CT Liotta was born and raised in West Virginia before moving to Ohio for college, where he majored in Biology. He now uses Philadelphia as his base of operations. You can find him backpacking all over the world.
Liotta takes interest in writing, travel, personal finance, and sociology. He likes vintage airlines and aircraft, politics, news, foreign affairs, '40s pulp and film noir. He doesn't fear math or science, and is always up for Indian food. His favorite candy bar used to be Snickers, but lately it's been 3 Musketeers. He isn't sure why.
He is author of Relic of the Damned!, Death in the City of Dreams and Treason on the Barbary Coast!
No Good About Goodbye is his latest book.
Visit him on the web at https://www.ctliotta.com.
Sign up for Liotta’s newsletter at https://ctliotta.substack.com.
Fifteen-year-old Ian Racalmuto’s life is in ruins after an embassy raid in Algiers. His mother, a vodka-drunk spy, is dead. His brother, a diplomat, has vanished. And, he’s lost a cremation urn containing a smartphone that could destroy the world.
Forced to live with his cantankerous grandfather in Philadelphia, Ian has seven days to find his brother and secure the phone—all while adjusting to life in a troubled urban school and dodging assassins sent to kill him.
Ian finds an ally in William Xiang, an undocumented immigrant grappling with poverty, a strict family, and abusive classmates. They make a formidable team, but when Ian’s feelings toward Will grow, bombs, bullets and crazed bounty hunters don’t hold a candle to his fear of his friend finding out. Will it wreck their relationship, roll up their mission, and derail a heist they’ve planned at the State Department?
Like a dime store pulp adventure of the past, No Good About Goodbye is an incautious, funny, coming-of-age tale for mature teens and adult readers. 308p.
“So many treats are in store for the discerning reader of CT Liotta’s brilliant YA novel NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE. There’s a diverse array of multi-racial/cultural characters, organized criminals with complex political goals underway, and keystone-cop humor/blunders often sparking from the evergreen enchantment of a push-pull romance between two young people, neither of whom have yet decided to identify as ‘gay.’ Rich with often realistically crude boy lingo, NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE is an utterly charming teenage LGBTQ falling-in-love adventure while simultaneously rocking an international crime storyline.” – C.S. Holmes, IndieReader
★★★★★ “Sharply observed and sarcastic as hell, CT Liotta’s debut is the gay teenage spy thriller we have long needed.” -Matt Harry, author of Superkid and Sorcery for Beginners.
★★★★★ I found this YA spy novel to be an utter delight! Fast-paced and witty, we traverse the globe with Ian, who just lost his mother and is charged with stopping a war with China. All the while he’s 15, enrolled in a High School from hell in Philadelphia and struggling with his identity. The author offers his own particular take on the importance of friendship and found family. He also very cleverly features different viewpoints, so the reading experience never feels stale. Honestly, I did not know what to expect going into this story – I however finished it converted into a fan! – Thomas S., Netgalley
We welcome you to My Bookish Pleasures! Can you tell us how you got started writing fiction?
Thank you for having me!
Whether writing LGBT young adult spy novels like No Good About Goodbye or journaling for my travel & opinion newsletter,The Bag May Not Inflate, writing gives structure to the clanging, banging thoughts in my head.
My late father, the son of a night-shift steelworker in Pittsburgh, was a gifted storyteller. He never wrote a novel, but he had an innate sense that the way a story was told was as important as the story itself. At bedtime he’d sit between me and my brother, drag out all our stuffed animals, and improvise stories. They never had a plot or made sense, but they were magnificent, and even a little edgy.
I would practice storytelling with my friends at school in rural West Virginia and discovered fiction had power. Fiction could frame ideas and feelings as idiotic or saintly, help me empathize with people unlike me, or chew over problems.
Of course, this concept is as old as homo erectus, the advent of fire, and cave wall paintings, but it was new to me at the time. It helped to have parents who not only encouraged creativity, but were creative role-models, themselves.
Describe your writing process. Do you plot or write by the seat of your pants? When and where do you write?
When I write by the seat of my pants, I can come up with amazing scenarios not unlike my dad’s stuffed animal puppet shows. I can’t combine them into a coherent narrative, however. For that, I need to outline.
Many people hate outlining. I find it to be like any other creative endeavor. It takes about 20 minutes to settle into a rhythm before the creative gates open. Then, it’s as enjoyable as anything else.
One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t develop a story Bible for No Good About Goodbye and its potential sequels. I have great ideas for a second book in a series of young adult spy thrillers, but no idea what I’ll do for a third. That isn’t good.
Look at the Star Wars trilogy that started with The Force Awakens, or the Daniel Craig James Bond series. They’d have been stronger if the writers knew where they were going from jump. Instead, they’re like grade-school progressive stories with awkward transitions and retconned facts.
As far as where I like to write, I like to write as I travel the world—to find a coffee house with WiFi at some far-flung location, and settle in.
