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We’ve got some crappy weather going on this week here in DC. Yuck. And I’m working like hell on my newest secret project, which might, in fact, be the most exciting secret project I’ve ever had. Whee.
(I know, I’m a terrible tease.)
But there’s some cool stuff out there to read. Stuff like Vonna Harper’s awesome essay on the NINC blog about the pitfalls of vanity publishing. Perhaps you are one of those wondering why almost every profesional writer’s organization in the country is coming out against vanity publishing. It’s because why there is a place in this world for self-publishing, that place is, 999 times out of 1000, not the realm of commercial fiction. This essay shows why.
Pam Barchorz, author of CANDOR, explains why, even when the going gets tough, she doesn’t quit writing.
Justine Musk, who writes urban fantasy for YAs and adults, explores the topic of genre vs. literary and whether or not the internet age makes it more likely that readers will follow authors across genres. “I’m reminded of a fan of Poppy Z Brite’s who said, when she found out that Brite had a blog, “now I can have Poppy every day!” She didn’t care that Brite’s blog doesn’t chronicle vampires (from her early work) or chefs running a New Orleans restaurant (her later work). She craves Poppy’s voice, that mash-up of style and thought and personality that defines Poppy’s work and marks it apart from everybody else’s.”
I find this very intriguing. I know some of the readers of this blog found me through my fiction, some readers of this blog don’t read my fiction at all, some read Rampant but not SSG, SSG but not Rampant, or every single thing I put down on paper, including my essays for BenBella and Pocket and my food reviews for my old newspaper back in Florida (Hi, Dad!) One of the things I’m most curious about is how many of my chick lit readers gave my fantasy a try, and how many of my new fantasy readers are going out to find SSG. Though they are very different books, they are still mine. Naturally, I love them both, but I wonder if there are many other people who do, too.
The fabulous CakeWrecks takes a stab at bad Thanksgiving cakes. This is my favorite (please note: do not drink tea, as I was, while reading the caption):
Quoth CakeWrecks: “[Wreck a turkey cake] by putting an Indian headdress on Cthulhu.”
Ahahahahahhahhahahhahahhahahahahha! That chick cracks me up.
And finally, Jeff Carlson discusses the Big Idea behind his latest Plague Year book on John Scalzi’s blog. The part I found interesting was this:
“As a writer, you face two big challenges with a series. First, each book needs to work as a stand-alone for anyone who’s new to your work. At the same time, it’s important to jump ahead with each installment, always racheting up the stakes.”
Hmmm. I don’t think the books in my series are actually stand-alones. You could pick up Rites of Spring (Break) and I explain enough in the text that you’d knowwhy the characters hate Kurt Gehry or what the history is between Amy and Poe, but you don’t get the same deep sense as if you’d read the two books before it. The same goes for Rampant and its sequel. Yes, you can read them by themselves, but you get so much more out of them when you read them in order. I don’t see the point in a series if the characters don’t change, if they aren’t different people from book to book.
Which is why I definitely agree with the second part of Carlson’s statement, about ratcheting up the stakes. Rampant is the story about a girl who learns to use her superpowers. The sequel is about how superpowers don’t necessarily save the day. All those questions about what happens after the end of Rampant are kind of the point. If they weren’t there, there wouldn’t be a reason to write a sequel.
Speaking of writing… I’m off to do some.
I spent the weekend off the internet. Friday night, I went out to dinner with Sailor Boy, then had drinks back at the house with some friends. Saturday night, we threw a dinner party, at which I made my go-to dinner party treat, lasagna. I make a fantastic lasagna, if I say so myself, and it’s a great thing to make for guests because all the mess is cleaned up before anyone gets there and it’s really low-impact at the party. Just pop it in the oven and mingle.
I also made this:
My first attempt at latticework, and I have to say — SO MUCH EASIER than I thought it would be.
The pie was delicious, too.
We ate these things with Caprese salad, fresh bread, vanilla ice cream, and a really stunning 1998 Amarone that was part of my birthday case. Good times.
Sunday, I went to a baby shower, then a baby birthday, then a hike with the dogs. We currently have three dogs living in our house. Three. It’s crazy around here. Dogs and babies all the time, folks.
Okay, off to write! Did you do anything fun this weekend?
(No, not the TV show.)
So I know I owe y’all a big continuation of the Nice Guys exploration and I promise I’ll be getting to it, but I’m so ridiculously swamped right now, you have no idea. Meanwhile, here’s two interesting posts by Sarah Rees Brennan and Justine Larbalestier about the Blank Page Heroine — or the personality-less girl that often serves as either a male fantasy or a stand-in for female readers to insert themselves into the story and run off with the hot hero. One of the big tips in writing romance novels is to have a hero your reader wants to fall in love with an a heroine your reader wants to be. Relatable != Personality-free.
Go read those posts. In the comments section of Justine’s post, PixelFish brings up the topic of geeky characters, which is one type of personality that doesn’t get a lot of play in traditional romances:
I also wanna mention Meg Cabot who writes some geeky heroines in her adult romances. (My favourite is a short redhead who reads gossip columns, watches the weather channel and has a Princess Xen action figure.) I compare that to another writer who I will refrain from naming who claimed to write about geeks but only wrote Hollywood geeks–ie. beautiful people who just needed to take their glasses off to find love. Whereas Meg Cabot’s geeks are geeks to the bone. Her character wasn’t going to stop watching the Weather Channel or ditch the Xena figure just to get a guy.
I started thinking about geeky characters, and their portrayal in fiction. I have recently finished watching all the available episodes of GREEK, and among my myriad problems with the show (inconsistent characterizations, sexism, massively bad stereotyping) is the way they codify geekiness. It’s not “quite” as bad as watching an episode of Saved By the Bell, but it’s close.
For instance, the two main characters, Casey and Rusty Cartwright, are a brother and sister who fall firmly among the “popular cheerleader” “geek loser” lines. Casey, the older sister, is a gorgeous blonde who is the leader of her “best sorority on campus,” has an active social and sex life, and is time and again shown to be very shallow (picking taps pledges based on their hotness factor). It is established that her younger brother Rusty is a “loser” whom she doesn’t even acknowledge to her closest friends, predicated mainly on the fact that he wears striped polo shirts, turned down MIT to come to this state school and study “Honors engineering” and is a “genius” who doesn’t do tequila shots. Rusty wishes to join a fraternity, and is quickly welcomes into the embrace of the “loser” frat on campus, Gamma Tau. (And by “loser” they seem to mean “Animal House” not “Revenge of the Nerds” as this frat clearly throws amazing parties that seem to be populated every weekend by hundreds of students. Later in the series it is established that there is a frat for “nerds” called something that sounds like “sci fi” but is made of Greek letters, where the members all wear glasses and watch Star Trek.)
The members of Casey’s sorority, though they are the “hottest” girls on campus, are constantly worried about being associated more often with this “loser” party frat than with the blazer-wearing trust-fund frat Sigma Chi, who are supposedly the “hottest” guys on campus — DESPITE the fact that the leader of the “loser” frat is easily the most attractive and interesting person on the show, is tapped for the super special senior secret society that the leader of the “best” fraternity is also tapped for, has a long string of hotties to date and regularly dates the members of Casey’s so called “best” sorority (later, this becomes an issue, as apparently their intimate connection to the “loser” frat brings down their reputation on campus). Meanwhile, the members of this “hottest fraternity” are mostly either openly gay or closeted (thereby negating the purpose of being a source of dates for their “best sorority partners) or butt ugly (as evinced by the short, pale, pugilistic crew cut red head currenlty rallying the other frat members against the Jason Dohring lookalike frat leader)…
To make a long story short, I don’t really grok the understood and unstated value system which informs every plotline on the show, but that might be because I’m the kind of person who knows what grok means. To the characters of Greek, I would be a geek/loser relegated to (undeniably popular and sociable) fraternities, if I managed to make it into one at all.
I have a hard time understanding that. I didn’t go to a big frat school. I don’t even know if any of the frats were residential, but I do know that I had sorority girls as roommates (and my husband had fraternity boys) as upperclassmen. I always imagined there was a frat for every flavor at the schools where frats are a thing. And I have a really tough time understanding why the frat with the reputation for throwing the best parties on campus could be simultaneously regarded as “losers” — especially since time and again, the characters say they joined the greek system “for the parties.”
It’s a similar problem to the one I find watching The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, where often, in adjacent episodes, the characters make the EXACT SAME geeky reference (often to Star Wars). In the former show, the characters are drawn as out of touch losers with no friends outside their circle and zero romantic opportunities. In the latter show, the characters are drawn as attractive, sociable members of society with hot wives, hot girlfriends, and an endless parade of hot one night stands. (Also in the latter, the hot girl dates make geeky references too.) Since when does liking science fiction and academia turn you into an unsocialized loser?
Honestly, HIMYM feels way more realistic to me. Geeks come in all shapes and sizes, and some of us have happy, sociable, romantically fulfilled lives with our cool, cute geek husbands, thank you very much. We don’t live in Revenge of the Nerds or Saved by the Bell, people. Look around. The geeks have inherited the Earth.
I didn’t set out to write “geek” characters. The characters of Secret Society Girl are, granted, far more “geeky” — by Greek standards! — just by dint of studying hard enough to make it into an Ivy League school. I had to laugh at Pixelfish’s suggestion of “taking off the glasses to find love,” since the hottest and most popular guy in my books by far is George Prescott, who wears glasses and gets the girl. He also rocks a mean Star Wars reference on many occasions.
Poe, however, is a character whose geekiness is overlaid by general anti-social behavior. It’s not just that he wears old, ill-fitting clothes as a poor undergrad and owns a giant pet snake named Voldemort and was probably a D&D Dungeonmaster growing up. It’s that he doesn’t seem to want to be friends with most people and most people return the favor.
None of the girls in SSG are coded as geeks, either, and really, that’s part of the point. When I got to college, I realized that many of the interests that might have gotten you in trouble in the rigid high school hierarchy no longer existed. There was a larger pool of students from which you could draw your own social group, and even the most party animal of kids (again, I suppose “party animal” is coded as “loser” on Greek) were bookish nerds about something, otherwise, they wouldn’t have been at Yale.
Jenny, probably the shyest of the taps, is a computer engineer, but she has a large group of friends in both her computer and religious circles and can hold her own in most social situations.Her shyness is a cover, because she also has a smart mouth, and I always imagine her being much more outspoken online and probably more used to that in her day to day life — until the Diggers got their hands on her.
And part of it also is that I was writing about young adults at a highly competitive college. They were 21 years old and, for the most part had come to terms with their personality types and the friendships those engendered. That was the whole point of the society — to break them out of that mold and make them friends with people that weren’t part of their social group. (Greek has something similar with the leaders of rival frats joining the same secret society.) But I could also play with the hierarchy label, especially in the first book, where Amy’s insecurities about George and Clarissa are not even recognized by the other two characters. Amy’s whole reason for hating Clarissa is because she knew that Clarissa talked bad about her freshman year. Back when they were teenagers. Back when Clarissa and Amy were both more caught up in the idea of high school-style hierarchy. Clarissa, at 21, doesn’t even remember it. It’s no longer part of her personality or worldview.
And then I wrote a YA novel, and I got to bring the whole high school hierarchy back into play.
Astrid, in Rampant, comes from a high school society far more focused on sports (Phil is popular because she plays volleyball, Brandt is popular because he swims) but her borderline status is due to her own shyness, her mother’s reputation around town and family as a crazy person, and the fact that a lot of 16 year old boys are put off by 16 year old girls who are smarter than them, especially in the sciences. Nevertheless, she is, at the start of the novel, dating someone, and she gets another boyfriend in Rome.
I didn’t realize this as writing it, but I’ve had teen girls come up to me and say that Astrid must be very beautiful and popular, to have two boyfriends. I don’t really think of it that way, given the nature of her relationship with Brandt. He was her first boyfriend, and he’s the kind of guy who dates a lot of girls. Personally, I think he’s taking advantage of Astrid’s place in the social pecking order, especially in her first year at school where she doesn’t have Phil around as an anchor. But though Astrid’s love of science might code her as a geek, her mother’s reputation pushes her more into the “freak” realm. Either way, her social standing at school is far from secure. And then I take her out of that environment and put her in the Cloisters, where she suddenly finds herself to be at the top of the totem pole, part of an inner clique among unicorn hunters — a social structure that would be utterly alien to the kids on Greek. And she feels just as uncomfortable there.
I wonder if YA fiction is written about more “geeks” — more people who feel out of place in their environment. Because I think almost every kid does, no matter where they truly stand in society. I can think of very few books (outside the Gossip Girl and knock off group) written about the most popular girl and usually they are “the popular girl brought low” variety — like SKINNED by Robin Wasserman, which is a futuristic sci-fi take on destroying the life of the popular girl. And even Gossip Girl has that outsider perspective, the perspective of the gossip girl narrator.
My own high school experience was fine. Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of relationship drama, and a lot of the time I felt like I was on the outs with certain groups, but I also had plenty of friends. I went to a small high school (~60 people per grade) and lines weren’t drawn that way. The captain of the soccer team (we didn’t have football) was also the lead in the school play. The student body president was also the artsy, guitar-playing party kid (I dated him — in fact, he was my only high school boyfriend, an experience that proved I was so not ready for the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing at 16). We didn’t have much of a geek/cool kid divide. People hung out in different groups, but there was also tons of crossover and no one really looked down on any other group. I remember talking to one of my good friends, who was definitely part of the jock crowd and partied more than most of my friends, but was also in highest AP calculus and ended up at Princeton, and he was marveling about how the stereotype at most schools is that the “mean, popular” kids were all the jocks, but the theater kids in my school were way more stuck up. I was a theater kid, and had been, I believe, regaling him with tales of the latest theater crowd drama.
What do you think? Do you like books about geeks? Do you like geeky romantic interests? Do you think that YA books get the lion’s share of geeky characters? What book reminds you most of your own high school experience?
Oh, and for those of you who went to large, frat-focused school. Is Greek right about their take on that society? Why would people join frats “for the parties” then look down on the frat that throws the best ones?
Nina Shen Rastogi, a journalist for Slate and DoubleX who went to college with me, called me up a few months ago to talk about unicorns and the new Chris Lavers book, The Natural History of Unicorns, which the nice folks at Morrow were good enough to send me and which reads like a well organized, more thorough and thoroughly footnoted version of my research notes for Rampant.
Anyway, we talked for about an hour about everything I knew about unicorns and then Nina went off to do her own research into the subject. “Why Do Girls Love Unicorns” is the result, and it mentions Rampant in the “further reading” section, so thanks for the plug, Nina!
Go Team Unicorn!
You may have noticed RAMPANT written up as one of the top ten Children’s Books on the Winter Indie Next list:
8. Rampant by Diana Peterfreund
(HarperTeen, $17.99, 9780061490002)
“Rampant is the perfect book for teen readers who are sick of vampires. Meet Astrid, a descendent of some butt-kicking unicorn hunters. Who knew unicorns could be bloodthirsty human killers? Diana Peterfreund takes you on a wild ride filled with action, history, and even a little romance! Check it out.” –Summer Moser, Summer’s Stories, Kendallville, IN
Hi there, Indie booksellers! Would you like a signed bookplate or five to go with your copies of Rampant? Would you like a few of these gorgeous sparkly RAMPANT bookmarks?
(I can sign those too, if you want — have Sharpie, will sign, that’s my motto). If so, it’s as easy as contacting me with your address and what item (and how many) you want.
Happy Holidays, and may your winter be filled with crowded shops!
So, interesting commentary on my New Adult post. I’m not sure if my thoughts were quite as collected as I wanted them to be for a Sunday morning. I do wan to add that I think in many ways that it’s a difficult category to market, and I believe that Tiff’s comment on that post really illustrated why.
“It was like English literature was some sacred thing where no one could ever read or study anything that wasn’t “important.” So, of course, the second one gets out of college, one stops reading because reading has been so “important” and such a job for the past four years. And I think that’s where adult fiction is losing readers. Reading for fun becomes a kind of foreign concept. When you go out to brunch with those post-grad friends, and you talk about books, people don’t want to talk about the Dan Browns because, of course, you can’t learn anything from that (and don’t even get me started on YA books). It’s better not to have read anything at all than to have read something “trashy” or something off the bestseller list/front table of Chapters (or Borders, or Barnes and Noble).”
Also illustrative is the massive response to The Booksmugglers 4-line mention of it in their massive post full of far more interesting book news, cover reveals, and movie trailers. Readers were, in a word, offended. A sampling:
“‘New Adult?’ Really? Because when I was between the ages of 20 and 26, I was fine with reading adult novels. I didn’t need something that was more mature than YA, but not quite an adult novel yet. It sounds like a marketing ploy and a slightly insulting one at that.”
“WTF?!? Seriously???
The idea may be good, but the age range is ridiculous. When I was 20-26, I would’ve been seriously pissed at being targeted for “mature writing and ideas, but not full on adult stories.” Seriously. Pissed. 
Who are these 20-26 year-olds? College students, possibly graduate students, studying science, philosophy, medicine, etc? How many are married and have children by 26? How many soldiers are that age? And they’re not ready for “full on adult stories?”
I find the whole idea distasteful.”
And I have to say I’m with them. I think they are misreading what is meant by “full on adult stories” however. It’s like the people who think that because a book is categorized as a YA it can’t have mature complex themes. (Guys, To Kill a Mockingbird is YA. Just saying. It’s an issue of subject matter, not of maturity level. Even if I am a married-with-kids soldier at 22, I’m still probably going to want to read about married with kids 22 year olds than 40 year olds. (And indeed, some of the books that SMP uses to illustrate this “new adult” range features teens who are married with kids — Hello Ice by Sarah Beth Durst.) Or I’ll want the escapist facotr — not being married or with kids. What SMP is saying is that there seems to be a gap in books ABOUT people that age, written for an adult audience.
That why it was so hard when my book came out to figure out who exactly our market was. Bridget Jones was ten years older than Amy. The Gossip Girls were six years younger. My book wasn’t as fluffy and brainless as some, but it was a far cry from serious literature. There weren’t other books out there like my book. And as chick lit crashed and there were fewer and fewer books that were “like mine but slightly older” most of the comparisons for my book came from “like mine but slightly younger” direction. They were frequently compared to the Kate Brian “Private” novels or Maureen Johnson’s books, all of which are YA.
I think it’s going to be a challenge to market “New Adult” as such. The last thing a 22 year old college graduate who just wrote her thesis on Proust is going to want to be told is that she’s not ready for “real books.” Part of the success of chick lit was because the packaging treated it more seriously. It was in trade paperback form, it was shelved in the “fiction and literature” section in the bookstore, it had Book Club questions in the back. People who would turn their nose up at a romance novel would have fun reading a chick lit and not feel guilty about it.
I’m a big believer in not talking down to readers. I write commercial fiction and I’m proud of it. I’m in this biz to show readers a good time, but I don’t believe that commercial fiction equates to brainless fiction, and I don’t “dumb down” anything I write, whether I’m writing it for an audience of forty year olds, twenty year olds, or 14 year olds. The only difference is the situations my characters are forced to face (if anything, my teen characters are in a much more mature and dire situation than my 20-somethings — but that’s a product of the type of story I’m telling) and the resources they’ve got on hand. I don’t take my readers for granted, I don’t believe that a touch of romance or humor brings the level of a book down, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading for fun.
