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Z. R. Ellor

  • Queer Joy

    October 31st, 2022

    “We’re looking for stories about queer joy. Joyous queers. Happy queer stories. No homophobia/transphobia. Happy endings.”

    “We want authentic queer narratives.”

    When my mother explained to me what being gay was, she bent and whispered it in my ear, so no one else in the house would hear her say it. I was eight. I remember thinking that doesn’t sound so bad but everyone–my classmates, my church, my family–was convinced. My father caught me reading a story someone wrote about their lesbian characters in the Sims 2 and installed a parental controls module on the computer.

    Two years later, I had a crush on the captain of the girls’ soccer team, and I was horrified with myself. I vowed to never tell anyone, to keep it a secret from everyone I knew until my dying day. I was eleven and I thought I would be tortured in hell for all eternity because I liked how shiny another girl’s hair looked in her ponytail.

    I spent my childhood in a state of terror that still haunts me. Not to sound dramatic–most queer people do. You grow up. You do the work of putting yourself back together.

    And then you tell your story.

    One of my most profound moments of queer joy: I’m a few weeks from graduating college. Me and a group of trans friends I’ll be parting from set up a kiddie pool on the dorm lawn at 3AM. We float in the water and sing hymns from the churches that rejected us. The next day, we’ll go back to the hometowns we’re not safe in and build ourselves some lives from toothpicks. It’s the Last Supper and a baptism all in one. God is in the water.

    Queer joy. We want queer joy. I hear it over and over in publishing circles. We want queer joy. But I have never experienced any kind of ‘queer joy’ that hasn’t been touched–or given meaning–by the circumstances that marginalize queer folk to begin with. A bawdy joke in a bowling alley. The celebration when a friend leaves an unsafe household. The invisible language of touch in a gay bar saying things you cannot safely share out loud.

    There is joy and then there is queer joy. To me, queer joy is rooted in overcoming oppression, in dodging a gender norm, in seeking love and community against the odds. Queer joy is not permitted. It’s something illegal, taboo, something that must be stolen. I can write a queer person experiencing joy at finding a nice pair of shoes on sale. But to explore why that joy is queer, I need to hold in my head the laws and customs that deny us the right to self-expression, the consequences and complications and the intersections that go into something as simple as planning an outfit for a night on the town. Other authors may not, but I do.

    When I turn to queer literature, I look for stories about navigating the complexities of queerness–how you can belong in one moment and be banished in the next, how you can be hyper-visible and invisible all at once. I look for queer depression, queer anxiety, queer trauma–for queer characters who bear the scars of living in an unfriendly society and yet move forward. Other people want to read about people without trauma falling in love and expressing their gender how they please in magical worlds without homophobia and this is their right. But unless we invent a time machine and I can drag Baby Me to a kinder, safer era (whenever that may be)–queer joy with no homophobia is as alien to my authentic lived personal queer experience as life on the moon. And to build a literary canon that represents queer life, we need to keep the doors open for stories about pain.

  • Cover reveal for ACTING THE PART

    March 2nd, 2022

    Pre-orders aren’t open yet, but you can add ACTING THE PART on Goodreads!

    This delightfully tropey teen romance, perfect for fans of Ashley Poston and Lyla Lee, follows a queer teen actor navigating their gender identity while pretending to date their costar.

    Queer actor Lily Ashton has found fame playing lesbian warrior Morgantha on the hit TV show Galaxy Spark. Lily knows how little representation queer girls have, so when the showrunners reveal that Morgantha’s on-screen love interest, Alietta, is going to be killed off, Lily orchestrates an elaborate fake-dating scheme with the standoffish actress who plays her, to generate press and ensure a happy ending for the #Morganetta ship.

    But while playing a doting girlfriend on and offscreen, Lily struggles with whether a word like “girl” applies to them at all. Their male online gaming persona, Frey, feels more authentically them than the curvy body they see in the mirror, and coming out as nonbinary to the crush they meet in an MMORPG makes them feel like they’ve got a shot at a real-world happily ever after. #Morganetta means so much to so many people, though, so Lily decides to keep presenting as female to the world and continue the dating charade. Even as they genuinely bond with their costar, they can’t ignore how much it hurts to be something they’re not.

    Lily’s always been good at playing a part. But are they ready to share their real self, even if it means throwing everything they’ve fought for away?

  • Autistic In Public

    November 12th, 2021

    Honestly, I wish I didn’t need a social media platform. But here’s the thing: every other successful LBGTQ+ author does. Our books don’t often get the big fanfares, the major marketing investments. We’re expected to reach our readers on our own or get left behind.

    And it feels nearly impossible when you’re autistic.

    Growing up, I knew that other kids grasped the rules of how we were meant to behave in a way I didn’t, couldn’t. Books were my sanctuary, my refuge. I keenly remember the first time I visited NYC in sixth grade and walking around Midtown in a state of holy awe: here was where books came from.  Here was where I could belong, even if I didn’t fit in at school, because I knew books, loved books, with my whole being. 

    I wrote my first book not soon after. I was 13, it was a complete 60k, an absolute disaster, and I’m very proud of it still.

    I learned early on in life I wasn’t supposed to express myself: I was too loud, too weird, prone to going off on tangents and confusing people. I made an effort to be someone other people liked, and got told off for doing it wrong—or worse, welcomed in because cruel people identified me as an easy target. Writing books was the only way I could have a sort of personhood. Even today, I feel most like myself putting words on a page.

    Which isn’t great when the current hot platform for book sales is a video app.

    Every social media site has rules of its own, things that resonate with users and the algorithms. Unspoken rules that leave me feeling, once again, like I can’t navigate. These other YA authors have a hundred thousand followers on TikTok—what am I doing wrong when I make similar videos and only get a handful of likes? It wouldn’t bother me as much were these numbers not so intimately tied to book sales, were book sales not the thing j needed to keep doing the work I love. Once again, I feel my trauma responses kick up, as I scramble to figure out what I need to show the world to make people like me.

    Which isn’t healthy, but social media isn’t built for anyone’s health, especially not for autistic people.

  • Welcome to my website!

    November 27th, 2017

    This is the official website of bestselling YA author Z. R. Ellor (and adult SFF writer Zabé Ellor.) I don’t post much here, but you can find links to my books! I also work as a literary agent, and you can find my MSWL linked above!

Blog at WordPress.com.

 

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