Interview with Amy DeBellis
Author of 'All Our Tomorrows'
Hi all, and welcome back to rumblewrites. Today’s post is the second in my series of interviews with authors whose books are being published in 2025! And this time, we’re talking to Amy about her debut novel ALL OUR TOMORROWS.
To keep up with this series, makes sure to subscribe. And if you have a book coming out next year that you’d like to be featured, DM me! I’m open to novellas and novels, short story and poetry collections, through traditional, indie or self-publishing routes.
Interview
Hi Amy, can you tell me a bit about yourself?
I was born and raised in Manhattan, and I have a Bachelor’s in English from NYU. I’ve always loved writing—I tried to write my first novel at 10 years old but never completed it, although I did complete one at 14 (it was terrible). I’ve primarily written upmarket and literary fiction, but I’ve recently begun experimenting with other genres like Romantasy and Horror-Romance (I hope this will be a thing!). I also have a 9-year-old Havanese dog named Lily. This has nothing to do with my writing, but I just thought it was an important thing for people to know :)
Before we talk about your book, I’d just like to say that I’m a big fan of yours! I’ve read all your short stories, and I think your prose is just wonderful. It’s so raw and beautifully-constructed, and I love how atmospheric and introspective your writing is. I'd be interested to know what, if anything, has informed your narrative voice?
Thank you so much! My specific reading habits have informed my narrative voice more than anything else; I have always loved books that pay specific attention to the writing on a line level. If you show me two books—#1 has a great plot but poor writing, #2 doesn’t have much of a plot but does have amazing writing—the second book will win out every time. There is just something so magical about writing that shines on the sentence level. Since that’s what I gravitate towards when I read, it has informed my own writing over the years.
Now, I’ve already got my hands on an advance copy of All Our Tomorrows, but for the benefit of my readers, can you tell us what it’s about? And what inspired you to write it?
It’s about three women, all from wildly different backgrounds, who are trying to make it in a very near-future NYC. Anna is a Russian ex-model who is now a sugar baby / retail worker, Gemma is a British international student at NYU who is mourning the recent death of her mother, and Janet is a Korean-American online “grievance counselor.” All three of them face struggles including complicated family relationships, climate anxiety, and alienation.
I was actually inspired by a Reddit comment. I can’t find the actual comment online anymore, but I took a screenshot. Here’s my favorite part of it (it’s quite long) -
“Living on a dying planet, with the consequences of all the damage our global civilization has caused, are becoming ever more in-your-face….Our species is already on the slippery slope downwards, and we are rapidly picking up speed. Scream if you wanna go faster.”
Immediately after reading this comment, I knew I wanted to put the feeling it gave me into a novel. Looking at it now, it almost feels like Janet could have written it…
I’m generally not a fan of multi-fov fiction - I always find one character is less well-developed, or there’s a muddled plot line - but you’ve managed to pull it off! What made you choose this approach? And how did you go about constructing such distinct, well-rounded characters?
Thank you :) I wanted to experiment a bit, as all the books I’d written up to this point had been told through a single POV. It was a new challenge for myself.
I wanted each of their voices to pop off the page—for each of them to be so distinct that if you were to flip to a random page, you’d know instantly, without even needing to see any names, which character’s head you were in. In order to achieve this, I focused on making Anna’s chapters very lyrical and full of metaphors — this is my favorite way to write, and when it came to Anna’s voice I gave myself free rein to write as many lyrical and poetic sentences as I wanted. (So naturally I looked forward to writing Anna’s chapters just a little bit more than the other two girls’!) In Janet’s chapters, I put in a lot of snide/sarcastic remarks and focused on creating a cynical, wary tone. And in Gemma’s chapters, I tried to be more straightforward, more matter-of-fact, as this is Gemma’s way of facing the world. She’s also a little oblivious, so I tried to channel that mood as well.
In order to keep their voices as separate as possible, I rarely wrote from the POV of more than one character in a day. I also listened to particular songs when I was writing. Certain songs were “Anna songs” and got me into the “Anna mood” (such as “Pretty Head” by Transviolet), certain songs were “Janet songs” (like “Burial Society” by Have A Nice Life) and some were “Gemma songs” (“Hysteria” by Jadudah).
Janet, Anna and Gemma all lead quite separate lives, but their stories are united by running themes of nihilism, loneliness, and a struggle with identity. Did writing this help you explore these themes yourself? And was this in any way therapeutic?
Yes, it absolutely helped me explore these themes myself. I have quite a high tolerance for loneliness, being an introvert, but even I have my limits. I wrote this in the early fall of 2020, and I had lost my job at the beginning of the pandemic. Janet’s struggle with loneliness probably mirrored mine the most; her only friend in New York City considers her more of an acquaintance than a friend, and that’s a gut-wrenching feeling I’ve experienced myself. The nihilism is also something I can relate to; I can be a pessimist, and it’s easy to spiral into nihilism if you aren’t careful.
Writing is always therapeutic for me. It’s a way of sorting out the tangled mess in my head and making it line up on the page in neat, orderly lines. Writing with music playing in the background makes it even more therapeutic for some reason; I swear I get an endorphin rush from it.
