Greg Howard is the author of Social Intercourse.From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Social Intercourse, and for your characters Beck and Jax?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I wrote Social Intercourse for NaNoWriMo [National Novel Writing Month] in about five weeks and all I knew when I started was that I wanted to write a really funny, gay young adult romantic comedy.
The only other book I’d written before that was an adult paranormal thriller, so this was a huge direction change for me. I’d never really considered writing young adult before because I thought I was too old!
But after reading a few popular YA novels with gay main characters, I realized that there are so many different experiences and points of view, that mine are just as valid as the next.
I set the story in Florence, S.C., where I grew up and went to high school and tried to imagine how different things would be a for an out and proud gay kid there today, or how much it might be the same. I was NOT out or proud in high school, so Beckett is more of “who I wish I had been” rather than “who I was.”
The story evolved pretty organically, but I knew from the outset that I wanted the two main characters to be...[read on]