A warm welcome to author Kilby Blades, joining us today to talk about new release: “Adam Bomb”.
Q: First things first: Adam Bomb is about a guy who can’t fall out of love with his best friend. Has that ever actually happened to you?
Kilby: Ummm…kind of? I was best friends with a woman I later ended up in a relationship with. At the time we met, I was with someone else. Once that person was out of the picture, there was room for me and her to get together, which felt pretty inevitable once it finally happened. In Adam Bomb, Levi is pining for Adam in a way I’m thankful I’ve never had to pine for anyone.
Q: So paint us a picture of Levi and Adam. What are each of their personalities and what is their friendship like?
Levi is the introvert—he’s quiet and he spends more time observing and listening than he spends talking. He’s a well-known portrait photographer (think Annie Leibovitz) and he expresses himself more through the lens of his camera than he does through conversation. This is the perfect counter to Adam, who loves to talk and be the center of attention and who has a big personality to go along with all the other big things in his life: his big job as a hotel empire CEO, his big money, etc.
Q: What’s so great about the best-friends-to-lovers trope anyway? Is it your favorite trope to write?
Kilby: It’s very rare for me to write stories about a pair of strangers who meet and start dating like “normal” people (yes, those quotation marks were ironic). I love to write characters who have to work for their happy ending and I definitely love mutual pining. I also love that you can’t bullshit someone who knows you too well. I think that real people have all kinds of reasons for not acting on their attraction. Best-friends-to-lovers stories are great for exploring what those reasons are.
Q: So what are those reasons in Adam Bomb? Why can’t Levi just tell Adam how he feels? Would Adam not understand?
Kilby: With best friends, there’s always the fear that you’ll ruin a good thing or that, if one friend rejects the other, everything will be weird. Levi decided years before the starting point of the story that he’ll never tell Adam the truth. The story is really about Levi coming to terms with the failure of that plan. He convinced himself that he’d get over Adam eventually; but when he finally admits it just isn’t happening, he needs a Plan B. Plan B is him getting out of Adam’s orbit lest he never fall in love with anyone else or be happy. So he moves from New York to San Francisco out of sheer self-preservation.
Q: Hmm…how does that work out for him?
Kilby: (Laughs) Not so well. The story opens with Adam showing up to San Francisco after months of them not seeing each other. He’s supposed to just be coming for a weekend visit. Only, he doesn’t intend to just stay for the weekend. He’s come to ask Levi a favor and he’s operating on the assumption that the assignment Levi took in San Francisco is temporary. When when Adam realizes that Levi truly intends to stay, his reaction sets off a really unexpected chain of events.
Q: Damn. You’re kind of mean, being all vague and mysterious like that…
Kilby: Does that mean I get to do an evil laugh? (Laughs another decidedly non-evil laugh). No, seriously, though…it’s complicated and it’s getting harder to explain. I think you’d better just read the book.