But that’s me.
Sailor Boy and I have an old joke based on something we once saw on Felicia Day’s blog, or perhaps twitter feed. Day said something to the effect of “Saw an audition announcement looking for ‘a Felicia Day type.’ Guys, I am a working actress.”
Which I was reminded of this morning when I discovered (via The BookSmugglers) that a discussion had been raging this week throughout the YA world about St. Martins Press’s invention of the “new adult” marketing niche and their contest to recruit writers to write it. What is New Adult, you might ask (and many writers did, on the St Martins Press’s editorial assistant’s blog, on a #yalitchat Twitter discussion dedicated to the topic, and on blogs and forums all over the internets)?
Let me show you some:
So according to all those Q&As, which time after time name-checked Secret Society Girl, I’m New Adult.
I’m intrigued by the team at St. Martins’ new mission. Intrigued because my standard answer to the dozens of emails I get every year from aspiring writers frustrated by all the rejections they’ve received from editors and agents calling their college-set books too old for YA, not of interest to adult readers and how did I do it is: it’s not an easy sell. The fact that my book sold in a week and a half after submission in a six way auction is a bit misleading and more a factor of the time period in which we sold the book (YA heating up, adult chick lit winding down, my book straddling the fence) and the subject matter of the book (not just “college” but “secret societies” in a year that The Da Vinci Code was king, and a short six months after 2 Skull & Bones members were vying for the US presidency).
Most of these writers end up revising their books down to high school and selling them as YA. I know one who revised it down to middle school and has a crackerjack MG series going on right now.When I sold SSG, we got rejections from YA houses for being “too old.” Some YA houses offered, and one even offered upon the condition that I rewrite the characters to be 18 year old college freshmen.
Those of you who have read the SSG series (oh, and I wholeheartedly recommend that each and every one of you who hope to write New Adult for St. Martins run out and buy the entire series right away — you know, for research purposes. I only have your best interest at heart) know how vastly that would have changed the tone and storyline.
When I wrote the proposal for SSG, I thought (like all those people who email me) that it was young adult. My agent very wisely realized it could go either way, and the rejections we received from young adult houses bore that out. After we sold it as adult novel, it was developed as such, completed as such, and the series was written with a slightly older audience in mind. If you recall, PREP was really big then. It was a story about a high school girl written for adults.
When SSG was sold and then came out, we were living in a very different literary marketplace. Young Adult as a marketing category to be reckoned with was just starting to heat up. Twilight came out late in 2005 (I sold SSG in April of 2005) and though a bestseller very soon after its release, was not the market juggernaut we know today. In the adult writing community, you were just starting to see established writers jumping the chick lit ship for YA: folks like Jenny O’Connell, Sarah Mlynowski, and Ally Carter. YA was still pretty young. You didn’t see quite so many –if any! — plotlines revolving around marriage and motherhood (hello, Breaking Dawn, Impossible, Ice, A Curse Dark as Gold, Madapple). It was an entirely different landscape.
Chick lit, which has enjoyed an enormous popularity for the first part of this decade, was also just fizzling out. The summer my book came out, marketed as chick lit, Curtis Sittenfeld (author of the aforementioned Prep) called chick lit writers sluts in The New York Times and participated with several other women writers in an ill-tempered anthology mocking and degrading their fellow writers who did write in that genre. Urban fantasy, which has now stepped in as the genre of choice for 20-something women, was barely a blip on the radar. The backlash against “pink books” (my hardcover was pink) was intense, and intensely disturbing for a baby debut author who got shoved into the middle of it and was asked at every interview to respond to the allegations that I was single handedly destroying the face of literature as we knew it. A New York Times bestselling author who gave my book away on her blog on its release date admitted it looked good, if you liked books about shoes. (Though my characters wear shoes — a common trait of characters in books of all genre — I don’t think they ever mention the fact.)
In passing, it’s interesting to me the way that urban fantasy has become the new chick lit. You’ve got the same, young, usually first person, almost always snarky, female voice. You’ve got the twenty-something character usually stuck in a scut job (before she realizes she’s the last in a long line of vampire slayers/werewolves/fallen angels/what-have-you), you have the romantic subplot, and you have the mockable/interchangeable covers (instead of candy colored headless chicks wearing high heels, you have magenta and indigo colored headless chicks in leather pants with swords).
Anyway, Secret Society Girl came out, an adult book in the adult section. Adults read it. And teens read it. Lots more teens, I htink, than anyone expected. It got named in the NYPL’s Books for the Teen Age list. My publisher looked at how well YAs like Gossip Girl and Traveling Pants were selling to the adult market (see, it was heating up) and rebranded my paperbacks with Gossip Girl style covers, hoping to hit a crossover market. They set the price of the trade paperback at a teen-friendly and “I’m living in a fifth floor walk up closet with three friends and eating ramen” post-grad-friendly $10 (except for the fourth one, and that’s a whole other story). Young, post grad, ramen-eating young adults read it. More teens read it. Some adults read it and were totally disgusted that it was not marketed to teens. Some adults read it and were totally disgusted that they thought it was marketed to teens.
