Interview with Dahlia Adler, author of Out on Good Behaviour!

Hi, everyone! I’m so excited to feature Dahlia Adler, author of Out on Good Behaviour today! I am a totally Adler fangirl and I will read anything she writes.

Before the awesome interview, let’s learn more about Out on Good Behaviour and Dahlia Adler!

About the Book

Out on Good Behaviour by Dahlia Adler
Radleigh University #3 (companion)
June 14th 2016
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Frankie Bellisario knows she can get anyone she sets her sights on, but just because she can doesn’t mean she should—not when the person she’s eyeing is Samara Kazarian, the daughter of a southern Republican mayor. No matter how badly Frankie wants to test her powers of persuasion, even she recognizes some lines aren’t meant to be crossed.

But when Frankie learns she’s been on Samara’s mind too, the idea of hooking up with her grows too strong to resist. Only Sam’s not looking for a hookup; she wants—needs—the real thing, and she’s afraid she’ll never find it as long as Frankie’s in her head.

Forced to choose between her first relationship and losing the girl who’s been clawing her way under her skin, Frankie opts to try monogamy…under her own condition: 30 days of keeping things on the down low and remaining abstinent. If she fails as hard at girlfriending as she’s afraid she might, she doesn’t want to throw Samara’s life into upheaval for nothing. But when neither the month nor Frankie’s heart go according to plan, she may be the one stuck fighting for the happily ever after she never knew she wanted.

About Dahlia

Dahlia Adler is an Associate Editor of Mathematics by day, a blogger for B&N Teens by night, and writes Contemporary YA and NA at every spare moment in between. She’s the author of the Daylight Falls duology, Just Visiting, and the Radleigh University series, as well as over five billion tweets as @MissDahlELama. She lives in New York City with her husband and their overstuffed bookshelves.

 

The Interview

1. Please describe your novel using any 5 words.
   
   Sexy, fluffy, super queer NA
   
   
2. You are no stranger to explicit sex scenes, both within your YAs and your NAs. While you have written an f/f romance before (Under the Lights of course), has the experience writing an NA f/f romance different than writing a YA one?
   
   My YA is very much on the upper end, and my NA is on the younger end, so there’s not as huge a difference for me between the two as there is for other authors, but there’s definitely still a difference. With YA, when you’re writing sex, it tends to focus a lot more on sensation and motion, and less on body parts, whereas in NA you can go all in. (Heh.) But both of these f/f romances in particular feature one more experienced partner and one who’s having sex for the first time, so I think they have more similar vibes than books with more experienced women would have, and you kinda see that within Out on Good Behavior, since there are multiple sex scenes and there are huge differences between the more YA-friendly first one and the verrrrry not YA second one.
   
   
3. The love interest in the novel, Samara, is a huge YA novel fan. I’m curious, how did you decide which novels to include in OoGB?
   
   I can’t reveal too much about this for Reasons, but without getting specific, it was a combo of three things: Books I love, Authors I love, and books that just very well fit into that point in the story.
   
   
4. This is your third Radleigh University novel. Do you have any plans to write another book in this companion series?
   
   I definitely don’t have plans to write another single-POV book in the series. It’s really about the friendships between those three girls, and now that they’ve each gotten their own book, that phase of the series is over. I have toyed with the idea of a book of interlinked short stories featuring a bunch of the secondary characters, which I’d do if people were really interested, but mostly I’m looking to starting new things.
   
   
5. Do you have any advice for aspiring LGBT+ writers?
   
   Definitely. My biggest one is that it’s not enough to know the individual letter(s) you’re representing in your work; the LGBT+ community is a community, and it’s important to understand that and how people in it find safe spaces in each other. Yes, there’s infighting in prejudices in the community too, but essentially, it’s important to get the whole world that you’re working with. Recognize if you’re throwing bi characters under the bus for gay people, enforcing the “slutty, indecisive” stereotypes to make your own characters look pristine, that that’s a thing you’re doing, and an in-fight you’re enabling. It’s not just a story choice. People are going to seek out your books from all different spaces under the rainbow, so think about your intentions when you make it an unsafe space for any of them.
   
   Similarly, it’s really important to be aware of what’s already out there, what are tiresomely recurring narratives, what are constant repeated microaggressions in YA, and on the flip side, I think it helps to pay attention to what really works. Why certain books click so much more with queer readers than others do.
   
   Another more basic point – the older your characters get, the more likely they’re going to seek out other queer people. Sure, your deeply closeted MC in high school might not have any queer friends, but your out MC in college? Will definitely have queer friends. Probably more than they do cishet friends. Setting is also a really important point in LGBT+ – how safe it is to be out in that geographic location is going to affect a lot. Being queer is not something that lives entirely inside a person; it’s something that, whether actively or passively, constantly interacts with the world at large.
   
   
6. Clear something up for our readers: do you have to read the other novels in the series to read Out on Good Behaviour? (This question is purely so I can toss copies of OoGB to everyone without them panicking at the mention of a series!)
   
   You do not! Obviously the characters are recurring, and in fact Frankie and Sam do meet in the previous book, but you’ll have no trouble following the story or anyone’s place in it. If you’ve read Under the Lights, it’s pretty comparable to having read that without having read Behind the Scenes.
   
   
7. Any hints on what you’re working on next?
   
   Next up is my short story for The Radical Element, an anthology about badass girls in American history, edited by Jessica Spotswood, to which I’m really excited to be contributing. I can’t say much about it, but I will say it stars my first Jewish main character, and I’m really excited about that. After that, hopefully I’ll finally finish my next YA manuscript, War of the Roses, which is a historically inspired dual-POV contemp about feuding cousins, and yes, one’s in an f/f relationship 😉 Aaaand after that, an f/f sports romance. I’ve got a busy year ahead, and I’m very excited for it!

Thank you so much to Dahlia for this awesome interview! What did you think of the interview? Have you read of Adler’s books? Let’s chat in the comments and don’t forget to follow Dahlia on Twitter!