RT FTW!

Okay, I might have a bit of an unhealthy love for acronyms. But I'm sure it's not a problem with any of you.

So...as some of you may know, I was at the Romantic Times Booklovers' Convention last week (RT for short). RT is always an interesting trip because you can never be quite sure who you're going to meet or what opportunities are going to be presented to you.

One thing I did know going in was that I would meet a bunch of the people from Entangled Publishing since they signed quite a bit of my adult stuff recently. And boy, did I! RT is one of those places where it sucks to have a brain like mine, because I will remember your face forever, but I have a horrible time with names. Anyway, I digress...

On the last day of RT, I was having lunch with a certain YA author, and this anthology idea came up. We talked about it and tweaked it and apparently we're going to try to make the thing happen. I'm beyond excited, not only for the opportunity to work with her but also for the chance to re-awaken this me. It's been too long since I've actively done anything that wasn't adult. I miss YA like crazy. So, keep your fingers crossed!

In the meantime, I have adult books to write and a house to sell and all sorts of craziness to participate in. I promise to keep you posted on any and all YA news I have to share though!

*happy post-con hugs all around*

Age Group Jumping

There are two of me. One writes adult and the other writes YA/NA. There's a simple reason why I write all three. I am an adult (and quite frankly, that stuff sells better digitally) and I loved high school and college. That was a great age for me, so I'm drawn to writing it.

Much to my children's sorrow, I will not write middle grade or chapter books. It's not anything weird like a lack of respect for the genre. I am HUGELY appreciative of those categories because those are the books that make lifelong readers. Problem is, I didn't come into my own until high school, and I don't look back on the earlier years with any fondness. If someone said to me "Hey, we're going to make you twelve again and you can live your whole life over!" My response would be "No thanks, I'd rather choke on my own panicked vomit and die." Plus, quite honestly, I don't have the right voice for it.

There are people who can bridge from picture books all the way to adult and do it all well, but they are few and far between. It always makes me shake my head when I see writer friends/acquaintances who seem to jump on whatever the "it" genre is.

"MG is hot? I'm going to write that!"

"NA is the new thing. Sign me up."

Now, anyone who knows me knows I'm all about trying new things and stretching as a writer, but if the reason you're doing it is because it's popular, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. It's like dating the captain of the football team in high school even though he's a misogynistic creep who never bothers to comb his hair or brush his teeth. Hey, he's still football captain. Hello...popular.

Hello... lame... stupid... ridiculous. (Pick an adjective.)

So is chasing the "it" genre. By all means, if it calls to your muse and fits your voice, have at it. But if you're just doing it because it's popular...

Do you know why I write (some) New Adult? Because I love writing YA, and some of my YA has always nudged into the college arena (I was told at the time it was unsellable). I also write adult, but I've been told I have a "youthful" adult voice. (Appropriate since Julie means youthful.) So that sweet spot for me? It's 16-25. Yes, I've written older characters, but that (even with my adult stuff) is where I like to sit. I'm just lucky enough that it crosses three genres. I have very little desire to branch out much further.

Young Adult...New Adult...Why Can't You Just Be an Adult?

The last question in the title I won't even bother responding to beyond this. I am an adult. I'm just not a grown-up. The end.

As for the rest (I'm about to show just how much of an adult I am, by the way)...

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as young adult. Yep, that long ago. I think the Sweet Valley High books were just coming into popularity (maybe), but by the time you're in high school I'm not sure those really cut it for reading material anymore. The point of this is kids jumped from reading kids' books to reading adult books. Age-appopriate had no meaning because the best a teenage reader could do was sift through the books and hope to find characters somewhere near their age. (Either that or so foreign that age didn't matter--I think this is one reason so many of us gravitated to sic-fi/fantasy early on.) Truly, the only book I can recall reading that would still fall under the YA heading today is The Outsiders. 

I'm sure when someone first suggested YA there was some industry backlash. Where will we shelve them? Teens don't have money for books. All sorts of reasons to fight against it. 

Then somewhere, some brave publisher decided to give it a try. And the books sold. Maybe not like hotcakes, but they sold. Over time this led to Harry Potter madness, Twilight insanity, and a few other huge sellers. YA wasn't some void--it was big money! (I can't find hard numbers, but I believe I've seen where YA as a genre is second only to romance in sales.)

There's a simple reason for this. YA is about firsts. First kiss, first love, first time, first car (er...firsts not in any particular order). A lot of things happen for the first time during those high school years. (Yes, some happen earlier or later, but on average, it's high school.) There were very few books that addressed those things. Things teenagers generally don't want to talk to their parents about too much. Teens needed YA fiction. 

