UNLOCKED: The Terrible Young Adult Novel I Wrote

I gooned too close to the sun- Gilded is now available to all paid subscribers.

Well, this is embarrassing. On Sunday, I released this article as a perk for gooner/sickos, the highest tier of CHH membership. But apparently the long-awaited young adult novel The Gilded isn’t enough of a draw for this membership tier. I will say that this tier has other perks, like access to CHH chat on Substack, discord, and the ability to submit questions, requests and advice to be answered in an advice column. But maybe we’re not quite at the point of locked content yet. Oh well!

Anyway, I encourage upgrading your subscription if those features sound interesting, but in the mean time, enjoy The Gilded, now available to all paid subscribers.

As I’ve written about before, my quest to be a full-time writer took a detour in my twenties when I realized that I couldn’t just be a good writer, I had to be a writer who wrote things that were hot. And at the time, what was hot? The Hunger Games. Divergent. Twilight. You get the point. In one year, a former college friend (who to my knowledge had never written much before) reached out to get me to promote his vampire series, and my boss wrote a series of self-published vampire novels. Clearly, this vampire shit was getting out of control and I wasn’t going to go there, but I did feel drawn into the world of dystopian young adult novels. I really enjoyed The Hunger Games and after watching the movie adaptation of Divergent I realized that these books were fairly easy to write, because you actually had a pretty well-defined structure and formula to use.

Some of the key features that I realized I would have to include in my book:

• Unassuming, underdog main character who is secretly special (and preferably orphaned)

• The government wants to capture or stop the main character

• Sexy, brooding male love interest

• Some kind of sorting ceremony or selection ceremony (this is an underrated key component of basically any dystopian young adult novel.)

So I set out to write the perfect formulaic young adult novel. It was called The Gilded. The premise was that in the not-so-distant future, to curb population growth, the authoritarian government has created a program to temporarily sterilize all civilians with a hormonal arm implant, and provide chemical castration drugs to the masses to prevent desire—except for the select few Reproductive Citizens, who have passed some kind of test for genetic fitness, called the Future Test. Only they are given the option to desire, love, and of course, procreate. Basically, a reverse Handmaid’s Tale.

The Gilded centers around Ella Slate, a foster child who doesn’t know who her parents are (of course.) Ella has given up all hope of becoming a Reproductive Citizen, even though she’s always wanted to have kids. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the book, where Ella is accosted by a mysterious woman:

“Are you Ella Slate?” she asked.

Ella had never been recognized before.  She didn’t even think about why the woman would know who she was, and instead pretended for a moment that she was a movie star from Province Purple.

“Yes, yes, I am.”

“Did you get your Future Test results back yet?” she asked.

“No,” Ella said, “I get them tomorrow at the ceremony.  We all do.”

The woman grabbed Ella’s bony forearm arm so tightly that Ella could feel her right hand ring pressing through her shirt and into her tricep.

“You need to leave Province Yellow immediately,” she said, “Do not refer to yourself as Ella Slate again.  Do whatever you can to change how you look.  Whatever you do, don’t attend the Future Test results ceremony.”

At one point, Ella gives an extremely long expository school presentation about the history of their civilization (called the UP, or United Provinces,) which absolved me of doing any serious world-building. It ends on this note:

“Now, one hundred years after the start of the Future Test, there are still people who oppose Reproductive Citizenship and the Future Test, both of which are currently sponsored and administered by Sapicon, the leader in pharmaceutical advancements.  Suicide attacks and bioterrorism against Sapicon has been on the rise, as well as conspiracy theorists that many fear will lead to a Third Civil War.  As a closing sentiment, I urge you all to support the President and Sapincon in stomping out the rebels and terrorists who wish to end our way of life. Thank you.”

In hindsight, this book was basically an incel allegory. New genre when??

 After dark, any urban center was a sexual meat market, where the young Reproductive Citizens dressed in glamorous clothing, applied luxurious colognes and perfumes, and rubbed against each other in crowded dance clubs.  They ordered drinks with chemical aphrodisiacs and kissed—sometimes more—in public.  But if you didn’t want to see it, you didn’t have to.  You just had to go to bed before nine.

At the ceremony to reveal the Future Test results, we are introduced to Tarys Larkin, the villain of the story: