The YA-5

Where'd You Go?

2011-08-24T07:52:00.000-04:00

Obviously, we haven't been in for a while. Let's face it, when the weather is nice it's hard to sit down and talk about anything but how awesome sunshine is. And really, you're probably out realizing the same thing.

But never fear! We will be back!

For now, enjoy this old school clip of My Little Ponies. Because they are awesome and rainbow-y.

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

2011-07-12T17:39:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I haven't posted here in, I don't know, like a half a century or something. And I have excuses! Lame ones! Or mostly lame. I have been rather busy with this, and this, not to mention the continuing adventures with my evil-genius kids and my cheats-death-once-again dog. Also, writing a new book. And revising said book. And re-revising it. And re-re-revising it.

And it's killing me.

You'd think this sort of thing would get easier with time, but let me tell you: it doesn't.

It doesn't at all.

But I wanted to write a little bit about waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

You see, a few years ago (way, way back in 2008) I finished a book. This book:

I worked on it for about nine months, and I worked very hard, and when it was done I was so proud of it and happy with it, that I sent it to some agents. And then I waited. A lot. And heard no. A lot.

Finally, I found an agent liked it, who found an editor who liked it, and I was happily ensconced in the Little, Brown family, and all has been wonderful.

Still.

The waiting.

From selling the book in October of 2008 to finally seeing it in print in 2011, is a long time to wait. It's slightly longer than what one might expect (my book was moved twice due to editorial constraints and concerns, so I had an extra year tacked on in there), but only slightly, and still within the range of normal. And while at first the thought of such a very long wait from the writing of a book to the release of the book chafed slightly, I started to see the value in a long, slow wait. I started to see the good things that waiting was building in my work.

I am now very good at waiting. Indeed, I'm something of an expert.

There is something lovely, you see, in an extended waiting period. I had the chance to get used to thinking of myself as a novelist. I had the chance to take a ton of notes and run thought experiments on around fifteen different novel ideas - books that will likely keep me busy for a good long time, which is a comfortable place to be. I was able to learn how to use social media to connect and interact and truly love a bunch of writers and librarians and readers and booklovers from around the globe (I'm still not all that adept at it, mind you, but at least I've learned how to participate in the conversation).

I wrote a book while waiting, called The Final Exile of the Insect King and another one called Iron-Hearted Violet, and I'm currently revising two other books called Witless Ned and the Speaking Stones and The Firebirds of Lake Erie. And while Violet is currently scheduled, the other three are still floating. I am comfortable with floating. Waiting takes the pressure off. It lets me write the thing I feel like writing with no pressure for its entrance into the world.

When I wrote JACK, I had absolutely no idea how to write a novel. And that worried me. Now I still have absolutely no idea how to write a novel, and I still allow myself to keep going. Now the stories spin and spin, and every time, I learn a little bit more.

Now, here's the thing about waiting: Even though it's really, really, reeeeeeaaaaalllllly hard, I think it's one of the best things to happen to a person who seeks to make a living telling stories. Here's why: Panic is murder on a person's muse.

Indeed, I do believe that my Muse has been well and good murdered. And what is left is a vaguely ambulatory, moaning, rasping, decaying, limping version of itself. What I'm saying, ladies and gentlemen, is that I'm suffering from Zombie Muse. I've heard of the condition before. I thought it was a myth. But as my release date gets closer and closer and the time in which I can call my book mine gets smaller and smaller, and the day comes ever nearer to having to relinquish my book to the world, my productivity has gone to hell.

In a handbasket.

And I am not pleased with this development at all.

Now every morning I wake up and it's one day sooner until my book goes into the world. (That was true before, of course, but since it didn't feel true, it didn't matter if it was true or not. In the end, we believe a thing, and it is, and I chose to believe that I would wait forever for my book to reach the air, and as far as I was concerned, the forever waiting was true.) Now, I must accept the fact that the story that was mine, that I fully controlled will no longer be mine. It will be the reader's story, the reader's book. It will become new again and again and again, in whatever imagination shapes it. And while that is a lovely thing, and was the reason why I started the book at all, I let go not without a little bit of sadness.

I imagine I'll feel something similar when my kids head off to college.

In any case, once the book is out, my attentions will return to Iron Hearted Violet and I can relax into a nice long period of blissful and productive waiting. Until this time next year when I will, once again, transform into a nervous wreck.

Please Don’t Feed the Trolls

2011-06-29T08:39:00.000-04:00

In the past couple of weeks there have been several articles by people, so called concerned adults, about what they see as too much darkness in YA. I told myself I wasn’t going to post a response to this, since it’s obvious these are just people fishing for their fifteen minutes, but it seems like the topic that won’t die. So I figured I’d go ahead and throw my two cents in.

This “such and such is ruining our youth” mentality is nothing new. Just like rock and roll in the 1950s and heavy metal and rap music in the 1980s, people have been pointing at trends they don’t like and bemoaning the plight of the children. “Think about the children!” they wail. “They’re all going to end up sex-crazed criminals.”* The general consensus is that YAs shouldn’t be reading that crap. They should be reading the classics.

Yeah, the classics. As though a book written fifty years ago is automatically without darkness. So here’s a list of “classics” that would put even the raunchiest YA to shame.

Lord of the Flies: A bunch of boys shipwreck on an island. There’s a dead pilot decomposing on a mountain top, boys running through the woods hunting pigs, oh, and a boy beat to death while he has a seizure and another smashed by a boulder. Just the kind of heartwarming story kids should be reading.

Native Son: As if marginalization of a slow-witted black man wasn’t enough, Richard Wright throws in murder, a body in a furnace, rape, and some more murder. Classic literature at its best.

A Clockwork Orange: Just a bunch of boys out for a night on the town that includes drinking, joyriding, rape and murder, and state-sponsored brainwashing. The kind of classic writing you’d never find in today’s offerings.

The Great Gatsby: Drinking, adultery, more drinking, more adultery, violence against women, murder, and a murder suicide. How is this better than what is one the YA shelves today?

The Bible: Oy. I’m not even going to touch that one.

The point is that there is darkness in any grouping of literary works if you’re looking for it. Broad generalizations backed up by cherry-picked examples just makes you look like you have an axe to grind. Or like you’re bashing the fastest growing sector of publishing in order to get your fifteen minutes.

Let’s all agree to try and ignore these folks in the future. After all, they’re just the trolls with a platform, and won’t even be relevant in a year or so.

*Let’s be honest, it’s the sex people are worried about. No one ever bemoans the fact that a book is too violent. Look at the Hunger Games. One of the most violent books ever, but because it avoids sex people overlook its content. Honestly, shouldn’t we be more worried about people bashing each other’s heads in rather than someone getting their swerve on.

That thing just happened wherein I read a book and now can't decide if I loved it or hated it.

2011-06-23T12:15:00.006-04:00

It feels like such a weird reaction, you know? Like, isn't it black or white? You love it or you hate it. The end. But I'm finding more and more that I can read a book, finish it, pull up Goodreads to add some stars or write a review, and then have to close the tab because I'm not ready.

Is it a sign of a well done book if I have to let it settle in my brain for a few days before I know if I loved it or hated it? Or is it a sign that I need to read it again? Maybe it's a sign that, if it didn't grab me and shake me and make me woozy (in a good way), that it's never meant to be?

(photo borrowed from sodahead.com)

Right now, I'm working on a quiz to help me figure things out.

If I read this book again tomorrow would it make me:
a. dance around in ridiculous circles of joy
b. want to punch someone's face
c. sigh dramatically
d. write a satire of it for McSweeneys

If I saw someone about to buy this book at the store would I:
a. slap it out of their hands like a live grenade
b. shake my head, but say nothing
c. Engage them in a confusing discussion about love/hate relationships
d. point out better choices

When I put the book on a shelf in my office, will I:
a. Hide it behind a snowglobe
b. lay it on its side on top of other books
c. laboriously make space for it by moving other books around
d. forget to shelve it and leave it on the kitchen counter

When my friends read it and discuss it, will I:
a. jump into the conversation
b. sit back and listen to what they have to say
c. base all my opinions on their opinions
d. ignore them and post a Facebook status about how I'm ignoring them

If the author comes to town, will I:
a. skulk around the bookstore, spying on him/her
b. wait in line for hours for an autograph
c. be overly polite and say things like, "Wow. You write words."
d. not care

If this book was a condiment it would be:
a. fish sauce
b. BBQ sauce
c. spicy mustard
d. mayo

Maybe this quiz will help you decide if you love or hate a book, too. I'm still so confused I can't answer my own questions. I feel like I'm leaning towards hating the book right now, but I don't know... it's becoming kind of like the fish sauce of YA to me. People tell me it tastes good, that it can even be transcendent at times (if mixed with the right stuff), but I can't quite get there. It smells a little off and I'm worried it might be poisoning me.

Please don't poison me, Book I Kind of Hate, But Might Have Loved At First. Maybe we just need some time away from each other to sort out our feelings....

Examining the Excerpt

2011-06-15T08:04:00.000-04:00

One of the things I love about the internet is that it has made book buying a lot less painless than it was ten years ago. Back in the dark ages, before the internets and social media, I had to schlep down to the mall hoping that the book you’d heard about a year ago was finally in, if you even remembered you wanted it. Most times you were stuck with whatever crap Waldenbooks or B. Dalton decided to stock in their tiny, tiny, mall store.

That’s assuming you didn’t stop on the way there and buy a cinnamon roll and iced coffee and blow half the money you had. *sigh*

One of the things I love about Amazon (yes, I know it’s evil, and as soon as Indiebound syncs to my Kindle and develops an app for my phone I will use them instead) is the wish list and the excerpt. Mostly the excerpt. I can have the first chapter or so of any book sent directly to my Kindle, allowing me to preview the book without buying it. It’s something I never did in the stores for fear of the employees judging me, but something I can do now in the comfort of wherever I am. I love that.

But I also like people posting the first chapter or so of their books online, and reading it there. See, there are way more books I want to read now than there were ten years ago, or even five years ago (GO YA!). And in the first chapter I can immediately tell whether or not I’m going to want to read the book. Here’s what I look for in an excerpt:

1. Voice-this is the way the character communicates, or the way the character is communicated in a story, if it’s third person. I’m not a big fan of third person (unless it’s high fantasy, it’s a staple there), and I have to like the character to want to spend the next two hundred or so pages with them. Chances are if they’re whining on page one, we aren’t a good fit.

2. Movement-I need a plot to move. I don’t have a lot of free time, and if what I’m reading spends three pages describing the sunset, I’m outta there. Things have to happen, and they have to happen NOW!

3. Logic-There’s nothing more irritating than when characters start acting CRAZY. And I mean seriously crazypants crazy. Sorry, folks, love is not an excuse. You can act a little irrational, but if you throw yourself in front of a train on page one because a boy you think is cute is in danger, we aren’t a good fit. I will allow some crazypants activity in the name of TWU WUV a little later in the book, but if your character is the Mayor of Crazytown in the first chapter, chances are it’s only going to get worse (caveat is if the character is actually, certifiably insane. In which case, I can make an exception).

4. Freshness-Like bread and milk, stories have an expiration date. Some tropes have become so commonplace that even killer writing can’t save them. If your story reminds me of a million other stories just like it, I’m going to find something else to read. Because there is lots out there.

5. Too Stupid to Live Characters and Mary Sues-I’m sorry. If your character is perfect or has a non-flaw like she’s clumsy or a little goofy (a real flaw is something like your character likes to kill people) or if your character rushes into a situation with no plan (even crazy plans are better than none), I know I’m in for a few hundred pages of eye-rolling, and the story isn’t my thing.

So what do you like about excerpts? What do you hate? Do you read excerpts on the internet, and do they make you more likely to buy books?

What's in a Title?

2011-06-10T06:00:00.002-04:00

Recently my lovely publisher Sourcebooks decided to change the name of my book SCORE to CATCHING JORDAN. (I love it!)

But when I first heard we needed to find a new title, my heart stopped a little. I said to the intern in my office, "I need a new title asap. I'm supposed to brainstorm!"

Intern replied, "I'll get right on that!" and strutted off like he was going to war. An hour later, he sent me this email that I just have to share with y'all. And no, I'm not sure what all of these titles mean.

Dear Miranda:

Fear not! Despair not! I have many titles for you.

(Some are stupid, some are punny, some are innuendic (hehehe), some
are sexist kitchen/food themed, some are football jargony)

1. 10 Guys, 1 Girl
2. Down, touch
3. This gridiron ain’t in the kitchen
4. Through the Uprights
5. Her First Down
6. All Four Downs
7. Tightest End
8. Punting and Receiving
9. Little Miss Pigskin
10. Hashbrown marks
11. Sports Bra(wl)
12. Quartrix-back
13. Facemasque (cover art: head on shot of girl in helmet, with
avocado masque-peel and cucumbers on her eyes)
14. Homegirl Team Advantage
15. Pre-season Dame, Post-season Fame
16. Coached (cover art: girl in football gear, carrying a Coach purse)
17. Curves of Scrimmage
18. Little Black Playbook
19. You Can Put Lipstick on a Pigskin
20. Pigtails and Pigskins
21. Pigskinny Jeans
22. Defensive Womaneuvers
23. Pigtailgate
24. Hometown Heroine
25. Hail Jordan Pass (like Hail Mary, but the character’s name)
26. Mixing Bowl Games
27. Apple Turnover on the downs

Just a Few More...

2011-06-08T13:10:00.001-04:00

So, on Tuesday I wrote a guest post for Stacked of my fav contemporary YAs that I thought ended up overlooked. Of course, no list is ever truly complete, so here are some additional contemporary books you should check out.

But you don’t have to take my word for it:

Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers

The Set-Up: Climbing to the top of the social ladder is hard--falling from it is even harder. Regina Afton used to be a member of the Fearsome Fivesome, an all-girl clique both feared and revered by the students at Hallowell High... until vicious rumors about her and her best friend's boyfriend start going around. Now Regina's been "frozen out" and her ex-best friends are out for revenge. If Regina was guilty, it would be one thing, but the rumors are far from the terrifying truth and the bullying is getting more intense by the day. She takes solace in the company of Michael Hayden, a misfit with a tragic past who she herself used to bully. Friendship doesn't come easily for these onetime enemies, and as Regina works hard to make amends for her past, she realizes Michael could be more than just a friend... if threats from the Fearsome Foursome don't break them both first.

My Thoughts: This book is BRUTAL. The story is probably about as close to noir as YA gets. Regina is a despicable character, as she reveals through flashbacks that she was a willing member of the Fearsome Fivesome. You won’t want to like her, yet she’s still likeable enough that you’ll find yourself overlooking her past behaviors. There is so much tension in this book that reading it gave me a stomach ache, and I still get a little queasy thinking about the book today. Amazing book, and once you won’t want to miss.

Sweet, Hereafter by Angela Johnson

The Set-Up: Shoogy left home with all her jeans still in the washer because she couldn’t think of a reason to stay. She’s not sure where she belongs, until she meets Curtis. Curtis knows for certain where he does not want to be and that’s to be back in the army. He is happy to be in Ohio, where it is quiet and he can spend time with Shoogy. But when Curtis gets orders to return to Iraq, will belonging with each other be enough to keep Shoogy and Curtis together?

My Thoughts: This book is short and bittersweet, and although it’s part of an interrelated trilogy (Heaven and The First Part Last), it’s such a gorgeous book that it stands on its own. It’s a tiny book, but so impactful that you’ll want to go back and reread it once you’re done.

North of Beautiful By Justina Chen Headley

The Set-Up: As he continued to stare, I wanted to point to my cheek and remind him, But you were the one who wanted this, remember? You're the one who asked-and I repeat-Why not fix your face?

It's hard not to notice Terra Cooper.

She's tall, blond, and has an enviable body. But with one turn of her cheek, all people notice is her unmistakably "flawed" face. Terra secretly plans to leave her stifling small town in the Northwest and escape to an East Coast college, but gets pushed off-course by her controlling father. When an unexpected collision puts Terra directly in Jacob's path, the handsome but quirky Goth boy immediately challenges her assumptions about herself and her life, and she is forced in yet another direction. With her carefully laid plans disrupted, will Terra be able to find her true path?

My Thoughts: This is one of those books that, like Some Girls Are, physically hurt to read. Terra’s such an insecure character that she makes you ache to comfort her. Her father is loathsome, and her mother is on the pathetic side. But through it all, it’s Terra’s pain you feel, her sense of insecurity, her fragility. Still, there’s a strength to her that will pull you through the story.

All right, it's your turn!! What must contemporaries have I missed? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

An open letter to a frightened mother and her bookless teen.

2011-06-06T16:18:00.002-04:00

To: Amy Freeman
CC: Meghan Cox Gurdo n
Re: Darkness Too Visible

Dear Ms. Freeman,

I am disheartened to know that you did not find any books for your 13-year-old daughter at your local Barnes & Noble. I mean, the saddest part of this whole fandangle is that you went home without a book! Or maybe the saddest part is that there were, indeed, a bazillion choices for a) a younger, more innocent YA reader and/or b) a conservative mom to share with the aforementioned teen who may or may not be as innocent as you believe.

The bookseller in question, well, I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was new to the store and specialized in cookbooks and didn't know who to tag in. Either way, a GOOD bookseller could have helped you. Since I am a former bookseller who was TOTALLY badass at her job, I'm going to help you out. The following are a list of books that I would have suggested. Some might be too saucy for your tastes. You might object to a few titles because of purported violence or swear word or vampires. But, ho! I will be letting you know why they are good books for your girl! And all of them are light reads that I feel completely comfortable selling to an 11-13 year old who enjoys reading OR to a conservative family with a parent willing to answer her daughters questions should she have some. Here goes:

1. I'D TELL YOU I LOVE YOU BUT THEN I'D HAVE TO KILL YOU by Ally Carter
Yes, the word "kill" is in the title of this book. But Ally Carter's Gallagher Girls series is about butt-kicking smart girls in an academy for spies. SPIES! There're hints of romance, action, and adventure, but you won't find over-the-top violence or sexual themes here. Bonus: readers will SO be inspired by the overflow of girl power!

2. DEAD IS THE NEW BLACK by Marlene Perez
Again, this might look like a "dark" book. But I swear, it's not! I don't even think it has any swear words. Yes, it's a paranormal. The main character is from a family of psychics and her mom works with the police department. Yes, this series has murder mysteries. But at heart, this is a comedy. Think Nancy Drew meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So if your girl is aching for something ghostly with a side of werewolf, fear not. The DEAD IS series will sate her passion for the paranormal without putting too much of the dark, sexy stuff on her plate.

3. ANGUS THONGS & FULL-FRONTAL SNOGGING by Louise Rennison
I love this book. I love that the most salacious thing about this book is the title. And I love that the protagonist Georgia Nicolson is such a real girl, and in this diary-formatted series, she says everything she thinks. And like so many girls her age, she thinks she knows a lot more than she does. What really shines through is a lot of her naivete. I mean, all she wants to do is kiss boys and play pranks! And while she might be a bit boy crazy, she's a good sister, way supportive of her family, and (albeit at times reluctantly) a good BFF. I guarantee this book will make your daughter laugh her butt off, and it won't put any ideas in her head that she isn't ready for.

4. CLOVER TWIG AND THE MAGICAL COTTAGE by Kaye Umansky
This is a book that you will probably find in the middle grade section, but I think most 11-13 year olds read a decent mix of YA and MG. Clover Twig is a precocious young lady who has taken a job as housekeeper for a witch. Little does she know that the witch's sister has a major case of jealousy, and that she has a nefarious plan to steal the magical cottage that Clover is currently in charge of. This book is a completely silly fantasy and I don't know anyone who's read it -- of any age --and not enjoyed every minute. I swear!

5. DEALING WITH DRAGONS by Patricia C. Wrede
I love love love Patricia C. Wrede. One cool thing about her is that she's a very prolific author with books for all ages from young readers to adult, so if your daughter becomes a fan of PCW, you'll be able to stock up! DEALING WITH DRAGONS is another of my fave girl power books -- it's about a princess who doesn't want to be a princess and runs away to live with a dragon instead. It's hysterically funny, rife with fun feminism, and full of magic! It's also the first in a four book series which I read and reread many times during my own tween years. I was so inspired by the main character, Cimorene, that I truly believe she had a part in making me the confident woman I am today. This series definitely straddles the line between MG and YA, making it a solid tween title. Your girl will love it.

6. FRONT PAGE FACE-OFF by Jo Whittemore
Another book that straddles MG/YA, this tween comedy from Jo Whittemore tackles the middle school issues of popularity, competition, and crushes with a serious sense of humor. I love that the main character is a smart girl with absolutely no intentions of toning it down. I love that this book made me laugh out loud when I was reading it on the bus. And I love that it's a book about competition for control over the school newspaper. If your 11-13 year old likes a good, girly comedy, this one hits the spot and then some.

7. THE TIME-TRAVELING FASHIONISTA by Bianca Turetsky
Once again we have a book that fits easily in either the teen or kids section of the library (though you will probably find it with the middle grade books), this is a fun, girly book with a touch of sci fi (time travel, hello!) and history (it takes place on the Titanic. Yes, THAT Titanic). When Louise Lambert puts on a dress at a mysterious vintage sale, she slips backward in time into the body of a teen actress on board the aforementioned doomed ship. At first she's having the time of her life, but when she figures out that, you know, she might drown, everything changes. Louise has got to find a way to save herself -- and her new friends -- before the ship sinks. And she wouldn't mind getting back to the future either. The first in an upcoming series, this one is sure to delight any burgeoning fashionistas and it will absolutely spark an interest in history as well!

8. GIVING UP THE GHOST by Sheri Sinykin
Yes, it's a ghost story. Yes, it's a southern Gothic, taking place at an old Louisiana plantation. Yes, there are some, er, questionable deaths on the part of the ghosts. And it's not like the elderly aunt that our protagonist, Davia, is taking care of is going to survive the book (I promise, this isn't really a spoiler). But the cancer-survivor mom is inspiring, and the fact that this book is, at its heart, about overcoming fear really hits home for almost everyone. I love the idea that Davia has to help the ghosts at the plantation in order to help her aunt. GIVING UP THE GHOST isn't about death, it's about finding strength, about forgiveness, and about facing the things that scare us the most. If your daughter wants a more serious book, this would be a good one to start with.

9. OYMG by Amy Fellner Dominy
This comedy about a Jewish girl at a Christian summer camp has a bit of a serious side, but that doesn't make it any less fun to read! I mean, who doesn't love a girl who loves to argue -- and does it so well that she's a candidate for a debate scholarship? Who doesn't love a grandpa who speaks Yiddish and encourages his family to be strong in their faith and to be proud of their culture? And while the protagonist of this story does have to face antisemitism while in pursuit of her scholarship -- and her crush -- I think that the message of the book is a good one: being true to yourself is worth more than any boy, OR any prize.

10. ZITFACE by Emily Howse
If your daughter loves stories about teen Hollywood, this new YA/tween novel from Emily Howse is a sure-fire hit! It's about a teen actress who has just landed a job in a major commercial campaign. She's also just landed the boy of her dreams -- the new kid at school who is just completely crushworthy. But everything goes awry when she breaks out. And one breakout leads to another and she's diagnosed with every actress' nightmare: acne. She goes from being popular to picked on at school, and her agent is none too pleased either. But this is how she learns who her true friends are, how she learns to persevere and pursue her Hollywood dreams despite her condition, how she becomes a stronger person. ZITFACE is funny, cute, and a great read for younger readers looking for a new YA title.

11. DRY SOULS by Denise Getson
Dystopian novels are a major trend right now, and if your daughter is interested in reading about a not-too-distant future in which things have gone awry -- but she's not quite ready for some of the harsher, more violent titles -- DRY SOULS is a great choice. It's about Kira, a girl who, in a world where water is beyond scarce and controlled by the government, discovers that she can generate water herself. Kira runs away from the orphanage in which she grew up, hoping to find a way to share her gift and replenish the world's water sources. But it's not long before she realizes the government is on her tail, and they have other plans for Kira. In this book about friendship, ecology, and survival, there's nothing I would feel uncomfortable sharing with an avid reader as young as 10.

13. MY SO-CALLED DEATH by Stacey Jay
Stacy Jay has written a lot of books about zombies, and this is one of my favorites. It's about a young cheerleader who falls during a stunt, dies, and comes back as the undead. But while the topic seems grim, I'd hardly classify this as a dark book. I mean, it's about a cheerleader, right? It's not long before the girl is whisked away to a secret academy for the undead, where she'll learn all about being undead along with, you know, math and reading and all that jazz. Of course, no zombie book is complete without a little brain harvesting, and this is where our heroine comes in to help solve a mystery and perhaps even save some of her classmates from a sinister power using forbidden magic to steal her friends' brains. No, seriously, this book is funny, sweet, and a great book for kids and teens who want to read about zombies but still want to sleep at night. And, on the sexy front, there's nothing more than crushing and kissing!

13. FORGIVE MY FINS by Tera Lynn Childs
Everyone loves a mermaid tale! (Tail?) And in this coming-of-age novel a teen is torn between her new life on land (an experiment to see if she would ever want to leave her mermaid heritage) and her old life at sea. Of course, everything gets completely messed up when she's tricked into kissing the annoying guy next door instead of the boy of her dreams -- because in the world of mermaids, when you kiss a boy, you're choosing him for life. So now she's on a mission -- to ditch annoying neighbor boy and get back to her life -- whichever she should choose. But what she can't predict are the sparks of romance in the last place she'd ever expected. FORGIVE MY FINS is a totally adorable and safe pick for teens looking for the paranormal, magical element without anything too dark or sexy. I think your daughter would love it!

Hopefully this list is helpful. If not, feel free to write me for more choices. I'd be happy to reply! I mean, I could go on all day.

And if you're looking for, you know, well-written, heart-felt, and intelligent replies to the article in the Wall Street Journal, I hope that you will look here, here, or here. Or, like, Google it -- everyone in YA has something to say about the bias in the article, the anger, the ignorance, and the hate. I'm choosing the let the other voices say what I'm thinking about this part of your complaint, because they've already done it so well. I'm offering you my book shopping help instead. Because YA is so big. Kidlit is enormous. We have books for everyone!

Warm Wishes! (For real!)

I just want to say hello

2011-06-02T11:53:00.004-04:00

I'm still here!

I have not forgotten you guys!

I remember what blogs are!

They are for writing down thoughts and interacting with other people!

These are things I forget to do on a regular basis!

So today I will forget that I forget how to write things down and interact with people and I will talk to you about things that are whirling around in my brain - talk to you in written form!

1. I'm reading Greg van Eekhout's THE BOY AT THE END OF THE WORLD to my kids in the evenings, and it is a fantastic, exciting, action-packed middle grade novel. Also, I really, really, love speaking in a robot voice when I read. This book has my 9yo son completely entranced. And me, too. (Not just because of the robot voice.)

2. Lenny Kravitz! What?! (I kind of love it. Can't wait to see how it plays out.)

3. Previously mentioned 9yo son won't stop narrating his Spore gameplay right now and I am about to GO CRAZY.

4. I bought a Kindle (or Kangle, as the 2.5yo calls it), much to my own chagrin, and now I can't figure out what to read on it other than the newspaper and the first chapters of pretty much every book ever. When I find a book I really like, I can't stand the idea of downloading it, because I want to go to the store and buy it and smell it and ruin it in my bathtub by accident.

4a. Help me learn to love my Kangle.

4b. What books can I buy to read on the beach with my Kangle? Will I always be sad I'm not buying them in the store? My book spending is going to skyrocket because I'm going to start buying all my books TWICE. (#Iamdoingitwrong)

5. The Spore narration has ceased, but now the almost 5yo is pretending to be a baby. Very loudly.

6. When you have a book out on sub and you want to just sit and check your email every five seconds waiting on word from your agent, what's your favorite thing to do to distract yourself? Write something new? Read trashy things? Play Spore? Insult your Kangle?

7. I dislike it when I read a book that is purportedly from a young man's point of view and he says things like, "I stepped beside the bougainvillea and picked up the teak bracelet that was half buried in dirt." Do I not give boys enough credit, by thinking they don't know what specific plants and wood types are? Am I boy-ist? Or is this a ridonk thing that also drives you crazy?

8. I just had to pause to explain to my almost 5yo that Xavier starts with an X and while that is the name of the guy who invented cabbage path dolls and ALSO the name of the guy who started Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, they are not the same Xavier.

9. Today is the first day of summer vacation. So far it appears one child has croup, one child just busted his knee falling off the ottoman, and the girlchild is intent on contradicting everything I say. "Do you want some cheese?" "NO, I DO NOT WANT CHEESE. [pause] Can I have some cheese?"

10. At this point you are probably glad I haven't been blogging in a while.

OK. You are reprieved now, at least until some future time when I am also trying to ignore the kids and look busy.

I bid you adieu.

In which I Talk about Stupid Amazon Reviews and Possibly Piss Some People Off

2011-06-01T08:10:00.001-04:00

I'll confess it. I am the person that reads the reviews on Amazon. I can’t help but read a couple of five-star reviews and one-star reviews before buying a book. Part of it’s because I’m nosy, but part of it is also because I love a good train wreck, and there’s nothing funnier than a typo filled rant about the quality of a book.

But recently I’ve been noticing a trend that I find a more than a little irritating, and it follows the line of thought that this review of Bleeding Violet did:

Bleeding Violet feels like a bondage smut book toned down for teens, and it doesn't work. Movies have ratings and books have genres to prevent children from reading or seeing what may not be good for them, and I think Bleeding Violet should definitely not be in the YA fiction genre. It has too much unnecessary sex, drugs, swearing, violence, self-violence, stealing, lying, and hatred. There is a place for these issues, but it's not in the teen sci-fi/fantasy section, and they need to be treated appropriately.

Here’s another one for the Duff:

I was really excited to read The Duff after hearing so many good things, but I was sorely disappointed after reading. I thought the book would be about a girl coming to grips with her self esteem issues, and negative outlook on life. Instead it's about angry sex, and emotional abuse. Honestly, there is so much sex, and gratuitously described, that I felt like it belonged on the romance shelf. Definitely not in YA (and the sex scenes aren't even that great). I am not a fan of censoring things for kids, but this has so many incredibly bad messages there's no way I'd let my niece read it.

So let’s look at the reviews. They both have the same overall message: this is not appropriate for YA. Okay? But why? The first review states that Bleeding Violet has “too much unnecessary sex, drugs, swearing, violence, self-violence, stealing, lying, and hatred.” The second review states that in the DUFF “there is so much sex, and gratuitously described, that I felt like it belonged on the romance shelf. Definitely not in YA.”

So my question is: where do they belong?

The first reviewer seems to be hinting that those kinds of topics only belong in what most people call “issue books”. That’s great and all, but sex and lying and drugs don’t just happen to kids dealing with a friend dying or being raped. They kind of happen to everyone (the sex and lying and drugs, not the raping. Although the statistic on that is pretty depressing). In my high school (many moons ago), people were having sex and a few girls even got pregnant. There were drugs and drunk driving and all of the general stupidity that you see in the “real” world. You know, because high school IS a microcosm of the rest of the world.

You kids quit reading those books!

Look, YA means Young Adult. These aren’t books for children. I know that gets confusing because publishers like to lump YA in with middle grade and chapter books and picture books. But YA books are books for adults trying out their independence for the first time. Teenagers make mistakes, just like adults do. They make different mistakes because they're new at the whole making-their-own-decisions thing. But that doesn't make them children.

By reading about the consequences of other people’s mistakes teens can relate to a character that is more like them, that may or may not be going through the things they do. YA should be relatable, it should have flawed characters, and it should have violence and sex and lying and hateful people. Because all of those things exist, whether you like them or not.

And who decides what is appropriate and what isn’t for someone? I’ll tell you who: the person reading it.

If YAs are adults, then we should treat them as such. We should trust them to pick something up, say to themselves “Ugh, this is so not for me,” and put it down. If they don’t do that, then maybe they aren’t ready for YA, the same way they aren’t ready for the regular adult market. Hell, there are some sections of the adult market I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for. And that’s okay.

And if someone’s not ready for YA, well, there are a lot of really awesome middle grade books out there. Just because someone reads at a twelfth grade level doesn’t mean they are emotionally ready to experience twelfth grade. And that’s okay. But let’s not try to redefine what YA is or isn’t because we don’t like a book. Because, really, that’s just being selfish.

Your Truth Isn’t Necessarily Someone Else’s Truth

2011-05-27T06:20:00.001-04:00

So getting straight to it, let me ask you, what’s the biggest challenge you face as a writer? Is it coming up with the hook? Is it finding a distinct voice? Is it figuring out who your main character really is – what they want most, what they fear most?

I discovered my arch-nemesis a long time ago, and I’m still having problems overcoming it: It was learning that my truth is not necessarily someone else’s truth.

I thought that because I believed something, everyone else would understand where I was coming from.

For instance, I once wrote a story with negligent, somewhat-mean parents. Someone else read my book and said, “Miranda, I just can’t believe anyone’s parents would treat them that way!”

And I just didn’t get that. I feel like I see stories about neglectful parents in the news every day. Then I started thinking about where my reader comes from: A good stable home and a solid upbringing.

The truth is, not everybody comes from the same place, so everyone’s “reality” is different.

So how do you bring readers in so they “buy” your story?

This is where setting and background are crucial. If you want your readers to believe your main character’s circumstances, you must show a complete picture.

Let’s look at Harry Potter. From the very first page, J.K. Rowling made it very clear that Mr. and Mrs. Dursley are quite conservative and set in their ways. Mr. Dursley is described as wearing “his most boring tie.” His main concern in life is a shipment of drills. Young people who dress funny get on Mr. Dursley’s nerves. We also find out that Mr. Dursley doesn’t like his wife’s family – because they are wizards.

Even if they weren’t wizards and were punk rockers, Mr. Dursley would dislike the Potters.

Based on this set-up, the reader should “buy” how the Dursleys treat Harry after he gets left on their doorstep. As he grows up, they make him live in the cupboard under the stairs and make him wear hand-me-down clothes.

When you’re writing, how do you work to “show” your main character’s circumstances?

As a reader, what sorts of details help you to “buy” the story?

I Got Nothing

2011-05-25T17:43:00.000-04:00

So, here's a little bit of boy band awesomeness.

Book Recommendation: Bleeding Violet

2011-05-18T08:08:00.001-04:00

The Set-Up:

Love can be a dangerous thing....

Hanna simply wants to be loved. With a head plagued by hallucinations, a medicine cabinet full of pills, and a closet stuffed with frilly, violet dresses, Hanna's tired of being the outcast, the weird girl, the freak. So she runs away to Portero, Texas in search of a new home.

But Portero is a stranger town than Hanna expects. As she tries to make a place for herself, she discovers dark secrets that would terrify any normal soul. Good thing for Hanna, she's far from normal. As this crazy girl meets an even crazier town, only two things are certain: Anything can happen and no one is safe.

My Take:

I loved this book. Seriously. I. Loved. This. Book. This is one of those books that I picked up and wondered “Why the hell didn’t I get this sooner?” Hanna is such a fun character, and even though she‘s bipolar her mental illness isn’t really what defines her. Neither does being biracial.* She has so much going on, and her self-confidence leaps off of the page. Even though she’s thrown into a completely strange situation she goes along with it, convinced that she can make the grimmest of situations work. She’s optimistic without coming off as a Pollyanna, and that’s really nice to see.

I usually have one or two things that I take issue with, but the only thing that even gave me pause was Hanna’s attitude towards sex. It gave me pause not because I had a problem with it, but because it isn’t very often that YA features a character who’s sexually active and not because she has some sort of problem she’s trying to escape. Hanna is as matter of fact about sex as she is everything else, so the romantic scenes in the book quickly become more matter-of-fact than scandalous.

I also loved that the romance in the book was so realistic, yet satisfying. Wyatt is a bit of a jerk sometimes (like most guys), and despite his jerky tendencies he was still a decent romantic lead. I’ve gotten spoiled with reading YA, I tend to expect some sort of romance at some point, but the romance between Wyatt and Hanna was satisfying without feeling forced or unnatural.

The town of Portero was hands down my favorite part of the entire book. I look forward to reading more books set there, and meeting more of the residents. While I was reading all I could think was “What kind of insane person would willingly live in such a place?” I look forward to finding out. J

I guess I should give a warning here that the book has some pretty graphic bits. Nothing that I found offensive, but I have a pretty high tolerance for gore. But this book is probably not something you would want to give younger readers. The violence is probably on par with the Hunger Games, but with the addition of sex I think some Amazon reviewers were a bit more scandalized than they would’ve been if the two hadn't coexisted. However, I think books should be about pushing boundaries, and I love how Bleeding Violet does that while telling an intriguing story.

So if you like your YA on the older side with a bit of the dark, this is definitely a book you should check out.

*I was pretty annoyed that one Amazon reviewer complained that “Hanna herself is biracial, but comes across as a generic white girl, who just a bit on the slutty side.” So, she should act all conflicted because she comes from two different cultures? Or should she be a little ghetto, but still dig tea parties? Pffft. This is why no one should take Amazon reviews too seriously, but more about that later.

It’s Not You, It’s Me (Okay, It’s Mostly You)

2011-05-11T11:40:00.000-04:00

So the other day, I picked up a book beloved and lauded by many on the interwebs as being the next best thing since egg salad on whole wheat (Yum!). After five pages in I set the book aside and went to get a snack. After twenty pages I opted to watch the People’s Court I’d DVR’d instead. By page fifty I decided to move on to something else, since it was either that or rip the book apart because the characters were so frustrating and unlikeable.

And then the guilt set in.

There is something very difficult about hating a book that everyone else loves. It’s a little like telling a room full of vegetarians that you really love bacon. You find your self hemming and hawing, and when friends press you about whether you liked a book or not you shrug, give a half smile, and murmur “It was okay.”

WHY?!? Why are we so afraid to say “I hated that book with the burning fury of a thousand suns going supernova?” Instead, we demure and make excuses, and pretend to be glad when a friend gives us the next book in the series for our birthday. Yay.

Look, it’s okay to not like books. Just like egg salad on whole wheat, not everyone is going to like every book. It’s not your fault or the book’s fault (okay, sometimes it’s the book’s fault, but that’s a subject for a different post). If you didn’t like egg salad you would say, “Ah, no thanks, I don’t really care for it.” We should be able to express our dislike of books the same way, without being afraid to express our opinion but also not becoming that loud mouth jerk that slams the book, either. Surely there has to be some happy medium.

So feel free to tell me you don’t like egg salad on wheat, just do it with some tact. It’s cool. More for me.

Review: DRY SOULS by Denise Getson

2011-05-09T08:00:00.006-04:00

There are a billion dystopians out there right now. And a lot of them are based on ecological premeses. But it's been a while since I read one so compelling as debut author Denise Getson's DRY SOULS.

DRY SOULS follows Kira, a teen girl who can hardly remember her mom, and has grown up at an all-girls orphanage. She's never quite fit in with the other girls, and when she finds a flower -- something no one has seen in years, since the water is too tightly regulated to support purely aesthetic plantlife -- Kira is compelled to protect it. It feels like her safe place, her one thing that she has in the world. And it could have been the key to friendship, with a girl named Mary. Together they water the flower by saving their rations -- it's their secret. But on the day that Kira discovers she can conjure water on her own, Mary freaks out, tells the headmistress, and is on the outs again.

So Kira strikes out on her own, as a traveler, with little direction except to maybe go to the town of her birth, Slag, in an area once known as the Great Lakes Region. Meeting up with fellow runaway J.D., things seem to be going okay, and Kira is feeling good about her choice to leave the orphanage. Little does she know, the goverment -- the Territories -- is out to find her. They know about her power, and have no interest in her filling the lakes and rivers and bringing water to the people. The Territories have managed to keep control over the population by keeping control over the water, and to them, Kira is an enormous threat.

Part adventure, part coming-of-age, and completely unputdownable, DRY SOULS is an elegantly written addition to the dystopian genre. One that presents its stark future with an element of hope, with relateable characters, and without the pretense of a forced romance. And, at just under 200 pages, it makes a great pick for reluctant teen readers. Make sure you go to your local library or bookstore and ask for DRY SOULS, stat!

And, fyi, DRY SOULS is with the small press CBAY books. So if you can't find it right away, make sure to special order it! Gotta love the small presses, y'all!

Think Your First Draft Sucks Major and You Should Just Quit? Don’t! Why Revising Does a World of Good

2011-05-06T07:05:00.001-04:00

Every time I start a first draft of something new, I want to cry. I moan to myself, “Oh my writing sucks! Why am I even doing this?! I suckkkkkkkkkk……….”

But then I remember that my best work happens when I revise (especially after draft #85 or so), so it’s important to just get the first draft down, and deal with cleaning it up later.

I just recently finished up copyedits on SCORE and pretty soon my book will be off to the printers so ARCs can be made. Woo! As I was doing my final readthru, I started wondering how much this book has changed since I first started writing it back in 2009.

And boy has it changed! Wow, the first draft was choppy and didn’t flow and had no personality. Now, I think it’s much better.

So, without further ado, I present the first page of my very very very first draft of SCORE, before I ever even had a plot! But before you read the crappy version, read the first page as it is now. Enjoy!

FIRST PAGE NOW:

I once read that football was invented so people wouldn’t notice summer ending. But I couldn’t wait for summer vacation to end. I couldn’t wait for football. Football, dominator of fall—football, love of my life.

“Blue forty-two! Blue forty-two! Red seventeen!” I yell.

The cue is red seventeen. JJ hikes me the ball. The defense is blitzing. JJ slams into a freshman safety, knocking him to the ground. The rest of my offensive line destroys the defense. Nice. The field’s wide open, but my wide receiver isn’t where he’s supposed to be.

“What the hell, Higgins?” I mutter to myself.

Dancing on my tiptoes, I scan the end zone and find Sam Henry instead, and hurl the ball. It flies through the air, a perfect spiral, heading right where I wanted it to go. He catches the ball, spikes it, and does this really stupid dance. Henry looks like a freaking ballerina. With his thin frame and girly blond hair, he actually could be the star of the New York Ballet.

I’m gonna give him hell for his dance.

This is my senior year at Hundred Oaks High, and I’m captain, so I’m allowed to keep my players in line. Even though he’s my best friend, Henry has always been a showoff. His antics get us penalties.

Through the speaker in my helmet, I hear Coach Miller say, “Nice throw. This is your year, Woods. You’re going to lead us to the state championship. I can feel it…Hit the showers.” What the coach actually means? I know you’re not going to blow it in the final seconds of the championship game like you did last year.

And he’s right. I can’t.

The University of Alabama called last week—on the first day of school—to tell me a recruiter is coming to watch me play on Friday night. And then a very fancy-looking letter arrived, inviting me to visit campus in September. An official visit. If they like what they see, they’ll sign me in February.

I can’t screw this season up.

I pull my helmet off and grab a bottle of Gatorade and my playbook. Most of the guys are already goofing off and heading over to watch cheerleading practice across the field, but I ignore them and look up into the stands.

I spot Mom sitting with Carter’s dad, a former NFL player. My dad isn’t here, of course. Asshole.

Lots of parents come to watch our practices because football is the big thing to do around here. Here being Franklin, Tennessee, home of the Hundred Oaks Red Raiders, eight-time state champions.

Mom always comes to practice—she’s been supporting me ever since Pop Warner youth football days, but sometimes she worries I’ll get hurt, even though the worst thing that’s ever happened was a concussion. Sophomore year, when JJ took a breather, the coach brought in this idiot to play center, the idiot didn’t cover me, and I got slammed hard. Otherwise, I’m a rock. No knee problems, no broken limbs.

Dad never comes to my practices and rarely comes to games. People think it’s because he’s busy, because he’s Donovan Woods, the starting quarterback for the Tennessee Titans. But the truth is he doesn’t want me playing football. Why wouldn’t a famous quarterback want his kid to follow in the family footsteps? Well, he does. He loves that my brother Mike, a junior in college, plays for the University of Tennessee and led his team to a win at the Sugar Bowl last year. So what the hell is Dad’s problem with my playing ball?

I’m a girl.

FIRST DRAFT:

“Blue forty-two! Blue forty-two! Red seventeen!”

The cue is red seventeen. The center, my best friend JJ, hikes the ball to me. I catch it effortlessly. The defense is blitzing. JJ slams into a freshman safety, knocking him to the ground. Nice. The field’s wide open, like an ocean. Dancing on my tiptoes, I scan the end zone and locate Sam Henry, a wide receiver, and hurl the ball. I watch it fly through the air, a perfect spiral, heading right where I intended it to go. He catches the ball, spikes it and does this really stupid dance. Henry looks like a frickin’ ballerina. With his thin frame and girly blonde hair, he actually could be the star of the New York Ballet. I’m gonna give him hell for his dance later. This is my senior year at Hundred Oaks High, and I’m captain, so I’m allowed to keep my players in line. Henry has always been a showoff; his shenanigans get us penalties.

Through the speaker in my helmet, I hear Coach Miller say, “Nice throw. This is your year, Woods. You’re going to lead us to the state championship. I can feel it. Take five.”

The coach means: I know you’re not going to blow it in the final seconds of the championship game like you did last year. And he’s right. I’m not.

I grin, pull off my helmet and walk to grab some Gatorade. Most of the guys are goofing off, watching cheerleading practice going on across the field. But I ignore them and look up into the stands. I spot my mom talking to JJ’s dad. My dad isn’t here, of course. Lots of parents come to watch our practices because football is the only thing to do around here. Here being Franklin, Tennessee, next door to the middle of nowhere. If you think hanging out at practice is lame, forget movies - games are typical Friday night dates for couples.

My mom always comes to practice. I think she supports me, but I’m not sure. Maybe she’s just overprotective and doesn’t want me to get hurt, but I’ve been playing football since Pop Warner days, since I was seven, and the worst thing that’s ever happened was a concussion. Sophomore year, when JJ took a breather, the coach brought in this idiot to play center. The idiot didn’t cover me and I got slammed hard. Otherwise, I’m a rock. No knee problems to speak of, no broken limbs.

My dad never comes to my practices, and rarely comes to games. People think it’s because he’s busy, because he’s Donovan Woods, the starting quarterback for the Tennessee Titans. But the truth is he doesn’t want me playing football. You might wonder why a famous quarterback wouldn’t want his kid to follow in the family footsteps and play the great All-American sport. But he does. He loves that my brother, Mike, a junior in college, plays for the University of Tennessee, and led his team to win at the Sugar Bowl last year. So what the hell is my dad’s problem, you ask?

I’m a girl.

This Post Is Not A Post

2011-05-03T19:27:00.000-04:00

I had every intention of writing a long, thoughtful post today, I really did. But the stomach flu had other plans. So here I sit, silver barf bowl balanced on shaky knees, saying hello, briefly, and would like to provide you, dear Readers, with the following Updates.

1. I read I AM J by Cris Beam and it was wonderful. I shall have more to say about it in the near future, but in any case I am glad that we're seeing more books featuring sexual minorities in major roles, and am looking forward to seeing those books included in curricula and library lists and various awards. Because these voices matter.

2. Have continued my own personal quest to read every Diana Wynne-Jones book ever written. And while her books are like food to my hungry imagination, I've found the process heartbreaking and piteous sad. I do miss that woman - though I never met her. I miss the idea that maybe one day I would. And I miss her.

3. Am teaching currently. Fiction. Fourth grade. And it is marvelous. Seriously, these kids are amazing.

4. We had an issue recently with my Middle School aged daughter, and her consequence was to cut her off from the internet for five days. Five Long Days. Apparently I'm the meanest mother alive. Honestly, from the way she was carrying on, you'd think I was killing her. And then I got to thinking about it. Social media requires a certain level of consistent use before a person's profile - one's electronic personhood - begins to diminish. When we are cut off from online conversations, do we become electronically dead? Did I temporarily kill my daughter, as far as her online use is concerned.

Well, if that's true, then I'm killing all of my computers and cutting the entire family off (ruining your life MY EYE, I said to her) and really, I don't think that we've reached the point at which electronic interconnectedness is equal to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But.

It would make a cool book. And an interesting story. And I think someone around here should write it. (not me, though. I already have too many projects in the works.)

All right. Feeling crummy. Back to bed. More next week, folks!

Lois Duncan Winners!

2011-05-02T16:31:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone! Today I just wanted to announce the winners of the Lois Duncan books!

Each winner will receive a set of THREE Lois Duncan YA thrillers, courtesy of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

1. Maggie Desmond-O'Brien
2. Darsa Morrow
3. The Book Groupie

Looking forward to hearing what you all think! I'll be contacting y'all shortly to get mailing addresses. Congratulations, and thanks again to Little, Brown!

I’m Not an Evil Person! Why I Write Sexy Edgy YA

2011-04-29T07:05:00.008-04:00

In high school, I was a church-going, show choir-loving soccer player.

But here are a few things I was thinking about when I was 16:

1. My best guy friend was constantly asking me to help him locate places where he could take his girlfriend to park. He needed something better than the side of the road right near her house.

2. Another guy friend had just had sex with another friend’s ex-girlfriend. I was sworn to secrecy. When the ex-girlfriend found out I knew they’d had sex and didn’t tell her I knew, she punched me in the cafeteria, even though I was trying to be a good friend to everyone involved. I kept the secret! Gah!

3. The guy I wanted more than anything (who I’d just gone to second base with) had decided to start having sex with the ex-girlfriend mentioned above (yeah, she got around). From what other people told me, he’d go over to her house every night of the week and have sex with her in her room. I cried and cried. I wondered if he’d date me if I would have sex with him.

4. The guy friend mentioned above in #2 was trying to hook up with me, even though I didn’t want to hook up. He came over to my house all the time and would lie on my bed and it freaked me out. Somehow I managed to avoid doing anything with him, even though he was persistent. Once he went through my underwear drawer without me knowing, and then asked me to model for him. Gah!

5. My best girl friend was being pressured by her boyfriend to have sex. He would whine to her that all the guys in the locker room made fun of him for not having gotten laid yet. She didn’t want to have sex until she got married, but she didn’t want to lose him either. They had sex and then she felt ashamed of herself for doing it, and I had to convince her that it was okay, she wasn’t going to Hell.

6. Everyone at my church told me that if you have sex before marriage, God would send you straight to Hell. I spent a lot of time worrying that all my friends were going to Hell for having so much sex.

7. I wanted a boyfriend. Bad. But no one wanted to be my boyfriend.

Nearly everything I write has sex in it. Why? Because teenagers have sex! They think about it, too!

It’s not that I’m trying to make a statement by writing sexy YA, it’s that I try to write the truth, and the truth is that kids have sex.

When I’m writing from the perspective of a teenage girl or boy, that subject is bound to come up. And when reading books, teenagers want to relate to the main characters, not feel like they’re being preached to. They don’t pick books and think, “I want a lesson on morality today.”

Sure, all parents want to protect their kids and I don’t fault them for that, but I don’t want people to consider me a bad person for writing books for teenagers that include a sex scene.

Sometimes I go into detail during sex scenes, because I remember when I was 16, I didn’t have the foggiest clue about the mechanics of sex. It wasn’t that I was desperate to have sex and needed to know how to do it, I was just curious. A girlfriend of mine managed to find a porno, and we watched it, and I was HORRIFIED. But it did satisfy my curiosity.

For parents who worry that sexy YA books are going to make their kids race out and have sex, that might be true, but I don’t think so. And if it does happen, then I hope those parents have prepared their kids for the real world by educating them about sex and risks and protection. I always show my characters using condoms and/or birth control. However, including sex in a book must serve the plot in some way - either positively or negatively. Being in love is a good enough reason for me.

At graduation, 50% of teenagers are still virgins. Good for them! Some of my characters are virgins, too.

When I was a teenager, I searched the library for books featuring sex. Today, some of my friends admit to having read romance novels as teenagers, because they wanted to read about sex.

A part of being a teenager is thinking about and being curious about sex. I want my books to be a place where teenagers can read the truth and not feel judged for being human.

Book Recommendation: Across the Universe

2011-04-27T14:45:00.001-04:00

The Set Up:

A Story of Love, Murder, and Madness Aboard an Enormous Spaceship Bound for the Future

Amy is a cryogenically frozen passenger aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed. She expects to wake up on a new planet, 300 years in the future. But fifty years before Godspeed's scheduled landing, Amy's cryo chamber is unplugged, and she is nearly killed.

Now, Amy is caught inside an enclosed world where nothing makes sense. Godspeed's passengers have forfeited all control to Eldest, a tyrannical and frightening leader, and Elder, his rebellious and brilliant teenage heir.

Amy desperately wants to trust Elder. But should she? All she knows is that she must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets before whoever woke her tries to kill again.

My Thoughts: I sort of struggled with this book recommendation, because like a lot of books I finished the book with more questions than I wanted to. Part of this is because this is obviously the first in a series, but it’s also because I felt there were some things left unfinished, not just as a story arc, but just got left behind in the rapid pace of the story.

Still, this book was really good, and I found myself pulled into the story immediately. The biggest issue I had with the story was the alternating POV. I liked Amy much more than I liked Elder, and found myself zipping through her chapters eagerly while I read through Elders more slowly (Elder’s chapter were also where I took most of my breaks). I think this was because I never felt any motivation from him to solve the mystery, not like I did with Amy. In fact, most of his chapters are spent with him talking about her, and I never really felt like I knew him all that well. Either way, it wasn’t enough to mar my enjoyment of the story. Most likely, if this book had been Amy’s alone I would have read it twice as fast J.

The storyline flew, and I appreciated the minimal description and back story. I like to be able to fill in my own details as much as possible, and I get bored with endless pages of back story and descriptions of things. So I loved how Beth Revis described something for us and moved on, and I loved her creative look at how a micro-world would evolve, especially where human tinkering is rampant. The terrifying moo-oink of cow-pigs (you’ll have to read the book to see what I mean) is still with me.

My biggest nitpick (because I always have one) is an incident that I believe isn’t handled. Not that it isn’t handled well, it isn’t really handled AT ALL. Suffice it to say something very upsetting happens, and instead of the character dealing with it, the aftermath gets all of two pages. I’m hoping Revis comes back to this in later books, because I think it’s something that needs to be addressed. But again, I still really enjoyed the book despite this.

Bottom line? I liked this book, and I think you will, too.

WINNER of THE TIME TRAVELING FASHIONISTA announced! Plus, check out these other giveaways!

2011-04-24T16:33:00.000-04:00

Chosen by random number generators, the winner of THE TIME TRAVELING FASHIONISTA is....

Schuyler, aka @ReadersInk!

Schuyler, I just know you're going to love this one! And to those of you who didn't win, don't dispair! There are a LOT of giveaways going on both here and at my other blog, The Tart. (And more still coming! Go ahead and enter -- I'm linking some of them below. All of these are open through May 1!

For THREE Lois Duncan novels, newly reissued and updated by the author, see this post! Three winners will win a set of these books including DOWN A DARK HALL, STRANGER WITH MY FACE, and SUMMER OF FEAR.

For a copy of the adorable new middle grade novel in verse, LIKE PICKLE JUICE ON A COOKIE by Julie Sternberg, comment on this post!

To enter to win a copy of POEM IN YOUR POCKET FOR YOUNG POETS, edited by Bruno Navasky, see on this post.

Especially for National Poetry Month, win one of THREE copies of renowned author Julia Alvarez' poetry collection, THE WOMAN I KEPT TO MYSELF, comment on this post.

And if you're interested in a set of TWO poetry anthologies for young readers from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, check out this post, here! Two winners will be selected.

Thanks to Abrams/Amulet, Algonquin, and Little, Brown for providing all of the above books!

A Terrifying, Scream Filled Run Down Memory Lane

2011-04-20T10:08:00.002-04:00

When I was in seventh grade I started reading Lois Duncan. Keep in mind this was back in the early nineties, when Paula Abdul was still making albums (shudder) and the coolest thing fashion-wise was to layer several pairs of socks in a multicolored tier that matched your outfits (my shoes were two sizes bigger than I needed, and I wore those shoes until high school). Basically, Lois Duncan was the bright spot at the time.

The first Lois Duncan book I ever read was A Gift of Magic. I actually picked up the paperback at a thrift store, and it smelled like cat pee and cigarettes. But I braved the funk for the story, about a girl with a psychic ability. Why? Because it was AWESOME.

I then devoured just about every Lois Duncan book I could find. I loved the Daughters of Eve (appealed to my feminist side right up until it didn’t) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (even Jennifer Love Hewitt couldn’t ruin the story of a hit and run gone horribly wrong, as though a hit and run could go right). But my favorite Lois Duncan of all time has to be Killing Mr. Griffin.

This was the first book I’d ever read where even the protagonist was complicit in some not so nice behavior. I’d never really read a book where it was hard to agree with the hero, but in Killing Mr. Griffin you have the sense that the kids who kidnap their teacher aren’t bad. But their actions aren’t good.

The best part of the book is that you, as the reader, feel conflicted about whether or not they did the right thing. There’s no ambiguity like with I Know What You Did Last Summer, where you wonder right along with the folks in the car what the hell someone was doing in the middle of the road on a dark and stormy night (idea: stay home). The main characters in Killing Mr. Griffin set out to kidnap their teacher, and as things go from bad to worse (you had to know that the kidnapped English teacher was only the beginning) you begin to wonder why you even liked the characters in the beginning. Because you will like them, and they will continue to make bad mistakes, and you will groan and shout “WHY?” to the heavens, while the characters skip along towards what you know is going to be certain disaster.

And you will love every page of it.
So, I’m really glad that Lois Duncan is being re-released for a new generation. It looks like I have some reading to do…

***WINNERS***

Since there were only three entries for last Wednesday's contest, EVERYONE gets a book! Yay! Email your screenname, real name, and address to trackdowntheya5@gmail.com so I can send your books!

Gendertranscendent Love Story

2011-04-19T23:44:00.000-04:00

(or, how I talk about Steve Brezenoff's new novel by first talking about my old job)

Love, when it comes down to it, is not defined by gender, nor is gender defined by love. Love, in my experience, resists definition. It is without boundary, without pretense, without externally-imposed rules. Love makes the rules.

I once had a student - a long time ago - who told me that the term "trans" was too limiting in their particular experience. "Trans," this kid told me, "assumes a person is transforming from one specific thing into another specific thing." My student was young - maybe fifteen - with dark, wide-spaced eyes, a shorn head, a fine-boned face and an easy smile. Tattoos on the neck. Lean, ropy muscles. Long, tapered fingers. Painfully thin - a body made of reeds and sticks and dry grass.

"Some of us," my student said, "are transitioning from middle to middle. A sea of endless middles. And endless possibilities. Gender doesn't define us. Only love does."

And so my education began.

Back when I was pregnant with my third child, I got a job as a GED teacher at a drop-in center for homeless youth in Minneapolis. Now, it doesn't take very much time trolling through Google - its deep undergrowth of studies and statistics and reports, its wide canopy of articles and profiles and sob stories - to know that the stats on homeless kids really, really suck. They're at risk for HIV and Hep-C. They're at risk for prostitution and sex trafficking. They're at risk for overdoses. And violence. And pregnancy. And lifelong poverty. They're at risk for everything.

Even more at risk? They gay and lesbian homeless kids. Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless kids in America, between 20 and 40 percent of those kids identify as GLBTQ

And even more at risk? The trans kids. A whopping one in five trans-identified children winds up homeless before the time they hit eighteen. And these kids are terribly at risk.

As the teacher at the drop-in center, I saw the kids who chose to come downstairs to my windowless rooms, lit by the strange blue light of my glowing computer screens, to let me poke and prod at their brains, filling in the gaps left by too many self-imposed "vacations" from school, too many schools in general (one kid had been in seventeen schools between the ages of five and fourteen) and too many years when their brains were simply in survival-mode, which left precious little time for learning.

But because they chose, because they wanted their degree - and the paths that lead away from that degree - the kids that I spent my time with were the kids who were poised to beat that statistic. I spent hours and hours with them in my basement domain, drilling them, foisting books on them, quizzing them, and generally annoying them to bits until they were ready to take the test.

Now, in my teaching life prior to that job, I had certainly taught a fair amount of gay and lesbian kids and certainly a LOT of kids who were questioning their sexuality, but I had never had a transgendered child in my classroom until I worked at the homeless center.

And there - well I had many. Now, seven years later, I can call up the names and faces of fourteen different kids. There were probably more.

These were kids who had been kicked out of their homes. These were kids who had been abandoned by their families. These were kids who had loved the people who were supposed to love them forever - and were betrayed.

I loved those kids. I loved them with my guts. (It's a mom thing, I think. The majority of your emotional energy goes naturally to the individual who needs it most. It's like a homing beacon for Love Rays.)

I loved that job. I really really did.

Anyway, once I had three kids, I couldn't make the schedule work, so I had to leave the job, but I found my mind and my heart and my memory pulled back into that experience so viscerally, so completely recently, that I could almost smell the cheap cigarettes and the haven't-been-washed-in-four-years black jeans and the yesterday's liquor and Jolly Ranchers that I smelled on those kids every day.

And it was all because of a book.

Last week, I read Brooklyn, Burning, by Steve Brezenoff. And maybe it's ridiculously cruel for me to brag that I got to read this marvelous, heartbreaking little novel in the first place.

But holy crap. This book was amazing.

It's not due out until September, I think, so come fall, I'm sure I'll be blowing horns and putting out signs and forcing all y'all to open up your wallets and spring for a copy.

My point is this: there are other books that have come out recently - or that are making their way to the surface - that reflect a little part of the Trans experience in America (I AM J, for example. And Luna. And.....there was another one whose title I'm forgetting) (and, really, hallelujah, I say. We need more.) but none that I have read has achieved what Brezenoff has achieved in this lean, textured, lovely little book.

You guys. I loved this book so hard, I can hardly even express it.

Sometimes, you read a book that is larger, richer and more real than the elements that it contains.

This book, for example, has a main character in love with another character, neither of which is identified (nor do they seem to identify themselves) with a particular gender. But this is not a "trans book", nor is it a "genderqueer book".

This book has a character in the throws of an addiction, but this is not an "addiction book".

This book has a teen runaway, but this is not a "teen runaway book".

This book is a love story - no. It is a love song. And while the love relationship between Kid and Scout defines the arc upon which the story is drawn, theirs is not the only love story being told. It is also a love song to youth. It is a love song to summer, and Brooklyn, and the ecstasy of music making. It is a love song to families - the ones in which we are born into, and the families that we choose. The families of our own making. It is a love song to teeming streets and hot, packed bars, and the songs that grab us by the guts and pull us away.

This is a beautiful book - big-hearted, and tough; clear-eyed and brave. The prose reads insistent as a song, breaking the heart again and again and agin.

Brooklyn, Burning is the story of Kid - sixteen, kicked out of the house, homeless, aching and drunk (on booze, on youth, on music, on grief, on guilt). Despite the fact that Kid's innocence has been shattered nine ways from Sunday - betrayal, abandonment, loving broken people and being broken in return - Kid is still primarily an innocent. Kid is tender, vulnerable, and despite the many, many flaws, ultimately lovable. And, well, I'm a mother - and my instinct as a reader was to gather that child in my arms and offer my protection and my love. I loved Kid. From the very first page.

And what I most appreciated was the fact that Kid's story brought me right back to that room in which I hung out with a bunch of teenagers who were just as fragile, just as broken, and just as brave as Kid. I appreciated having the opportunity to experience a love story that transcends gender. To see Kid as Kid sees Kid - that is, without the pretense and limitations of the birth-gender construct - means that we can know that character in total. We understand Kid with no expectations, no assumptions, no baggage. Kid is just Kid - no more and no less, and that was an amazing experience. And what's more, I was able to experience the miracle and audaciousness of love in the context of the world-view of my beloved students all those years ago. I was able to experience a story of redemption that explores the bright sea of middles between the hard limits of "male" and "female" - where gender does not - and cannot - define people. The only definition that matters is love - and it is boundless, uncontainable and wild.

Celebrate Lois Duncan with Us! And win a set of LD books!

2011-04-18T16:42:00.001-04:00

So many generations have enjoyed Lois Duncan's eerie mysteries -- her tales of suspense and horror that kept us up at night reading, hoping that the good guys would maybe catch a break on the next page.

This week another generation gets the chance to read Lois Duncan. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers has redesigned the covers and the author herself has updated the text to add things like CDs and digital photography and cell phones to her novels, most of which were published in the 70s and 80s.

I recently read, oddly for the first time (I think -- I read so much LD as a tween it's hard to say) SUMMER OF FEAR, in which a Rachel's home is invaded by her cousin Julia -- a cousin who has recently lost her parents and to whom Rae is meant to act as a sister. Everyone seems to love Julia. She is charming and sweet and when Rae's dog attacks her cousin, her parents don't hesitate to exile him to the backyard. Rachel sees what the others don't see though -- there is an evil about Julia, and Rae is determined to figure out what she's really up to. And when Julia steals her boyfriend -- a boy who Rachel has known since childhood -- it's the last straw. Rae begins to suspect that Julia is practicing witchcraft, and when she starts to find evidence that she might be right, Rachel begins to fear for her life.

If you want to take a look at these gorgeous reissues of Lois Duncan's classic thrillers, make sure you leave a comment! Litte, Brown is sending a set of the three novels that come out this week to THREE of our readers. I'm super psyched to see some of the classics I grew up with making it into the hands of another generation. So if you'd like to read DOWN A DARK HALL, SUMMER OF FEAR, and STRANGER WITH MY FACE, just leave a comment below and make sure to include a way for us to contact you! One caveat: US addresses only, please!

Rock the Drop! And a Giveaway!!!

2011-04-13T13:11:00.001-04:00

So, Thursday is the Readergirlz annual Rock the Drop, a really cool day in which folks are encouraged to leave YA books in public places, to sort of pass the YA book love along.

Since we obviously love YA here at the Five, and since I have a ton of CYBILs books that I'll be dropping around my town in the middle of Pennsylvania, and since the likelihood of any of you finding those books is slim, I thought it would be cool to give away a few books here on the blog.

YOU CAN WIN! It's easy. Just leave a comment below telling us which book you'd like. We're giving away:

Amy and Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson
The Unwritten Rule by Elizabeth Scott
I Now Pronounce You Someone Else by Erin McCahan
Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel
By the Time You Read This I'll Be Dead by Julie Ann Peters

Amazing books! Amazing authors! Our own Internet version of the book drop!

Winners will be announced next Wednesday, and will be chosen randomly. Please, only U.S. addresses.

All right, have at it!

Review: THE TIME-TRAVELING FASHIONISTA by Bianca Turestky

2011-04-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

Wow. If there was ever a book that understood my passion for vintage fashion, it's this one. Add a savvy teenager whose voice I can totally relate to (Louise and I would totally have been BFF in high school), a trip back to the Titanic (whoa!) and gorgeous full-color fashion illustrations throughout, and I'm hooked. Bianca Turetsky's THE TIME-TRAVELING FASHIONISTA is a must read for all you girlie girls this summer.

I mean, it definitely helps that the story is compelling -- girl gets invitation to exclusive vintage sale, girl tries on mysterious dres, girl gets sucked back in time and is thrust into the life of a glamorous film star....and girl has to save herself and her new friends from dying on the freaking Titanic? I mean, hello...it doesn't get much more riveting. And you know what? The writing is absolutely wonderful as well. Just plain magical!

So, in celebration of this fabbity-fab new book for teen and tween fashionistas, Little, Brown has offered to give away a brand new copy to one of our YA-5 readers! So leave us a comment to enter. Winners will be determined by the random number generating faeries. GOOD LUCK!

Review: PERCIVAL'S ANGEL by Anne Eliot Crompton

2011-04-04T14:40:00.000-04:00

If you love Arthurian legend, knightly battles, and tales of The Good Folk (you know, faeries!), I have a book for you.

The third in Anne Eliot Crompton's series of companion novels taking place in the times of Merlin and the Knights of the Round table, PERCIVAL'S ANGEL is an adventure novel sprinkled with magic and mystery. Percy has known the Fey Forest as home his whole life -- his mother brought him there when all of her other sons and even her husband were killed as knights. She never wanted Percy to become a knight, and it was her life's goal to prevent this, even if it meant living in isolation among the faeries. But when a few of Arthur's knights stumble into the forest, Percy knows that his path in life is to pursue knighthood. He will have nothing else.

Lili is fey, grew up not knowing her mother, as is traditional for fey. But she's always known Percy. And over the years she's developed a desire to understand the human heart. In fact, she wants one on her own. When Percy decides to go questing, Lili accompanies him, both as a protector, but in pursuit of her own goal -- the human heart she yearns for.

And elegantly written novel, PERCIVAL'S ANGEL is filled with prose that is almost magical in its construction. The reader is immediately swept into the world of magic and knights and ladies and kings. While this is the third in a series, it does stand alone (I haven't read the first two books myself) and it's an adventure that readers of Robin McKinley and Ursula K. LeGuin will love to follow.

WINNERS announced for two signed copies of THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORES by the indomitable MICHELE YOUNG-STONE!

2011-03-31T13:44:00.002-04:00

So excited to announce these winners today! Kari graciously lent me her Thursday post to do so, so thanks, Kari!

A reminder, this is what our lovely winners will be getting:


Signed, sealed, and delivered by Ms. Michele! (emphasis on the SIGNED!)

I'm really excited to share this book, one of my favorite reads of 2010, with two of the YA-5's readers. I hope y'all enjoy it and will blog about it when you've finished! And again, thanks to Michele Young-Stone and her publisher, Crown, for providing the loot!