And the crazy part? 

Adults needed to go back. Adult sales account for a very large portion of the YA market. Yes, part of it is well-written characters and blah blah blah, but the bigger part is wanting to "re-live" that time in our lives. For some of us (I'm probably in the minority) who loved high school, reading YA brings back a lot of good memories about the crazy shit we did. For others (who weren't so fond of the time), reading YA gives them a different (perhaps better) experience than what they lived through. It's very similar to the way a lot of women will return to romance novels after a bad break up. It's a reminder that there's good stuff out there somewhere.

Now New Adult is going through that same question phase that YA did. Do we need it? Who will it sell to? Is it just erotica for teens? Do we really want that?

The questions make me want to bash my head through a wall. Remember how I talked about the way teens used to jump from kids' books straight to adult? The advent of YA solved that...but there's still a hole. People (generally) don't go straight from high school graduation to a career or marriage and kids. There's college or first jobs or struggling as you move out of your parents' house. From eighteen to about twenty-five, there's a gaping chasm in fiction. Sure, you can sometimes find protagonists in the age bracket, but they aren't that common and there's no definitive place to look for them and even having characters of the right age doesn't guarantee a book that deals with those issues that plague "new adults."

Let me say it up front: New Adult is not erotica with teenagers. Period. Full stop. Books that are erotica with teenagers are erotica. Period. Full stop. It would be a very rare plot that is both erotica and deals with those new adult issues. (I can think of one that does, but it's a sub-plot in an adult book, so it doesn't really apply.)

So what is New Adult?

Young Adult is about firsts, but New Adult is about leaving. It's about exiting childhood, leaving that safety net as well as the one represented by parents. It's also about self-discovery. Those years after you leave home are when most people start to figure out who they really are without the rules of school or the rules of their family home. It's about responsibility on a level they may never have had to deal with before. In short, they're about becoming an adult in everything except age. 

Does that include sex? Maybe. Probably. So does life though. And it is different than teen sex and different than married (or almost-married) sex. Self-discovery, remember? So yes, New Adult books will likely be sexier than their YA counterparts. That does not, however, make them erotica or even erotic romance. It just means sexier. Sort of like the girls in the 60s movies who go to school in their proper below-the-knee skirts just to roll them up once they get there and show a little leg. Sex in YA is (usually) fade-to-black or minimal details. Sex in New Adult is going to be more open--it's going to show a little more leg as it were.

Every time New Adult comes up on Twitter, I see people saying "we don't need it." Sure. We didn't need YA either. Generations of readers got by without it. That doesn't mean readers (and publishing) aren't better off for having it. It's taken self-published New Adult hits for publishers to sit up and take notice. People, readers, want new adult. They want to build a bridge over that gaping hole between YA and adult so they don't have to try to catapult across it. 

And here's a crazy thought. Maybe, just maybe reading about the pitfalls of that time in life will help a few people from making the same mistakes the previous generation (or two) did. I know. Books don't ever teach people anything. Right? 

Why Age Matters

No, this is not a post about how old I am. I'm feeling pretty young lately, so we aren't going to go there. What I do want to talk about is those pesky age guidelines. You know the ones they have for movies or that they've started putting on non-adult books? Yeah, those.


First off, I'm not a fan of them as a hard and fast rule. As they said in Pirates of the Caribbean (PG-13 for those paying attention): "They're more like guidelines." Or at least they should be. "14 and up" should never be taken as "appropriate for everyone over 14" or "inappropriate for anyone under 14." It's really just a heads up that it has some content that the average 14 year-old will be equipped to handle whereas younger readers might not. Simple, right?


Apparently not.

For those of you who haven't seen The Avengers (also PG-13), there's an exchange that goes like this (from IMDB):
BRUCE BANNER: I don't think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy's brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him. 
THOR: Have a care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard. And he is my brother. 
BLACK WIDOW:  He killed eighty people in two days. 
THOR: He's adopted. 


The delivery of the line is spot-on and, in the theater, the bit gets a lot of laughs. But apparently someone has started a petition against Marvel over the line. If you read the article linked, one parent said: 
(his daughter, who is adopted, was not old enough to discern the humor behind the line.)


“I almost laughed, too; the line is well played. But the laughter stuck in my throat when all of the joke’s implications crashed down on me. My daughter never got for a second that it was supposed to be a joke.


“‘Are people laughing because they think adopted kids are bad? Am I bad?’”


Now, I'm a really lenient parent as far as ratings go, but we'll get to that in a minute. The problem is, the movie is PG-13, which for those who have ever paid attention means "Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13." (From MPAA) That means, you take your younger kids at your own risk. You, as the parent, have decided it's okay for them to see. The production company, director, etc. is not responsible for your child. Now, maybe these parents who are up in arms have kids over 13 who were traumatized by that line, but again, the parent is responsible for knowing their child and what that kid can handle. 


