Who are you?
I’m Joe Jiménez. I’m a Leo who loves barbecue, drag queens, and unsweet iced tea. For twenty years I’ve worked as a high school English teacher. I currently live in San Antonio, Texas, with my partner and our two rescue Boxers, Harper Lynn and Sweet Baby Ray. I grew up in small-town South Texas and moved to LA after graduation to study English and Creative Writing. My vibe is big sky, basketball shorts, dog walks, gym, circuit music, meditation stones, late nights with my best friends, and of course bacon and egg tacos.
What do you write?
My experience is mostly in poetry and fiction. My most recent book is Hot Boy Summer, a young adult novel about four bffs from San Antonio—Mac, Mikey, Flor, and Cammy—all joining together the summer before their Senior Year to bond over breakfast tacos, pop music remixes, and their mutual love of the iconic Ariana Grande and international drag superstar Valentina. It’s giving very high school friends group drama, with explosive group chats, excessive hashtags, and a character fluent in the art of keeping receipts.
I didn’t grow up thinking I wanted to be a writer. However, when I moved to LA to study at Pomona College in Claremont, California, I kind of a lot fell in love with other people’s writings, and because I enjoyed talking about characters and tensions and both big and small ideas in books, I started writing. I felt I had something to contribute to the great conversation that happens in the world when people talk about books and movies and tv shows and how they connect to our lives. So, yes, I enjoy writing, a lot in fact—especially making characters and building scenes with all the forces and factors of the world acting upon them in ways that I hope resonate with readers like and unlike these characters.
In regards to themes in my writing, I feel fairly comfortable working with emotions I’ve known in my life, however, I’ve tried staying away from purely autobiographical events and experiences for now.
Where do you write?
We live in a part of San Antonio surrounded by oak trees and deer, and although I have a really great office with lots of natural light, my dog Harper, who’s the Princess of the house and very much daddy’s girl, hates when I sit at my desk, so she paws at my leg and scratches at my thigh until I move my laptop and books to her favorite blue couch in the living room, where she can lounge and look out the front window with me beside her. I write mostly like this.
When I’m writing, I like background music or a tv show also. When I was finishing Hot Boy Summer, I listened to Soundcloud mixes by DJs like Nina Flowers, Joe Pacheco, Tony Moran, and Marti Frieson, and I watched a lot of Drag Race. As for tools, I’m seriously into Post-Its. I have about a hundred or so that helped me in constructing Hot Boy Summer, which may seem like a lot, though for Rattlesnake Allegory, my last poetry book, I think my last Post-Its count was around 219.
When do you write?
To tell the truth I wish I had more time to write. For now, I have to squeeze in writing whenever I can—summers and holidays mostly since teaching eats up my time. When drafting, I think I work best when I organize myself around constructing a scene, which functions sort of like a checkpoint or a goal I set for myself to meet. Here, I’ve learned to group chapters and scenes around characters’ emotions, and other times I simply try to write chapters in groups of three, because for some reason that makes sense to me.
When revising, deadlines set by my editor help guide me, help me stay on track. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with Christian Trimmer, an extraordinary editor at MTV Books who has helped build my understanding of character-making and ways I might express what exactly characters want from scenes and how these elements shape a character’s arc, how I can allow characters’ wants to guide the ways scenes fit together and the ways they don’t. These were essential lessons that helped me construct Hot Boy Summer as a novel as opposed to just writing a bunch of scenes I liked and then trying to glue them all together.
Why do you write?
For me, writing the characters of Mac, Mikey, Flor, and Cammy in Hot Boy Summer is writing about hope. Making characters who experience the realness of life’s difficulties is important, sure, and I also feel a need to make characters who experience happiness and joy and connection, because that’s the good stuff, the places in life that no matter how hard it may get we can find hope waiting for us.
In this, I am especially in love with writing about the ways characters work through real problems we face everyday, like having messy friends and sometimes being messy ourselves, or making friends with people who have tons more money than us and don’t grasp our everyday realities or finding out that a good friend talked major shit about us or about those we feel close to. I hope that writing Hot Boy Summer gives readers interactions that can help us figure out or realize things about who we were, who we are, and who we’re becoming. If anything, I hope the characters in HBS spur readers to ask questions as well as giving hope and affirming so many of the wonderful parts of our lives. That’s where I think the real magic is.
How do you overcome writer's block?
I’m certainly kinesthetic, so if I’m feeling stuck, I move around, which often is a way to help me pick up a new perspective or to ask a new question as an avenue for re-entering my text. For me, it’s about physically making my muscles do things, which helps me be reflective, because as I’m moving, I find I’m asking different questions about my writing. Walking dogs (if it’s not 90+ sweltering degrees here in Texas), going to the gym, or dancing alone in my house or accompanied by my dogs—especially to Ariana, Britney, Pink, or Dua Lipa remixes–usually does the trick if I’m putting together a scene. In Legally Blonde, when Elle Woods talked about the effects of endorphins, I took notes. I think it applies to marriage and writing as well.
Bonus: What do you enjoy doing when not writing?
I love a good tea dance day party all-sunshine friendship moment. I think I have some of the best friends in the world, so any chance I get to spend time with them, especially when there’s music, sunshine, and happiness vibes, sign me up. I’m also a sucker for semi-deep conversations with strangers while waiting in line for the bathroom at a venue. At the same time, I’m also into getting coffee or food on my own, and I love love love family time on the couch with our dogs and our shows. Right now, I’m really into Palm Royale with the brilliance of Carol Burnet, Kristen Wiig, and #swoon Ricky Martin, and of course, I’m way into Drag Race and House of the Dragon.
My thanks to Joe Jiménez for today's interview.