CT Liotta was born and raised in West Virginia before moving to Ohio for college, where he majored in Biology. He now uses Philadelphia as his base of operations. You can find him backpacking all over the world.
Liotta takes interest in writing, travel, personal finance, and sociology. He likes vintage airlines and aircraft, politics, news, foreign affairs, '40s pulp and film noir. He doesn't fear math or science, and is always up for Indian food. His favorite candy bar used to be Snickers, but lately it's been 3 Musketeers. He isn't sure why.
He is author of Relic of the Damned!, Death in the City of Dreams and Treason on the Barbary Coast!
No Good About Goodbye is his latest book.
Visit him on the web at https://www.ctliotta.com.
Sign up for Liotta’s newsletter at https://ctliotta.substack.com.
Thanks for stopping by! What attracted you to LGBTQ+ YA Books as a genre?
When I wrote NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE, I didn’t consider genre as carefully as I should have. “Write the book you want to write” was the prevailing advice, not “analyze what sells and conform,” which is the advice I would give young authors who want to find an agent and publish traditionally.
I would spy young adult fiction in bookstores or airports and I knew the genre was there, but I wasn’t reading it and simply assumed a book with a teenage cast would land among the other LGBTQ+ young adult novels.
I’m glad I knew as little as I did. Had I known more about the
young adult and teen genre, its form, its mandarins, and its politics, I may have written nothing.
I spent a good bit of my GenX childhood laughing about really awful things with my teenage friends. The comedy and tragedy masks hang in close proximity for a reason, and we dealt with life’s problems by turning them into jokes.
Modern YA operates with the sensibilities of a different generation. To me, it’s solemn. I am not to laugh about a piece of buttered toast. Rather, I am to think about how it feels when a child with celiac disease eats a piece of buttered toast, then can’t get out of her dress in the middle of her quinceañera. I am to reflect on whether I have license to write about both celiac disease and quinceañeras.
I remain hard pressed to tuck my story in with other YA LGBT books or YA spy novels. It’s a mm high school romance espionage adventure written in third omni.
If you’re unfamiliar with the lit industry, it’s a nightmare when you’re an unknown writer and you can’t slot a project. Agents have query piles 300 letters deep. If you can’t say which shelf your book will occupy, most of them will move to the next query letter rather than trying to analyze yours.
In my case, I couldn’t simply say, “hey, this is like Adam Silvera or Michelle Gagnon, or Code Name Verity or Aristotle and Dante.”
I got some good advice from agents, and some that didn’t connect. One agent wanted me to rewrite in first person or close third, but that isn’t how the story works. Another wanted me to make my characters 25 instead of 15, but that’s part of the gag. A third asked if I’d ever read YA before and said I was in the wrong genre. “Where should I place it?” I asked. The only answer she could muster was, “I don’t know, but not here.”
Another challenge is that boy-hero spy books like Alex Rider and Agent 21 terminate in upper middle grade, when boys finally give up books for video games. The few remaining boy readers seeking a spy adventure rarely want a gay romance.
So rather than saying I write spy novels for teens or LGBTQ+ young adult books, can I just say I’m adrift?
Do you write in any other genres?
Most of my other writing is technical and ghostwriting. I’m a world traveler and write for Instagram (@cartergoesplaces) and for my newsletter (http://ctliotta.substack.com). The newsletter is off to a poor start because of the pandemic, but I expect it to gather steam as the world opens back up.
What inspired you to write NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE?
I’ve wanted to write NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE in some form since I was about 12 or 13. As I grew older, I wanted to write a book to my teenage self.
By about 8th grade, I was reading tons of adult literature and not YA. I loved dirty jokes and questionable tropes and stories of Vegas mobsters and Nazi hunters. ‘70s potboilers with torn, ratty covers especially influenced me.
But here’s the thing: the world was default straight, and even as a kid I noticed. Young adult heroes, especially, were never gay. If they were sexual beings at all, they always made eyes at girls across the room. Now and then, something would come along to challenge that—usually foreign films like Beautiful Thing in 1996 or Y Tu Mamá También in 2001. Still, Had John Connor been gay in Terminator 2, I’d probably have worn out the VHS tape and died of want for Edward Furlong—not that I didn’t, anyway.
Even in today’s literary environment, where both spy novels for teens and LGBT YA books are more commonplace, something feels defanged. The gay kids are gentle or meek; the spies carefully avoid mention of foreign governments. A common argument is that kids are impressionable, but I’m not writing LGBT books for tweens, here.
Can you give us your book blurb so others can find out what your book is about?
Fifteen-year-old Ian Racalmuto’s life is in ruins after an embassy raid in Algiers. His mother, a vodka-drunk spy, is dead. His brother, a diplomat, has vanished. And, he’s lost a cremation urn containing a smartphone that could destroy the world.
Forced to live with his cantankerous grandfather in Philadelphia, Ian has seven days to find his brother and secure the phone—all while adjusting to life in a troubled urban school and dodging assassins sent to kill him.
Ian finds an ally in William Xiang, an undocumented immigrant grappling with poverty, a strict family, and abusive classmates. They make a formidable team, but when Ian’s feelings toward Will grow, bombs, bullets and crazed bounty hunters don’t hold a candle to his fear of his friend finding out. Will it wreck their relationship, roll up their mission, and derail a heist they’ve planned at the State Department?
Like a dime store pulp adventure of the past, No Good About Goodbye is an incautious, funny, coming-of-age tale for mature teens and adult readers.
How can readers discover more about you and your work?
Website: https://www.ctliotta.com
Subscribe to my newsletter: https://ctliotta.substack.com
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58803703-no-good-about-goodbye
Twitter: @CTLiotta
Instagram: @CarterGoesPlaces
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cartergoesplaces
Book website: https://www.nogoodaboutgoodbye.com
Where can readers buy your book?
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09C4ZWWY5
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/books/no-good-about-goodbye/9781955394024
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/no-good-about-goodbye-ct-liotta/1140173005?ean=9781955394024
Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/no-good-about-goodbye/ct-liotta/9781955394024
Dymocks: https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/no-good-about-goodbye-by-ct-liotta-9781955394024
Thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to take part in this interview. What’s next for you?
As the pandemic winds down, my day job is busy again. I haven’t traveled overseas since I returned from Japan in 2019 and it’s time to get back out there. If my book were super buzzy, on dozens of lists, and trending on NetGalley, I might be racing into the storm and anxious to write what’s next. As it is, I’m heading to Hilo to tour some volcanoes and eat some Macadamia nuts. I’ll figure out what to do from there. I haven’t ruled out a sequel or future young adult espionage novels. I doubt I’ll ever publish traditionally, however. There’s no need.
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