In some places, it is. Many of my foreign rights sales were to teen imprints, and the books there are released as young adult novels. This is not unusual, in either direction. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is published as teen here but adult in Australia. Ditto Graceling and Fire (teen here, adult in the UK). Some independent stores here in the U.S. (as well as a few chain stores where they know me) cross promote the books in the adult and YA section. I watch with interest the rebranding of Maria V. Snyder and PC Cast’s old adult novels as YA novels in the new HarlequinTeen imprint, and wonder if that would benefit the series.
And I watch with interest the creation of this new marketing category. “New Adult.” As with the explosion of chick lit in the early part of this decade, there are some YA titles out right now that probably shouldn’t be classified as such. Fire of Fire is a teen, I guess (barely), but I read plenty of “adult” romances where the heroine is nineteen as well, and they aren’t YA for all that. The ubiquitous talk of taking lovers and controlling one’s own landed property and armies and who sired who else’s illegitimate bastard children in Fire just didn’t have a YA feel to me. I mean, Hamlet’s a teen too, you know? (Cf. with Graceling, where you got the sense she was a child under the thumb of her uncle and how the book was about her escaping that). Fire, note, is not published as YA overseas. There are other books out, especially of the “I’m a successful UF writer doing YA UF right now” variety that read just like the adult versions of those authors books, except they say the protag is 16. There are “adult” UFs, like Rachel Vincent’s bestselling STRAY books that read younger to me than some of these new YAs. Faythe starts her journey from grad school.
I suppose that would fall under “New Adult” too.
I am curious to see how this does. I’m curious if, when there’s a place that the target market can go to for books, if it will increase the sales (much like creating a YA place did with YA). (however, it didn’t work for Dorchester’s Shomi line, though that might have been too focused on the niche market of futuristic cyberpunk, and did not have the leather-clad covers that were selling so well for the UF crowd).
I like that when people email me now I can tell them that there is possibly a place for their college-aged protag at St. Martins. Many of their strategies seem familiar to me: lowering the price point on the paperbacks to YA-friendly/ramen-friendly levels, marketing to a crossover audience while shelving in the adult section and hoping teens read up. And hey, if this becomes a thing, perhaps it will widen the audience for my SSG books. I’ve already seen folks going out to buy it because of the online discussions (thank you, St. Martins and everyone else, go check them out!)
And thank you also for making me feel, even for a moment, a little bit like Felicia Day. 
So those of you on Twitter know that I signed a contract today. I’m so excited about it — especially since this is something that’s been in the works for so long. Here’s the skinny: next year, I’ll be participating in a short story collection entitled ZOMBIES VERSUS UNICORNS, edited by Justine Larbalestier and Holly Black and headlined by some pretty serious heavyweights in the YA and fantasy world. My story’s called “The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn” and, in case you can’t guess from the title, it takes place in the world of RAMPANT. It’s a stand-alone story, though, so you don’t need to have read Rampant to enjoy it.
Seriously, how exciting is that? We can finally duke it out. Team Zombie vs. Team Unicorn. Go, unicorns!
I’ve read one other story in the collection (one on the zombie side. boo!) and let me tell you, you do not want to miss out on this book. I cannot wait to read the rest! Mark your calendars for fall of 2010, folks. Which, coincidentally, is also the release date for the second full-length killer unicorn book. It’s going to be chock a block with unicorns next fall.
And next spring, since I’m also going to be in another anthology of short stories coming out then. I’m not sure if the title of the anthology is final yet, but I’ll let you know when it is. Also, not entirely sure if the title of my story shall stick. Lots of info for you, right? I can tell you this: this killer unicorn story, also set in the world of Rampant, is about another unicorn hunter, from a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away. Well, except not that galaxy part.
Soooooo excited y’all. After doing the secret stories earlier this year, I realized I’d been bit by the short story bug. I’m thrilled that my first two professional short stories will be released next year, and that they’re about killer unicorns. That should be a little something to keep you Rampant fans satisfied until the second book comes out.
Sue Grimshaw, the romance buyer at Borders, has an interesting discussion up on her blog today, in conjunction with her review of Sarah MacLean’s upcoming adult historical romance debut, NINE RULES TO BREAK WHEN ROMANCING A RAKE. She asks at one point:
As a modern woman, I’ll admit, I may have pined at one time, but not for 8 years! Good God! 3 months maybe & then have moved on. I realize in the 1800’s a woman is probably more apt to pine for a longer period of time, but to relate this story to today’s reader, isn’t 8 years a bit much?
Because Sue, you see, is obviously very well-adjusted. But we don’t read romances for well-adjusted people. We want larger than life! We want drama! We want desperate, star-crossed lovers fighting against all odds to make it work!
