The Ideas Bucket – #LGBTQIA+ #Romance #Music

By William Campbell Powell (Guest Blogger)

Thanks for inviting me to talk about the origins of my new book, Teardown.

Well, it all began with my dad’s acoustic guitar. I don’t know why he had one – he never played it (he was a drummer), as far as I can recall. But I wanted to learn, because my friends at school were getting together to make music, and I wanted to be part of that. I think three of us had guitars, and at least one of the other two was better than I was, and over the next couple of years it became apparent that I was going to have to find another instrument. Drums were already taken – one of the guys had snapped up a cheap second-hand kit found in a junk shop.

So I decided to build myself a bass guitar, which I finished in my first year at uni. Same group of friends, but we were now at four different universities, so when we did get a gig, we’d strap our guitars on our backs, cycle down to the railway station, and hope to borrow an amp when we got to the gig.

Fast forward. We graduated and got jobs, cars and professionally built guitars. And, having failed to conquer the UK, we decided to try our luck in Germany. We hired a van, threw our gear in the back, packed tents, and we were off. Cue gigs, mishaps and shenanigans. The following year we did it again.

So how did that turn into Teardown?

I’d started to write around 2000, give or take a year, but my writing really took off a few years later, when I fell seriously ill and was off work for more than a year. Actually, writing literally saved my life – though that’s another story. Several manuscripts later, I managed to place my novel Expiration Day with Tor Teen, who published it in April 2014. A couple of months later, I see an entry in my “Ideas Bucket” entitled “Band On Tour.doc”, containing the lines:

Basically a KWTM* Germany Tour, but with a boy/girl twist.

Variant 2 – they get swept up by aliens, people from future / another timeline.

* KWTM = Ken Wood and the Mixers, the name of my old band.

The “Ideas Bucket” is my writing folder where I keep all my writing ideas for future use. Any idea I get, I jot down as soon as I get it, before they’re lost in the whirl of a busy day. So I can be confident that that was the day that I got the idea.

I didn’t know much about the LGBT+ rainbow back then – I just wanted to write a love story where the gender of the main character wasn’t explicitly stated. But I had an opening scene, a cast of characters (adapted from that first band) and one scene that belonged near the end of the book, and on May 6^th 2015 I wrote the first 480 words.

A few months later I went to the USA, to attend the Sasquan World Science Fiction convention in Spokane, and on to New York, where I met my team at Tor Teen. I pitched the novel to them, because they wanted to know what else I was writing. It didn’t really fit with Tor Teen’s market, which was YA Science fiction and Fantasy. I guess I could have reworked it to fit, maybe using that alien idea, but that wasn’t where my heart was for this story.

That opening scene is still there, albeit significantly modified and extended, and no longer the opening scene. Stevie became Kai, Mike became Dave, then Clayton. Howie became Kai’s brother Jamie. Jake was always there, head down, strumming the guitar, trying to keep well out of it as the band imploded.

How those 480 words became Teardown? How the gender-not-stated Stevie became the explicitly non-binary, no-pronouns Kai? Well, that’s one for another blog post.

Blurb

Growing up in a dead-end, Thames Valley town like Marden Combe, Kai knows there’s no escape without a lot of talent, hard work—and luck.

Two weeks before the Clayton Paul Blues Band plans to set out on tour to Germany, their singer quits, and drummer Kai takes matters in hand. With bandmates Jake and Jamie, they recruit a talented new singer—the enigmatic Dominique—as the new face of the band and set out on the road to Berlin in a rickety white van.

Dogged by mishaps and under-rehearsed, the band stumbles through their first shows, zig-zagging between chaos and brilliance. But as the first gig in Berlin draws near, the band begins to gel. They’re clicking with their audience, and even the stone-hearted Kai starts to crumble under the spell, first of Dom and then…of Lars.

As the end of the tour approaches, Kai must make hard choices. Dom? But she’s keeping a dark secret. Lars? Not after the acrimony of their last parting. The band? Or will that dream crumble too?

Excerpt

The bus stank of commuters. It wasn’t like a night bus, granted, but the mix of sweat and cheap scent—and the pungency of diesel—was another reminder of how much I hated Marden Combe.

A Thames Valley town like every other Thames Valley town, Marden Combe had a posh, blingy bit, where the bankers, footballers, and celebrity chefs lived. The rest ran the spectrum from dilapidated through demolished to barely affordable modern rabbit hutches. The old town centre was closing down, and the new shopping centre was gridlock hell.

The bus lurched and swung left, past a school named for a long-dead parliamentarian. Or possibly a royalist. I ought to know; it had been my old school till I’d turned sixteen. But it had all seemed irrelevant to the more immediate problem of not getting picked on for being different. There were a dozen ways and more to be different, whether it was for being too ugly, too geeky, too slow on the uptake, too shy, too dark, not dark enough, having a funny accent, or a fundy religion, or being neurodivergent, being too posh, being too poor, liking the wrong music, or football team, or playing oddball sports, or using last year’s tech; not liking girls, not liking boys, not liking either, liking both. Plus others, plus combinations. By more than one marker, I was weird, and I hadn’t always kept my head down. But there’d definitely been no bullying at Sir Long-Dead-Parliamentarian School. Or Royalist, as the case may be. Oh no.

That didn’t come close to summing up the suffocating, hope-crushing, soul-sucking, shit-brown hole that is Marden Combe. I needed to escape.

If I had a plan, it was that music would save me…

About the Author

William lives in a small Buckinghamshire village in England. By night he writes speculative, historical, crime and other fiction. His debut novel, EXPIRATION DAY, was published by Tor Teen in 2014 and won the 2015 Hal Clement Award for better than half-decent science in a YA novel—the citation actually says "Excellence in Children's Science Fiction Literature".

William’s latest novel - TEARDOWN - was published 10th December 2024, by NineStar Press in the US; it is an LGBT+ romance/road-trip.

His short fiction has appeared in DreamForge, Metastellar, Abyss & Apex and other outlets.

By day he writes software for a living and in the twilight he sings tenor, plays guitar and writes songs.

My websites: https://williamcampbellpowell.com/

https://teardownbook.co.uk/

Buy Links: https://teardownbook.co.uk/  

The book is on sale for only $0.99

Social Media

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WillCamPowell/

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/willcampowell

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/willcampowell.bsky.social

My comps for the book:

The novel combines elements of LGBTQIA+ romance with Road Trip fiction, and - with its focus on music - might sit alongside Taylor Jenkins Reid’s ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’ (2016) or Dawnie Walton’s ‘The Final Revival of Opal & Nev’ (2022), or - with its focus on (Kai's) gender-ambiguity and relationships - near Camille Perry’s ‘When Katie Met Cassidy’ (2018) or Beth O’Leary’s ‘The Road Trip’ (2022).

One USP: The book is about a band and contains original songs, for which I have created demos – see/listen: https://williamcampbellpowell.com/music/music.html

William Campbell Powell will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.

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