Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 207

The Twelfth Secret Object

Did you know that Emma Newman’s Any Other Name is out?

IT IS.

And it’s a lovely book by a lovely author.

In fact, I was recently on said lovely author’s podcast — TEA AND JEOPARDY — where I discussed tea and books and the Devil and barely escaped her sinister volcanic lair.

No, really.

Anywho!

She has prepared a series of “secret objects” you are tasked with finding within the pages of her book, and here at terribleminds you will find this link to the twelfth object.

Any Other Name is the second novel in the Split Worlds series, following on directly after the events in Between Two Thorns. Cathy is secretly seeking a way out of Nether Society by helping Max and the gargoyle to investigate the murders in the Bath Chapter. When she learns more about the mysterious Agency which oils the wheels of life in the Nether it becomes clear that the privileged few are enjoying their existence at a price far higher than they realized. It’s time to change Nether society, but with assassins, Fae lords and revengeful fallen Rosas to deal with, can Cathy survive long enough to make a difference?

Signed copies will be available from Toppings Books, Bath and Forbidden Planet.

UK Print & Ebook

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US Print & Ebook

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DRM-Free Epub Ebook

On-sale from the

Kindle US and Kindle UK

The audio version (narrated by me) is available from †|† |†

The Blue Blazes Photo Contest: The Results (And A Vote!)

AND WE HAVE OUR WINNER. IT IS KRISTEN SULLIVAN — AKA, “THE RUSSIAN.” SHE WINS ALL. BIG BASKET OF BOOKS COMING HER WAY. HUZZAH AND HOORAY CAPSLOCK WHEE.

YOU MAY ALL GO HOME NOW.

Wait! Wait, shit, no, don’t go — hold on. Hold on.

We’ve got 25 other entries.

You should click here to see the whole set.

Because, by golly, I want to give away more books. That set has so many rad options it was genuinely hard to pick. I mean, it has stab wounds. It has my doppelganger. It has children on toilets. It has cosplay. THESE PICTURES HAVE EVERYTHING.

I want you to look through that set and then go to the comments below and vote for your favorite. Just list the photo # (with or without the title added is fine).

Vote for just one.

The top two photos in terms of votes will get:

A signed copy of Unclean Spirits.

And a signed copy of the Polish version of Blackbirds.

Voting is open until noon EST tomorrow — June 7th, Friday.

Go. Gaze. Vote!

Again, the link to the set:

The Blue Blazes Contest Photos.

And congrats to Kristin, who boldly and violently embodies both Nora “Persephone” Pearl and also any number of the Get-Em-Girls roller derby gang from the book.

Thanks to everyone else for participating!

Ten Questions About The Testing, By Joelle Charbonneau

Joelle is an agent-mate and a friend, and I gotta tell you, she’s written a helluva young adult book here — the marketing pitch is ‘Hunger Games meets the SATs,’ which is a pretty killer hook. But as hooks go, it only just scrapes the surface. Here’s Joelle to talk about the book:

Tell us about yourself:  Who the hell are you?

I’m a very tall redhead who keeps making career choices that involve rejection.  Lots and lots of rejection.  So, I suppose that also makes me a masochist or someone who isn’t very bright.  Huh…  I started out as a musical theater and opera performer (totally secure field), did some modeling (an even more secure field that involves copious amounts of exercise and small quantities of food), before teaching voice lessons while performing dinner theater.  After being rejected from a show that everyone else in my dressing room was cast in (true story), I was struck with the opening line of a book.  A book NO ONE should read, but it lead me to keep writing.  So, now I teach voice lessons and write books…which allows me to work with kids (which I love) and get rejected in totally new ways (which I’ve gotten really good at!).

Give us the 140-Character Story Pitch:

The SAT from Hell in which our heroine works to pass The Testing and become one of the next leaders of her country.

Where does this story come from?

Over the years, I’ve worked with lots of students as they go through the college acceptance process.  Each year the bar is set higher.  The pressure to be the best gets more extreme.  Some of my students handle the pressure better than others.  The parent and teacher can’t help worrying about the future and whether this process will become even more difficult.  The writer couldn’t resist the challenge of seeing how difficult it could become.

How is this a story only you could’ve written?

My fingers.  My computer.  And no one else was willing to do the work.  So…I guess unless a ghost took possession, the only way the pages were going to get filled was if I filled them.  Here’s hoping I did a good job!

What is the hardest thing about writing The Testing?

Aside from dealing with my computer crashing?  I would say The Testing pushed me to examine some less than happy ideas about the lasting changes modern warfare could cause and our society’s need to test students.  Thinking about how easy it would be for our world to be corrupted by weapons is frightening.  Examining how our education system has truly shifted its paradigm so that almost all lessons are geared toward better test scores was depressing.  Up until writing The Testing, my published novels have all been lighthearted mysteries containing camels that wear hats.  The Testing pushed me to confront some darker issues and the fears that I have about education, war and the way we chose our leaders — which is interesting, but never comfortable.

What did you learn writing The Testing?

That I never have a clue how a story is going to end.  Not even when I REALLY think I do.

What do you love about The Testing?

I love the characters. Especially my heroine, Malencia Vale.  Cia is smart, and comes from a wonderfully loving family.  That gives her a solid moral foundation, which is one of her strengths.  However, depending on the circumstances, that strength can also be one of her greatest weaknesses.

What would you do differently next time?

I’d love to say that I would have outlined the book, but I’ve learned that I can’t outline to save my soul.  Um…I guess I probably wouldn’t have let one of my students read some of the early pages because then she wanted to see the rest.  Which, of course, had yet to be written.  The enthusiasm was great, but she ended up asking me about the book during every lesson…which made me feel like I was writing at a glacial pace.  I wasn’t, but boy I felt like the tortoise from that fable.  The good news is that I finished the race!

Give us your favorite paragraph from the story.

Oh…well, my favorite is one that technically contains a spoiler.  So, I’m not going to give you that.  However, here is one that I have a great fondness for.

