Today on the site, I’m delighted to welcome Victoria Koops and Cale Plett, authors of YA Romances Who We Are in Real Life and Wavelength, respectively, both with Groundwood Books/House of Anansi. Please welcome Victoria and Cale!

Cale: I think it’s important that people know that our original transcript was 12,000 words long, and that we cut it down by 80 percent. We really said “let’s fix it in post.”

Victoria: We were meant to have a podcast instead. So everyone can be subjected to our tangents.

Cale: But here, with only some tangents, is our conversation. Starting right in with our actual questions.

Victoria: So I wanted to start with music, because music is so central to Wavelength, and we’ve both brought our passions into a framework to tell a story really close to our hearts. I’m curious, what were you listening to while you were being homeschooled as a teenager?

Cale: I liked artists who felt like they had the dark feelings that I felt, but artists that weren’t really remotely heavy. So I was listening to a lot of things like Metric and Death Cab and Paramore. I remember being seventeen and listening to Metric’s album Synthetica, which is probably the album that influenced the fake bands in Wavelength the most, especially Monochrome Stoplight. And the first line of Synthetica is “I’m just as fucked up as they say.” And I was like, yes, that’s me. Emily Haines understands me. Really, everything was fine. But things in my head were not good. And that’s very much a space that we often see Lillian in.

Victoria: That ties in really nicely to my next music question. We’re doing this interview at the end of the year, and everyone’s doing these music retrospectives on social media. I wanted you to know that this question all started because “Elevator,” from your book, made my top five songs this year. So for people who aren’t familiar, you can listen to the music of Wavelength, because Cale did this cool project where they professionally recorded “Elevator,” an actual song from the book that Lillian writes (listen to it here!)

So that kind of started me thinking about what would Sasha and Lillian’s Wrapped each be?

Cale: Lillian I see as having these bands that she just can’t quit. The really prominent one is Monochrome Stoplight. And then I think there would be some really obscure songs that she would proudly be the only one with in her Wrapped. And if that wasn’t the case, she would be mad. She’d be like, I have to change my listening habits.

We’d also see songs that she’s fixated on in connection to her art. We see her working on these guitar parts. Lillian would have a song in her Wrapped where she’d be, like, well, it’s not a good song, but it has a good solo. I was just learning the solo.

Lillian’s also gone through such a big breakup. But in the first half of the year, she’s been happily together with Emelia. And so there’s those songs that are going to show up where Lillian’s shattered all over again. But then also falling-in-love with Sasha songs. This song reminds me of them, so now I listen to it a million times.

Victoria: Okay, tell us about Sasha, then. What is Sasha’s retrospective for music?

Cale: It would predominantly be big gay-people-love-her anthem music. Sasha loves somebody who can sing-sing. Sasha loves to be feeling big feelings. There would also be a couple very particular big pop hits by people Sasha had met or admired. And then it would start to become very influenced by Lillian.

And if Lillian’s voice memo of “Elevator” could be on that list, it would be at the top.

Victoria: So I think this is really obvious to anyone who’s going to be reading this, but you and I are friends in real life. And we became friends because of our books. We write with similar themes, we share a publisher, we share an editor, we share a publicist and even a cover artist. So we’ve got a fantastic team supporting both of us and connecting both of us.

Knowing you personally, our books carry a lot of ourselves in them. So my next question is, which parts of yourself were the most joyful to write? And which were the most intimidating or challenging?

Cale: When I had the idea for Wavelength, I didn’t know I was queer yet. I felt like I couldn’t write the characters in my head. And so when I wrote the very first drafts of Wavelength, which are quite far from the final, I started writing them right after I felt like I could put language to the queer parts of myself. It was both very joyful, writing Sasha, doing all this discovery, but also extremely vulnerable.

Lillian and I also have very similar mental health. We have very similar adolescent mental health spirals. Lillian gets really fixated on mortality and nothingness. And I wanted to get really, really close to her experience for those parts. Some of those scenes were not only difficult to write, but I don’t especially like reading them back now because I find them anxious.

Victoria: I also write queer romance. That’s one of the overlaps between Who We Are in Real Life and Wavelength. I’m not sure if I’m envious, or just impressed, but I love the way you’ve approached writing queer romance. I find that you’re really honest and direct, and that you’re not pulling punches to make things palatable or more comfortable for people who might have internalized issues about this. You’ve really leaned into writing queer desire, love and sex. Can you tell me more about that writing process?