Let us look at my favorite story of long-term longing and deliciously painful pining of the first order: PERSUASION, by Jane Austen. If I want a nice cathartic cry, I pull out my dog-eared copy of Persuasion and turn to Captain Wentworth’s letter. Or I watch the movie. ANY version of the movie. Waterworks. In fact, nothing is guaranteed to produce waterworks in my as quickly as that scene in Persuasion except for that scene in Before Sunset where Julie Delpy goes off on this beautifully wild rant about the reason she never tried to have romance in her life again is because she was afraid it would never live up to the fantasy she’d created in her head about the boy she went to Vienna with that one time — which, you will note, is also pining.
Ahem.
Now, part of the pathos of PERSUASION is that, well, though both Anne and Wentworth are pretty intelligent, practical people (compared to the rest of their acquaintance), neither of them have the chance to act on their well-adjusted impulses, because their community is just too small. There is practically no one else that Anne can marry in her neighborhood, a point that her friend makes to her whenever she starts bringing up Wentworth as The Perfect Man She Never Got Over. Well, he’s not perfect, he’s just way more suited to you than that Musgrove dude you foisted off on your sister. If you ever met a nice guy (the friend argues), maybe you would have gotten over Wentworth and married some other perfectly nice guy.
And Wentworth spends the whole time at sea.
So, Austen cheats — or, to be more polite about it, she crafts a supremely awesome and skillful complication. She gets her perfectly well-adjusted characters and she gets some seriously emotional pining. And then she tortures her characters even further by putting them in the path of some perfectly nice people that they could probably be perfectly happy with — Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick — were they not simultaneously in the presence of their One True Love, who, by comparison, no one else will do. Which is when the pining really ratchets up, because what’s worse: wanting something when there’s nothing on the horizon and the whole concept is just kind of vague and impossible, or wanting something when there’s something okay there, but just beyond it, a little ways away, untouchable but so infuriatingly close, is the thing you really, really, really want?
And these guys pine for years. YEARS. Anne’s pining is right up there with Penelope of Ithaca’s. Pining is the backbone upon which romance is built. If you get over someone in three months, it wasn’t a love for the ages, was it?
I for one can’t wait to read NINE RULES. Pine away.
Note: Read this first.
I’m beginning to suspect that there is a new “get into college” book out advising teenagers that one way to stand out on their applications is to publish a book. I can’t imagine what else it is, because I’ve gotten a bunch of emails to this effect in the past few weeks. And I guess it’s not too surprising. I remember one piece of advice I read in one of those books, way back in the mid-nineties when I was applying to college, was to learn to play an unusual instrument, like the hammered dulcimer or the mandolin or the accordion, on the off chance some college admissions committee person would go, “wow, we really need a hammered dulcimer player in the freshman class, how many of those applied?”
Another theory is the “noble cause” theory. Most authors get letters from aspiring writers looking for advice. YA and kidlit authors, because that is their market, get letters from child and teen aspiring writers. There have been lots of articles out recently about how authors are inundated with such requests. Perhaps this whole, “I need to get published now to get into college” thing is an attempt by the aspiring writer to explain why their situation is more urgent and desperate and important than all the other aspiring writers’. I’m not like every other writer who needs all the answers so I can be published nownownow. I’m different. I need to be published nownownow or I won’t get into college.”
Thing the First: I Do Understand.
I know exactly how you feel. Every single day that I wasn’t published, I wanted to be published. I would look at the people who were published, and I would wonder why it wasn’t me. (For many years, it was because I didn’t have a manuscript, for the four years after that, it was because I didn’t have the right book at the right time in the right place.) It’s really, really hard to be patient. I know I don’t have the personality for it. The 27 months I had to wait between selling Rampant and seeing it on the shelves? Y’all, it almost killed me. Especially the last six.
But, looking back at it, I’m glad things happened the way they did. I’m glad I didn’t sell some of those earlier manuscripts, and that they can lie there under my bed on my hard drive, secreted away from the rest of the world. It was really really hard and every day I wanted to sell and every manuscript I wrote I wanted it to be my first sale… but as it turns out, there were more important things at stake.
There are a lot of people who sold back then, during those four years I was trying desperately to sell a book — who aren’t selling books anymore. There are people I know who sold books in bad deals where there book was put out with no support whatsoever and they haven’t been able to sell another book since. They are in a worse position than people with no books out, because they have the bad sales of that last book haunting them. It’s harder for them to sell something new than if they were just starting out, unpublished. The day I sold my first book, my agent called me up and asked me what I wanted out of my career. I said I wanted to write and sell books for a living for the next forty years. I’m in this for the long haul and every sale of every book I make I’m thinking about that goal. The same goal — to make this my career. To do this on a steady schedule and with an eye for growth, like any other business.