Without further ado, here are the shiny, sparkly, lucky winners!

KATE and CHOLISOSE! Y'all, I'll be sending you an email. If the email associated with your blogger account (or the one you left me is inaccurate), please be sure to get in touch with me at e.kristin.anderson AT gmail DOT com. THANKS! And ENJOY!

I went to the Rio Grande Valley and all I brought you was this blog post

2011-03-31T12:01:00.016-04:00

You guys! It's me, Kari! I know you probably thought I'd been abducted by aliens and enslaved on a ship with a bunch of other writers forced to write exceedingly high quality children's books for the kids of planet xl932, but that is UNTRUE.

I have been working on my very own books, trying to finish up a new one, work on some other new ones, and still maintain the facade that I am a present and attentive parent.

Hard.

But ALSO, I have been gallivanting around Texas visiting with librarians and teachers and students. Earlier this week, I spent three amazing days in the Rio Grande Valley as part of the Texas Book Festival's Reading Rock Stars program.

Gwen Zepeda is on the left, holding her book I KICK THE BALL, and that's me with MIKE STELLAR.

The program brings authors to economically disadvantaged public schools in the state of Texas. And not just that, each child at a participating school receives a signed copy of the author's book. During this latest visit, over 4,000 books were handed out!

I joined forces with authors from New York and Seattle and cities all over Texas. Split up between us, we visited 6 elementary schools in the Valley. My schools were Clinton Elementary in Penitas, TX and Kika de la Garza Elementary in Mission, TX.

It was very exciting to visit a school named after Bill Clinton!

Bill Clinton was the first president I was old enough to vote for.

At Clinton, Gwen Zepeda spoke to the Pre-K through 2nd grade kids about her picture book, I KICK THE BALL and then I spoke to 3rd-5th graders about MIKE STELLAR.

Those kiddos could not have welcomed us more graciously if we were JK Rowling and Dr. Suess.

The kids at Kika de la Garza held up signs!

Amazing Mike Stellar artwork by 4th grade students at Clinton

At Kika de la Garza, I had the pleasure of visiting the school with author Samantha Vamos. She spoke to the younger students about her picture book, THE CAZUELA THAT THE FARM MAIDEN STIRRED, and the older kids got a crash course on space adventures from me.

Samantha Vamos and I are posing with the Kika de la Garza Millionaire Readers - kids who have read a million words or more. Check out the beauty queen sashes they made for us. AWESOME.

During these school visits I had some of the most rewarding, exciting and emotional encounters with students I have ever experienced. When the kids learned they'd each get a book, the excitement in the room was electric with cheers and squeals. I haven't given so many hugs and posed for so many pictures since my own wedding, I think!

Presenting to a very attentive audience. Check out the posters on stage!

One very special moment of the trip occurred while I was passing out books. The students line up, and it's a bit of an assembly line, trying to hand out 300-400 books in a short amount of time. One little guy stopped, though, and handed me a note. He'd been paying close attention when I spoke about my own kids, and told them that my youngest son, Isaac, has a scar on his forehead just like Harry Potter.

"Hi my name is Isaac and I have four scares on my head"

He grinned at me as I read his note, and then I told him it looked like my Isaac wasn't the only Isaac with a Harry Potter head! Big smiles all around.

I am just so touched to have had this opportunity, and for that I thank Clay Smith of the Texas Book Festival and Blair Newberry, the outreach coordinator for TBF, who organizes the author visits for the Reading Rock Stars program. I also want to thank the amazing and gracious English department at UTPA. Not only are they partners with TBF in bringing authors to the Valley schools, they were wonderful hosts, who drove us around the towns and took care of anything little thing we could think of.

(Special shoutout here to Amy Cummins, of UTPA, who took me and Samantha fourwheeling in her Camry in order to avoid a road closure that would have made us late to our breakfast with the millionaire readers at Kika. She drove us over a yard and through a ditch to get around a wreck. A BEAST behind the wheel, that Amy Cummins.)

And, of course, I want to thank the students and faculty of WJ Clinton Elementary and Kika de la Garza Elementary. YOU GUYS ROCK.

Kids, books, new friends - and of course breakfast tacos. I don't think a children's book author could ask for anything better.

WIN a copy of THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS by Michele Young-Stone

2011-03-28T13:35:00.001-04:00

One thing that I love about books is their indefinability. You know, we love to label things -- books being no exceptions. This book is YA, this book is sci fi, this book is for adults -- you know the drill. But every once in a while you come across a book that seems shareable amongst all readers. Or, you know, at least crosses that boundary between the YA audience and the adult world.

One of my favorite such books is THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS by the inimitable Michele Young-Stone. Today, we are giving away copies of Michele's book. Because a) it is an awesome book that, while labelled as "adult fiction" is absolutely a book worth sharing with YA readers and b) because I love this book and Michele is awesome enough to send my readers copies and c) we are celebrating next week's paperback release of this, her debut novel.

I could talk about this book for days and months and years, so let me just tell you what a few of the fancy reviewers had to say:

"Yes, it's a book about lightning, but it's so much more. It's about the interconnectedness of our stories, our seemingly lonely and individual sufferings. It's about the strength of the human spirit. It's about finding redemption where you least expect it. This book, like lightning itself, will take your breath away." Our State Magazine

Young-Stone has written an exceptionally rich and sure-handed debut, full of complex characters, brilliantly described. . . . Her style certainly has an electric immediacy." The Boston Globe

Author Michele Young-Stone
with her hardcover debut!

So if you want to win your own brand-new, shiny, autographed(!) paperback of THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS -- which you will have in your hands before it even hits store shelves -- all you have to do is leave a comment. I promise, this won't be a book you'll soon forget. I mean, Publisher's Weekly named it one of the best debuts of 2010. (And yours truly does not disagree! In fact, it was one of my favorite books PERIOD of 2010!)

To review: All you have to do to win is leave a comment (though retweeting and all that is appreciated). Two winners will be selected by the random number generating faeries, and results will be posted on Thursday. Good luck!

Book Recommendation: The Replacement

2011-03-23T14:46:00.000-04:00

I’ve been spending the past few weeks catching up on schoolwork and reading, so my blogging has been minimal (read: non-existent). My TBR pile was out of control, mostly with library books way past their due date (library fines are my way of giving back to the community). So for the next few weeks I’m going to talk about some of the books I’ve been reading.

First up: The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff

The Set Up:

Mackie Doyle is not one of us. Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is fighting to survive in the human world.

Mackie would give anything to live among us, to practice on his bass or spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world, or theirs.

My Thoughts:

I liked this book, but it’s definitely one of those books I liked with reservation. The story is cool, the build up around what’s going around with Gentry definitely gives a creepy vibe, and I’m a huge fan of stories that don’t necessarily rely on sparkles and flash to get the reader’s attention. The writing was so solid that there were passages where I wished I'd written it. I mean, this was seriously a book that pulled me along, and kept me reading even after I wanted to go to bed. Mostly because I didn't want to turn out the lights :)

I really liked this book and the story, but I did have one eensy-weensy problem. Mackie.

Ah, Mackie.

Poor Mackie is a conflicted character. He lives in a world he doesn’t belong in, but has no clue how to fix his dilemma. When Tate (by far my favorite character in the book) asks for his help to find her sister, he blows her off. Repeatedly. It’s understandable why he does it, he has his own secrets to protect, but it doesn’t really make him any more endearing. I can handle a character who is just selfish or shallow, but Mackie isn’t. He’s conflicted. Unfortunately, through a lot of the story. This inner conflict of his makes him seem wishy-washy and weak, instead of introspective. I wanted to like him more, but he really ended up being one of my least favorite characters in the book.

Thank goodness for Tate.

For me, Tate carried the novel. She’s determined and doesn’t take no for an answer. She fights for her sister, and refuses to let anyone put her in a corner. If it wasn’t for Tate, this book wouldn't have been a bust, but it wouldn't have kept me nearly as engaged as it did. I liked Tate enough to put up with Mackie and his brooding.

In fact, this book sort of leaves things open for a sequel. If that happens, I really hope we spend more time in Tate’s point of view. She’s definitely a character I’d like to spend three hundred pages with.

So, if you like books that defy the traditional tropes out there, you’ll probably like this. If you like strong, kickass girls, you’ll like this.

If brooding guys make you want to hit something, you should probably skip this.

Overall, though, I think this is a good read for a stormy night.

YA, Pop Culture, and You, the READER!

2011-03-21T08:00:00.003-04:00

Hi everyone. I've had this blog post rattling around in my brain for a few weeks now and I think it's finally time to put it out there. There's no place like the YA-5 to question the norms and find out what the readers REALLY think of industry standards and yadda yadda yadda.

So here's the thing: pop culture in YA can be kind of a hot button. Some people think that referencing a popular actress or hit song immediately dates a book -- and I can't argue with that. If I set out tomorrow to write a book, whether it's YA contemporary or adult horror, I'm probably not going to talk about my protagonist's addiction to Ke$ha. No matter how catchy Ke$ha's music is. I mean, I have no idea which pop stars are going to be remembered just two years from now (which, even if my book sold the day I finished it, is probably about how long it would take for the novel to hit stores), let alone five or ten years.

Do you watch your fave
shows with your friends?

But here's the dilemma: a lot of teens -- a lot of people -- really think in terms of pop culture. We schedule our evenings around our favorite TV shows. (I have friends who go to Glee-watching parties, and in high school I had my BFF over once a week for Buffy night.) We stand in line for hours to be in the front row at a concert for our favorite band. We make play lists for ourselves and our friends on iTunes. We idolize actresses and models and pop stars and emulate their styles. Is there any way to write a book without talking about some of these things? Sure. Do I want to? Not really.

I aspire to write characters that feel like your friends, your family. I like it when I'm inside a character's head and I can see what she likes and how she relates to her world. If my character is an audiophile, you can bet she's going to relate to her world through her favorite bands. If my character is a musician, she'll probably talk about her influences. If my character loves fashion, she's definitely going to describe clothing in terms of style icons. For some, it might cut it to make up names. This doesn't always work for me.

So when is it too much pop culture? I think it comes down to context. If I can talk about a band from 1994 that you don't know about, and make you feel like you know why it's important, does that work for you? If my book takes place in 1980, is it more obnoxious to have my character reference made up movies and fashion icons, or to talk about real ones that you don't know much about?

Like all things, I think pop culture in literature is about balance. And like all writing, there's got to be a reason for anything an author puts into a book, whether it's violence or a sex scene or swear words or a sub plot or your character's iPod playlist. I mean, if I can go again to HIGH FIDELITY, that book simply wouldn't have been right without all the real pop culture infusion it showcased. Music is what makes that book work. As a reader, what makes a music-y, pop-culture-y book work for you?

Celebrate International Women's Week With Me!

2011-03-07T15:27:00.002-05:00

Hi everyone! Sorry about the crazy inconsistency of my posts over here at the YA-5 lately. I promise, I'm going to work hard to make my Mondays awesome! BAM. There, I said it -- I PROMISE!

Okay, so, there's this thing this week. It's INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S WEEK. Yeah, feminism is a dirty word to some. I know some women who don't even like to call themselves feminists because they associate the word with man-haters and bra-burners. To me, feminism just means being able to be who I want and do what I want and achieve what I want regardless of my gender. I believe in equality. I believe in fierce, fabulous ladies making names for themselves in a world that would rather they stay silent. I believe in stay at home moms and career women. I believe in girls who want to be quarterbacks and cheer captains. I believe in fashion models and rock stars and engineers and math teachers. And, DUH, I believe in women writers.

Author Cayla Kluver

So this week over at my personal blog, I'm celebrating women in writing. From LOTS of different angles. Today, the fabulous Cayla Kluver (whose debut novel LEGACY will be coming out with HarlequinTEEN later this year) is talking about writing "That Woman" -- the Mina Harker, the Buffy Summers -- the woman that every man and even a lot of the ladies want to write off but, you know, they sort of kick butt anyway?

I love Cayla's post and I am looking forward to the lineup I have for the rest of the week: Tess Hardwick on the sometimes limiting labels of "chicklit" and "women's fiction," The YA-5's own K.A. Holt on writing male-voiced middle grade, Tiffany Reisz on writing naughty novels WITHOUT a penname, Gretchen McNeil on being bold, and Jeanette Larson on literary awards. I'm so so so excited for this week, and I hope you'll join me in celebrating the literary ladies who make our bookshelves so much more badass. And, you know, go give some chicks a hug today, okay? The world would totally suck without women!

The End

2011-02-23T11:17:00.002-05:00

So, recently a couple of my favorite series have ended. Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely series’ last book came out yesterday, and Last Sacrifice, the final book in the Vampire Academy series, came out in December. I’m usually okay with a series ending, as I’m a big believer of leaving before you’re thrown out, but I find that I’m not so anxious to give up some of my series anymore.

Reading a series is like eating comfort food: you know what to expect, you’re familiar with the flavor, and it always satisfies. Sure, some books aren’t as good as others in the series, but I know the characters and feel like I have a vested interest in the outcome of their story from page one. With a book featuring new characters I have to grow to like the characters. Sometimes that never happens. Sometimes I’m only sticking through their story because I’m waiting for that moment when everything falls apart.

Either way, I much prefer reading a new book in a series than something completely new. Maybe it’s because my reading roots are in fantasy, where a series can have eleventy billion books, but I hate leaving characters.

So, what do you think? Are series something you like, or are you strictly a stand-alone type person? Or do you just pick up anything that grabs your attention?

On Ass-Kicking Heroines (and other women I have known)

2011-02-22T23:31:00.000-05:00

Once - long, long, ever-so-long ago - I was a high school student. Now, I've written before about my insufferable dorkiness, and my loneliness, and the fact that I was out of step, out of rhythm and generally odd. But what I haven't blogged about was about my athleticism - and how my experience as an athlete changed how I thought about myself, how I thought about my body, and how it changed who I am as a writer now.

For a little context, though, let me tell you a little about the high school I went to: it looked like a prison. I say this without hyperbole or histrionics. My high school was designed by the same guy who designed the state prison in Stillwater, Minnesota. It had almost no windows - and those it had were narrow little strips of cloudy plexiglass that let in precious little natural light. It was built from slab upon slab of dull brown concrete, reinforced by steel. Inside, the rooms were lit by harsh, flickering florescent lights, and the doors could be locked from the outside in case of "emergencies" - though we were never told what, in the opinion of the powers that be, constituted an "emergency". The student body was dynamic, involved and diverse in almost every respect - by economics, by race, by first-languages, by immigration status. We were one of the first high schools in America to offer four years of Native American language study (Dakota/Lakota and Ojibwe), and the first high school to have a Hmong student association. As a white person, I was a minority - an experience that precious few white people get to have in this country, much to their detriment, if you ask me. As a student body, we had all kinds of differences, but there was an over-arching spirit of comraderie and unity that sought to see the differences in our community as part of our strength - and we celebrated it.

However, there were problems. The school itself was situated in a neighborhood that found itself the unwitting setting for a gang turf war. Gunshots were commonplace - not inside the school, but we could hear them nonetheless. My freshman year, one of my classmates was shot in the belly at a party - he was wearing the wrong colors, apparently. (He lived, though barely) My sophomore year, my principal, upon learning that two rival gangs were facing off in the street in front of the school, was hit over the head with a crow-bar, and was brought in, blood streaming down his face, right in the middle of lunch.

To top it off, the parks (not to mention the vacant houses) nearby were riddled with crime - drugs, prostitution and some terrible attacks against women. The girls in my high school were given dark and sinister warnings about Places Where We Could Not Go and Things We Should Never Wear In Public and Things That We Must Never Do.

But then I became an athlete. And then everything changed.

To be scared of the world around you is to relinquish your personal power. There is something heady and marvelous about snatching that power back. I joined the cross country team. I got strong. I got fast. I was by no means the fastest kid on the team, but I was Varsity, could run a mile in five and a half minute, and could bench my own weight. I could beat boys bigger than me in arm wrestling matches and hip check hockey players when they got fresh.

My body became an instrument of power - and I was drunk on it.

My friends were athletes too, and we took it as a point of pride to scorn any and every bit of safety advice that our teachers had given us. We ran in the dark. We ran through alleys and tough neighborhoods. We re-designed our routes to take us to the places where bad things had recently happened.

Bring it on, we were saying to the world. You mess with us and we will take you down. We will mess you up, then we will run ten miles. We are unbeatable, unstoppable, uncatchable.

And the thing is: we believed it.

And nothing bad ever happened, though I wonder what would have happened if it did. I wonder how we would respond to the intersection of our perception of our own power and the harsh reality of true violence. Clearly, we lived in a fantasy of our own making, but despite the fact that we took some stupid, stupid risks, I feel like we deserved to feel that way. We deserved to be bad-ass. We deserved to be heroines.

And we deserved, for just a little while, to feel that sense of unchecked power.

A new butt-kicking supergirl for paranormal fans.

2011-02-21T11:00:00.011-05:00

Riley was hoping to trap a simple Biblio-Fiend making a nuisance of itself at the library -- one of her first traps on her own -- but instead of making a name for herself as a decent trapper she's ended up all over the web in a video that makes her look like a total spaz. You know, books flying, shelves toppling, the Biblio nearly escaping.

She's the only female Trapper in the Guild, and the old boys' club already thinks the only reason she's an apprentice is that her dad is the legendary Paul Blackthorne. This so isn't helping. And the last person she wants to see is the first person who shows up -- cute but obnoxious Beck, a guy who idolizes her dad and treats her like a little kid. And he doesn't believe her when she says that the demons must be working together -- a low-grade Bilio-Fiend can't create that kind of chaos on its own.

