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This article was previously published on EloraFergusToday.
ELORA – For Rio Youers, it was never a question of if he would make it as a writer but when.
With a fifth novel being published from a major New York publishing house, the Elora resident has arguably done it.
Youers’ next novel The Bang-Bang Sisters published by HarperCollins was released Tuesday with a launch party in the evening at Elora Brewing Company.
In an interview at a cafe in Elora, Youers said he was very excited about this “page turner” of a novel he described as a high-octane action thriller.
“It’s about an all-female rock band called the Bang-Bang Sisters, they’re also vigilantes. They tour the country in their beaten-up old van playing gigs and also taking out bad guys,” Youers said. “Everything is going their way, it’s all fine, no problems, and then they run into a guy who has a vendetta against them.”
He likened writing his books similarly to how Quentin Tarantino directs movies.
“Snappy dialogue, lots of violence and too many f-bombs,” Youers said. “Most of my books are pretty violent in places but it’s not gratuitous, it’s entertaining.”
Originally from the UK, Youers moved to Canada with his wife more than 20 years ago and ended up in Fergus, Cambridge and Elora with brief interludes in upstate New York and Vienna, Austria.
He considers Elora the first place he really wanted to put roots down because of its picturesque charm, amazing people and liberal-minded inclusive people.
“People when they move to Elora they can’t help but to be absorbed by it,” Youers said. “It certainly happened to me. I was quite happy living in Cambridge and then we moved here and within a short space of time I felt like I was part of the community.”
It took a lot of time for Youers to get to where he is now as a full-time writer. He’s been working at his craft for nearly four decades.
“There were years and years of drought, years and years of rejection and I just kept pushing,” Youers said. “With every book I pushed a little bit harder than the one before, with every book I got a little bit closer. That’s the time when you don’t quit, that’s the time you keep going. It was never a question of if (he’d make it as a writer) it was always a question of when to me.”
Youers started with smaller independent presses in Canada and the UK before getting on with the major publishers, first Macmillan and now HarperCollins.
He noted there’s a lot of ways now for people to have success publishing fiction, including self publishing where writers get to maintain creative control and set their own process.
Being under a major publishing house, Youers said he outlined this book ahead of time more so than he normally would as a “seat of the pants” kind of writer who loves the thrill of not knowing precisely where a book is going.
The idea for this book had been circulating for awhile but he’s been working more seriously on it for the past year-and-a-half.
Now, it culminates in a release party at the Elora Brewing Company, where Youers sometimes works, on Tuesday from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. with local book store Magic Pebble Books on hand to sell the novel.
The event will also have an all-female rock band, as a nod to the novel, The Thunder Queens from London playing some music.
Early reviews for it have been a good sign so far, Youers said.
"Every review I've had so far has been off the charts, I'm so excited for this book," he said.
Not taking too much time for a follow-up, Youers has his next novel Black Ash Down already percolating. This one will be a bit more character-driven as he said it is about two best friends who “did something terrible” when they were younger they regretted and have gone on with their lives and circumstances to bring them together again with history potentially doomed to repeat itself.