As for my children, we don't shelter them from much, but I know exactly what buttons not to push with them. My son gets very upset over extremely realistic violence against children. Pretty much anything else goes for him. I try to avoid "disturbing images" because I can see those inducing nightmares, and I really just don't want to deal with that. My daughter... doesn't really seem disturbed by much of anything. I make a point of knowing my children and what they're sensitive to. Considering the violence (including brother-on-adopted-brother, man-on-woman, etc) included in the film, a line that took all of two seconds to utter should not be the area of most concern. If your child is not old enough to get the joke, and is not old enough to understand when you explain it, then your child is not old enough to be at a PG-13 film. My daughter is seven. She got the joke. I can't imagine how old the child in question is. 


The same goes for books. My son (10 1/2) is out-growing middle grade fiction, and we are very carefully dipping his toes into YA. It's a fine line of balancing his interests with the appropriateness of content, but we're walking the tightrope together. Hunger Games, yes. Twilight, no. While he enjoyed Zombie Tag, I won't let him read any of Hannah Moskowitz's other books yet. Will he, at some point, read something he's not ready for? Sure. It's called growing up. And we'll deal with it when it happens. In the meantime, I love the age recommendations on YA books. Do I always listen to them? No. But if it says "12 and up," I don't even question giving it to him. "14 and up," I'm more cautious. That's my job as a parent, and I thank the movie and publishing industry for making it easier on me. 


What are your thoughts? With ratings there, whose responsibility is it to police content before letting kids get their hands on it?

Pulling Up My Big-Girl Panties

Sometimes this writing thing is hard. I don't want it to be. I mean, I like writing, I like revising, I like editing. I don't lurve blogging, but I don't hate it either. So why can't it be as simple as writing a book, editing the hell out of it and putting it out there. You know, so I can move on and write another book?

I've been giving a lot of thought to self-publishing lately. I know quite a few people who have or are doing it and they're happy. They seem to be doing well. But I follow some of them on Twitter and it feels like all they ever do is promo.

Promotion is the single most dreaded part of being an author for me. I hate going up to people and saying "buy my book" or even "this is my book and it got a really great review from ______." I suck at that stuff, and I have ever since I was little. When I was a girl scout I was lucky if I hit the 50 cookies badge every year. And those were GIRL SCOUT COOKIES. Those things practically sell themselves!

So, I look at self-publishing and as much as I think some of my books would do as well (even with my crappy sales skillset), I'm leery of branching out in that direction. But... that means sitting on things I'd like to see out in the world. It means trying to decide what to do with some of my work at all.

This is not a pity party. I have it better than a lot of writers out there. Between this me and the other me, I have quite a few stories out. I have publishers who I like working with and who like working with me. But not everyone publishes YA (sad sad fact of life), and not all publishers who do YA do it well. Plus, all my YA stuff is novel-length which means it takes more work than shorter pieces. So, I can't put everything out when I want to. And, right now I know it's making some people not happy with me.

There's stuff sitting on my hard drive right now that I need to make some decisions on. Self-pubbing is one option. There are others. All of them are a little scary. But eventually I have to do something because even letting them collect dust is me making a choice. It's just the chicken's choice. So, I'm pulling up my big girl panties (because one should never fight demons in any other kind of panties) and staring down my options. Hopefully it won't be as hard a decision as I'm worried it will be. But I want to thank each and every one of you who has been patient (and those of you who have been less so). You're the reasons I'm staring down my demons at all. You're the ones who make the fight worth it. So thanks.

Now where did I put my sword?

Die, Damn You, Die... Again

I'm in the midst of doing some revisions to a manuscript. On the one hand, I'm remembering just how much I love this story and how in the main character's head I was when writing (this is the book I drafted last year in 31 days). This was major in-the-zone writing and I love it. I think the revisions are making it better too. But... I hate re-killing characters I love.

An explanation first. Those 31 days last year? I spent most of them crying as I wrote this manuscript. It's a very emotional story for me and so many scenes tore me up to write. But I was a sobbing idiot on the days that I had to kill a couple characters. Yes, I know GRRM--if he were ever to read this--would be laughing at me right now, but I think I understand where the difference lies between his perspective and Rowling's. (https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-P_pCHQCYvkE/To3M6oNp6fI/AAAAAAAADFg/q9OUVE65Z8I/jk_martin.jpg)

You see, I kill characters all the time in my adult stuff. I even kill characters I like a lot. And when I do it there, it doesn't really bother me. (The adult story that affected me the most remains unfinished because it was so depressing for me to write. Not tear-jerking, just depressing, and no one even died on the page--only in the past.) But when it comes to my young adult work, killing characters sucks something out of me.