As a woman in her 20s, I identified with all 3 characters on quite a deep level. How would you describe your book’s ideal reader?
My book’s ideal reader might indeed be a woman in her early twenties living in New York City, but really it could be anyone who feels they can connect to the themes in the novel.
Can you tell us about your path to publication? Why did you choose CLASH?
My path to publication was a long and winding one. I wrote this novel in the fall of 2020. At the time, I had an agent, and we were already on submission with another novel of mine. That novel died on sub (RIP), but we rallied and submitted ALL OUR TOMORROWS to publishers in late 2021. It, too, died on sub a year later. I won’t lie, this was pretty crushing.
But I still believed in ALL OUR TOMORROWS. So I started researching small presses. I only submitted to three, and CLASH was one of them. I liked that they were willing to publish more experimental books that the more risk-averse traditional publishers might not want to take a chance on. Another thing I immediately loved about their books is that they always seem to have a lot of “heart.” You can tell that the books CLASH publishes exist because the authors love their craft and love what they do — not because they’re trying to follow some how-to-write-a-bestseller-101 formula.
I see you’re now agented too (congratulations!). How long did this take? And are you planning on pursuing traditional publishing for future projects?
Thank you! I was without an agent for a couple of years, but in spring of 2024 I wrote a Romantasy and started querying again. From the time I finished writing the book to getting Aurora’s offer, it was about 6 weeks. And yes, we are planning on pursuing traditional publishing for this project and for future novels.
I know a lot of authors find navigating social media and self-promotion very difficult. I actually found you via one of your Tweets that had gone viral in the writing space for all the wrong reasons! How do you find navigating social media?
Oh yes, the infamous Tweet about publishing 50 pieces in one year! I wouldn’t say it was quite the worst way for something to go viral — most of Twitter actually gathered around me and took my side on that, which was pretty cool. I also gained like half a thousand followers overnight. But it was kind of jarring, too. Navigating social media is okay for me, depending on the platform — I’ve been on Instagram since 2015, so I’m used to it. Twitter (or, rather, Blusky now) is pretty cool too. But TikTok is challenging, because I was born in 1996 and I feel like I am just a little too old to navigate it as naturally as true Gen-Z people do. I only just figured out how to use CapCut, and honestly, it feels like it takes so much longer and so much more energy to film a TikTok video than to write a Twitter/Blusky post or take a picture for Instagram.
Self-promotion can definitely feel awkward. I worry sometimes that I’m annoying people by talking about my book so much. But then I remind myself that if people don’t want to hear about it they can just skip past it! And I’m never annoyed when the people I follow talk about their books — I’m excited along with them.
I know you have multiple other projects on the go. What’s next for you? Or which of these are you most excited about?
Right now the Romantasy is on submission with Big 5 publishers. I’m definitely most excited about this one! I also wrote a Horror-Romance recently, and I haven’t started editing it yet with my agent, but that’s next up on the agenda.
Any advice for aspiring authors?
Yes — read books that you wish you’d written. Read in the genre you want to write in. Moreover, read books with beautiful language! (This should be taken with a grain of salt because, as I mentioned before, I am a sucker for gorgeous prose, but I feel very strongly about it…)
Also, this may be controversial, but I really don’t think you should force yourself to write. Some people say you should make yourself write every day, but that’s never worked for me, so if it doesn’t work for you either, it’s okay. If you’re not feeling it, you’re not feeling it. Sometimes I go weeks or even months without writing much of anything—and then I vomit out a novel draft in a month, and then rest for a few weeks, and then write another novel draft the next month. (Actually, that’s pretty much what happened this spring!)
About ‘All Our Tomorrows’
ALL OUR TOMORROWS is a novel that follows three young Gen Z women, isolated and slipping into a downward spiral of nihilism, climate anxiety, loneliness, and grief — and eventually, the inflection point that unites them, as they tentatively begin to pull out of that downward trajectory.
Janet, Anna, and Gemma lead separate lives, each ground down by the weight of the world they were born into, lost against the dazzling pixelated backdrop of the city. Too young to remember life before the iPhone 4, they think the real world was destroyed long before they were born. Janet Ha is an underpaid gig therapist who spends her time as a mental health matchmaker, responding to grievance letters from faceless online avatars. Anna Sidorova is a model-turned-sugar-baby who dissociates during dates with her aging daddy, hoping to save enough not for a Birkin bag, but for the water wars of the near future. And Gemma Taylor is a freshman at NYU who aspires to become an influencer but is so haunted by a recent loss that she can’t even film one video.
Sharp, incisive, and sparkling with dark humor, this is a novel for the age of the doomer generation. DeBellis delivers an unflinching examination of three young lives as they circle closer and closer to the drain of nihilism, climate anxiety, isolation, and grief.
About Amy
Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and can be found in X-R-A-Y, Write or Die, Pithead Chapel, Monkeybicycle, The Pinch, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Her debut novel ALL OUR TOMORROWS is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2025). Read more at amydebellis.com.
I haven't heard of this author before. This interview is so good and showcases a generation. I am going away to order the book as it sounds great. Wonderful piece, thank you.