“My heart races with excitement even as it is torn in two.  I can see the same conflicting emotions on the faces of the other Five Lakes candidates.  Our graduation ceremony changed our status from adolescent to adult, but this journey makes it official.  We are on our own.”

What’s next for you as a storyteller?

Revisions!  I am currently in the middle of reworking Graduation Day, which is book 3 of The Testing Trilogy.  Once that is done…um….well, I do have a new idea I want to ply with that I’m not sure I can pull off.  But I really want to try!

Joelle Charbonneau: Website / @jcharbonneau

The Testing: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

Ten Questions About The Shining Girls, By Lauren Beukes

It is my crazy pleasure to have Lauren Beukes here to talk about what is genuinely my favorite book so far this year. Here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to read this interview, and you’re going to nod and laugh at all the right parts, and then you’re going to go and visit your favorite meatspace or online book retailer and you’re going to get a copy of this book because it is that goddamn good. Now, hey! Here’s Lauren to talk about it.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Jeez, that cues all kinds of metaphysical philosophical quandaries. Can I be a mismatch of atoms and carbon and mind thoughts in the restless dreaming of a post-dimensional crocodile god?

Okay, seriously, I’m a South African writer who is incredibly lucky to get paid to make up stories all day. It wasn’t always like this. Over the last 15 years, I’ve been a journalist, a TV scriptwriter, a documentary maker and a mom to a small and amazing daughter – and had to find time to write novels in between.

I guess I’m best known for winning the Arthur C Clarke Award and the Red Tentacle in 2011 for Zoo City, a black magic detective story set in Johannesburg about refugees, redemption, criminals with magical animals and the evils of autotune.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH

Harper, a time-travelling serial killer is untraceable, unstoppable until one of his victims, Kirby, survives and turns the hunt around.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

This is a little embarrassing. I was messing around on Twitter instead of writing (as you do) and threw out the idea in the middle of a random conversation. I immediately deleted the tweet because I was like, YES! That must be my next book! Quickly! Before someone else thinks of it!

But I think that’s often the way of interesting ideas – they come around when you’re least expecting them, in those moments when you’ve let your subconscious off the leash to romp in the grass.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD HAVE WRITTEN?

There are a lot of social issues that leak through my novels. It comes from having grown up under a terrible repressive racist regime (aka apartheid) and ten years as a journalist, getting backstage in the world.

I could have done a Bill And Ted’s Excellent Killing Spree from the dinosaurs to the middle ages to killing Hitler, or a Jack The Ripper Doctor Who, but I wanted to mess with the conventions of both genres.

I wanted to use time travel as a way of exploring how much has changed (or, depressingly stayed the same) over the course of the 20th Century, especially for women, and subvert the serial killer genre by keeping the focus much more on the victims and examining what real violence is and what it does to us. The killer has a type, but it’s not a physical thing – he goes for women with fire in their guts, who kick back against the conventions of their time.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE SHINING GIRLS?

Keeping precise track of the multiple timelines was tricksy, but really the hardest thing was the killing. I wrote deep portraits of interesting women, from an African American World War Two single mom welder to a troublesome broad architect accused of pinko sympathies in the 50s to a gentle abortionist and a burlesque dancer with a terrible secret… and then I had to kill them.

The attacks usually happen from their perspective, so you’re not riding along with the killer, complicit in the murder, getting off on it. You’re with the women, feeling their fear and their outrage and grief and trauma and that was pretty hard to write, to make it more than a gratuitous murder, to get at the shock and emotion of it, because violence should be shocking. It should punch us in the face, that this is what it means when a murder is reported on the news or a woman turns up dead in a story. It was about creating characters rather than pretty corpses.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE SHINING GIRLS?

That history is amazing! Okay, I knew that already. But the resonances of stuff that happened then with stuff that is happening now was a little scary.

There are a lot of echoes, some of them obvious, like the Great Depression and our current recession, or the Red Scare’s tactics coming up again in the War on Terror, sneakily eroding our privacy and stirring up fear for political control, or the fact that women’s rights to control their bodies is apparently still up for debate, somehow? Which just makes me sad and mad.

But there were others that creeped me out, like the Motion Picture Association of America’s role in McCarthyism and politics which explains so much about their political clout now in trying to get people cut off from the Internet for illegally downloading a movie. Seriously. Losing access to the Internet, which the UN has determined is a basic human right and is pretty fundamental to the way we live now, because an entertainment company is pissy that you pirated The Hangover 3? Not okay. (Which is not to say I’m endorsing piracy – pay creators, kids, but that’s a lot of political power for a movie organization).

And a lot of amazing detail I just couldn’t fit in, except in passing, from the first labor case, by the women who painted undark dials on watches during World War One with radium paint and died horribly of radiation poisoning or how abortion got legalized in New York or the first nuclear fission in a lab under the University of Chicago’s football field. So. Much. Good. Stuff.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE SHINING GIRLS?

The women. All of them, how they’re sharp and bright and curious and ready to set the world alight in some small way, and if they’re scared, they find a way to push through that. Especially Kirby. And I love her relationship with Dan. The love unfolding, if only she’d let it, if only she hadn’t let her whole life be derailed by her obsessive quest to find the man who did this to her.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I really want to write Nella’s story. She’s the daughter of the African American welder who is killed in 1943 and starts trying to put the puzzle together before Kirby does, because Harper left an impossible clue on her mother’s body – a 1993 Jackie Robinson baseball card, but real life gets in her way and there are too many missing pieces, literally, as she develops Alzheimers and can’t keep track of the threads any more. I may still do it as a short story.

GIVE US YOUR FAVOURITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY.

Okay, it’s a long one. But it’s my favourite moment between Dan and Kirby. Shit’s getting real. Kirby, the determined-as-hell survivor and Dan, an ex-homicide reporter turned sports journalist are heading towards a terrible confrontation.