Can you tell us about your most recent release?
I mixed the tropes of LGBTQ+ YA books with a teen & young adult spy story. 15-year-old Ian Racalmuto loses his mom, a vodka-drunk spy, in a coup overseas. He relocates against his will to his grandfather’s house in Philly, where he has 7 days to find a top-secret smartphone as his mom’s killers resurface. Fear of death, however, doesn’t come close to Ian’s fear of his best friend finding out he has a crush on him.
As I tell my 9-year-old nephew while having him pour two fingers of Johnny Walker Black in my morning coffee, “it’s gay as hell and funny as f**k.”
I’m kidding. I prefer Grand Marnier in my coffee. I pour Johnnie Walker Black on my cornflakes. Plan your purchase accordingly—especially if you’re a middle school librarian.
What do you think teen and young adult readers want from a book? Who’s your audience?
I don’t see teen and YA readers as a homogenous group. They all want different things.
The readership of teen fiction from traditional publishers will look like the people selecting and editing the books. Highly educated mostly white progressive women clustered in the Northeast comprise 75% of publishing. I’d therefore surmise most YA fiction readers are women and girls who share those values. What surprises me is that something like 50% of YA readers are adults in their 20s and 30s.
Adventure and YA spy books for boys drop off after mid-grade, while the YA readers and writers who remain have massive Twitter arguments about who should write about whom and how. It fascinates me, because when someone like Scott McEwan pops up with a blimpish conservative YA book for boys like Camp Valor, nobody in the liberal YA ecosystem even acknowledges it. Instead, they eviscerate Amélie Wen Zhao on Goodreads for using the words “tawny” and “bronze” in a book that’s better written and more thoughtful.
The future of publishing may well be micropublishing—writing to very specific niche market segments that exist in isolation.
I wrote No Good About Goodbye at mid-life to my 14 year-old self and anybody else who wants to come along for the ride, rather than to a broad audience. “Who’s going to read it?” Who knows? Who’s going to read Amish romance?
Where does your book fit with other LGBT YA books?
Women write most MM YA books for audiences of women and girls—a fact I find both disappointing and confusing. The prototypical gay boy many of them write about is de-fanged: non-toxic, plucky, sensitive, scared, and emotional. Either that or he’s troubled, homeless, beaten, and ignored, and in need of a platonic girlfriend.
Maybe women who read LGBT YA books centering gay boys are sick of cishet boys with their toxic masculinity and love of sports. Or, maybe fist-throwing gay boys are playing Gears of War and don’t buy LGBTQ+ young adult novels.
Either way, it’s a strange dynamic. Why are young women and girls so fascinated by stories of boys becoming lovers? And where does it leave gay kids who go deer hunting with their dads, or dream of winning a Super Bowl ring? As a rural teen, I learned how to shoot guns and fly Cessnas. I had an offensive sense of humor, an abundance of self-confidence, and good friends, but I didn’t know what the hell to do about being gay, or where it might carry me. It was scary, but hardly the same experience as an at-risk gay kid living in the margins and teetering on homelessness, or a sassy sasspot wanting an enemies-to-lovers romance with Prince William.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing your book? Do you have any advice for young writers?
When you begin writing, especially teen and young adult fiction, you’re inundated with missives and screeds and tweets about who has license to write and how people need to “stay in their lanes.” It’s often tied to a judgment about whether a person is good or bad, enemy or ally.
Most of us want to be good, fair people—or at least seen that way. It’s not uncommon to ask, “why should I bother writing?” or worse, “should I cancel my project so someone else can write?”
As Kwame Anthony Appiah once said, however, “you can’t predict the effect of a self-denying ordinance.” Just because you step aside doesn’t mean someone more deserving will step in.
I realized with rapidity that I wasn’t simply outside my lane, but upside-down in a ditch, waiting for someone to extricate me with the jaws of life. It didn’t stop me.
So, write! Write whatever you want as often as you want, however you can. You may not get things right, but simply trying to understand people and situations different from you and yours generates a higher level of empathy than sitting in your bedroom restricting yourself to autofiction.
Finally, a quick plug: if you’re concerned about what people will say about writing “outside your lane,” grab a copy of Writing the Otherby Cynthia Ward and Nisi Shawl. It’s an old-but-wonderful introduction to help writers write more fairly and a fearlessly.
What are your hopes for NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE?
They aren’t super-high, to be honest. It’s been fairly-well ignored on the galley services and has received few giveaway requests compared to the books surrounding it. Traditional YA readers hate the cover, and the giveaways haven’t generated tons of engagement, so it’s hardly buzz-worthy. I’m glad I have a day job.
But, whatever. I love the way the book turned out. The people who like it seem to like it for all the right reasons, and I don’t mind upsetting the people who don’t like it. I hope it ruins their day, in fact. Maybe it will be a slow burn. And, if it reaches just one person who connects with it as I would have at 14, I’ll have done my job.
