The Brink of Darkness Author Jeff Giles on the 6 Friends You’ll Need If You’re Going to Be a YA Author

In the opening pages of Jeff Giles’ dark and funny debut, The Edge of Everything, teenaged Zoe was saved from a violent man by X, a bounty hunter from a hellish realm known as the Lowlands. When Zoe stops him from reaping her attacker, it sets off a chain of events that leads to first love and terrible peril. In sequel The Brink of Darkness, X is back in the Lowlands, more powerless than ever—but a search for his true identity may lead to freedom. Back on Earth, Zoe is determined to do whatever it takes to save the one she loves, including descending into the underworld and breaking him out herself.
Giles isn’t just an awesome author, he’s also one of the funniest people in YA. Here, he shares the friend squad you’ll want by your side when making the journey to YA author-dom.
The Friend Who’ll Always Tell You the Truth. Many of your friends will tell you that even your roughest drafts are genius and they’re having your main character’s name tattooed around their neck. You cannot trust them. You need at least one person who’ll be ruthless when necessary. Once, in an early draft of a book, I had some high school characters sitting around doing nothing and one of the characters said, “This is boring.” My journalist friend Susannah Meadows wrote in the margins, “You’re telling me!” Did I curl up on the floor and shiver silently for an hour? Maybe. But Susannah cared enough to be blunt, and if she’d said it any other way, I might not have listened.
The Friend Who’ll Lie to Make You Feel Better. No matter how successful you are, you’re going to have setbacks and they’re going to make you want to hide in a closet and chew on a shoe. It could be that your sales numbers aren’t great. It could be that your books are hidden way back in the corner of the store near the fire extinguisher. It could be that your novel’s not on a list called “These Are the Only Good Novels Being Published This Month, The Other Ones Suck.” Because of our wonky wiring, a lot of us have a hard time accepting praise, but when it comes to criticism we fling our arms open and say, “Come to mama!” When something mortifying happens, you will need a friend who can convince you absolutely no one noticed and that it doesn’t matter anyway. Usually, they will be lying. And god bless them.
The Friend You Can Text at Any Hour. Sometimes you need to be reassured right now, right this second. Is your title actually good? Are people going to show up at your book signing in Antarctica? It helps to have friends in different time zones. And it helps to know authors—like the wondrous Danielle Paige (Dorothy Must Die, Stealing Snow)—who work around the clock and sleep less than deer.
The Friend Who’ll Promote You on Social Media So You Don’t Have to Promote Yourself Every Single Second. Self-promotion is humiliating for virtually everyone. “Man, it’s awful how human rights are under attack, but check out how cool my book cover looks on these cupcakes!” (I’ve actually done this.) As authors, we’re obligated to help our publishers get the word out and, look, this is our livelihood. It helps enormously that YA authors support each other in a way I haven’t seen in any other genre. Find yourself a person or persons who’ll retweet that glowing review you got and rally people to come to your events. And then do the same for them. Kami Garcia (Broken Beautiful Hearts), Kathleen Glasgow (Girl in Pieces) and Kerry Kletter (The First Time She Drowned) have been stupendously generous to me—and that’s just the people whose names start with K.
The Friend Who’s Such a Good Writer They Make You Want to Be Better. When I read a beautiful book (Still Life With Tornado, by A.S. King; Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor; When the Moon was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore), I often have the same thought: “Hey, maybe I should just give up.” But the trick is to be inspired. Even if you can’t actually be friends with your idols, you can follow them online, where you’ll find they’re at the mercy of all the same insecurities, rage storms, and daily dramas that you are. Sabaa Tahir pretends she’s on the phone so she doesn’t have to talk to people sometimes. Laini Taylor’s cat won’t get off her computer.
The Friend Who Needs YOUR Help. As in all things, you have to give back as much and as often as you can. You have to read a friend’s 600-page manuscript—which has fifteen different narrators and is told partially in runes—when you’d rather be bingeing Killing Eve. You have to get on the phone at whatever o’clock when they think their career is over. And you have to look beyond your own comfortable social circle. You have to help get all kinds of different people’s voices heard. You have to review, retweet, repost. You have to show up at other writers’ signings. You have to tell people the absolute truth, and, once in a while, you have to tell a white lie. All this would seem like a lot—except it’s exactly what has been done for you.
The Brink of Darkness is on sale today.