You only get one debut. Better make it the best that you can. I’ve talked to a lot of writer friends about this, and they all agree that they’d rather wait more years and come out with a really stunning debut that makes the world sit up and take notice rather than get whatever published, indifferently, and disappear into the morass of books that don’t even make a blip on the radar. It’s really hard to claw your way out of that. Which brings me to
Thing the Second: Getting Published is Not a Publicity Stunt
One does not “get published” as a way to “get into college,” and the more I hear this option being bandied about as a viable, and indeed, desirable path of action, the more I’m reminded of people who “get caught on a sex tape” as a way to “get famous.” Perhaps the association exists in my mind because the one person I ever heard of who chose to “get published” in order to “get into college” (as I talked about in my last post) was Kaavya Viswanathan, and she ended up with an enormous and horrific scandal on her hands. Probably more of a scandal than a sex tape.
Getting published is the start of a career. It’s MY career, And if you want it to be your career, too, you should take it seriously.
Thing the Third: Why “I Need to Get Published So People Know I’m Serious About My Writing” is Wrong
Alongside the “I need to get published now so I can get into college” emails are ones that are similarly phrased. These aspiring writers still feel they need to get published to up their college admission chances. However, they feel that, rather than a straight up publicity stunt, that they won’t be able to convince colleges that they are serious about wanting to be a writer unless they have something published.
No. Those are two different elements. One is something you control; the other is controlled by some people in an office building in New York City. One is the amount of effort you put into something, another is the level of success you have achieved. I am not as successful as other writers in my industry, some who have been working in this field for way longer than I have, and some who haven’t. Does that make me a less serious writer than they are? Nope.
And, as I mentioned in my other post, I was every bit as serious about writing before I was published as I’ve been in the four years since. That’s why I describe it that way: “I wrote seriously for four years before I got published.” I set aside time every day for writing, I sacrificed other things in my life for the sake of writing, and I pursued it in a serious. professional manner. I treated it like a second job, an apprenticeship, or, probably most accurately, as a course of graduate/professional study. I told members of my family who worried I’d never “get there” that it was like spending a few years in grad school. A career as a writer does not happen overnight.
And during all this time, all these years of laboring away on manuscript after manuscript, using nights and weekends and work lunches and commutes and vacation time to work and attend writing conferences, I was incredibly serious about my writing. I kept excellent records of where all that time and money and energy was going (partially because the IRS may have wanted to see it). There was no doubt that I was serious about it, and people in my life either recognized that fact or I wised them up to it super quick.
And I had a lot of writer friends back then, because I was so serious about my writing. Very few of them were already published. But you know what? They were all just as serious about their writing as I was about mine. Published or not, I found myself making close friends with other writers who were serious about their writing. And you know what else? Most of my fellow unpublished friends are now published, because they were serious about it. These people include: Jana DeLeon, Colleen Gleason, Wendy Roberts, C.L. Wilson, Marianne Mancusi, Elissa Wilds, and Marley Gibson. I have other friends, like Carrie Ryan and Erica Ridley (whose first book is coming out in a few months) who I met when they were unpublished, too, and I expect to see other friends of mine who are unpublished breaking through any day now. And I look back on those days, when we were all struggling so hard, reaching out for that brass ring, getting rejection after rejection and writing new manuscript after new manuscript, and I think it’s amazing. If I’d decided that those other unpublished people weren’t serious about their writing because they weren’t published, I would have missed out on some of the most valuable pieces of friendship and advice I’ve ever gotten.
Were there some people who weren’t taking us seriously because we were unpublished? Sure. Those people were wrong. Here’s how not to be serious about your writing: be so intent on publishing anything, now, so long as you’re “published” that you sell a book that’s not ready to a publisher that’s not right in a deal that doesn’t have the best interests of either the book or your career at heart.
Thing the Fourth: None of this Means I Think You Shouldn’t Try
By all means, keep writing (or not) as a teen and try to get it published (or not). If that’s what you want to do, then absolutely, you should do it. And as doing it takes an enormous amount of time and dedication, it is also by all means something you should let the colleges you’re applying to know that you are doing. (I talk more about this is the first college post.) And if you do get published in high school, fantastic! Congratulations! You are a very hard working, very talented, very dedicated young professional writer.
But please, don’t go about this as a college stunt. You are not trying to get published to get into college. You are not trying to get published to prove you are serious about writing. You are trying to get published because you want to share your stories with the world and/or you are really not good at any kind of stable career such as dermatology or accounting or horse-shoeing. At least, that’s why I am doing it. I have a sneaking suspicion farriers (horse-shoers) make more money than me. I know dermatologists do.
And if you are a teenage aspiring writer (as I was) and you don’t have any interest in seeking publication at this time (as I didn’t), don’t sweat it. Maybe you’re really busy with your volleyball team practices, or being on your prom committee and student council, or building the sets for your church’s yearly Christmas Pageant, or editing your school newspaper, or becoming an eagle scout, or working an after school job so you can afford to go to college in the first place. Colleges really, really, really like this stuff too.
And, because it must be said, you can still be a writer when you grow up. You can still be a writer when you grow up even if you never write a book in high school or college or whether you never go to college or all, or whether you never put a pen to a piece of paper until you’re fifty years old. There is no law against it, I swear.
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