She is tense in the car. She keeps playing with the lighter. Flick. Flick-flick-flick. He doesn’t blame her. The pressure is unbearable. Flick. Catapulting towards something that can be averted. A car crash in slow motion. Not just an ordinary fender-bender either. This is like your ten-car pile-up halfway across the freeway with helicopters and firetrucks and people weeping in shock on the side of the road. Flick. Flick. Flick.

‘Can you stop that? Or at least stick a cigarette in the hot end? I could use one.’ He tries not to feel guilty about Rachel. About driving her daughter into danger.

‘Do you have one?’ she says eagerly.

‘Check the glove compartment.’

She pops the latch and the cubby dumps a bunch of crap in her lap. Assorted pens, condiments from Al’s Beef, a squashed soda cup. She crumples the empty packet of Marlboro Lights.

‘Nope. Sorry.’

‘Shit.’

‘You know there’s still as much cancer-causing stuff in the light versions?’

‘Never figured cancer would be the thing to kill me.’

‘Where’s your gun?’

‘Under the seat.’

‘How do you know you’re not going to hit a bump and blow your ankle off?’

‘I don’t normally carry it around.’

‘I guess these are special circumstances.’

‘You freaked out?’

‘Out of my mind. I’m so scared, Dan. But this is it. My whole life. There’s no choice.’

‘We getting into free will now?’

‘I have to go back is all there is to it. If the police won’t.’

‘I think you’ll find that’s ‘we’, pal-face. You’re dragging me with you.’

‘Dragging is a strong word.’

‘So is “vigilantism”.’

‘You gonna be my Robin? You’d look good in yellow tights.’

‘Hold on there. I am definitely Batman. Which makes you Robin.’

‘I always liked the Joker more.’

‘It’s because you relate. You both have bad hair.’

‘Dan?’ she says, looking out the window at dusk creeping in over the empty lots and boarded-up houses and the rat-traps falling apart. Her face is reflected in the car window with the flame as she clicks the lighter again.

‘Yeah, kiddo?’ he says tenderly.

‘You’re Robin.’

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER

A novel set in Detroit, working title, Broken Monsters, about weird monstrous bodies turning up and a police detective’s relationship with her daughter and I can’t say more, because I’m still in the middle of it and talking too much steals the story’s soul.

Lauren Beukes: Website / @laurenbeukes

The Shining Girls: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

Kirkus Reviews Under The Empyrean Sky

Kirkus Reviews Heartland, Book #1!

A chilling post-apocalyptic adventure set on an Earth devastated by poor agricultural practices.

For teenager Cael, a good day might be killing a shuck rat for dinner and sailing a land-boat above ultra-engineered cornfields to scavenge parts from a wrecked motorvator. A bad day is watching the girl you love become Obligated to your archrival. Welcome to the Empyrean world, where the haves hover above ruined Earth in luxurious flotillas and the have-nots toil below in the Heartland, told whom to marry and what to grow—those “endless…everything” fields of corn that threaten to swallow towns and must be beaten back with “Queeny’s Quietdown,” an ominous herbicide. It’s all just “[l]ife in the Heartland,” resigned citizens say of violent “piss-blizzard” pollen storms, stillborn babies and the tumors that grow like strange fruit on their bodies. When Cael and his friends discover a trail of precious, prohibited vegetables growing deep in the corn, they stumble on a secret that may save them—or get them killed. Wendig offers vivid glimpses of authentic teen emotion and snappy, profanity-laced dialogue set in a grim-yet-plausible wrecked world. With last pages that offer more late-breaking revelation than resolution, this story’s dangling threads will no doubt entice readers to reach for the next book in the Heartland Trilogy.

A thoroughly imagined environmental nightmare with taut pacing and compelling characters that will leave readers eager for more.

Kirkus Reviews June 2013

UNDER THE EMPYREAN SKY

Preorder: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

Ten Stupid Writer Tricks (That Might Actually Work)

We’re all full of weird little penmonkey tricks. Hell, I got a whole cabinet of ‘em.

So, here’s ten.

Peruse.

Add your own should you see fit.

The Tiniest Outline Of Them All: The last 50-100 words you write at the end of your day should be a note to yourself detailing just what the fuck you should write tomorrow. (“HORACE MURDERS LORD THORNJIZZ AND THE LITHUANIAN DETECTIVE CIRCUS IS ASSIGNED TO THE CASE”). In other news, now I want to write a book about a “Lithuanian detective circus,” whatever that is. I call dibs. You can’t have it. I’ll get stabby.

Little Jail Cells: Use a spreadsheet to track your deadlines and daily word count. Individual cells can detail word target and word actual for the day. Color code those motherfuckers: a red cell means you missed the target, whereas a green cell means you met or exceeded the target. Subtract current story’s word tally from total word tally desired to see just how much more blood you have yet to squeeze from this particular stone.

Chekhov’s Continuity: You’ve got lots of little things to track from start to finish when writing a long-form story (novel, screenplay, comic script), and it only gets harder when you sit down to write the sequels. Take notes on continuity as you go. Write them in a little notebook. Or use the function of your individual word processor (Scrivener is great with this, but using Word’s comments or notebook view could work, too). You have lots of things to track: where’s that gun and how many bullets are left? Who’s got the key to the Apiary Gate? Who knows the secret about Lord Thornjizz and his clockwork marmoset? Who put the bop in the bop-she-bop?

The WTF Code: Sometimes you’re writing and you hit a part in the story where you’re just like, “Nope, no fucking idea what happens here. Maybe they fight? Maybe they make love? I’m envisioning an orangutan for some reason.” Or maybe you reach a portion where you need more information (“Note to self: research the sewer tunnel layout of Schenectady”). That’s okay. Leave it blank and drop a code you’ll remember right into the section, a code that will specifically not be duplicated anywhere else in the text (WTF2013, for instance). Then when you complete the first pass of the manuscript, just do a FIND for all instances of YOUR SEKRIT CODE and hop through your many narrative gaps and chasms. FILL AND SPACKLE.