It's not long before things get even worse, when the unthinkable befalls Riley, Beck, and the entire Guild. It's a tragedy that makes stresses like Riley's crush on fellow apprentice Simon and her strained friendship with civilian Peter and even the economic upheaval that is her hometown of Atlanta seem like small potatoes. With a whole new -- and scary and tragic -- look on life, Riley has a new mission: find the Grade Five Geo-Fiend who created this disaster and put an end to it all.

Set in a post-apocalyptic-y Atlanta that most of us wouldn't recognize, and built on intricately woven mythology, THE DEMON TRAPPER'S DAUGHTER by Jana Oliver is a fast-paced, exciting read. With sparks of romance and bone-chilling fight scenes, the intrigue and the action compel the reader forward with each turn of the page. I am eagerly anticipating the sequel, set for release in fall of this year. In the meantime, if you've loved the tough heroines in series like Lili St. Crow's STRANGE ANGELS and Richelle Mead's VAMPIRE ACADEMY, get thee to a bookseller or library and pick up THE DEMON TRAPPER'S DAUGHTER.

How Much Time Do You Spend Online?

2011-02-18T12:05:00.000-05:00

I spend a lot of time on the computer. A lot. At least, I dunno, 14-15 hours a day? And when I’m not on the computer, I have my trusty Droid phone in my right hand – just in case my agent needs me or my editor needs me or Alex Pettyfer needs me. (Kidding, kidding)

How much time do you spend on the computer?

I have a day job, and then I come home and write and do social networking and watch great videos on YouTube (a Tribute to Gwildor from Masters of the Universe, anybody?).

All very important things.

So I recently had the opportunity to read an ARC of AWAKEN, by Katie Kacvinsky. It comes out on May 23, 2011. Here’s a description:

“Maddie lives in a world where everything is done on the computer. Whether it’s to go to school or on a date, people don’t venture out of their home. There’s really no need. For the most part, Maddie’s okay with the solitary, digital life—until she meets Justin. Justin likes being with people. He enjoys the physical closeness of face-to-face interactions. People aren’t meant to be alone, he tells her.

Suddenly, Maddie feels something awakening inside her—a feeling that maybe there is a different, better way to live. But with society and her parents telling her otherwise, Maddie is going to have to learn to stand up for herself if she wants to change the path her life is taking.”

I enjoyed this book and it made me think a lot about my own life. In the book, Maddie does most things from her own bedroom, and her dad likes it that way because it keeps her out of trouble and keeps her safe, etc. Maddie’s never been kissed, never been on a real date, never done much of anything.

I have a hard time making friends in real life. I have a hard time going out to dinner with a random group of people I don’t have anything in common with. I even get upset when work colleagues who aren’t friends ask me to get coffee.

It just makes me uncomfortable.

For a long time, I wrote my stories in solitary, with only my husband and my dad as beta readers. I got all my “energy” from myself, from doing the things I enjoy like reading and getting coffee by myself (or with my husband) and eating Mexican food. Sure, I have friends, but it’s best to have friends who share your passions. My passion is writing, so I felt lonely for a long time.

And then I discovered the online writing community, and my world blew up. I talk to so many authors every day. And I enjoy it. I’m comfortable with it. I’m more social than I’ve been in years, since college. What’s even better is that I can control who I talk to and for how long.

What I liked best about AWAKEN is that the author showed that what’s most important is balance.

In that regard, I’ve met some online writing friends at conferences, and I really enjoyed it. It didn’t feel forced. And we got drinks and Mexican Food!, and talked “in the real world.”

I’m still working on finding the balance in other areas of my life, but I am very grateful for the online writing community. I’m grateful for all the great friends I’ve made.

How about you all?

Do you prefer being online, or meeting people in person? What makes you most comfortable?

Can you imagine being a writer and NOT having the online writing community?

Books that would be better with explosions.

2011-02-07T19:23:00.010-05:00

So on Friday Miranda posted about how much she loves love. Like, she loves love in contemporary stories and she loves love in dystopian and fantasy stories but mostly she loves love in realistic stories. And of course, I was all like, oh Miranda, what book ISN'T better with an explosion? Because, you know, love is great and all, but explosions are kinda where it's at. And you know what? THAT MIRANDA NEVER ANSWERED. So here, for you (and Miranda), I present a very short list of books that would be better with explosions.

1. ROMEO & JULIET. I mean, we all already know what happens in ROMEO & JULIET. There are no surprises when you get to Freshman English and your teacher hands out Dover Thrift editions to the entire class and you are all like, oh, hey, star-crossed lovers. BUT, what if the Capulets were all, check it out, we have TNT! And ILLEGAL FIREWORKS FROM OVER THE COUNTY LINE! Yeah, violence never solved anything, but it's perhaps more entertaining (and, weirdly, a lot less macabre) then the age-old tale of double suicide in the name of romance.

2. MOBY DICK. Okay so I haven't read this book in, well, forever so I think there might actually be an explosion somewhere in its later chapters, but as you might remember I am of the PLEASE JUST MAKE IT STOP contingency when it comes to Melville. So I'm thinking that if the boat exploded and the whale exploded and Ishmael exploded and everything exploded in, say, chapter 2, okay, yeah. I think I'd read that book. All 20 pages of it.

~~3. EVERYONE POOPS.~~ Just kidding. This might be the only book that wouldn't be improved by an explosion.

3. BLUBBER. Okay, we all know how I feel about THE JUDY, right? I love her and want to be her and think she's like sort of maybe a demigod. But here's the thing, imagine if BLUBBER were more like CARRIE. And, yeah, I know the mean girl gets her just desserts in this book, but what if the girl getting picked on could SHOOT LASERS FROM HER EYES. That'll learn some mean kids real fast, no? Or, you know, at least make for an EXPLOSIVE plot twist. Like, edge of your seat stuff. Think about it, THE JUDY. Dystopian robot girl BLUBBER could be your next bestseller.

4. BLUEBERRIES FOR SAL. Oh how I love Robert McClosky. And in this classic tale of a girl picking blueberries with her mom, and a bear cub doing the same, there is just so much cute and sweet you sort of, well, explode. But picture this: the bears are not bears but aliens. And they do not want Sal near the blueberries that they have travelled LIGHT YEARS to collect as data. So the BEAR ALIENS go on the offensive. Yeah, Sal. You had better take your pail and run, because it's about to get epic up in here. Fire and brimstone style.

5. TWILIGHT. Hey, I'm not knocking it. I read all four door-stop volumes. But I'm just saying. Wouldn't TWILIGHT be better if something BLEW UP? I know, I know, there's that car accident where Bella ALMOST DIES and Edward is all TO THE RESCUE but it's not an explosion. There is no fire. No debris propelled at high speed into someone's eyeballs. I seriously think Meyer should look into incorporating explosions into her next work of fiction. I think that, maybe, if there had been an explosion, Jacob would have had a chance. And as a member of Team Jacob, I'm totally into that. I mean, Edward would have a hard time rescuing Bella from EXPLOSIVE FIRE, since, you know, fire kills vampires. Jacob would just get sexy scars from the ordeal. WIN.

So there you go. Five books that would be better with EXPLOSIONS. Not that I endorse violence. No, actually, I do. Just, you know, IN FICTION.

What books do you think would be better if stuff blew up? Tell me in the comments! TELL ME!

Contemporary Love vs. Paranormal and Dystopian Love: Which Do You Love More?

2011-02-04T09:51:00.000-05:00

I love apocalyptic and dystopian stories. LOVE them.

I am not sure why it’s so fun to watch Los Angeles get destroyed by tornados in The Day After Tomorrow, considering people are dying and all, but any time this movie is on, I stop to watch it. Same goes for 2012 and Independence Day and Dante’s Peak and Volcano and…

I guess I’m an Armageddon whore. (pun intended)

But when it comes to the actual romances in these movies, I could care less. Jeff Goldblum is having problems with his lady friend in Independence Day? Who cares? Did you just see the White House get blown to smithereens? Who cares that Jake Gyllenhaal can’t tell Emmy Rossum he likes her in The Day After Tomorrow? A giant wave just took out Manhattan! And helicopters are freezing in midair!

When it comes to books, I feel the exact same way.

A lot of people loved MATCHED and TWILIGHT and DELIRIUM because of the longing. The characters in these books couldn’t be together because of some outside force. Sure, I care if the guy and girl get together or not, but it’s not the main reason I’m reading and loving these books.

For instance, in I AM NUMBER FOUR, there’s a big romance, but I honestly didn’t care that much. I was more interested in how John had to change his life all the time, and the logistics involved with that. How did he get his money? How did he blend into society so seamlessly? How did he buy all new things every time he had to adopt a new persona?

In MATCHED, I was interested in the 100 poems, 100 books, 100 songs, etc. The government in this book decided that there could only be 100 of any given thing, and the rest would be destroyed. I thought, how did the government choose which books to save? Which books would I save? Which songs? I was way more interested in imagining those scenarios than whether the main character chose Ky or Xander.

And with TWILIGHT, which I still love of course, it’s not like any guy I’ve ever dated has thirsted for my blood. (I hope)

I guess what I’m saying is that “I’m Not Feeling It.”

I didn’t cry when I read DELIRIUM or XVI or ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, even though I loved the books. However, I bawled like a baby when reading WHERE SHE WENT and AMY AND ROGER’S EPIC DETOUR. Hell, I even cry when reading Elizabeth Scott’s books and Simon and Schuster Romanic Comedies.

I got really upset when reading PROM AND PREJUDICE for crying out loud.

I think I’ve realized that I relate more to contemporary love stories, and feel more for the characters, because I can relate. Because “that could happen to me.”

I could want to be with the hot Will Darcy of the nearby prep school, but because he told me he doesn’t like scholarship students, and I am a scholarship student, I’ll never speak to him again. Even though I want him.

Or maybe this guy wants to be with me, but I want to be with his brother, and then eventually come to realize that the first guy was the better choice. But he’s moved on to another girl. That could actually happen!

Or maybe I want to be with this guy who’s in a gang, but I live in the ritzy part of Chicago, and he’s involved in all sorts of life-threatening drama. That could actually happen!

Now compare that with MATCHED and DELIRIUM. The government won’t let two people be together? How can I relate to that? I highly doubt I’ll wake up tomorrow to find that the U.S. Government won’t let me date the guy I want.

I didn’t cry while reading MATCHED or DELIRIUM, but SWEETHEARTS by Sara Zarr? You best your ass I did. J

Don’t get me wrong – I did find the guys in these dystopian books very swoon-worthy.

On the flip side, I recently read and loved WITHER. I was most surprised when I actually started getting interested in the love story. I had thought I’d be more interested in the virus destroying Earth’s population.

What kind of love story do you prefer?

Did you feel more while reading these dystopian and paranormal stories than I did?

Do you all think I’m a nut now? J

The Lost Art of Consistency

2011-02-02T10:07:00.005-05:00

I'm terrible at being consistent. I'm one of those "put the fires out as they light" kind of people, which means I'm usually running in several directions at any given time with no idea what I'm going to do when I get there. I am not the person you want to ask to plan a large event. I'll show up ten minutes before the party starts with a couple of pizzas, some two liters of soda, a cake that says "Happy Birthday Ethel", and a mass text message to everyone I know asking them if they want to stop by for Bobby's birthday party. I am the definition of "phoning it in."

But it kind of makes me mad when some of my favorite authors do the same thing.

Recently I've read several books by authors I rely on, and they've been, well, pretty lame. And when I say "lame" I don't mean that I've read them in one sitting only to find the world's worst cliffhanger (although that also irks). No, I mean the book has sat on a shelf half-read for over a month because either the writing, the characters, or the storyline are so boring that I start to nod off every time I read a page. It's a tragedy, and I want it to stop.

One of the reasons I get an author's follow up is because I feel like I can depend on it to be good. That's the covenant of repeat business. You give me a good product, I will continue to buy said product. No one wants to plunk down twenty bucks for a "meh" book, and one of the reasons people don't try new authors (not me, I love debuts) is because they are spending money on an old favorite. But what do you do when the old favorite disappoints? To me, it's actually more irritating than when a debut isn't the greatest, because there's an expectation of something there that never develops. With a debut, there's no expectation, or at least not as strong of one.

It's depressing when I have a book with a bookmark gathering dust.

Does it bother you when a favorite author's book doesn't move you? More importantly, do you continue to buy their books, or find something else to read?

Art Intersecting Art Intersecting Art

2011-02-01T14:16:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite museums on earth is right here in my hometown - The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Now, the reason for this particular favoritism has a little to do with the quality of the art itself (though, it's astonishing) but has more to do with the relationship I've had with this museum over the years. It's where we took our Elementary School field trips. It's where I once went on dates when we were past the mini-golf stage but weren't yet of drinking age. It's where I took my kids when they were little and we just needed to get out of the house.

The MIA has, over the years, worked hard to make itself an inclusive place, to democratize art - it's free, for one; it has a play room and programming for children; it features free tours and lectures and music on Sunday mornings and hands-on art projects that parents can pretend are for their children to do, but secretly enjoy that odd satisfaction of decoupage and clay and tempura paints.

So, I love this museum. And I try to come over here at least once a month. But I do so on my own, on the sly and for my own particular reasons.

I come to the institute because it makes me a better writer.

It started out with one painting. (Doesn't it always?) Once, when I was much younger than I am today, I came to the museum on a date with a young man who was, let's face it, something of a dud. No imagination, no spark. Hot? Yes. Smart? Not so much. Since he wasn't much for conversation, I focused my attention on the art. And then I saw her.

Lucretia. Despite the fact that her story has been told and re-told by men (always men) - her resistance to Titus, her refusal to allow herself to be made a pawn, her suicide, not as acquiescence, but as defiance to the perversions of power - no matter who is telling the story - Shakespeare, Chaucer, Heywood, St. Augustine, and Livy, to name just a few - the person of Lucretia remains: The woman who stood up for herself, who called rape what it was, and by her death, spawned a revolution, a government, a republic, and a new way of life.

Go Lucretia.

And this painting, when she is standing in front of her husband and father, when the knife is still wet with her blood and her tears shimmer at the rims of her eyes - I know that Rembrandt gets her. Go Rembrandt.

So I kept coming back, always to see Lucretia. And her voice has whispered in my work - her defiance, her impatience with power, her willingness to hold wrongdoers accountable, even if her own death was a requirement to move the wheels of justice - has insisted its way into my pages again and again.

And it isn't just Lucretia. Given that I am not a visual artist, and never could be, and despite the fact that I am not a visual thinker at all, I am still thrilled by the visual arts. The hands that lovingly carved Saint Catherine of Alexandria, for example:

have made their way into a story that I'm working on now. Notice the man she's standing on. Notice the serenity on her face as she presses him into the ground. I've always been a big fan of Saint Catherine (despite the fact that most folks tell me that she likely didn't exist. I don't care. In my heart she existed, and continues to exist, so really, isn't that enough?) and I absolutely love this statue. In my story, my heroine has a very specific reason to portray these two people in this - ahem - rather compromising position. More on that later.

And the painting of this panel: found its way into one of my stories a number of years ago. Currently, there's an exhibit that's on tour called "The Mourners", which were originally carved for the tomb of John the Fearless in Dijon, France.

These statues are delicate, heartbreaking and utterly, utterly thrilling. Each one demonstrates his grief in his own particular fashion, and each one communicates that grief to the viewer through gesture, stance and expression. And it isn't the individual expressions of grief that is so stunning to me. Rather, it is the assertion that grief is a communal emotion. Grief is something we share, it is something we burden one another with, and by burdening, release one another as well. I stood in front of these statues, transfixed, hardly breathing, my mouth and eyes wide open and astonished.

I'll probably be back tomorrow.

I will probably steal . . . something. A shrug, a turn of the neck, a delicate unfurling of the hand, and sneak it into a story. More as that develops.

So here's my question for the lot of you: What are the museums or paintings or sculptures that call out to you? What pieces of art has fed you as a writer or a reader or just as a person?

You know how sometimes you read a book and you're like HEY AUTHOR GET OUT OF MY HEAD? Yeah. That thing.

2011-01-24T19:48:00.004-05:00

Ever been just minding your own business, enjoying a good book, when you realized the author has clearly been stalking you? Or perhaps even tapped your phones? Or implanted a microchip in your brain?

You're like, holy crap, how the frick did you know that about me? Because, there is no way that moment could have been captured without a direct link into your cerebellum.

Yeah. It's a little unnerving. But it's also kind of cool. It's one of the best things about books, really.

One of the books that does that for me is HIGH FIDELITY by Nick Hornby. It was one of the first books that I connected to as a young adult, even though it's not a YA book and it's totally about thirty-somethings. What does this say about me? Well, there's the fact that the narrator has a certain sense of self-importance, worked in a record store, and defined his life in terms of the pop culture around him. He made top-five lists (I used to make top-tens obssessively), mix tapes (check), and big mistakes in his relationships (oh yeah). And, okay, he was totally a dude, but he got me. Nick Hornby got me.

I still go back to that book as a home base. I look at passages and smile. I'm still angry at one of the characters. I'm still nostalgic for Championship Vinyl. And I watch the movie that was based on the book as if I'm sitting down with friends. It's just that cool.

What books feel like that to you? Is there anything that just boggled your mind when you read it, like the author might even be yourself in a parallel universe? I need to know. Because, apparently, I've been exactly like a 34-year-old, male record shop owner since I was about 19.

