot stress the major limbo I was in about that; I’m not sure how I would have gotten out of it without their influence, and maybe I wouldn’t have at all.

So here’s another shoutout to Meg and Linds, for getting me involved with this against my will, and who both write so poetically that I’m thinking about slapping you with some kind of lawsuit re: emotional distress???; to Alie, for her love of music and no-holds-barred expression, writing style, and comedic timing, all of which inspired me to take my foot off the brakes and just fucking go for it, man; to May, for her exploration and characterization of a virgin MMC in a way that was equal parts chaotically funny and compassionate and real, messy but all the more romantic for it; and to Haley, because even before we knew each other our styles and characterizations intersected in a creative soulmates kind of way, and because she writes with such depth and love and this kind of heartwarming slice-of-life romance that feels so possible.

I love you super cool nerds so much. You made me a better writer when I wasn’t sure I could keep doing this; you made me love it again the way I’m supposed to. You made me not afraid to do things with my whole, authentic self. It is sincerely my greatest wish-upon-a-star that y’all write your own books, or otherwise follow your creative passions, because holy shit do you have so much heart to give to people.

(I’ve got some more friends like this, too, that I’ll be calling out—affectionately!—in future posts.)

I did write a sex shop AU for a fanfic couple. I’m not sure why, since I knew I wanted to use all my stories, jokes, etc., for an original. When I look back on it, I think I was trying to explore it all a little more, I was testing the waters, I just wanted to have fun again? I’m not sure. It was definitely a validating experience, though, so even though I recycled a lot of material between the fic and the book, they both did something different and equally important for me. I was still in that limbo stage of what I wanted to write—it was a transitionary period for me, and sometimes there’s just shit you need to do to make your way to the other side.

(If you’re not into any fandom culture and read this part anyway, all that probably means nothing to you; but trust me, it sure is something.)

The working title was Don’t Kill My Vibe, which I wasn’t super into but it did the job for the time being (vibe… vibrator… you get it). I toyed with the idea of No Plot, Just Vibes, because that was kinda meta but, as my cover designer pointed out, potentially off-putting to readers.

I decided it wasn’t really accurate, anyway, because there is a plot to it—it’s just character-driven more than action-packed (generally, that’s the kind of media I’m into. Like, you gotta love the rising tension of characters who air out their grievances with one another around the dinner table for three hours. There’s always like six affairs and someone died and maybe there’s incest and definitely an endless well of self-loathing… I’m all a-flutter. Maybe I should write plays).

It took another handful of minutes for me to think up What’s Your Vibe?, and that felt right, like the relief you feel when a word or the name of that actor you’ve seen in another movie is on the tip of your tongue and you suddenly remember what it is. So, kismet. Or something.

The customer stories are all, at their core, real interactions I had while working at the store. Of course I took some liberties to fictionalize them, and to give these interactions narrative meaning, y’know? But the dialogue? Baby, these are real things people said to me, right to my face in broad daylight, or occasionally over the phone, but all the same in front of God and everybody.

It was a small store, too; if you called while customers were around, they know all your innermost secrets almost as intimately as I do.

There were three notable customers who didn’t make the cut into the book for no real reason, I just didn’t know where to put them, but here they are:

• My favorite couple in the world, a man and woman in their later-in-life romance stage who padded my commission with the most high-end products that they bought in bulk.
• A very friendly older man who played some kind of guitar in a local band, always swinging by to pick up a Kangaroo on his way to meet a different lady friend every time. He once invited me to hang out with him with “wine, Mountain Dew, whatever you like!” I didn’t take him up on it, and honestly did not realize it was probably a come-on until I told the story to someone else, but props to him because he had my number just looking at me. Like, if he’d asked me ten years ago, he would’ve had me at Mountain Dew.
• A man who asked me, very seriously, why Fleshlights are shaped “like that,” and his very tired-looking (that part feels important) female companion. As well-versed in customer service as I am, this was one of those times that stumped me into a quick succession of I-don’t-know-what-to-say-to-you blinks, and then, deadpan—“Sir. It’s a vagina.”

There’s a lot of technical rigamarole wrapped up in indie publishing—all publishing, but indies have to do it ourselves—than people realize. I’d rather be on a deadline of, say, six books per year, than manually typeset a paperback interior EVER. AGAIN.

(I’ve since purchased formatting software, and thank you, Atticus, for saving me from an inevitable mental breakdown—and I do not say that in any way shape or form flippantly; I was sobbing my way into dehydration. Shoutout to Phoebe Woods for her cosmic timing, for finishing her debut and needing an editorial hand at the exact moment I needed the cash influx to buy Atticus. Yet again a soulmate connection was made!

(I’d rec Phoebe’s book regardless. It actually makes me kind of like, righteously furious, how good it is? Like when you see something cute and you have the irrepressible urge to squish it, possibly to death? You can’t comprehend your love and it makes you unhinged. It’s like that.)

Anyway, aside from the ninth circle of hell that is typesetting, there are some bits and bobs I’m privy to, thanks to my day job, which is essentially a lot of parts of publishing no one knows is a whole job, but—jazz hands—here I am.

This is how I know that my back cover text (BCT) is actually a little too long. For any indie authors who have perhaps inadvertently stumbled across my carnival funhouse of thoughts here, you want to keep your BCT at 160 max, which leaves room for a tagline intro and any closing thoughts, like preliminary trigger warnings, you might want to include. In total, you want to stick with 250 words max.

…300 if you gotta, but for real that’s the cap and I mean it this time!

I tapped out around 260-something, which was more than I would’ve liked, but what can I say—I’m a maverick, an ’80s teen bad boy, rebel without a cause, and I’ve got the cool jacket to prove it!

(The cool jacket in question is a replica of the Finn/Poe jacket from Star Wars.)

(I don’t even watch Star Wars.)

(MOVING ON…)

The last overall point of interest off the top of my head, as I write this in a frenzy of finish-this-blog-post-now-before-you-once-again-lose-your-will-to-live, is the soundtrack.

Music is woven throughout the story, and will continue to be a major theme in all my books, because—and as Phoebe once said to and about me, after I sent her yet another song that made me think of her writing—I really like music.

My depth knows no bounds, truly.

Following are links to WYV’s two playlists, as well as Stevie’s playlists that are mentioned/discussed (she has a couple that, alas, do not exist in my Spotify profile, but more on all things music in future posts):

• what’s your vibe? mood playlist
• what’s your vibe? extended edition, aka every song name-dropped or otherwise referenced in the book
• bangers
• girl, turn off the snooze and eat some breakfast
• 😑😑 …songs that are def abt eatin pussy, i’m pretty sure
• portrait of an existential crisis
• if you need me i’ll be dissociating to doo-wop
• frankie say relax

That about does it for generalities. Every fun facts post to follow will cover the behind-the-scenes action chapter by chapter. See you then!