Felipe is fat. So, he doesn’t believe that someone like Caio (his crush) would fall in love with him. In this summer, his plans just include watching videos on YouTube and reading some books. But, when they both have to live together for 15 days, new feelings show up and change not only all the situations but also their relationship.
That’s the blurb from Vitor Martin’s book, published for the first time in Brazil in 2017. Martin was born in a city called Nova Friburgo, close to Rio de Janeiro, but he currently lives in São Paulo. He graduated in journalism and works often with Editorial Marketing.
As a queer author, he belives that “diversity in youth literature is a powerful weapon, and his main goal as a writer is to tell stories about people who have never been able to see themselves in a book.” Check out the his interview for Her Campus!
- How did the idea for the book “Here The Whole Time” come about?
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A: One kind of content that I love to consume is writing diaries. I love it when writers talk about their processes (by text, video, newsletter, etc.) because we always learn a little by watching who does it differently than we do. I remember that in 2016 I received a newsletter from some writer (I can’t remember who it was) talking about a writing retreat that she participated in as a speaker and about how one of the exercises that was passed on to students was about retelling. The author said that many times we get very caught up in the idea of creating the perfect plot and that prevents us from practicing writing itself because we only plan and plan and we never reach the cool part (unless planning is the cool part for you, haha). Then she suggested this exercise of taking a known story (a fairy tale, for example) and retelling it in a new way, using the existing plot as a basis. It’s almost like writing a fanfic, and what differentiates the original work from the retelling is in the hands of the writer. I kept bearing it in my head for months until I came up with a fairy tale retelling project in contemporary LGBT versions. It was this project that I presented to Editora Globo, after they asked me for a conversation about a future publication. They liked it but, commercially, they wanted a romance and not an anthology. I was asked to choose a single story and develop more, and that was how ‘Here The Whole Time’ was born (which, in the begging, was a gay retelling of Beauty and the Beast). The boy who finds himself ugly and incapable of being loved, a forced confinement for a certain period of time that has day and time to end, a series of secondary characters who watch this romance happen and cheer for them both, an approximation from the passion for reading and breaking ice with a book loan (like when the Beast gives a HUGE LIBRARY as a gift to Belle after being rude and an asshole for days). The references are there but the story is different. To have a starting point like this prepared me a lot to put my first book out.
- How is it to write for young audiences?
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A: It’s really fun and rewarding. I have no comparative factor, because I never wrote for other audiences, but the young reader has a very open mind to learn new stories. It is an audience that takes a position on what they like and dislike and, above all, they spread the word haha. When a young reader likes a book he doesn’t keep it to himself. He talks to friends, comments on social networks, gets in touch with the author… This is too good because it keeps me closer and more connected to understand my next steps.
- How did the idea of publishing “Here The Whole Time” abroad come up?
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A: It was not quite an idea. We received a proposal from an editor at Scholastic (who had already purchased another Brazilian book, “Where We Go From Here”, by Lucas Rocha), after receiving some national titles to evaluate. The path from my book to the hands of Orlando dos Reis (my editor in the United States) was a mixture of luck with chance, with that thing of being in the right place at the right time. He liked the story, made the proposal, we accepted it and here we are!
- How did it feel to see it published?
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A: It was a feeling of relief too great. Before the book actually exists, there is always that anxiety about the next step and the process of producing a book has many stages. From finishing writing, going through revisions, layout, cover, getting the book ready, first launch event. All of this generated a great expectation in me and I had moments of relief in each one. It’s like a long race, full of stops. But seeing it published, which seemed to be the “final stretch” is only the beginning of the writer’s journey. In parts, selling your book can be much more challenging than writing.
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The article above was edited by Safira L.M.
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