Save Or Die: Wanna know when to save your manuscript? Uh, pretty much always, always, always. Ah, but here’s a good specific tip: anytime you stop for any reason at all — to think! to take a shot of vodka! to tweet! — SAVE THAT MOTHERFUCKING MANUSCRIPT. Save frequently. Save obsessively! Future You will thank Present Proactive You the moment your asshole computer shits the bed and you lose barely any text at all.

The Dictionary Of Superfluity: As you write, begin to collect what you believe are instances of so-called “junk language” that you seem likely to use again and again. This might be any word that seems to bog down the flow of a sentence – actually, very, really, effectively, just. Slap that shit in a list. When it comes time to edit, do a FIND and look for instances of all these nasty little word-goblins. Then stick them in a bag and burn them. (You can also do this with words that may not be junky but that you find yourself overusing — “For some reason I really seem to like the words ‘turgid,’ ‘clamshell,’ and ‘widdershins.’”)

The Shape Of The Prose: Print out pages of the work. No no no — don’t read it. Not yet. Just let your eyes gloss over it — behold the shape of the prose upon the page. You should see diversity there in shape — a few big sections, some short sections, some one-line dialogue. Uniformity is not ideal. Big giant shit-bricks of text will bog down the story; but too many short little sentences crammed together may also unnerve the eye. (Tip to an old writing professor, Doctor Kobre, for turning me onto this one. I still do this.)

The One-Sentence Description Exercise: Practice honing your mad description skillz by looking at someone and describing them with a single sentence. (And not a sentence with a half-dozen hyphens, colons and semi-colons, you little cheater.) Maybe it’s a celebrity — Tom Cruise! Maybe it’s that poor homeless down by the train station who looks like a bunch of half-full garbage bags lashed together under a pile of dirty rags. Alternate version: make it a tweet-length description, 140-characters only. Similar! But different.

Outline Other People’s Books: Pick up a book. Read it. And outline it. Study that outline. Study the narrative pivots. Study the shifts in pacing and tone. Take as many notes as you care to or are able to. Do this with multiple books. Compare them. GO MAD AS YOU INGEST THE SPIRITS OF THOSE AUTHORS WHO HAVE COME BEFORE YOU. Okay, maybe not so much with that last part — but this is a good way to grasp how other authors handle plot, story, and character. Don’t limit yourself to novels, either: study films, games, short stories, comic books.

Lords Of Google, Allow Me To Be Your Avatar In This World: Can’t visit a place? Use Google Maps Street View. It isn’t perfect (there’s no smell-o-vision, nor can you drive the Google Car into a bar and get a drink and talk to the local drunks), but it’ll give you a feel for what a place is like — enough to describe it in your Fancy Fictions. Plus you might catch some guy whizzing on a telephone pole or a couple of geriatrics having sex in a Chevy Malibu.

I Enter Scott Sigler’s Hallucinogenic Pop Culture Dreamscape

So, Bad-Ass Bestselling Author Scott Sigler said, “Hey, you should come on my YouTube show,” and I said, “NO I DON’T WANT YOUR CANDY BUT THAT IS A PRETTY SWEET VAN IS THAT A WIZARD PAINTED ON THE SIDE?” and he’s like, “Yes,” and then I got in the van.

Regardless, he let me talk about The Blue Blazes, then he let me talk about a bunch of other stuff and he put that in a whole separate bonus interview, which is right here:

So, thanks to Herr Doktor Sigler for having me on and letting me ramble.

He actually puts together a really swanky looking videocast, so.

Plus, rad van, sweet candy, and a helluva mustache.

25 Things You Should Know About Young Adult Fiction

As always, this is not meant to be my bold-faced proclamations about This Particular Thing, but rather, twenty-five hopefully constructive and compelling talking points and thought bullets about the topic at hand. It is not meant to be gospel etched into stone, but notions — sometimes controversial — worth discussing. Let us begin.

[EDIT: It's 28, now. Because, reasons.]

1. If You Say The Word “Genre,” I’m Going To Tear Gas Your Mother

Young Adult is not a genre. I hear that often — “the YA genre.” You’re wrong. Don’t call it that. Stop it. Young Adult is a proposed age range for those who wish to read a particular book. It is a demographic rather than an agglomeration of people who like to read stories about, say, Swashbuckling Dinosaur Princesses or Space Manatee Antiheroes or whatever the cool kid genres are these days. Repeat after me: Young Adult is not a genre designation. See? Not so hard.

2. And That Age Range Is…

“Teenager.” Young adult books are generally written for teenagers. I’ve seen 12-18, but really, just call it “teenager” and be done with it. (The age range before it is “middle grade,” which runs roughly from 8-12.) This is where someone in the back of the room grouses about how when he was a young reader they didn’t have young adult books and he read whatever he could get his hands on, by gum and by golly — he read the Bible and Tolkien and Stephen King and Henry Miller and Penthouse and he did it backwards, in the snow, besieged by ice tigers. “In my day we didn’t need teenage books! We took what books we had and liked it! I once read a soup can for days!” I’ll cover that in more detail, but for now, I’ll leave you with this lovely Nick Hornby quote: “I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of.”

3. Young Adult In Fact Runs Giggling Over Many, Many Genres

Young Adult can be whatever you want. It can be epic fantasy. It can be space opera. It can be (and often is) dystopia. It can be elf romance. It can be funny cancer. It can be ghosts and fast cars and serial killers and Nazi Germany and one might even say that it operates best when it karate-slaps all your genre conventions in the face, when genres run and swirl together like paint and make new colors and form new ideas and change the way you think about stories.

4. It Should Feature A Teen Protagonist

It’s not a completely bizarre thing to suggest that teen books should feature teenage characters. I mean, I guess it’s not essential, but I’m not sure that your book about an old man fighting raccoons in the park — young and sprightly as he may seem! — will really qualify. And here is where Cranky Old Crotchpants in the back says, “Them dang teenagers should read about more than just themselves! Selfish little boogers always stealing my flip-flops!” And here I say, the best thing about YA fiction is that it’s talking to what was once an under-served population: teenagers. It’s not saying, You will buy this book because you’re solipsistic little shitbirds but rather, it’s saying, I will write this book because finally someone’s going to start telling stories about all the things that are happening to you and your friends.