Don't Forget to Pay it Forward

2011-01-21T11:21:00.001-05:00

I hope this post doesn’t make you think I’m a tremendous *&#^(#*. I’m not, I promise. Okay, most of the time I’m not a tremendous #*)&#%&#.

I’m lucky. Very, very lucky. I have a great agent, a great editor and publisher, and lots of

great writing friends.

When I started querying my first book, I didn’t quite know what I was doing. I wrote a query letter that is absolutely terrible and didn’t get much attention from agents, even though people had read and enjoyed my book.

So I started studying. I went to like a billion agents’ websites and learned what to do and what not to do. I bought Guide to Literary Agents and devoured the entire book.

I basically got a PhD in query writing.

Then I rewrote my letter and started talking to a couple published authors I know through friends. These are not small authors by any means. One is huge in the non-fiction world, and the other is truly a god of steampunk and sci-fi.

They both agreed to read my letter and give me feedback.

Both authors RIPPED my query apart. I felt lower than plankton. For about five minutes. Then I re-read their critiques, decided what advice I agreed with, and decided what changes to make.

But first – I THANKED both authors for their time. Profusely thanked them.

After I got an agent, I started agreeing to look at query letters and sample pages, because I wanted to pay it forward. I wanted to give back, because other people had helped me.

I wouldn’t be where I was today without the help of friends, critique partners, beta readers, etc.

I really don’t mind critiquing work. I love helping people out. But if I spend an hour or two (or more) reading people’s work and critiquing it (I give honest, constructive advice), it would be great to get a thank you. Or even a response.

So basically all I’m saying is, even if you don’t agree with something someone says about your work, please make the time to thank them for theirs.

We all start somewhere.

On Being Uppity

2011-01-18T14:48:00.000-05:00

So here's a weird thing about Kelly Barnhill: little old men totally dig me. I can't explain it, but I know it's true. I've always been very, very popular with old dudes. I think maybe I remind them of their favorite granddaughters, or the girl they wanted to marry. I've often been told that I'm "perfect daughter-in-law material" (though, strangely, not by my own father-in-law, who I'm pretty sure feels otherwise, but never mind).

Now, for the past few years, I've been a teaching artist with a local arts organization that sends musicians, visual artists and writers into the schools for week-long intensive residencies. It's a pretty cool job and I enjoy doing it. When they send me to the tiny towns in outstate Minnesota, I make it my habit to have dinner each night in the local bar, where I'll sit, munch on french fries, talk to locals and write in my notebooks. Invariably, I'll end up with about a half a dozen or so old dudes at my table, their collective breath laced with whiskey and cigarettes and cheap beer, swapping story after story after story.

And they all say the same things to me (always accompanied by the classic Minnesotan "arencha", one of my favorite idioms):

"Yer a sassy one, arencha?" they say.
"Yer a spunky one, arencha?" they confide.
"Oh, yer a pistol, arencha?" they whisper with a knowing smile.

"Um," says I. "I guess so."

Once, a guy said to me, "I've never much cared for uppity girls, even when I was a young thing. But you're all right."

And I said, "Uppity?"

And then I thought about it for a while, and I decided that "uppity" was the best compliment I've ever gotten. I think that a certain amount of uppityness is required for the writing life (probably all sorts of other kinds of life as well - politics, law, corporate espionage, and what have you. But writing is what I know.). We need to be uppity.

It is an uppity notion for me to assert that the story in my head is one worth telling. It is an uppity notion for me to want you to read it. It is an uppity notion for me to want to put my book in the hands of readers, on the shelves of libraries, on the tables of bookstores, in the musings of blog posts and reviewer columns. Writing books is uppity, so I'll embrace it, and I won't apologize.

So, here's my question for the rest of you: After spending our formative years being praised for adhering to specific norms and admonished when we abandoned them, what sorts of personal negatives turned into positives for the rest of y'all? At what point did the world's admonishments become points of your own personal pride?

I'm sure there's a few.

Now don't even let me get started on sassy.

Anna and the French Kiss: yes, you need to read it!

2011-01-17T18:52:00.005-05:00

There's another YA romance around every corner. And whether you love or loathe the genre, sometimes it feels like it needs a little kick start. Like you've read that story a few times and want something new.

Let me be the first to tell you that ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS is not just another anything. It's a romance, and it's an adventure, and it's a comedy, and it's a coming-of-age story. It makes me want to spend all day at a cafe in Paris. It makes me want to go back in time and go to boarding school. It makes me want to go on silly romps with my friends and take my boyfriend to arthouse theatres. It is a story in which you feel like you know everyone, and when you close the last pages, they're a part of you.

It's the story of Anna, sent by her rich father who writes melodramatic cancer romance novels to a French boarding school. She soon finds herself in a tight group of friends including the charming St. Clair, an American boy who grew up in Britain but has a French dad. And Anna has never met anyone like him. Not even the cute boy she is almost sort of maybe dating from the theatre where she works back home. As she and St. Clair -- who is dating a college freshman -- get closer and closer, Anna has to push back her growing feelings for him. And, ultimately, this school year abroad in France could either be the best year of her life, or lead her to self-destruct. Either way, it will change her forever.

If you like John Green, Maureen Johnson, or Simone Elkeles, you'll love Stephanie Perkins. Pick up ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS right now.

Shameless Self Promotion for January

2011-01-12T09:30:00.002-05:00

Have a book releasig this month? Here's your chance to tell us all about it!

Read an awesome book that we must read NOW? Let us know!

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

The ALA Youth Media Awards and You

2011-01-10T19:01:00.006-05:00

So today many of us were up early watching the live webcast or following closely on Facebook and Twitter as the American Library Association announced its award winners.

Boy was I off. I managed to predict one Alex award winner (THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS by Alden Bell) and a Coretta Scott King Author honor (YUMMY by G. Neri) in my predictions post. Librarians are always surprising me.

I'm psyched about the Printz honor for PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ (Knopf, 2010) by A.S. King -- it was already going to be my next read, and now I'm even more excited to curl up with it. I've read the first page, and that alone is worthy of acclaim.

After the awards were announced, I decided I could buy a book. One book from the list. And I picked NOTHING by Janne Teller (Atheneum, 2010), which not only garnered a Printz Honor but a Batchelder Honor for excellence in translation in children's literature. It sounds freaking awesome and I love reading books that were translated into English -- there's something really different and interesting about that experience, both culturally and literarily.

Admittedly, I'm already thinking of breaking my rule and buying THE FREAK OBSERVER by Blythe Woolston (Carolrhoda LAB, 2010), which won the William C. Morris Award, which is given to a debut novel. How cool, that it went to an author with a small press, too! I'm on the lookout for this title, for sure.

So what did you think of this year's winners? Any surprises? Are you eager to read/buy any of the titles? I'm especially wondering if teens are affected by awards like this, or if they ignore the shiny stickers and the press and just buy what they like. Tell me!

Miranda's Hierarchy of Publishing

2011-01-07T07:05:00.020-05:00

I'll admit it. I have a real hard-on for sociology. Forgive me for this dorky post. :)

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
(Click on image to enlarge)

I definitely have gone through Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in my lifetime. You know, in college I was mostly concerned with finding my next meal, e.g. Ramen and Easy Mac. I got next to no sleep, because I was working ALL the time. And on top of that, all I could think about were boys. (See lowest rung of Maslow's Hierarchy above.)

As I got older, I started moving up the pyramid, and I can definitely say I'm at the "Self-Actualization" stage of my life, meaning, I spend a lot of time contemplating my place in the universe and the evolution of humankind (when will we have biochips in our heads?!) and my carbon footprint and whatnot.

The highest level of the pyramid = You've run a marathon, and now you're going to run another one to beat your previous time. To grow as a runner.

So I was looking at Maslow's Hierarchy and got to thinking about my publishing journey. If I were to apply Maslow's Hierarchy to my publishing life, I'd say I'm still on the middle rung. I have a fancy book deal and I love my agent and editor, and I have lots of fabulous authorly friends. Yay for life!

Miranda's Hierarchy of Publishing
(click on picture to enlarge)

I'm hoping to move up to the fourth rung. So now of course I'm thinking, "HOLY SHIT what if Kirkus reads and hates my book? What will I do?!?"

I'll write harder. Keep moving up the rungs of the hierarchy.

You know the best part about the publishing journey? Even if I by some one in a million chance I were to get on Oprah or win the NBA, my writing can always grow. I will always have the opportunity to become a better writer.

Pretty cool, eh?

Where are you at on Miranda's Hierarchy of Publishing?

Synchro-what? or What I Read for the Past Few Months

2011-01-05T01:00:00.001-05:00

synchronicities: 1. the quality or fact of being synchronous

2. the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

--Merriam-Webster Online

So, for the past few months I've curiously silent (very unlike me) whilst I was reading my way through 182 of the finest Young Adult fiction readers cared to nominate. That part of my life is now, sadly, over. But, some loose ends remain!

This list of similarities and coincidences that follows was taken from the 2010 Cybils YA Fiction nominations and was compiled by the 2010 Cybils YA Fiction Panel. It is no way to be considered completely exhaustive, as we are certain nominated books may have been missed. This list was originated out of amusement as the seven panelists as we read our way through the 182 titles. If you know of a nominated title that should be included in one of the synchronicities below, please feel free to submit it in the comments! To get the entire list, you’ll have to visit all seven of the panelist’s blogs.

42. Parents Called by First Name: Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters, Nothing Like You

43. Pepperspray: The River; Tension of Opposites

44. Photography is DEEP and MEANINGFUL: Faithful; Jumpstart the World; Hellie Jondoe; Hold Still, Split

45. Pissing Outdoors: City of Cannibals; Compromised; Folly, Jump; Stringz; When I was Joe

46. Poetry as a coping mechanism: Sorta Like a Rockstar, The Sky is Everywhere, Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs

47. Preacher’s Kids: Saving Maddie, The Less-Dead

48. Pregnancies: Dark days of Hamburger Halpin; Every Little Thing in the World; Folly; Stranded; Tell Me a Secret; Three Rivers Rising

49. Quoted Keats: The Life of Glass, The Secret to Lying

50. Rainbow Positive: f2m; Jumpstart the World; Love Drugged; A Love Story to My Dead Best Friend; Hold Still; The Less-Dead (ok, ultimately positive); Rhythm and Blues; Will; Will Grayson, Will Grayson

51. Red Hot Chili Peppers: A Little Wanting Song; Friend is Not a Verb

Wanna read the rest? Visit these blogs:

http://interactivereader.blogspot.com/
http://cherylynne.blogspot.com/
http://stackedbooks.blogspot.com/
http://3tnar.blogspot.com/
http://www.apatchworkofbooks.blogspot.com/
http://melissawiley.com/blog/

Apparently, I Was A Very Bad Girl This Year

2011-01-04T13:39:00.000-05:00

Every year my friends and family ask me what I want for Christmas. Every year I say the same thing: good books; wool socks. Not necessarily in that order.

This year, I got some good stuff - tea from England, oranges from Florida, money from my mom - but none of it was what I asked for.

"Wool socks are so boring," people said.

"Nobody wants to give books to a writer," a relative told me. "It would be like we were setting up unreasonably high bar for your book." And then, I swear to god, he patted me on the head. Which, for those of you watching at home, is how Midwesterners participate in the soft tyranny of low expectations. (Also, I would like to say yet another prayer of thanksgiving that none of my relatives know how to work the internet.)

So I really wanted to write a post-holidays post on the really cool books that I received this year, but instead, I'm gonna talk about the books that I'm excited about - the books I can't wait to read.

1. I don't know if any of you have been reading the first two installments of the Prophesy of the Sisters, but book 3 comes out this summer:

And holy smokes, does that cover look pretty. I'll fully admit that I judge a book by its cover - at least at first. Also, by its font, the texture of its pages, its smell. All love starts with lust. Or at least it does with me. But these books are worth that first flush of desire. They're sly. Meaty. Heartbreaking. And I can't WAIT for the next installment.

2. Deathless, by Cat Valente

I've loved that woman's prose for years, but this? Russian folklore? Revolution? Mythology? Love, death and everything in between. Yup, I'm there. With bells on.

3. Native Star, by M.K. Hobson

Ah, steampunk meets the wild, wild west. Mine-dwelling zombies, a down-on-her-luck witch, and a fancy, Eastern warlock with something to hide. Snake oil salesmen, the expansion of the railroad, fast-talking cowboys, and a healthy dose of magic. I absolutely cannot WAIT to read this book, and I'm staring at the mailbox RIGHT NOW, waiting for Amazon to hurry up and bring it to me.

4. Mechanique: A Novel of the Circus Tresault

I mean, come on. Look at that cover! It's so pretty, I want to take it places and buy it things. But, even more, inside the covers is Valentine's sly, deft, luminous prose. (Full disclosure: I've already read this book, but it was a pdf. I want the real deal, baby. No internet-dating for this book lover!)

Now I realize that only one of those books is specifically YA, but one of the things that I love about the YA reader is that they refuse to balkanize themselves. They read across genre, across age groups, across culture and time and modes of reality. I'd really like to see a day in which books are no longer shelved according to type. The more we try to separate books, the more limited the conversation becomes. Books need to talk to one another. They need to influence one another. And they need to do this broadly - not only on the shelves and not only in classes or review pages, but in the brains of their readers.

So, here's my question: What books are you itching to read? What books do you REALLY FEEL that you should have gotten....but didn't?

Happy New Year! Let's talk about our loot!

2011-01-03T16:31:00.006-05:00

Hi everyone! Long time, no see. Well, you know. Blog-wise.

Before I go off and give the rest of the 5-ers a kick in the butt (I've been looking at that angry velociraptor on the top of this page for far too long. Is it going to eat me or what?) I thought I'd check in with everyone. And, before you get too groan-y and moan-y, fear not. I'm not going to talk about New Year's Resolutions. I don't know about the rest of the YA-5, but, personally, I feel that making an effort toward awesomeness daily is way better than declaring a major change in January that you'll forget about by the 31st.

No, today I want to talk about awesome presents we got over the holidays. Specifically, BOOK-SHAPED PRESENTS. Or, you know, books.

Here's my loot list:

PERSONAL DEMONS (Tor Teen, 2010) by Lisa Desrochers
I've been aching to read this for a while and I know I read a review somewhere -- possibly by someone here. Justina, was it you? -- that said that the protagonist was just so relateable. So real. And that's one thing I have a hard time with in some paranormals -- not that I don't read a jillion paranormals, I just often end up feeling like the MC was a little too...unreal. So I'm psyched for this one. I got it from my grandparents on my dad's side.

ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS (Dutton Juvenile, 2010) by Stephanie Perkins
My brother brought me to an indie bookstore and told me to pick something out two days before Christmas. This is what I picked. And I started reading it on the plane back from Maine to Texas. It's amazing. I have about 100 pages to go, but, still, I can't imagine this book starting to suck anytime soon. I mean, even if there are velociraptors parachuting in from outer space, I think it will still be one of my favorite reads of the year. Romance, and real people, and funny anecdotes and...well...I'm sure you've heard the buzz. Let me tell you this: all the buzz is true.

A PASSION FOR BAKING (Oxmoor House, 2001) by Marcy Goldman
Okay, slightly less interesting for those of you who love YA. Or, like, novels. And stories. But I'm a huge baking fiend and my grandmother on my mom's side got this for me and it is big and heavy and I can't wait to try out some of the recipes. Mmmmmmmm.

STRAY (Mira, 2007) by Rachel Vincent
Also from my brother. Inadvertently He got me a gift card to the same indie so I had to spend it before I left Maine. (Who am I kidding, gift cards to bookstores burn holes in my pocket faster than hot coals.) I got a few embarrassing pop albums and had just enough leftover for a used paperback. I've been intrigued by Rachel's SHIFTERS series ever since I read some of her SOUL SCREAMERS books, so for $2.95 the price was right. It's an adult novel, and I hear it's super action-packed and sexy. Looking forward to reading this on a rainy day in the near future.

So what books did y'all pick up over the holidays? Have you read any of the ones I got? Discuss in the comments, I want to know!

TV: It's just another way to tell a story, right?

2010-12-13T18:58:00.010-05:00

Oh my goodness. How many times in my life have I heard someone tell young people (or me!) to "turn off the TV and open a book?" Or, you know, something similar?

How many times have you heard that television rots your brain? And then wanted to charge at the person making this claim like a velociraptor at a cocky paleontologist?

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love books. I mean, well, duh, I write books! I have a house full of books! Books are sort of my life. But you know what else I love?

TV.

I love TV on DVD. I love that I can use my DVR to record shows that are on at the same time. I love that there are funny shows and serious shows and documentary shows and sci fi shows. I love that there are all these stories that I can watch.

So why does TV get a bad rap? Why do so many of us think of it as a "low" art form, or as a hobby for the feeble-minded? Like, okay, The Jersey Shore exists. I'll admit it. But so does The X Files. So does House. So does Scrubs.

And, yeah, books might be easy to pin as a high art, because you have to read them. But, come on, not to lay the smack down on anyone, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that GOSSIP GIRL isn't particularly literary. (And I'm putting this out there because I'm like 99.9% sure that creator Cecily von Ziegesar would agree with me. I hope.) Does this fact stop jillions of readers from being entertained by the books? No.

Books are a form of entertainment, too. Sure, sometimes books are going to be what I like to call "meat and potatoes" books. SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green's LOOKING FOR ALASKA -- you know, award-winny types. Entertaining and also enriching. Then there are what I like to call "candy bar books" -- the books we read for funsies and sometimes consider guilty pleasures. Books without many SAT words but with superfluous kissing scenes or maybe epic gun fights. Do these books change your world? Probably not. And that's cool.

