The White Glove War (Magnolia League #2)

"It would be creepy if we included explicit sex scenes with glistening young skin and heaving young bosoms, but we keep it on the clean side. This isn't Twilight. No slutty werewolves here. Mostly we pass the rare sex scenes in outline form back and forth between us like a ticking time bomb until one of us bites the bullet and puts it on paper. When it's completed, the other one innocently asks to make a pass "for editing" and then reads it aloud in a mocking voice and turns the most embarrassing lines into an email signature."

"What neither of us was prepared for was the insane pace. There's a reason that so many Y.A. series are written by collaborators: The timetable is crazy. Katie, having come out of an M.F.A. background where the rule was that good writing requires rumination, pain, and the slow loss of your best years, fought the craziness at first. But readers in Y.A. don't care about rumination. They don't want you to pore over your sentences trying to find the perfect turn of phrase that evokes the exact color of the shag carpeting in your living room when your dad walked out on your mom one autumn afternoon in 1973. They want you to tell a story. In Y.A. you write two or three drafts of a chapter, not eight. When kids like one book, they want the next one. Now. You need to deliver."

" 'Hi,' Alex says. She hesitates, then hugs me. 'Oh, dude. I've missed hanging out! We've hardly talked since the Christmas Ball, except for that meeting, and that barely counts. I've been jonesing for a download.' " (Crouch and Hendrix, 57).

" 'Dude, you've been totally MIA,' he says. 'Plus the Baby Maggots are all over your butt, man. And not in a good way. It's like you pepper-sprayed their Hanky Pankys or something." (82).

"'We live near Doc' cause he's old and he needs us, you little crab. Eat your stew. You're such a skinny little shrimp that even a hungry shrimp would throw you back.'"