5. This Teen Protagonist Should Ideally Suffer From Teen Protagonist Problems

We write about teens to talk to teens. And you talk to teens by embracing their problems. Teen problems are — well, crap, do you remember being a teenager? Holy fuck was that ever a weird time. High school! Sex! Drugs! Drinking! Parents! First love! First breakup! Bullying! College planning! SATs! Pregnancy scares! The realization that your parents don’t know all the things you thought they knew! Even in a genre-based setting teen-specific problems can be reflected (quick plug for a friend’s book, out today: The Testing gets pitched as The Hunger Games meets the SATs). Young Adult fiction isn’t about selling books to teenagers. It’s about writing books that speak to them. And speaking to them means talking about their problems.

6. Sex, Drinking, Drugs

I mentioned it above, but it bears repeating here: sex, drinking and drugs are part of a teenager’s reality. This isn’t me suggesting every teenager has sex, or drinks, or does drugs — only that it’s there. It exists for them. And some adults may bluster — “Bluh, bleh, muh, not my teenager!” — to which I say, even Amish teenagers deal with this. The Amish. The Amish. So, I’m always dubious of any young adult book that doesn’t at least address one of these three in some way. Not saying they need to be drug-fueled drunken orgy-fests, mind you.

7. The Hormone Tornado And The Unfinished Brain

Read this: “The Teenage Brain Is A Work-In-Progress.” Their brains ain’t done cooking yet. They’re these unfinished masterpieces that are pliable in some ways, rigid in others, and whose emotional and intellectual development is driven by a drunken chimpanzee whacked-out on a cocktail of high-octane hormones. The teenage brain is like, NOW IT’S TIME TO KNOW SHIT AND DO SHIT AND HAVE SEX WITH STUFF AND KICK THINGS AND POUR YOUR HEART OUT AND DRIVE FAST AND AAAAAAAAAAAH. I’m not saying a teen protagonist has to act like a coked-up ferret, but it is important to recognize that the teen psyche is a really strange thing.

8. What Were You Like As A Teen?

Write What You Know is one of those roasted chestnuts of writing advice that fails to tell the whole story — it sounds like a proclamation, that it’s the Only Thing You Should Do, but it’s not. It’s just one of the things you can do. And given that most of the people writing young adult fiction are not themselves young adults it behooves us to not just study teenagers like we’re Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey (“I am hiding in the teenage human’s locker. This locker smells suspiciously of gym socks, weed, Cheetos, and desperation”) but rather to look back our own time doing battle in the Teenage Arena. Rip off the old gnarly Band-Aid and let the memories flow. What were your teenage years like? What did you deal with? Remember! And write.

9. The Prevalence Of First-Person Point-Of-View

YA fiction is often told in a first-person point-of-view. One could intuit reasons for this: first-person tends to be a faster and more forthright read, teenagers often embrace their own first-person narratives (from handwritten journals to, say, Tumblr), teens might be more inwardly-focused than adults. The first-person POV is not a necessity, to be clear — nobody will beat you with a copy of Divergent if you write in, say, close third.

10. The Preponderance Of Present Tense

YA fiction is also frequently given over to the present tense. One might suggest reasons for this: present tense is a snappier, sharper read (more “cinematic” as the saying goes); it also provides a more urgent read; the teen mind lives more in the present than in the past, and so narrative tense should reflect it. Again, present tense is not a requirement, just a frequent feature.

11. Shorter, Punchier Books

You won’t find many Young Adult books that are big enough to derail an Amtrak train or to bludgeon a silverback gorilla. The average Young Adult novel probably hovers around the 70,000 word mark — shorter if it leans away from genre and toward literary, I think. That’s not to say you won’t or can’t see BIG GIANT GALLUMPHING TEEN EPICS, but it isn’t really the norm. Particularly for the first in a series.

12. Pacier, Chattier Books

They also tend to be more quickly paced and with a great deal of dialogue. I’ve read some young adult books that read with almost the spare elegance of a really sharp, elegant screenplay.

13. The Role Of The Adult Character

Adults are rarely the main characters of a young adult book. Why would they be? They don’t have teen problems. They’re witnesses, at best. That said, adults can be the supporting characters (though usually still peripheral to the teen world — teachers, parents, older siblings) and they can certainly be the villains (which is true to the teen mold because sometimes, when you’re a teenager, the adults in your life can be giant, cankerous assholes). What I mean to say is, TEENS RULE, ADULTS DROOL *flushes Dad’s toupee down the toilet and sets fire to the house*

14. The Teens Sound Like Adults

Sometimes the teens you read in young adult books sound like adults. They speak with intelligence and wit. I’ve seen this as a criticism against YA fiction, but hey, fuck that. I write with the assumption that — drum roll please – teenagers are capable of intelligence and wit.

15. But They Should Always Act Like Teens

Just the same, teenagers in your young adult stories are best when they actually act like teenagers. Teens do stupid shit. I look back over my teenage years and it’s like… oooh, oh, wow, yeah, I made some poor life choices. Driving way too fast. Unprotected sex. Disputing authority even when authority might’ve actually been right. Doing things because they seemed “cool” rather than because it was actually a good goddamn idea. I once punched a locker based on misappropriated jealousy (still have the scar). I once accidentally shot a hole in our kitchen ceiling with a .22 rifle. I was once in a car with a friend who tried to circumvent like, five minutes of traffic by driving on the side of the road, thus breaking the car on a giant drainage block. I could probably do a lecture on all the really teenagey things I did as a teenager, and I didn’t even drink in high school (it took me till college to learn the love of the sauce).

