Tee Dah!

A writer friend urged me to celebrate every little good thing in this business because there are always plenty of bad-writing-days and setbacks to discourage us. I've taken her advice to heart, and often pop open a nice bottle of wine on evenings after I've completed a new chapter, or heck ... even written a decent paragraph. If several writing friends have had good news ... a manuscript sold, a good review, a productive day of writing ... we like to get together for a mini celebration.

So I guess right now it's a champagne moment, because not only has Knopf released this wonderful cover for my next book, Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best, but a talented young man (Jasper Lowe of Thompson Street Productions) has just completed a book trailer for the novel. These are very "big" good things, if you ask me.

They are also time consuming things which, frankly, have very little to do with the actual process of putting words on paper and writing a story. Jasper and I went round and round discussing small details, correcting typos, tracking down the right "actresses" for the video and the right person to do the voiceover. Everything takes longer than you think it will, and before you know it you're spending a LOT of time promoting a book instead of writing one.

When I write, I have to sink down into the world of the story and shut out all the ambient noise of my "real" life. I can't answer the phone or think about errands or make out the grocery list, and I have to set aside HOURS to read passages out loud and "get" my narrator's voice in my head. I'm trying to find a metaphor for this place where I have to travel, imaginatively, and I guess I can most closely liken it to stepping into a padded, soundproof box, alone, and waiting for a video to begin playing.

Facebook, Twitter, press releases, book trailers, blogging, author signings and appearances are diametrically different activities. What's more, the type of person drawn to the latter seems awfully different from the type who enjoys the former. How are we supposed to do this, authors in the brave new world of social media? It seems to require a split personality, at least professionally.

I asked author Robin Brande, who has published two young adult novels (Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature; Fat Cat) how she balances her role as writer with her role as marketer and she said after wrestling with the topic herself and asking other writers what they advise she's concluded that the most important thing for her to do is write the next book. She said adding a hundred followers on Twitter is much less important than making sure the book she's working on is the best it can possibly be. Sure, we can't ignore social media, and we can tweet and blog and friend a bit ... but the lion's share of our energy has to be directed at the next book.

So ... Jersey Tomatoes won't be out until March, 2011, but check out this wonderful video which Jasper Lowe created for it:

Book Trailer

I'm going to sign off, and return to my padded writing cell.

Adults: MIA in YA?

I just finished reading a fun, paranormal young adult romance called Shiver by Maggie Steifvater and it got me thinking about how adults are portrayed in books written for teens. This is something I wrestle with in my own novels, especially since the formula in a lot of YA these days seems to be that adults are either Missing in Action or idiotic.

In Shiver, the adults are inept/neglectful at best, and murderous at worst. Don’t get me wrong: I really loved Shiver (and just added it to the Book Talk section on my website) which is a wonderfully imaginative, beautifully written girl-meets-boy-who-is-also-a-werewolf romance. Much of the plot is driven by the premise that the protagonist’s parents are fairly indifferent guardians, leaving her free to host a wolf-boy not only in their house but in her bed, unbeknownst to them.

It’s a Teen Theme: Parents Don’t Get Us. Parents don’t communicate with us. They don’t understand our pain. Adults are pretty stupid. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, the parents communicate with their clearly depressed daughter by leaving notes for her as they zip off to work. In Carl Hiassen’s Hoot, adults are highly comic idiots. In Libba Bray’s Going Bovine, parents are incapable of understanding or easing their teen son’s pain, whether that’s emotional or physical pain.

“Kids don’t want to read about adults,” my agent tells me. Under her direction I’ve slashed and burned countless pages containing scenes with grownups. Granted, she was right about those cuts (she tends to always be right) but I’m one of those YA authors whose teens inhabit a world where adults are clearly present and involved, for better or worse. Balancing readers’ desires for peer-centric fiction with my desire to create authentic stories has been challenging.

In the book I’ve just completed, Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best, overinvolved parents are one of the main problems facing the teen protagonists. I’ve got the stage mother and a sports-sidelines screaming father from hell in this book, so I couldn’t very well have eliminated adults completely. Still, I had to trim and cut and streamline all the scenes with the parents, in the interest of holding my readers’ attentions.

In my first book, Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress, one of the main characters is the protagonist’s grandmother. My guess is that if the plot outline and synopsis for that book had ever come before an editorial board, it would have gotten dinged. (Luckily my editor just bought the whole book outright; no board.) I can imagine the comments: “Teens don’t want to read books about grandmothers.”

Well … sure they do. If grandma is funny. If grandma has something interesting to say. If grandma actually listens to the teens in her world, and gets what they are about. In Speak, an art teacher throws the main character the lifeline she needs to save herself from drowning in depression. In Robin Brande’s Evolution, Me and Other Freaks of Nature, one of the coolest characters who helps put the whole science versus religion controversy into perspective is an adult (again, a teacher.)

Part of writing YA is understanding how important, developmentally, it is for teens to test limits, push back at authority and take ownership of their lives. Perhaps they need to see adults as inept and clueless in order to take those steps. I get that this is a device in YA; I’ve used it myself.

But if we want to write authentic stories for young adults, should “old” adults necessarily be missing in action or foolish? I don’t think so.