Today we have author Christopher Koehler visiting Love Bytes . He is talking about the research he did for his new release Poz
and there is a giveaway to participate in!
Welcome Christopher! 🙂
Title: Poz
Series: The Lives of Remy and Michael: Book One
Author: Christopher Koehler
Publisher: Harmony Ink Press
Publication Date: 8 Jan 2015
Cover Artist: Paul Richmond
Genre: Contemporary, Gay, Young Adult
Blurb:
A Harmony Ink Press Young Adult Title
The Lives of Remy and Michael: Book One
Remy Babcock and Mikey Castelreigh are stalwart members of the Capital City Rowing Club’s junior crew, pulling their hardest to earn scholarships to rowing powerhouses like California Pacific. Just a couple of all-American boys, they face the usual pressures of life in an academic hothouse and playing a varsity sport. Add to that the stifling confines of the closet, and sometimes life isn’t always easy, even in the golden bubble of their accepting community. Because Remy and Mikey have a secret: they’re both gay. While Mikey has never hidden it, Remy is a parka and a pair of mittens away from Narnia.
Mikey has always been open about wanting more than friendship, but Remy is as uncomfortable in his own skin as he is a demon on the water. After their signals cross, and a man mistakes Remy for a college student, Remy takes the plunge and hooks up with him. After a furious Mikey cuts Remy off, Remy falls to the pressure of teenage life, wanting to be more and needing it now. In his innocence and naiveté, Remy makes mistakes that have life-long consequences. When Remy falls in the midst of the most important regatta of his life, he can only hope Mikey will be there to catch him when he needs it most.
Buy links:
How I Researched Poz
Christopher Koehler
Poz is one of the two books I’ve researched the most (the other being Tipping the Balance), and it taught me many things.
For starters, all of us have an HIV status. Mine happens to be negative, and this presented certain roadblocks when it came time to write a novel featuring a young man who made some colorful decisions the summer before his senior year of high school and faced the lifelong consequences. But that said, if writers only wrote about what they had firsthand experience with, fiction as a genre wouldn’t exist. We research. Sometimes it works better than others.
First I asked my husband about HIV, the physician. I thought hey, he practices internal medicine and that’s adult primary care. I know for a fact he’s told patients they’ve contracted HIV. Pay dirt!
Noooope.
In this era of managed care, he basically did to me what he does to his newly-poz patients, and that’s to send them off to the HIV specialists in ID—infectious diseases. Thanks, hon. You’ve been a real help.
So I turned to that breeding ground of misinformation and outright bullshit, the internet. Fortunately, I have something to help keep me from falling into traps and it’s the mad skillz (as the kids aren’t saying these days) I picked up in grad school. I can tell what’s a reputable source and what’s not.
What kinds of sources did I use?
The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. That one was a slam dunk. The latest figures about new HIV infections were one of the inspirations for Poz, specifically that not only were many, if not most, new infections in the US are showing up in young men ages 16-24 or so, the demographics that YA and NA fiction target. Not only that, the rate of new infections in those demographics continues to increase. Given that it’s part of the CDC’s mission to track this sort of thing, I take the CDC at its word.
Likewise, I trusted anything published by the National Institute of Health or any university’s medication school (see below for a quick discussion of peer review). Much of what I found from this sort of institution I’d categorize as “public outreach,” but if it had .gov or .edu as the domain I figured it was reasonably reputable.
I put a similar level of trust into foreign governments’ public health services or government-sponsored research. This required a health dose of skepticism, however, as I believe the official position of the government of South Africa is still that HIV can be controlled with diet rather than drugs. But anything from Canada, the United Kingdom, or France? Absolutely, particularly in the latter case. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute were the first to identify HIV as a retrovirus, after all. I don’t read German anymore, unfortunately, which closed off a number of sources, I’m sure.
Likewise, I considered an article in a peer-reviewed journal safe (again, a .edu domain…). That said, if the date of publication was more than five years old, I considered the science out of date. HIV research is a quickly changing subject, after all. But peer review sits at the heart of the self-correcting nature of the modern scientific method. So no matter how out there one’s claims, someone will try to reproduce the results…and likely fail. Actually, the more out there and outlandish the claims, the more likely someone will be to call you out.
All efforts at accurate, objective information aside, I actually searched out subjective information, as well, and that was the personal blogs of those living with HIV. What was seroconversion like—did you actually know when you contracted HIV? Surprisingly, some people did, going from HIV-negative to poz in a remarkably short amount of time. What’s it like living with HIV? No amount of research in scientific journals or gleaning of demographic facts from government institutes could tell me that. So if I plundered your blog, please know that I made every effort to scrub anything remotely personal from what I took away from it.
These blogs helped me realize that while HIV is life changing, it’s not life ending. Yes, there’s still no cure, but the medications are a far cry from the early days of AZT, and even that was a miracle drug when it first came on the market.
Research of both kinds led me to Truvada and its controversies. It’s a drug that helps keep those who’re HIV-negative stay that way in serodiscordant relationships (even if said relationship lasts 10-15 minutes). Naturally there are those who assume that people take it—or abuse it—so they can ride bareback without worrying about consequences. The head of one of the country’s (if not the world’s) largest AIDS charities even stooped to calling them Truvada whores. Nice.
Personally, I don’t think that’s helpful (even assuming use of Truvada as a recreational drug is a thing), that such gay-on-gay slut shaming just leads for further HIV stigma, but what do I know? Well, I do know that using Truvada regularly plus condoms means virtually no chance of passing on HIV, so there’s that. The only modality with a better chance of not passing anything STI on is abstinence, and we all know how well that works.