Cale: For me, one of the biggest things was to show Sasha and Lillian having very different modes of attraction to each other and very different ways that this is reflected in their orientation. Sasha doesn’t really experience a lot of visual attraction to people. They think Lillian looks cool. They like Lillian’s style, all that, but they’ve been in this fake relationship with a famous model and felt no attraction. Isabelle’s just their best friend. For them, so much of the pull toward Lillian has to do with energy and presence and intangible things.

Lillian has that towards Sasha too, definitely in that Sasha has this magnetism, and the two of them have all this connection, but for her the visual attraction is really important along with all of that. I didn’t want either of those spaces belittled or held up as better. I wanted the like… amorphous sort of quality of so much queer attraction.

Victoria: There’s like an omnidirectional sort of exploration of what is Romantic, capital R, when you’re looking through the lens of queer love stories. I find that a lot more dynamic because the romance exists outside of the box we’re told is a romance story.

So can we expect to see more queer romance from you?

Cale: I have two books coming out, The Saw Mouth on May 12, 2026, and Stranglehold in fall 2027, both standalone queer YA horror books. Both of them have very significant queer romantic arcs. Both of them are epic sorts of love stories. And like Wavelength, they are equal parts epic love stories that are romantic and that are about friendship. The Saw Mouth even gets pretty steamy in between various monster-related issues.

Victoria: So how might The Saw Mouth appeal to readers of Wavelength?

Cale: I think it’d be really easy to look at them and go, “This is a big genre jump.” If you liked Wavelength, you’d look at even the cover of The Saw Mouth and be like, “Absolutely not.” But to me, a lot of the things that people love about Wavelength are things that are really deeply present in The Saw Mouth. It’s really grounded around queer community and found family. It’s romantically messy too. For me, when I write horror, I try to set very similar stakes to when I write romance, which is that first we have to love and care about these people. Otherwise we won’t care about any sort of threat to them, even if it’s a threat to their lives. The monster is disruptive and attacking a community space and a space of belonging. It’s actually not entirely dissimilar to Heather Erin, the evil manager in Wavelength. Because it comes for queer community, it’s probably a monster. And you can apply that across everything.

Victoria: We should make T-shirts for that: “If it comes for queer community, it’s probably a monster.”

So my last question: if your characters from Wavelength were in The Saw Mouth, tell me what their fates would be.

Cale: I think that Sasha is at heart a final girl.

Victoria: Sorry, I’m happy dancing because I think Sasha has final girl energy for sure.

Cale: First of all, Sasha keeps wearing outfits that would look really good as they sort of decayed throughout a horror story, which is very important. Sasha can be tough and resourceful when pressed, but they have that sort of like sweetheart naiveness. Lillian on the other hand would die very quickly. Because Lillian has very poor self-preservation. Lillian would think the basement seems scary and I can’t seem scared, and then she’d go into the basement and die.

Cale: And on that cheery note, let’s switch roles! Basements are kind of like dungeons and there’s D&D in your book, so we’ll call that a segue.

I feel like I’m kind of moving between serious and sillier questions. The first one is a bit more of a serious one, but is very grounded in play because there’s a lot of play in Who We Are in Real Life. 

You use tabletop role-playing games, obviously, as a big part of the narrative in Who We Are in Real Life. If anyone missed that, they haven’t been paying attention. So, how do you think that things like TTRPGs and gaming and cosplay and fanfiction connect with how your characters explore their identities in this book and in the book you’re scheming up?

Victoria: Cale, like me for their work, has a peek behind the curtain and knows what I’m working on for my next couple projects.

So, all those things, TTRPGs, fanfiction, cosplay (hint hint) are all fantastic avenues for exploring identity because that’s really what you’re doing — playing with your identity — when you create a character or write self-insert fanfic or construct a cosplay.

It’s so important for Darcy and Art to use the game they play as a space where they can practice and rehearse the type of people they want to be and even the type of people they don’t want to be maybe. They feel safer to explore different versions of themselves in the game, to play with their identities more, then they take that experience outside the gaming space.

