Lisa Tirreno

On the Cusp is a regular series I do on this blog, comprising an interview with another writer who’s about to become a debut novelist. I send them the standard list of ten questions and ask them to please pick five, and to also answer the bonus question.

This week we have Matteo L. Cerilli, who I know via on online group for debut authors. Matteo lives in Toronto, Canada, and his young adult horror novel Lockjaw will be out in June. Pre-order links can be found here.

Why did you pick traditional book publishing? Why not self-pub or even some other art form, to tell this story? Interpretive dance, perhaps? A computer game? A series of sculptures? Why a novel, with a publisher?

As for self-pub versus trad, I dabbled a bit with self-pub during my undergrad. There are two poetry books out there with my name in the acknowledgements. But ultimately, I know I’m not an expert in marketing or sales or even editing my own work. Again, the book belongs to all of us. In traditional publishing, I can stick to story-crafting and trust other people to do what they’re best at too. I’m not really territorial over my work, so I find that works well for me. But that’s definitely a matter of opinion.

Why this genre? Why this age group? Why these characters?

I talk about this in the author’s note, but I actually didn’t think I was going to write horror! I started this in the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown, after getting uprooted from my big city university and stranded in the suburbs with my parents. I was feeling really lonely and pretty self-sorry, so I thought I was going to write a happy little romcom.

The problem is that I don’t really read romcoms, and I didn’t really feel any warm, lovey-dovey feelings while the walls of my childhood room were closing in on me. I got about 50 pages in with many of the exact same characters (Paz, Asher, Beetle, Bird, Caleb, and Marcela allexisted in that draft) but just wasn’t feeling it. When I asked myself what I wanted to happen, everything in me said I needed something terrifying to jump out of the bushes and start looking for blood. And so, I pivoted to horror.

As for the age range and the characters, I didn’t actually grow up as an avid reader. Especially in high school, I was a little too closeted and depressed to read much. And as a middle schooler, I was one of those dorks reading above my age level to impress adults, not because I actually enjoyed it. Lockjaw primarily features two groups of characters: an 11-year-old bike gang of misfits trying to defeat a monster under the town and a just-graduated gang of teenagers trying to ignore everything going wrong. The younger characters encapsulate all the rage and loneliness I was feeling as a kid that I would have been thrilled to read about if I picked up a YA book above my grade level. As for the teens, so many of their struggles and fears (being an unhoused trans youth, trying to be yourself when it hurts, assimilationist culture, strict family legacies) are based off my own life or people close to me. The characters just sort of formed themselves in that fervour.

Was there anything in the journey to publication that you’d built up and then it turned out to be nothing to worry about/an anticlimax?

Hah! I signed on with my agent when I was 18 or so, sort of a mentorship/coaching opportunity. But I remember very clearly that my agent had sat me down, looked me square in the eye, and told me, “It’s very likely that your cover will suck. You can’t change it. They’ll show you the cover and unless it’s something egregious, you smile and nod and say ‘thank your for the opportunity’.” And I’m a visual artist too, not good enough to do a cover really, but enough to know when something looks wrong and have suggestions for fixing it. So I sat there dreading my cover … and then they brought in Corey Brickley who just absolutely stunned me. I had nothing but praise.

Now my cover art bar is super high, so I guess I have to get my expectations lowered again just in case…

What’s next?

So much. Lockjaw is a stand-alone, but I did sell it as part of a two-book deal. So, next fall, you can expect a noir fantasy novel about two step-siblings, one mortal and one fey, who are blackmailed into investigating a notorious fey-run jazz bar in order to keep up their family name long enough for their aunt to win the presidential election.

It’s my love letter to my partner’s obsession with classical noir films, and also a pretty vivid allegory for neurodivergence and mental illness. I’ve gotten to put all my rage and frustration into a fey girl that accidentally lights her fists on fire whenever she’s overwhelmed, and her dissociated brother who is only alright when he pretends life is a movie. It’s just fun. We’re still workshopping the name.

I also have some other projects in the works that everyone should keep an eye on … my tag lines are “ghost best friend story, but make it Italian”, “water-stealing videogame monster hunt tournament”, and “Italy’s 1920s anti-fascist anarchist movement with witches”. There’s definitely some others, but I think those are going to be popping up soonest.

Most writers on their path to publication think about giving up at some point. Was there anything that made you feel this way? What kept you going?

I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, and made picture books and then chapter books well into Grade 7 … and then I started getting bullied for it. I was a closeted trans boy with ADHD that no one was diagnosing but everyone was noticing, which made me very “weird”. I wrote a lot less after that, mostly focusing on getting through school. I don’t really remember a lot about that time in my life, if I’m honest. I was still plunking out some lackluster ideas, but I got it in my head that I was going to go into a STEM field like my parents to chase some of that acceptance. By high school, I was drawing more often so though I’d go into the animation field. I eventually had to decide between going to school for animation, or for writing/publishing. Ultimately, my portfolio wasn’t good enough for art school, so I thought I’d be an editor somewhere and went to do my undergrad in that. I really thought writing books would be some backburner hobby that would eventually flame out.

Every day I’m grateful for the faculty of my university’s creative writing program who looked at my portfolio and told me that I needed to major in this, not minor. And that’s what officially shifted me away from wanting to work in the back end of publishing. I wrote Lockjaw around the same time I got that news, and it’s been full speed ahead ever since. I’m still realistic about my prospects as an author (I do have a day job in sales, to keep some health benefits and a steady pay cheque), but it’s my career. Everything else is the side hustle. This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.

Bonus question: Is there anything else you wanted a chance to talk about?

If I can offer any advice to aspiring authors, it’s seriously to remember that everyone on your team is an expert in their field, and the book isn’t just your baby. They all want it to succeed, and their interpretations of the text are probably closer to the average reader’s vision than your own. So, embrace the teamwork process. An agent knows what a book needs to sell to an editor, who knows how to convince sales and marketing to take it, who know how to catch a reader’s ear and eye. Of course, when we’re working in budding genres like trans horror, there is less previous research to go off of, but find people who you trust to understand that. There are certainly situations where authors have been burned by a less-than-enthused team, and I don’t want to discredit that, but my personal politics lead me to believe that about 90% of people will try to help you if they have the resources to do it.

When you’re choosing an agent or an editor, find someone that makes you feel comfortable saying: “This is my opinion, but I’m not the expert in that, so I’ll trust your judgement!” Then, you can let them go on their merry way while you focus on your own side of the puzzle instead of trying to micro-manage everything. It’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t build a solid creative team.

If you’re heading into the industry or are already there, take a deep breath and remember that a traditionally published book is a community effort, including all the pros and cons of that.