When I'm working on adult stuff, the characters are like my friends. Yes, I'd be heartbroken if my friends died, but I know that I'd pick up the pieces and my life would go on. (Sorry to my friends, but it's true. If nothing else, I'd need to go on for my kids.) But as an adult writing YA, those characters are more like my kids than my friends. And if my kids died, my world would fall apart. Hell, even if my kids' friends died and I had to watch them crumble, it would kill me a little bit inside. So when I have to write the deaths of characters who are so real inside my head that they fell like my own children, it rips my heart out and stomps on it.

I'm at the part in revisions where people start dying. In this world, death is a really common thing, but not the type of death these characters face. I had to "re-kill" one of them today, but that was the easier death. The harder one? The one that really screws with my main character's world? That came a couple chapters later, and the closer I got to it, the less I wanted to work on the book. This death--and the aftermath of it--tear so many things apart that I couldn't stomach the idea of facing it so close on the heels of the last one.

But I have to do it.

So tomorrow, I'm going to pull up my big girl panties and destroy the lives of a group of kids who live inside my head. But tonight I couldn't. Tonight I decided to knit instead.

So, yes, GRRM fans, I guess I'm adorable too. But at the end of the day, I'm okay with that.

Uh-Oh... Advice Gone Bad

One of the things writers are often told is "write what you know." It's right up there with using active verbs and BICHOK (butt in chair, hands on keyboard).  But... is it always good advice? What if you know doesn't resonate with your readers. One of the hardest things about writing YA is staying true to the characters while also staying true to the readers... all while often being (*cough* several *cough*) years out of high school. Sure some things are fairly consistent, but a lot changes over time.

And what about those things that were unique to your high school experience? What the hell do you do with those? (Personal example first...) I went to a high school that wasn't stereotypically clique-y. The cheerleaders hung out with the band people who hung out with the sports teams who hung out with the nerds who hung out with the choir people--and any combination you can think in there. (For example, I earned letters in band, choir, sports, and academics--and it was a pretty big high school, graduating class of 600+.) Now, I know a lot of schools aren't like that, but in some ways (in others it totally wasn't), I saw it as kind of an ideal situation, so I do use it in my work because I think a lot of people want that, especially if they don't have it. Sure, in the PRT stories, there are still jerks, but they aren't cliques of jerks--they're individuals.

(Now for a not-me example.)

One of my crit partners recently read a YA novel that gave her absolute fits. Mind you, she's in her early 20s, so not all that far removed from her high school years, and she loved the author's previous book. So what was the problem with this book? It dealt with sex... pretty much the book is about sex. Now, my crit partner doesn't have any problems with sex or sex in YA. But the way the female characters in the book acted and talked about sex was the complete opposite of her high school years, and I have to say...mine too.

(Details. I have not read the book, so I'm getting all of this from my crit partner...)

1. The plot of the book pushes these girls to actually talking to each other about sex. Okay, I don't know about you, but at my school, I knew by the next day when my friends had lost their virginity. It wasn't some closely guarded secret. We talked about sex, a lot, and not in worried whispers in the locker room. It was normal conversation fodder (which is not so different from the way my friends and I act now.)
2. Said girls are disturbed by the idea that they like sex. They think liking sex makes them sluts. First off... I have never in my life heard this as even a partial definition for slut. Certainly not when I was in high school. You know who got the "slut" label most often? Virgins with boyfriends. And the only people other girls called sluts were the ones who were known to sleep with anyone... and we knew this because of point #1. They were mainly labeled in a "keep your boyfriend away from ______, she's a slut." This wasn't even slut-shaming, because we didn't care that she had a lot of sex, we only cared that she didn't have it with our boyfriends while we were dating them.
3. Does doing various sex acts (or liking it) make them weird? Again, see point #1. Unless all your friends were virgins (and therefore you were the only one talking about sex in more than theory), this stuff comes out. Sometimes girls would be all "Really?" when someone said they liked something, but it was never honestly thought of as weird. 

Society didn't rule our conversations at school, so what society thought never entered our conversations. What we though mattered. Now maybe the author when to a different kind of school. Hell, it may be the way things are at most high schools, but when there's a decade and a half (along with half a country) separating my crit partner and I, one would think the situations in the book would have resonated with one of us at least a little. I'm not saying the author should have written the book differently, but as a reader, I would wonder if she forced the school and the characters into that box just to suit the plot. And that would bother me.