Cale: You talk about nerd culture spaces. What are some of the ones that you’re going to touch on in your new book?

Victoria: My next manuscript is about exploring racialized identity and racial ambiguity using cosplay. I am white presenting, but also Japanese Canadian, and this is a part of myself that I’ve struggled to understand because I never want to appropriate culture or stories that are not mine to tell, but the reality is that I feel impacted by being sort of in-between what’s allowed to belong.

And I also love cosplay. I love sewing, I love crafting and I love cons, but when I think about what are you functionally doing when you cosplay, it’s sort of like you’re kind of erasing your identity a little bit to engage with something that you love.

So the book I’m writing about all of this is the story of two sisters. There’s one sister who is white presenting, who looks very similar to me, and one sister who is more Asian presenting. They’re sisters, but they have very different experiences and have internalized the racial ambiguity in different ways.

They both end up at Comic-Con, where they learn that yokai — the ghosts, spirits, and monsters from Japanese folklore — are real, along with all of the other supernatural things.

Fairies, vampires, werewolves and yokai — they all exist and they all hang out at Comic-Con because, of course they do. Then the younger sister gets stolen by a dangerous yokai and the story is about how these two sisters find their way back to one another while reconciling their different experiences.

So the book is really, really fun. It’s got Studio Ghibli vibes. It’s got Sailor Moon vibes. It’s really awesome, but it’s also really hard to write because it’s deeply personal.

Cale: You know I’m already sold. Also, you 100 percent answered the last question I was going to ask you, which was what you’re working on now and how you explore yourself in the new book, but I feel like you’ve described that really beautifully now.

So instead, earlier we were talking about the kind of music that I liked as a teenager. I think that there were actually a lot of ways we were probably very similar as teenagers, but what sort of teenager were you? And how does who you were then, or how you wanted to be then, connect to the characters that you write now?

Victoria: I really love this question because I think that this question sort of allows me to maybe speak to some of the complexity of how I find myself in both Darcy and Art, because they both really reflect different parts of me.

As a teenager, I did not know I was bi. I grew up in a Christian household with a lot of internalized homophobia. It was okay for other people to be queer, but it was not okay for us to be. So, at the time, I would have considered myself a straight ally.

Cale: A really, really good, straight ally.

Victoria: Yeah, a really good straight ally who happens to think women are hot too.

But seriously, I feel like the person I am now is sort of like just the glow-up version of who I was back then, where I’m actually able to embrace all of my pieces, all of my parts. As a teen, Darcy was who I wanted to be, but I think Art is learning all the things I had to learn first.

I just want teens who read my book to feel like they can have queer joy and authenticity in their lives now. You know, instead of decades later like me.

Cale: I think that’s a very real experience. It took me a long time to joyfully and loudly embrace those parts of myself too.

But back to questions concerning books. So we both love a dual POV romance. You have Darcy and Art in Who We Are in Real Life, then I have Sasha and Lillian in Wavelength, so how do we think these characters would get along with each other? Or how do we think they might interact?

Victoria: My first instinct when considering this question is that, yeah, of course they would, because you and I are such great friends, so of course these characters would be besties too. But then I think about it for one hot second and honestly, I think it could be a disaster.

Sasha and Art would vibe. Art, especially towards the end of my book, would be a really safe person for Sasha, so I feel like they would click.

Then on the surface, Lillian and Darcy seem like they should be friends, but I think that they are too similar.

Cale: Yeah. For sure.

Victoria: I think they would feel kind of threatened by each other, that they would crash and burn really fast, but if they could come back from that, they would have a great friendship, but I just don’t know if they would come back from the initial clash.

Cale: Lillian would eviscerate Art.

Victoria: Oh, definitely. She doesn’t have the patience for his redemption arc.

Cale: But Sasha helps soften her. Maybe Art by the end of the book. I see them all eventually, I think, friends.

Victoria: I think they could play a few games of D&D and get over their differences.

Cale: Oh, God. Lillian would have to do math, which I don’t think would be a good thing.

Victoria: Darcy only does math for D&D.

Cale: I think Lillian would do math if it was trying to figure out how hard she hit something.

Victoria: Oh my goodness, what would Lillian play? Like, some sort of combat bard? I love that! I love all of them!

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