Strangely enough, the people who were the least helpful during my research were those who were poz and who’d agreed to read the manuscript for veracity. They pretty much crapped out on me. Part of that was no doubt not asking enough people. I also probably should’ve thrown it out to the hive mind on Facebook instead of approaching people individually.
So I did the best job I could in the telling of a story. With any luck, it’ll be good enough.
Christopher Koehler learned to read late (or so his teachers thought) but never looked back. It was not, however, until he was nearly done with grad school in the history of science that he realized that he needed to spend his life writing and not on the publish-or-perish treadmill. At risk of being thought frivolous, he found that academic writing sucked all the fun out of putting pen to paper.
Christopher is also something of a hothouse flower. Inside of almost unreal conditions he thrives to set the results of his imagination free, and for most of his life he has been lucky enough to be surrounded by people who encouraged both that tendency and the writing. Chief among them is his long-suffering husband of twenty-two years and counting.
When it comes to writing, Christopher follows Anne Lamott’s advice: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” So while he writes fiction, at times he ruthlessly mines his past for character traits and situations. Reality is far stranger than fiction.
Christopher loves many genres of fiction and nonfiction, but he’s especially fond of romances, because it is in them that human emotions and relations, at least most of the ones fit to be discussed publicly, are laid bare.
Writing is his passion and his life, but when Christopher is not doing that, he’s an at-home dad and oarsman with a slightly disturbing interest in manners and other ways people behave badly.
Visit him at http://christopherkoehler.net/blog or follow him on Twitter @christopherink.
Tour links:
7 Jan – Prism Book Alliance
9 Jan – Cody Kennedy
10 Jan – The Novel Approach
14 Jan – JP Barnaby
15 Jan – Love Bytes
19 Jan – GGR Reviews
21 Jan – Hearts on Fire Reviews
22 Jan – MM Good Book Reviews
26 Jan – James Erich
28 Jan – Joyfully Jay
2 Feb – Rainbow Gold Reviews
Read Carissa’s Review of Poz HERE!
I have to read this. Sounds like you did some amazing research.
I certainly tried, but one thing I’ve been painfully aware of this entire time is that I’m representing people’s lives. I can only hope I’ve done them justice.
Thank you for the post it was really interesting read about your research about HIV.
Okay, my original reply is never going to show up :-/
Thanks!
Yeah, not very earth-shattering, but I try to to let people know I at least read their comments.
Although I’d expect any author to research to their best ability when it comes to the main topic of their book, from comments I’ve seen online about various books, I don’t think all authors do that. Which is just weird to me. If I cared about something enough to write about it, I’d want to have the facts straight to have my story feel that much more real, especially for the people who’d know the best. Especially on anything medical, it seems like you would REALLY want that to be correct. I follow a dentist on twitter, and I’ve seen her more than once throw her hands up in the air about dental mistakes, even saying she’ll fact check for free to anyone who needs it.
Thank you for sharing this post with us, but especially thank you for doing your best to get the facts right where you could. I feel it’s that much more important given it’s presented as a YA book. And hey, sometimes the adults who read YA could stand to be a lot more educated, too.
Right? Of course, I apparently didn’t get the details right about either renovations or historical preservation in Tipping The Balance, but not for lack of effort. This was according to one comment posted on Goodreads, but the commenter didn’t actually say what I’d gotten wrong, only that I’d screwed something up.
Biology and medicine are much more familiar territory, so I have a higher degree of confidence in this. Also, I enjoy research. Not enough to hoof it to the local medical school’s library (five whole miles from home), mind you, because that’s not what the story was about. Had it been about an HIV researcher and had research figured prominently in the story, then yes.
Now the research for the follow-up to Poz will be trickier–I need to hunt down the subjective experiences of those who live with HIV and find a way to integrate it into Remy’s daily life. I’ve already been researching high-intensity athletics and HIV, but it’s daily life I need to dig into. This is awkward because I have the story between 1/2 and 2/3rds written, but oh well. That’s what edits are for.
Great post, really, very interesting.
Thanks 🙂
Wow! It sounds like it was ridiculously difficult to get the kind of information you wanted. You’d think in this day and age that it wouldn’t be so hard or complicated.
It was only ridiculously hard to get anything useful out of my husband, who’s in primary care medicine. That said, a number of medical magazines arrive at home each month, and I took to scanning the indices for potentially useful articles.
Only research provided plenty of info, and I’m skeptical enough to weed out the garbage. As I mentioned in a reply above, had this book been about HIV research I’d actually have dragged myself down to the local medical school’s library. I’m every fortunate to live in a university town.
very informative…thanks!
You’re welcome. Thanks for stopping by 🙂
Thanks for sharing your sources. It sounds like a very extensive and intensive researching and very a profound subject that you had to make sure you got as accurate as you could. It couldn’t have been easy but hopefully it paid off and it’ll help to educate and make people think about the other side.
I tried, I certainly tried. Obviously I wanted to get the factual details right, or as least as up to date as I could, since the science changes fast in this field. Then, too, I worry about the appropriation issue–this is a condition people have, and I needed to do right by them.
You really did a lot of research. For this subject and for your target audience I believe it’s essential. I really enjoyed our conversation on Fb. Thanks for another great interview I am really looking forward to reading this book.
I certainly tried. And yes, I enjoyed our FB convo, too. If it hadn’t been for you, it’d have been me and the crickets 😉 DM me if you don’t receive a copy of the book.