16. Riskier Stories

Personal opinion time: some of the bravest, strangest, coolest stories right now are being told in the young adult space. It’s stuff that doesn’t fly by tropes or adhere to rules — appropriate, perhaps, since young adults tend to flick cigarettes in the eyes of the rules and don’t play by social norms as much as adults do. (Though teens certainly have their own social codes, too.) I wish adult fiction so frequently took risks on the material at hand, but it doesn’t. And as a person (relatively) new to the young adult spectrum, I used to assume it was all Twilight: generic pap. But then you read John Green, or Libba Bray, or Maureen Johnson — or holy shit, have you read ?! — and your eyes start to go all boggly. Amazing storytelling in this realm. Amazing! I’ll wait here while you go read it all. *stares*

17. More “Adult” Stories

Young adult stories are encouraged to deal with some heavy shit when needed. Suicide, racism, misogyny, teen pregnancy, depression, cancer, rape, school shootings, and so forth. Don’t feel like it needs to be all cushy and cozy and given over to some Hollywood notion of what it’s like being a teenager. Sometimes YA books get called “children’s fiction,” which makes it sound like it stars characters looking for their next cotton candy fix while trying to stop the playground bullies from stealing their truck toys. Young adults still deal with some particularly adult things.

18. Very Hard To Compare To Film Ratings

A lot of young adult books hover somewhere between PG-13 and R in terms of how you might translate it to a film rating — but that’s ultimately a broken comparison because of, well, how broken film ratings happen to be. For example: if you were to film The Hunger Games as close to the book as you could make it, it would almost certainly be an R-Rated film for the depiction of violence. Some of the sex in young adult books would similarly earn an R-rating or — given our deeply Puritanical roots — something closer to NC-17 (GASP TEENS HAVE SEX OH GOD BURN THE BRIDGES SINK THE BOATS). The takeaway is, you can get away with some profanity and some sex in young adult fiction – though, I have seen talk of some libraries, teachers and booksellers refusing to promote certain books to teenagers because of edgy content found within. This is, as always, a YMMV issue.

19. Adults Like It

Adults read a lot of young adult fiction, particularly “cross-over” fiction that leans toward the higher end of that teen age range. One might speculate adults like it because it recaptures some part of their youth. Or that adults are frequently not as grown up as they’d prefer these days. Or that they get some vicarious thrill. Mostly, if I’m being honest, I think it’s because of what I said in #13 and #14 — some of the bravest, most “adult” storytelling is happening in the young adult space. They’re gravitating to the quality. Or so I like to hope. At the very least, those who claim young adult books are there to play off of adult nostalgia for the age have never read a young adult book. (“Teen suicide. Remember those good times? Like a Norman Rockwell painting!”)

20. Something-Something New Adult

Now there’s this other thing called “new adult,” which I think is maybe like “diet adult,” or “adult, now with zero calories?” I dunno. My understanding is that it’s maybe just a sexed-up version of young adult? Or that it’s the next age range after young adult for, say, 19-25 year olds? (Soon we’ll be writing books based on your birth month. “THIS BOOK RECOMMENDED FOR THOSE BORN IN JUNE OF 1984.”) I always thought that 19-25 year olds were just regular old adults by then, but maybe I’m that crotchety old crotchbasket on the lawn yelling at you kids to stop trampling his begonias.

21. As Always, Hell With Trends

THE TREND RIGHT NOW IS TEEN MUMMY UTOPIAS FEATURING SPUNKY CHARACTERS LOCKED IN TURBULENT LOVE RHOMBUSES. Whatever. Fuck trends. You can’t really beat trends. You can’t really write to them either. Trends are boring. Write what you want to write and make it as awesome as you can make it. Set the trend instead of following it.

22. You Are Reading Young Adult, Right?

If you’re gonna write it, you better be reading it.

23. Of Waning Snobbery

I was once a young adult snob. I was that old dude on his front porch yelling at the wind — “I don’t need your stinky young adult fictions! I read Ender’s Game when it was just a book and the author wasn’t a homophobic Tea Party sociopath! It’s just a marketing category! I’ll fill your hide with rock salt from my shotgun MARTHA GET ME MY SHOTGUN.” But I think that’s changing. In part because folks like myself acquiesced and actually starting reading what was prematurely condemned. I’m happy to be seeing fewer and fewer essays elsewhere about how YA is too dark or too puerile or how adult fiction is just fine, thanks, shut up — as if the presence of young adult fiction somehow eats away adult fiction instead of contributing to the overall health of a great book market. Go read that Nick Hornby quote again.

24. Teen Self-Publishing Squad

I don’t really know how self-publishing impacts young adult fiction or vice versa. I did self-publish an “edgy YA” (Bait Dog) which did well over Kickstarter and has since sold fine enough since (well enough that Amazon picked it and a sequel up to publish with Skyscape starting next year). Trends have been that teen readers preferred physical books as they did not often own their own e-readers — though, I’ve heard they’re inheriting e-readers now, thus opening them to the digital space more easily. Good for indie publishing types, I think.

25. You’re Not My Mom!

We as adults have a tendency to talk down to children and adolescents. “Eat this. Don’t eat that. Get good grades. If you pee in the pool, the pool filter will release piranha. Don’t do drugs. Definitely don’t steal Daddy’s drugs. If you masturbate too often, your fingers will turn white and fall off.” Don’t do this in your books. These books aren’t lesson plans. You’re not preaching from the Adult-Sized Podium. (This is true of all books, by the way — you should be telling stories while within your audience, not from outside it. I just think the tendency to get all teachy-and-preachy is stronger when writing for teens.)

26. Big-Ass Market Share

The young adult market is strapping and robust, like a young Russian lad thick on borscht and vodka. Last year sales in young adult were up 13%, and up 117% in e-books which is more than twice the digital growth in adult markets — plus, by most reports, young adult fiction yields bigger advances, too. And it’s these bigger advances right now that maybe suggests young adult authors are better leaning toward more traditional publishing than self-publishing (whereas in other areas, like in romance, the reverse may be true).

