Why I Write YA Blogfest: Because Fin Made me Do It

The short answer is, I don't write YA.

If you asked me a year ago what I write, I'd have said, um, novels? I knew I wasn't writing memoir or non fiction but that's about it. The first book I wrote (currently mouldering gently in a digital drawer) is called Death Hires An Assistant. Hey, guess what happens in the book? Wow, you're psychic.

I had been writing Death Hires An Assistant in my head, on and off, for ten years. When we moved from NYC, to a place where deer walk down the street in the early morning mist and my neighbor keeps chickens, I had more brain space to let me get serious about writing. But the DHAA manuscript was a hot/cold/lukewarm-in-places mess. All my beta readers (except Tammy, I love you, babes!) said it was hit and miss. I didn't know what to do next.

I had a nugget of an idea that I wanted to play with, but I was afraid that starting a new project meant that I was abandoning DHAA, giving up. NaNoWriMo rolled around and I thought this would be a good way to 'waste' this new idea. You know, get it out of my system so I could get back to writing my opus.

I got the idea for BookEnd while driving up the Garden State Parkway. In my mind, I saw a boy, sixteen or so, standing by a ramshackle farm waiting for a man in period garb to walk through a gate. The man, looking like a lesser character in a Jane Austen movie, was pompous and confused. The boy laughed at him, taking him by the hand into the farm. That's it. That's all I saw. I was thinking about how funny it would be if minor characters from books found that, at the end of their story, they would be recycled.

I actually thought I'd write a light, funny story that I might be able to stretch to reach the 50K goal.
BookEnd has turned into a darker coming of age story that is over 75K and has a sequel, BookBegin already outlined. How the eff do these things happen? It's like I'm not even in control here.

So, why do I write YA? I think it's two things. It's because Fin, my main character, had a story to tell and his story is a YA story. And because YA is what I enjoy reading right now. I've been devouring Philip Pullman, Rowling and Garth Nix for years, not really making a distinction on A or YA reading, just loving the adventure.

For me, it's about the adventure, whether it's recycling book characters or having death for a boss.

Why do you write what you write?

Why You Read What You Read

Yesterday, when I posted about Summer Reads 2011, I realized that most of my picks were in the YA/Fantasy realm. I've been slowly sucked into that genre since Harry Potter and Lyra Belacqua hit the scene. Now it's what I look for especially since it's what I'm writing (now.)

Having said that, I love all genres, even the literary 'non' genre. There's nothing I won't read, but I do go through phases. When Bryce Daniels posted on my blog yesterday that he was looking forward to the new Jeffrey Deaver book, it brought me back to when I would devour those books. I had a serious crime/thriller bent in my late twenties. I've also been into golden age mysteries, romance novels, classics and graphic novels. 

It's not that I don't like those things now, it's just not where I'm at. I bought a romance recently by an author who I really liked, Elizabeth Hoyt. It has gathered dust in my TBR pile while other books get whipped through. I pick it up, I put it down. My reading moods seem to last for years. It's a funny thing.

At the Pennwriters conference agents couldn't say enough about the need to be knowledgeable about your genre - specifically reading in your genre. I think it was Kathleen Ortiz that had the rule '2000 in 2000 out', meaning that for every 2000 words you write, you should be reading that much of your genre. Barbara Poelle went a little further, telling us to find the shelf at the bookstore where our book would be. Go alphabetically in the genre and find where your yet-to-be-published book would be. Then buy (or get out of the library) the two books on either side of the shelf. Educate yourself.

So, do you read in your genre? Do you cheat on the genre you write in? Do you mix it up or go through phases like I do? What genre are you reading and why?

The White Mountains - For kids or young adults?

I'm reading Fool by Christopher Moore (really, I AM!) and I'm enjoying it. But I'm cheating on Fool with a couple of other side-books. It's my 'one book constant never' nature.

So I've been spending time with John Christopher's Tripod trilogy, which my husband left on my desk as a reference to my current WIP. The series, if you haven't read it, is great. like the Wrinkle in Time Books or the Narnia books, they resonate forever with a specific ring of childhood.

Which made me think - how old is the reader of this book? I don't count myself, I read children's books of all kinds for fun, and not only since I've had children. But who is, to use a hateful term, the demographic?

This mulling comes from some feedback I got from my crit group that my WIP seems middle-grade. To me, writing it, it always seemed young adult. My main character seems to be younger than I want him to be - more like Will in the Tripod series than, say, Katniss in the Hunger Games series. (I don't know what possessed me to write a boy protagonist, it didn't even occur to me that a 16 year old would shave - thanks, Greg, for pointing that out!)

Is the age of the protagonist the indicator of the age range of the reader? Well, that may be a starting point I guess, but Lyra Silvertongue in His Dark Materials starts out age twelve, but most of the people I know who have read and adore those books are adults. So, topics? Depth? Complexity? What are the general parameters of these designations, and how fixed are they? (I'm not talking to myself here, I'm asking YOU! What do you think?)

I certainly don't know. I didn't decide to write a children's book (I didn't even think about it as a children's book until I got an forwarded info on the NJ SCBWI conference this summer) I had an idea about a book about a teenage boy. Then I decided it would be in the first person and then the story came out. Voila, a children's book. So, after an exhaustive google search lasting about 2 minutes, here are some links to publishing definitions of genres:

Children's Books Genre Definitions (from write4kids.com)

Interesting definition of YA - which spans a broad range from 12-18

Anyone got any other resources they can share? Not just on children's books genres but genres in general? Seems to be a hard beast to pin down.

I Will Not Eat Them, Sam I Am

My grandmother used to make calf-brain raviolis and I used to eat them. It's not like I didn't know what was in them, because I'd go with her to the butcher's shop. We'd walk to the feria, the open air market in town and on the way back stop by the butcher's. I'm pretty sure I remember the brains being on display in the window. This being Uruguay and the 70's there were no screen doors or air conditioning so the doors were open and you walked through a colorful curtain of rubber strips meant to keep flies out. If you are wondering, she sauteed the brains with cheese and hand made the ravioli. It was yummy, tasted like scrambled eggs.

But I will not eat lamb. Never, ever.

I consider myself an omnivorous reader. There's very few things I won't read. I mean, there are specific books I won't touch with a barge pole (George W. Bush, I didn't care what you thought when you were president, I care less, if possible, now). But genres, I will read them all if they sound interesting. Biographies, Romances, Science Fiction, Chick Lit, pretty much anything is a possibility. That's the great thing about a book, any book. Until about page 10, you don't know, you may be holding your next favorite read.

If pressed, I guess there are types of books I won't read. I don't say (like the lamb) that I'll never read a Western (though I never have) but I can't think of a way that it would be interesting. Can you? So, here's my short list of books I won't read. Maybe you can persuade me to try?

-Westerns
-Anythingb y Glen Beck
-True Crime (have read some, always feel icky afterwards, even In Cold Blood)
-Sports

What about you?