Thursday, June 19, 2008

When Time Skips to the Beat

Time does that sometimes you know?

Very nearly done with the typing, and very excited to get down to the nitty gritty of making this book perfect. I've got a bottle of Dakota Red from Private Reserve that I've been itching to use. I've for a conference in July for the job that pays the bills, that will leave me with oodles of time in a hotel room (because really, who schedules a conference in Arizona in mid-July?) to edit.

I've had a thought about genre's lately. Who am I writing for? Who is my audience? I mean, my audience is always me; I write the stories that I want to read, but where do my stories fit in in the grand scheme?
I've always been a little disappointed in the schism that exists between YA and adult literature. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with either kind of literature, but there's a gulf between the two, some missing years and experience that people either forget to write about or are too scared to.
YA books tend to deal with the Harry Potters of the world. They're budding teens full of hormones and anger, but they never swear and their riskiest moments with the opposite sex (or same sex) are stolen kisses they then think about forever. They're light stories, bereft of the gritty details that growing up often entails. Then you move on to adult literature where it becomes permissible to say 'shit' and for all manner of behavior.
But in books there is no bridge. It's almost like if you write a story with a teenage (or early twenties) character, you must write a certain way and ignore whole hosts of behavior. Teenagers are risky, thrill-seeking hedonists who are not adults, but who want to act like them. Yet the literature doesn't reflect that.

So it's confusing about where my story(ies) fit in, because I have three 17ish characters who swear and drink and make life and death decisions and then giggle for days over the double entendre implications of the word "sack." It's a story with really touching and great moments, some really silly moments, but also some extraordinarily dark moments as well. Maybe it's like the BSG of YA lit.

So I'm not a big fan of "hey look what I bought," but I bought this moleskine journal from a place called Modo Fly and they "etch" the journals with artwork done by various artists. It's absolutely awesome. So while I'm doing the editing thing, I'm going to write an anthology of horror stories in it. Just something to do while I edit. But I have some big, super big plans for it, so I'll drop them in here later.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Keep it clean, keep it classy, and jokes are always appreciated.