27. Genres Being Codified

I always poke around the Barnes & Noble YA shelves and I’ve noticed that the big bookstore has begun to lump YA into weird, clumsy genres. What I used to love about that shelf is that it was once just YOUNG ADULT. No “general fiction,” no “mystery,” no “SFF,” just — boom, here’s all the awesome books, please dispense of your genre tropes and judgments. That’s changing. Now it’s like, “Teen Adventure!” and “Teen Romance!” and “Teen Boondoggles With Drugs And Dystopias!” and blah blah blah. I don’t like it. I also don’t like that the shelving seems almost arbitrary, like someone let my toddler do it.

28. Good Story Is Good Story No Matter The Age Range

Young Adult is not just some easy space to jump in and make a quick buck. It’s a place for great storytelling and no matter what the rules are now or what they become for this age range, good story is always good story. I’m not so blindly optimistic to suggest that you can’t lose with a good story (nor would I say you can’t win with a bad one because, well, c’mon), but just the same: put your best foot forward with the best story you can tell. If it’s a story about teens or toddlers or geriatric dudes or koalas or space koalas or teenage space koalas, fuck it: slam your best effort down on the table. Write a killer story. The end.

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Why It’s Time To Genderflip Doctor Who

Matt Smith is done being The Doctor.

Which means it is now time to introduce a female Doctor.

This apparently upsets some of you.

Don’t worry — it won’t happen. You’ve already won. You can be sure that right now they have suggested and summarily dismissed an actress for the role. (See also: Idris Elba.)

But I’m going to tell you why that’s fucked up.

So, I said on the Twitters like I just said here: it’s time for a female Doctor. I even mentioned what I felt was a good choice — Imogen Poots (Google her), who I think might carry on the same kind of gleeful anarchy and smoldering emotional intensity The Doctor so requires. Others mentioned Tilda Swinton — which I think also works! She’s maybe a little praying-mantisy, but she’s also really well in line with what Christopher Eccleston brought to the table, so hell yeah.

In response, I got a lot of folks saying that this was “PC tokenism.” That it would just be marketing. Falsely trying to balance — well, who gives a shit. You know the drill.

It’s nonsense.

Crap of the highest order.

You’re going to defend it as being against the story. Like it’s a money or culture decision made ahead of the interests of the narrative. Here’s why that’s wrong: the cultural status quo and the financial weight lies with keeping things the same. The Doctor of Doctor Who has always been a white dude. Cultural inertia and financial interest is stronger when that remains true.

(Plus, making the character female opens up new story avenues.)

You say, it’s “tokenism.” But tokenism isn’t what you think it is. Some people said — “Well, why not make the supporting characters be strong female characters?” That’s tokenism. Putting a black dude in your TV show — oh, ho, ho, not as the lead character, mind you — because you need a black dude for your “demographics,” that’s tokenism. Tokenism is a dismissive, hand-wavey gesture. Tokenism is, “Here, happy now? We’re eating bread, but you enjoy these crusts. HEY IT’S BETTER THAN NOTHING, SHADDAP.” Making your titular character — in this case, making the Doctor a woman — isn’t a token. It’s a nuclear bomb. 

You might say, well, it has nothing to do with the story, so why do it at all? But that’s part of the magic, here. Doctor Who is a show about a character whose very flesh is transitive. This character has carried across multiple iterations so far — this role is tailor-made to see actors and actresses who are not White Dudes. It’d be one thing if the character’s “maleness” was key to the role, right? You could make a case that says, this or that story – Ulysses, Fight Club, whatever — has its roots in a kind of male experience, and changing that might alter the story so much it’s not worth the genderflip. But this is Doctor Who. It is, as its heart, a show for kids and family. It should not be protected by some kind of geeky jurisdiction. The Doctor is practically already without gender. The romances are barely that; the sonic screwdriver is not a metaphor for some dude’s wang. If we can’t give the role of a flesh-changing alien to a woman and instead relegate the actresses only to the “girl groupies,” that’s kinda fucked up, isn’t it? What kind of message is that for the families who are watching the show? Not the adult geeks of Whovian fandom, but kids who dig the character and all its assorted fictions?

And it’s that last point that matters most for me; this is a show where kids are watching. Little boys. Little girls. Do we really want to say to little girls, “You can never be The Doctor? You are forever relegated to The Companion?” And do you really want that same message for boys? “You will always be The Doctor. Girls are forever your Companions.” Fuck that noise. I want my son to grow up in a world where women can be real doctors and imaginary Time Lord Space Doctors.

So, now I ask you –

Who would be a great female Doctor?

Note that I’m not asking to have a conversation about whether the Doctor should or should not be played by a woman. You want to have that conversation, have it somewhere else.

(Sidenote: I’m told the Corsair proves it possible for Time Lords to flip the gender, thus showing how the Doctor could do the same. I’m honestly not a Super-Fan of the show, more just a casual watcher, but YEAH WHATEVER LET’S DO IT LADY WHO WOOOOOOOO)

Ten Things I Learned At BEA 2013

BEA, baby. Book Expo America.

I came. I wandered. I got swag.

This was my first. My BEA cherry is now popped.

Let’s talk about what I learned.

1. BEA is not actually a Bea Arthur cosplay convention. My Maude outfit — which was, forgive my ego, exquisite — landed like an iron turd. I tried to segue and pretend I was doing some riff on “50 Shades Of Grey-Haired Ladies,” but that just weirded people out even more.

2. People will step on their nieces and grandmothers to get certain swag offerings. Like, at first I thought, “BEA is like a polite, bookish version of Comic-Con,” and that largely remains true. People are generally quite polite and professional. Until – until — it comes time to procure a highly sought-after advanced reader copy of an upcoming book, particularly if you could also get it signed. I think I saw a few sharpened toothbrushes. One librarian had trained peregrine falcons to go for the eyes of anybody reaching for a book she wanted. What also enraged folks: the fact that some ARCs were not produced and made available. The fact that Veronica Roth’s newest did not have a galley copy on the floor drove one librarian into twerking as if possessed by a twerking demon, and those who got close to her were incinerated in holy fire. It’s possible I’m making this up. I did, after all, consume hallucinogens with Mister Tyrus Books Himself. We made LSD from library paste. It was, as the kids say, “off the chain.”

