Estella Mirai

Three years ago, not quite today, I finally published the book of my heart. That both seems like a very long time and a very short one. Three years is definitely enough to make a book “old news”.  And it’s not nearly enough, apparently, to inspire floods of fanworks. (Y’all feel free to get on that, though, if you want.) It’s also enough to upend the entire world. The Stars May Rise and Fall is set mostly between June 2000 and January 2001. Although I was in Japan for that particular New Year’s Eve, I didn’t get seriously into the visual kei scene until I came back as a student in September 2001. But I chose to set my book a year earlier, specifically because I didn’t want it to touch 9/11. Now, even if I had set the book in 2001, I wouldn’t necessarily have needed to mention it. The number of newsworthy events mentioned in the actual book is zero (unless you count, like, Luna Sea breaking up or something?), and while even my not-terribly-worldly characters would’ve gotten news THA...

So. This was sort of   immediately  inspired by a random tweet about how not all M/M is erotica.   But it’s something that I’ve been facing ever since I first started trying to get  The Stars May Rise and Fall  published, and it’s something that authors of queer fiction have been facing for even longer: this weird assumption that just because a book is M/M (or F/F), it must be sexually explicit.   My book is not. That’s not a spoiler, as far as I’m concerned—it’s fade to black, please use that as you wish to help you decide whether you’d like to read it or not. I know that fade to black is a negative for some readers and a positive for others. And that others read all heat levels and don’t really care.   And to honest, the choice to do that—to fade to black, rather than writing the sex scene—was one of the ones I agonized the most over. But in the end, I think it was the best choice for THIS particular book. And here’s why.   So first, the points ...

  (FYI, this particular post doesn’t really contain any spoilers—there’s nothing here that I particularly WANT my readers NOT to know before they read my book, or that would typically go under a spoiler cut in a review. However, if you really really want to know NOTHING but what’s in the official blurb, maybe read the book first and then come back. <3 )   So, all of my characters are demi.   Well, maybe not  all  of them. Just the really important ones.   I’ve talked about this a lot on Twitter, but learning what the term “demisexual” meant a few years ago was like a puzzle piece clicking into place for me. When I was a teenager, I just thought I was too young. I legitimately did not understand how people accidentally got pregnant—why not just NOT HAVE SEX if you weren’t ready for the possible consequences? I understood how the act worked and wasn’t  repulsed  by it, but I also had zero interest in doing it myself. And even though I was like 1...