Here’s the Beef on Stakes
“What’s at stake here?” Sooner or later every fiction writer fields this question. Often the challenge appears as a single word – STAKES? – scrawled on a novel chapter or short story draft, plus or minus a coffee cup ring,…
Category: YA
Friday Feast: Breaking Up With Your Book, Writing for 21st Century Teens, Innovative Writers, Book Technology, and Why Some Authors Are Assholes
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. That’s the focus of the links this week, including changes to a common metaphor writers use to describe the writing process, depictions of 21st century teens in young adult books, storytelling methods of innovative authors, and the reading habits…
Friday Feast: #VeryRealisticYA and Helpful Charts for Writers, Including One with Cocktails
I thought it might be #VeryUnRealisticYA of me to put young adult fiction links in the same post as a chart of fancy cocktails from literary fiction. Do teens drink and read Henry James? Dubious, though I am sure there are outliers. So instead…
Friday Feast: Writing Conferences, Sleep Habits, Wes Anderson, and “Appropriate” Literature
Conference anxiety. Censorship. Coming of age. This post could have also been named Feelings. All of the links highlighted this week have that certain something that provide people with a spectrum of feels.
How the Pied Piper of Tucson Led Me to My Story
Some writers keep returning to the story they have to tell until they get it right. When I started my YA novel Half in Love with Death (Merit Press – December 2015), I’d already abandoned two novels about a young…
Sex in YA Novels
There’s a lot of discussion online about sex in YA novels: too much of, not enough of, inappropriateness of, negative consequences of, condoning of, etc. etc. Among the critiques I received on the first draft of my YA novel was…