So what makes books better than TV? What makes them sacred? Like, okay, there are lots of reasons that books are different, ways that without seeing the pictures on your screen you might have to use your imagination more while you're reading. But have you ever watched an episode of your favorite show and felt just so inspired? Just wowed? The same way you feel after you finish a good book?

TV and books are different ways to tell a story. But when it comes down to it, a story is a story. Why can't we love both, treat them equally, and call it a day? Why do we think certain things can go on TV but "don't belong" in books? Why are books on a pedestal, guys? I want to know.

Walking on Eggshells in Publishing. ALL the Time.

2010-12-10T04:06:00.000-05:00

I’ll admit it. I speak my mind. Almost ALL of the time.

I tell bosses what I think. I’m straight-up with my husband. We fight constantly. (It’s a healthy thing in marriage – trust me. J )

I’ve disagreed with a Deputy Secretary of State. To her face.

And I lived to tell the tale. People at work respect me for my opinions.

But most of the time, I’m scared to death to talk about how I really feel about publishing and books on the market.

A lot of book bloggers and reviewers have admitted that they won’t post negative reviews of books.

Why? They don’t want to ruin their reputation.

This year, a book came out that I didn’t really like, but everyone else adored it.

Of course, I didn’t say anything about the book until I was at the American Library Association Conference, where two trusted friends and I talked about how we didn’t think the book was all that much to call home about.

But we whispered about it. And then we swore we’d never say anything in public. Several months later, I saw one book blogger write about how she didn’t understand what the big deal was about the book.

It was the first time I’d seen this book publicly questioned.

Did I agree with her and say so in the comments section of her blog? Hell no. I didn’t want anyone to know my thoughts on the book. What if I said something about the book and then it damaged my relationship with the author? The publisher? The readers who adore the book?

As an author who’s about to have her debut novel published, I can’t risk that.

Recently, my friend found out that her erotica book had been flagged by Amazon as being not appropriate for kids or something, so readers couldn’t find it using a standard search. Readers had to have a link to find it.

A bunch of worse erotica/porno books are out there, and they’re searchable on Amazon. That’s not fair.

My friend’s book did not deserve this, so she’s going to battle to get it on the search bar.

I’m all for this, of course. I said, “Where do I light my torch and sharpen my pitchfork?”

But other people told her, “Don’t worry about it! Don’t say anything. Don’t rant about Amazon!”

My first thought was, “Well why the hell not? She wants to sell books. She should be fighting this, not ignoring it.”

Going further, sometimes famous authors/editors/agents act a bit mean online. I’ll admit I’ve stopped following a few of these people after watching them humiliate wannabe writers online. Okay, so maybe the author doesn’t know all the “rules” of querying, but do you have to call them out personally in front of your thousands of followers?

I know someone who deleted their Twitter account after being humiliated by some agents.

And instead of authors standing up and saying, “Whoa. Was that really called for?” everyone either 1) Ignores it, or 2) Laughs along with the agent.

Me? I ignored it. And that makes me ashamed. But I can’t really risk it, you know?

And then a month ago, a Twitter friend, who is represented by a great agent at a different agency from mine, and I were chatting about how now that we have agents, we rarely get good honest critiques of our work. Before I got an agent, readers and friends and critique partners ripped my work to SHREDS.

Now, it’s either that 1) People think everything’s perfect because we have agents, or 2) They are scared to question us because we have agents, and they don’t want to upset us and hurt our relationships.

I think this is total bullshit. If I critique a book/pages by someone, I tell them the God’s honest truth about how I feel, because if I lie and coddle them, what’s going to happen when they finally send the book to an agent and editor, and the agent/editor comes back and says exactly what I said? (This has happened before.) You’d be pissed, right?

You can take my advice or leave it, I don’t care, but I feel like I owe you an honest opinion.

I feel like people owe me an honest opinion.

Sure, I might hate you for five minutes, but then I’ll probably learn from whatever you said. And then I’ll thank you.

If everyone is too scared to say what they think, how will we ever weed out the good from the bad?

I feel like society is already on information overload, information coming from all different sources and angles, and it completely confuses people and makes it harder to think.

Is publishing like the Stalin era? We’re so afraid to say anything wrong because we’ll be sent to the PUBLISHING GULAG?!

What say you guys?

Have I gone too far?

Does everyone hate me now? J

Happy Friday!

"A taught thriller"

2010-12-09T14:34:00.003-05:00

This, to me, sounds like a way you might describe someone's butt, not someone's book. But that is probably just me.

Last night I finished reading REVOLVER by Marcus Sedgwick. Have you read it? I would classify it as a taught thriller (of the non-butt variety). It's an historical novel about a family living in the arctic circle, dealing with a major crisis. It is very intense, though I think the intensity is written extremely well for the target audience of this book (which I would put at probably 12 and up).

The book is written almost like a play - a one room drama with some flashbacks. It's short, concise, full of psychological action, and it's very easy to read. I recommend it, and not just because I want more people to read it so they can talk to me about it.

One thing the book made me think about is writing with minimal description and how, when a book is well done like REVOLVER, I finish it actually "seeing" the world better than I would have had there been detailed descriptions of every nook and eye twitch. My brain has filled in the nooks and eye twitches on its own and for this I am grateful to Mr. Sedgwick. Grateful that he trusts us to create the world in our own minds, with only a little guidance from his words.

This trust that the author has for his reader is another reason why REVOLVER reminds me of a play. When you write a play, people don't like it when you write in too much direction. Don't write in the script that the actor stomps into the room and shouts angrily, let the actors read your words and figure out the emotions for themselves. Often, in books, we are not given this leeway. Every minute feeling and action is laid out for us in a buffet of words. Sometimes this works (in something dated but beautifully ornate like Gone With the Wind), but often it steals power away from the reader.

I don't think writers think they are stealing power from their readers, and I don't think readers realize their jobs are being subsumed by too many words. Until a reader pulls out a book like REVOLVER. Suddenly, the world comes alive, with limited prose, and it is a wonder to behold.

I especially appreciate this authorial trust in children's books. Let the kids create the world as you take them on a tour. To me, A WRINKLE IN TIME is famous for this. I read it as a child and saw so much vivid detail, that when I read it again as an adult I was shocked - shocked - at how much of that book had been devised by my own wee brain.

So what do you guys think? Do you know what I'm talking about? Lack of description equaling a richer reading experience? It seems counterintuitive, and yet.... it's true. To me, at least.

On Allegra Biscotti, my new fashionspiration.

2010-12-06T17:40:00.006-05:00

I don't usually like to write about a book before I've finished it. But you know what? I can't help myself. THE ALLEGRA BISCOTTI COLLECTION by Olivia Bennett (Sourcebooks, 2010) is so freaking stuck in my head that last night while I was getting dressed to go out I was thinking of its main character.

I'm not even kidding. I was putting together a way-over-the-top outfit for my birthday celebration (we went to Sonic for dinner -- yes, THAT Sonic) and I was trying a bright purple mini dress and sparkly shoes with the right leggings and I thought to myself, "What would Emma Rose do?"

That's when I knew: THE ALLEGRA BISCOTTI COLLECTION is definitely one of the best tween books of 2010. When a character sticks with you like that, when you haven't even had a chance to pick up the book yet that day, man, you know it's good.

And I love that this book is about a young entrepreneur. Emma Rose is a thirteen-year-old fashion designer juggling all the craziness of the 8th grade with an accidentally burgeoning career. And, okay, I'm only about halfway through the book, but I have loved every page -- and not just because the pages are decorated with illustrations from Emma's sketchbook. But because Emma is so real, so vivid, so inspiring.

I started making my own clothes when I was in high school, but maybe if I'd read THE ALLEGRA BISCOTTI COLLECTION I would have gotten a head start. And had some serious delusions of grandeur...because the way Emma Rose is headed, whoa, there's no stopping this girl. Gotta love a character that lights a fire in you, that's for sure.

So, with Channukkah in full swing and Christmas right around the corner, I hope you'll give the young girlie-girl in your life some ALLEGRA BISCOTTI. I promise, she'll fall in love just like me!

Oh, and PS, yes it *is* my birthday today. And some of the YA-5ers are on my blog making fun of me. Hop on over for the hilarity.

Sex and Sexy Scenes in YA: Let’s Look at it a Different Way

2010-12-03T00:53:00.009-05:00

Does sex belong in young adult literature?

I recently had a lengthy discussion about whether healthy sex between two consenting teenagers, who are in love, belongs in YA or not. Before I get to the main point of today’s post (starring a special guest), here are three constants I have to mention:

First: I don’t know the answer.

Second: I personally don’t consider young adult books to be for children. I consider YA books to be books for adults, because I consider anyone above the age of 14 an adult in terms of their mind. Sure, they are silly and immature at times, but they think and feel like adults do. The YA genre consists of books written for adults that feature teenage protagonists.

Third, putting YA aside, I think all scenes in a book MUST matter, or they shouldn’t be in the book in the first place.

Last year, I was at a conference where Maggie Stiefvater spoke on a panel about love in literature, and someone asked her why SHIVER had a sex scene.

Maggie didn’t have to answer, because another author – uber cool Michael Knight, spoke up and said, “If you include a sex scene in anything you write, you should have a reason for doing so.”

Maggie had a reason for doing so (her characters were in love), and I loved Gayle Forman’s thoughts on it (which are put so much more eloquently than I’ve done here).

But getting to my real point. As I was discussing the positives and negatives of featuring sex in YA, I realized something.

How often do any of us actually ask teenagers what they want to read about?

Why is it always about what adults want to showcase about sex?

Why is it always about a “message” or lack thereof?

In other words, why is it always about what adults think?

I’ve seen sex in YA showcased in a very positive manner, e.g. – WHEN IT HAPPENS by Susane Colasanti. I’ve seen sex showcased in negative ways, too. TOO MANY BOOKS TO NAME.

So you tell me – what do teenagers want to read about?

If you’re a teenager, what do you want to read about?

If you’re a parent, what do you want your kids to read about?

Since some publishers want YA novels to be cross-over novels that adults will read, do you feel like this factors into the equation at all?

So, since I’m being all anarchist-like and crazy today, I’ve invited my romance author friend Tiffany Reisz to tell us what she wanted to read about when she was a teenager, and how that’s shaped her life as an author today.

So here’s Tiffany!

Matthew Fox, star of Lost, age twelve.

Britney Spears, pop star, mother of two, age fourteen.

Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter, age sixteen.

Johnny Depp, world's greatest actor, age thirteen

Angelina Jolie, Oscar winning actress, age fourteen.

What do all these celebrities have in common? They all had sex for the first time in middle school or high school.

When Miranda asked me to write a little about what I thought about sex in Young Adult novels, this list was the first thing that came to me. Sex in YA novels seems like a no brainer. Teenagers have sex. Not all of them. But a lot of them. And if you want to write realistic stories for teenagers, you're probably going to have to address the issue of sex at some point. After all, there really is no such thing as a YA Book. Books are books. The rules are the same whether your stories are about teenagers or million year old aliens--tell a good story and tell it well. Saying you can't have sex in a YA novel is like saying you can't have dinner in a YA novel. Makes no sense whatsoever.

As soon as I hit age twelve I started reading "Adult" Fiction. Some of it had teenage characters in it (Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series) and some didn't (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead...and A LOT of Star Trek novels.). I was a teenager reading these books. Did that make them Teen Books? Most of what I read back then had sex scenes. Especially when I discovered historical romance novels. Oh my Lord, my little thirteen year old brain delighted in reading semi-explicit sex scenes. So much so that by age fourteen I was writing semi-explicit sex scenes of my very own. I wasn't having sex then. I didn't lose my virginity until after college. But I was fascinated by sex, the mechanics of it, the power of it, and the joy.

Yes, I said joy. Sex in romance novels was so magical, so uplifting, so life-altering and beautiful, that I couldn't help but think that sex was something incredibly special. Reading about sex made me take sex more seriously, not less so. When I had my first boyfriend in college, I told him "No sex until marriage." He said, "Fine.”

Anywho, I didn't think of sex as an "issue" in those days. I heard about the "issues" of drugs and AIDS and teen pregnancy. But they seemed very far away from me. They didn't really interest me. I had my nose stuck in a Julie Garwood novel reading about a handsome earl seducing his virginal bride he'd won in a card game or something like that. I hear people talking about tackling "issues" in YA novels. Have these people even met a teenager?

Here's a teenager for you. She's fourteen. She's beautiful. She's smart. And she's my cousin. I took her to see Harry Potter over Thanksgiving Break. The trailer for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came on. The Narnia books are about God, sin, temptation, the resurrection of the world--BIG issues. But then tall, dark and handsome Prince Caspian strides onto the big screen. My teenage cousin leans over her friend and says to me, "I want to make love to that man."

Me too, Kid. Me too.

________

Tiffany Reisz's first novel THE SIREN comes out from Harlequin in 2011, and her first e-book novella SEVEN DAY LOAN is out now! Anyone below the age of 18 - please check with a parent before reading Tiffany's work. :)

A Most Awesome Endeavor

2010-12-01T08:53:00.000-05:00

So, if you didn’t already know. Today is the launch of the most awesomesauce Emily ‘s (you all know her as Miss Monday) new project, Dear Teen Me. She and Miranda (Girl Friday) have started this amazing website where authors are writing letters to their teen selves. This is going to be an amazing project, and I think it will be really popular.

One of the great things about reading the letters is I think most people will see it the difficulties of being a teenager have little to do with the year or the person. Adolescence (I hate that word, it’s so high school principal) is a rough time for all of us, and even if our problems are not all the same (anyone else who had to deal with being the only black kid in the entire high school, raise your hand), how we respond to them and how they change us is similar.

I look forward to reading everyone’s letters. In fact, why are you still here? Go!

From The Department Of The Friggin' Cool

2010-11-30T12:13:00.000-05:00

We interrupt this blog for a Very Important Announcement: NASA, launcher of freaky-cool space probes, gatherer of rocks, thinker-upper of massively amazing ideas like submarine space probes (with detachable drills to break through the icy surface of Europa into its watery sub-surface) has made an announcement.

Or rather, they've made an announcement for an announcement.

According to this, NASA will be making an announcement regarding a recent finding in the field of Astrobiology. So, first of all: ASTROBIOLOGY! Holy crap!

Now, here's a thing I did not know: NASA has an entire section dedicated to the study of Astrobiology, and the link to their site can be found here. And Astrobiology does not necessarily mean the exclusive search for E.T. and light-saber-weilding Jedis (though, certainly the search for non-Earth-based life forms is certainly part of their research). But mostly, what they're looking for is some sort of insight as to how life happened on our planet. And the fact that there are scientists who are looking beyond Earth to understand about Earth, is pretty dang cool if you ask me.

The thing that has the internets all a-flutter right now is the fact that NASA is instituting an information black-out in the run-up to the announcement on Thursday. So we don't know exactly what was found or what was learned. We just know that they learned something, and to find out what that something is, we are all gonna have to cool our heels and wait.

In the meantime, I don't know about you people, but I am going to be dreaming. And thinking. And imagining. And probably writing. If life was truly discovered somewhere beyond Earth, what does it do to our understanding of Earth? What does it do for our understanding of us? If we are not alone in the universe, does that change how we see our relationship to our own planet, or our relationship to one another? I wrote a story recently called "The Taxidermist's Other Wife" that will appear in the December issue of Clarkesworld Magazine. The story is essentially a meditation on loss and loneliness - and on the lengths that some people will go to to preserve the memory of what they once had, but there is a moment in the story when the narrators are bending their backs to the howl of the wind, feeling the aching emptiness of the land around and the sky above like a weight. (You are alone, the stars seem to tell them. You are still alone.)

But what if we're not? Do I need to re-write the story? If the universe is populated, how does that alter how we see the stars?

I've been working on a YA sci-fi novel lately set on an energy transfer station on the moon. I'm already bracing myself for how this information is gonna change my own story. And the question is this: how will it impact other stories currently being written now? How will it impact the stories we will write next month? Next year?

On Thursday, I will be simultaneously glued to my laptop and radio. Where will you be?

(And secretly, I am really, really, really, really hoping they're gonna announce they found this guy:)

New Year, New Projects, Epic Awesome

2010-11-29T18:58:00.004-05:00

As we get closer to the holidays (and further from the pie-pocalypse that was Thanksgiving), things may appear to be slowing down in the blogosphere. But that's not entirely true. Even if I miss a Monday every now and then (hey, I was in a wedding last week!) know that I am busy behind the scenes working with fellow 5-er Miranda on a sekrit project.

Okay, it's not so sekrit. It's called Dear Teen Me and, holy crap, it's going to be awesome.

Dear Teen Me launches Dec. 1st with some of your favorite authors participating. Head on over to the site for more details, but for now, I'll tell you this: it's an entire blog dedicated to authors writing letters to their teen selves. Could it possibly get more awesome?

I'm not sure. I mean, every time I get an email from an author saying "hey can I write a letter for Dear Teen Me, too?" it definitely gets more awesome. And all of the YA-5 bloggers are on board, so, you know, you can count on some hilarity.

I hope you'll go check out our website. There's not a ton there now, but there will be very, very soon. I promise, this is going to be epic!

Winner of the HUNTRESS ARC!

2010-11-28T10:28:00.001-05:00

An impartial third party (my husband :-D ) put all the names in a hat and drew out Maggie Desmond-O'Brien! Congrats on winning the HUNTRESS arc - we hope you enjoy it. Email mirandakenneally (at) gmail.com with your address, and we'll send it to you.

And thanks again to agent Sara Megibow for sharing her thoughts on YA with us!