Jeff & Will talk about their past week of business decisions and the coming week they’ll spend at the Podcast Movement conference. They also remind the authors in the audience to check out the new Big Gay Author Podcast. The guys talk about the production of The Wiz they just saw as well as the current season of Pose. Together they review Lucy Lennox’s Wilde Love and Jeff reviews Dreadnought by April Daniels. Amber Smith joins Jeff to talk about her young adult novel Something Like Gravity. Amber reveals how the characters of Chris and Maia had been the main characters in different books before she decided they’d be great together in a single book. Amber also discusses how she got started writing, the trademarks of her books and the research she does to create her characters. Complete shownotes for episode 201 along with a transcript of the interview are at BigGayFictionPodcast.com. Interview Transcript – Amber Smith This transcript was made possible by our community on Patreon. You can get information on how to join them at patreon.com/biggayfictionpodcast. Jeff: Welcome Amber to the podcast. It is great to have you here. Amber: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been really looking forward to this. Jeff: So I reviewed ‘Something Like Gravity’ back in episode 195 and it was the summer book that I didn’t know I was looking for. I’d like you to start us off by telling everybody, in your own words, what this book is about. Amber Well, this book is about a lot of things, but really, at its center, it’s a story about falling in love for the first time and finding yourself in the process. It’s told between our two main characters, Chris and Maia, and both of them are going through a really difficult time in each of their lives. Chris has recently come out as transgender and he’s really trying to figure out how to navigate his life now that everything’s suddenly changing, and he’s also trying to process this really terrifying assault that he survived the year earlier. Maia is dealing with the recent death of her older sister. And so both of their lives look very different, but the one thing that they have in common that brings them together is that they’re both trying to figure out who they are going to become in the face of these life changing events that they’ve been through. Jeff: What was your inspiration behind the book? Amber: There are various threads of inspiration, but it’s funny, I actually started writing this book as two separate books. Chris was the protagonist of one and Maia was the protagonist of the other. And I do generally work on two things at the same time because, if I get stuck on one I can sort of hop over to the other thing I’m working on. I always thought of these as separate books in the beginning and Chris’s story was primarily about coming out, and being queer, and being trans, and trying to figure all of that out. And Maia’s was a story about grief. At a certain point, I think it became too hard for me to continue working on these stories because both of them were super personal. I was drawing from a lot of my own experiences with coming out as a lesbian and also, you know, dealing with the loss of loved ones myself. At a certain point, I thought, you know what can I do to kind of make this easier on myself? And I thought about giving Chris a love interest. And when I started to think about what would be the kind of person that would be really good for Chris, and would kind of balance him out, and all of those wonderful things that happen in a relationship. I immediately thought of Maia – this other character that I was writing, and that’s when I realized, oh my gosh, I think these stories were always meant to be one story. And it just took me a while to realize it. Jeff That’s amazing to me on a couple of levels. I can’t do two projects at once because it makes my head want to explode. But also there’s – just coming back to the title, ‘Something Like Gravity’ is like gravity just pulled between th