3. People in publishing are frequently demonized, but this to me remains largely unfair. Demonize the industry all you like (and it has done things worthy of the exorcisms and excrement thrown at times), but generally the people who work in publishing love it. They love books. They love authors. They love selling books and promoting authors. Sometimes they might not be as good at it as we want. Sometimes they might be mired in thinking that sometimes seems “backwards,” but that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of people I meet working in the industry are there because they actually love the shit out of books.

4. Grumpy Cat brings all the boys to the yard. Seriously, like, I think Grumpy Cat’s line was longer than that of most of the celebrity authors who were there.

5. FUCK YES LIBRARIANS AND TEACHERS AND BOOK WORKERS. And book bloggers! I’ve seen commentary that dismisses them in favor of the generic “reader,” but that misses some things. First, it misses that librarians and teachers and book workers are readers. Second, it misses that these people can also be a book and author’s avatars into the world — they are not “middle men” fit to be excised but rather they are connective tissue that helps ensure that books (physical books and digital books) find hands. Anybody who cheers the demise of libraries or bookstores shouldn’t be allowed to write books and should in fact be slathered with tuna and thrown into a pit beneath Jabba’s Palace with a starving Grumpy Cat. GRUMPY CAT GONNA EAT YOUR FACE, FOOLS.

6. The BEA exhibitor floor is like a really boring labyrinth. (In the middle is not an angry minotaur but rather some tired guy trying to give away inspirational Christian cookbooks.) It’s amazing how I can get lost in a basic grid but after a while it’s like the streets of Los Angeles — it all starts to blur together and you start seeing the same corners and book hawkers and generic covers and next thing I know I’m drooling and pirouetting and peeing in a Starbucks cup. Then again, that might’ve been the library paste LSD? Hard to say.

7. If you’re a service trying to do outreach for authors and you want to step into the chain of authorial existence by adding yourself as a link, you need to have data. I spoke to a few services aimed at self-publishers (and they were admittedly free, to be clear, and were very nice), but they all balked when it came time to ask about data. No bells or whistles make a louder sound than a big-ass foghorn pushing back the haze with a trumpeting oomph of data. Have data. HAVE DATA. Authors across all forms of publishing NEED MORE DATA. Where are we selling? To whom are we selling? Who buys what where? Where are my pants? Where is the cheapest bottle of Basil Hayden bourbon in Manhattan? Details, please. Hopefully folks like Bookigee will do just that. Also, some companies will claim to want to cut out the middle-man while clearly inserting themselves as a new middle-man. See also: self-publishers who decry publishing while somehow missing the irony of creating their own small press publishing companies. If you’re going to tell me I don’t need a publisher, you probably shouldn’t then tell me you’re starting your own publishing company. Pro-tip, from me to you.

8. Given how many books they give away for free during this event, it’s amazing anybody worries at all about piracy. I’m not interested in a nuanced argument about the differences between targeted free marketing that you control and the lack of control one has over piracy — they’re different. I grok that. But for real, publishers give away a metric fuckliter of books. Effectively, to boot. Seems then that it would be best to find a way to utilize and steer torrenting and piracy (or in some cases, “piracy”) in a way where it adds value. Then again, what do I know?

9. The show isn’t super e-book friendly. Some publishers are getting there — they’ll give e-ARCs by scanning badges, which is a cool feature. (I saw a few recaps lamenting the lack of QR codes on the show floor — no, no, no, a thousand times no. If you tout the awesomeness of QR codes, you go on the “Grave Distrust” list. You’ve seen the handy helpful flowchart to help you decide when to use a QR code, right?) Generally, though, you still get the vibe that e-books aren’t “real” books. I heard more about how e-books were “cooling down,” which is like saying, “This 747 has reached its cruising altitude of 30,000 feet.” Yeah, it’s still 30,000 feet. It’s not crashing. E-books are a giant part of the ecosystem now so let’s not pretend they’re not. Also, publishers, it’s really, honestly, seriously time: if I buy the physical copy of your book, give me the e-book. Just do it. Take that leap of faith. Realize that this will sell more books, not fewer books. Add value. Do not limit it. If you don’t do it first, Amazon will.

10. BEA felt like a battle of cynicism versus enthusiasm — on the publishing industry side, it’s easy to see that cynicism at play (and that cynicism is, despite appearances otherwise, because many of the people in publishing love books so much and yet have to operate in what is presumed to be the best interests of the industry rather than the best interests of the art). But then in meeting the people who come for the books you get a face full of wide-eyed enthusiasm: people are excited as fuck about books. If there’s anything to take away from all the Monday Morning Quarterbacking and Grumpy BEA Wrap-Up Bloggery, it’s exactly that: we should embrace an industry that can support thousands of people descending upon a single place (whether as angels or as vultures) to feast upon Publishing in all its splendors and glories and frailties. People love stories! This is a place where people come to demonstrate that love and, ideally, carry that love back to classrooms and libraries and bookstores — and beyond. And this is why I will always embrace the enthusiasm rather than celebrate the cynicism. Meeting fans and readers and even publishers gave me energy going forward.

My Own BEA

A more personal look — had a great trip to NYC, met lots of great people, enjoyed the time spent with my publishers. Finally got to put faces to Twitter handles (Liberty! Shecky! Pabkins!). Finally got to meet writers I admire and adore (Erin Morgenstern! Robin Wasserman! T.L Costa!). Got to meet old friends (Dave “Eel Penis” Turner! Joelle “The Testing” Charbonneau! John Hornor “Twelve-Fingered” Jacobs!”). And more that I’m forgetting since I’m dizzy and tired and probably still half-drunk on books and fancy cocktails. I signed hundreds and hundreds of books for folks, which was wild — many of them seemed to actually be fans of this very blog or my Twitter feed. And the Blue Blazes launch at the mighty mighty Singularity & Co. in Brooklyn was bad-ass — wine! Charcuterie! An electrical fire outside! Bumsiders!

Good times.

Sleep now.