Once upon a time, I was on the internet
and was stuck in a Wikipedia spiral (which often happens when I’m reading a
Wiki article and click on a link to another page and then somehow, three hours
have passed, and I’ve gone from reading about Hamburger Hill to ending up on an
article about the mating of flatworms, I don’t even know), when I came across
the most magical website in the world.
You back?
Okay.
Did you see them? The articles?
They change daily.
Here are a few that I see today:
How
to become a prison warden
How to groom a Yorkshire Terrier
How to choose a good dairy cow breed (OBVIOUSLY
SO IMPORTANT)
How to get rid of chocolate stains
I remember being on this page for the
first time, looking through some of these articles, and saying to myself, Where have you been all my life?
This website is fucking batshit
bonkers, man. And what makes it even better,
is how the answers to many of the questions are actually illustrated. Someone took the time to draw the answers to the questions.
This got me thinking. How cool would
it be if someone lived their life based upon the advice offered by this
website? Because some of it was so fucking wrong,
that I couldn’t believe it was supposed to be taken seriously.
I put it aside, though.
I had to finish a book about a
wizard and a unicorn, after all.
But
it wouldn’t leave me alone.
Once I’d finished with The Lightning-Struck Heart, I was
contemplating what to write next. I wasn’t ready for BOATK4. Or the sequel to Tell Me It’s Real. I wanted to do
something new again, with characters I hadn’t written about before.
Weird things happened after that.
For some reason, I couldn’t get a
specific scene from the The Art of
Breathing out of my head. Do you remember Tyson’s graduation? He came out
while giving a speech, which led to an epic Bear meltdown:
“You
better have another thought coming! You know what could happen to you? Jesus
Christ, Kid! It starts that way, sure. Oh, hey! Look! That guy’s giving me the
come-fuck-me-eyes! That’s how it starts! He’ll introduce himself as something
ridiculous, like Gustavo Tiberius, because everyone has idiotic names these days, and he’ll say
it in a generic Bond Villain accent that you’ll swoon over.”
Gustavo Tiberius. I liked that name.
It was meant to be ridiculous, of course. But it had such a ring to it.
And then I thought, Okay, so what if Gustavo Tiberius was an actual person? And what if he’s absolutely nothing like what Bear said he was? In fact, what
if he was socially awkward, a loner who was the furthest away from my normal
rambling characters who say everything that’s in their heads? He’ll be grumpy,
and annoyed with everyone, and just wants to be left alone until…until….until something happens, I don’t know what, dammit, lost my
train of thought.
I pushed it aside.
And found myself pulling up that damn
website again.
I love it. I love clicking on the
articles, just to see how absurd they get.
One day in January 2015, I ended up on one
specifically. I can’t even remember how I got there, but here I sat, four words
staring me straight in the face.
How
to be normal
That was my oh shit moment.
Because of course someone named Gustavo Tiberius would need to look up how
to be a functioning human being on the internet. Of course he would. His name is Gustavo
Tiberius, for fuck’s sake. And this day and age, if we don’t know
something, what do we do?
We look it up on the internet.
The fact that this turned into an asexual
romance?
Well, that was decided the very next
day.
Look, I am going to be frank with
you. If you read M/M books for the sexual aspect of the story, you are not
going to like this book. There is no sex. There are no sex scenes. There are no
fade to black sex scenes. There are very pointed discussions about sex and sexual boundaries, but
Casey, the stoner asexual hipster, doesn’t like having sex, and is very up
front and honest about that.
That being said, there is no
sex-shaming in this book. There is no asexual shaming in this book. The stoner
aspect is played for laughs. Gus and Casey’s awkwardness is played for laughs.
The fact that one of the two main characters is asexual is not played for laughs.
I am asexual. I end up more on the
sex-positive side of things than sex-repulsed. I am hoping that by reading
this, you’ll be able to understand not just me a little better, but asexual people
as a whole. But this book isn’t meant to
preach at you. In fact, while asexuality is discussed in the story, it’s not the main focal point.
Because being asexual doesn’t define
Casey.
It’s just part of who he is.
This story is a romance, pure and
simple. It is more low-key than say, TMIR or TLSH, because I wanted to do my
very best to give a real world example of what a healthy and loving asexual
relationship could look like. It’s still a comedy, of course, because I like
making people laugh, but I also wanted to make people think.
Many people are going to find the
asexuality aspect hard to understand, and that’s okay. We’re taught that sex is
part of a loving relationship from a very early age. And there is absolutely
nothing wrong with that.
I wanted to show here that sex isn’t
the only way to show intimacy. That,
if the sexual aspect of a relationship was removed, people can still fall in love with each other, and
express it in ways that doesn’t involve a dick going in a butt.
And I needed this to be happy,
which is why I dialed back the angst until it was practically non-existent. I
didn’t want there to be stupid miscommunications, or people acting like idiots.
I told myself when I started writing this that I wanted the reader to walk away happy, that when they read the last
word, they’d want to go outside and hug random strangers or maybe get involved
in a flash mob that dances to an eighties song in the middle of a grocery
store.
In fact, by the time you finish this
book, I don’t want you to think of this as the “asexual romance.” I just want
this to be seen as a romance in general, because that’s what it is: two dudes
fumbling on their way to a happily ever after. Their orientations, their labels, shouldn’t matter.
This is my favorite thing I’ve
written. That shouldn’t color your perception of the book. You’re allowed not
to like it. You’re allowed to like other books I’ve written better. You’re
allowed to not like anything I’ve written at all. But for me, this is the highlight of my written works. I love these
characters so goddamned much, it’s ridiculous, but especially Gus, because I
absolutely needed him to be okay. He is very precious to me, right up there
with the Bear, Otter and the Kid.
By the time you read this, How to Be a Normal Person will be only
six days away. If I could have you remember one thing before reading it, it
would be this: there are so many different kinds of love out there. This story
is just one of them, and I hope it makes you as happy as it makes me.
I can’t wait to show you the story of Gus
and Casey, of Bertha, Betty and Bernice (the We Three Queens), of Lottie and
Harry S. Truman. And of Pastor Tommy, Gus’s dad who will probably be your
dealer of Wookie Cry Face this time around. It’ll be worth it, though.
I promise.
Love,
Tj
