SCBWI Conference – In a word, “Wow.”

To any future writing conference organizers who might be reading this blog post, I have a single piece of advice: Hire Sara Zarr to deliver your keynote. WHATEVER IT TAKES.

At the New York SCBWI conference last weekend, Sara got a standing ovation from a crowd that was really, really not in a standing ovation mood. It was nine o’clock in the freaking morning, to start with. We were sleepy. We had all been up late drinking the night before, and had already been through a full day (or for some attendees, two full days) of sessions.

But Sara’s speech tapped into something that probably every writer and illustrator in that room was thinking, or feeling, or had thought or felt, and it made me and everyone else I talked to about it get all overwhelmed and closed-up-throat-feeling and “It felt like she was seeing the inside of my soul.”

Seriously. There has been a lot written and said over the years about how important it is to carve out and protect your creative life, which is what Sara’s speech was about. But there was something about what she said, and the way she said it, that rose far above everything else I’ve ever heard or read on the topic. I’m still processing it all now, and I feel like I need to watch a video of her speech about five more times to really absorb it all.

But. There was other awesomeness at the conference besides Sara Zarr. There were other people! People to talk to! Writer and illustrator people!

I met Ashley Wolff, who illustrates the Miss Bindergarten books, of which my nephews are huge fans. I met Louise Borden, who has written a ton of picture books that I can’t wait to get for my nephews (seriously, how awesome does The Last Day of School look?). In fact, I came home with a long list of kids’ books I’m psyched to get, and they aren’t all YAs, either. It was awesome hanging out with kids’ writers from different genres. Sometimes it feels like YA writers exist in a tiny little bubble, and it’s fun to talk craft and industry with people who live in a different part of the bigger bubble. (You know, I don’t think that bubble metaphor I just attempted held up, but whatever, I’m more of a simile girl anyway.)

And I met more awesome writers, like agency brother Bryan Bliss and Absolute Writer Ellen Goodlett and fellow DC-er Guinevere Rowell. And I met Sonia Gensler, who has a book coming out this summer called The Revenant which I hadn’t heard about until she handed me a bookmark for it but which I am now super psyched about, because, dude, ghosts! Victorian ghosts! And I met Lee Wind, who runs the blog I’ve been following for years now for book recs and other gay news, I’m Here, I’m Queer, What the Hell Do I Read? And, most exciting of all, I met my agent, Jim McCarthy, for the first time ever, and got to hear him talk about my book in front of a room full of people, which was very cool and also somehow a little bit terrifying. Plus I got to hang out all weekend with my agent sister Jessica Spotswood and her critique partner Kathleen Foucart and their roommate Tiffany Trent and all these other fabulous people.

And speaking of fabulous people, I have to talk about the LGBT panel now.

Because the thing is, I feel like I sit around thinking about LGBT stuff in YA books ALL THE DAMN TIME. Seriously, if I’m not thinking about my WIP, or Glee, or, like, Pop Tarts or something, odds are I’m thinking about LGBT YA. And to be surrounded by a room full of 50 writers (plus an editor & agent, who happened to be MY agent) talking about how they sit around thinking about it too, it was just… I don’t even have the words. We talked about hypothetical gay couples who sparkle in the sunshine. We talked about how there are surprisingly more books with transgender main characters than bisexual main characters (and I have a theory about that, but I’ll save it for some future post). We talked about mean editors who make writers take gay characters out of books, and whether or not you really need to be able to sell your book in middle America to be successful, and Frankie Landau-Banks’ lesbian sister Zelda (who I had totally forgotten existed, and Disreputable History is one of my all-time favorite YAs!).

But mostly we talked about how we all liked writing about gay characters. And to be in a big room full of people who all like doing that? Seriously. Like I said, I don’t even have words. Can we please have an LGBT-only kidlit writers’ conference sometime where we can just talk this stuff through all day?

There is a lot more I could say about the weekend ― how freaky it was to live my 10-year-old fantasy of hearing Lois Lowry talk about the Anastasia books; how unexpectedly funny R.L. Stine turned out to be; how for my next conference I will need to be less of a procrastinator and make myself some gosh darn business cards already.

But instead I will give some links:

• Candy Gourlay’s excellent blog post on Sara Zarr’s speech
• Suzanne Young’s official writeup of the LGBT panel
• Agent Jim’s amusing post on his conference experiences

And finish up with a picture of me (far right) with Agent Jim (far left, obv) and agent-sisters (L-R) Suzanne Young and Jessica Spotswood:

Conference yay!

Sex, YA Book Covers, and Gayness

So I was reading this post about sexual imagery on the covers of upcoming YA releases by Simone Elkeles and Hannah Moskowitz. And it got me to thinking.

(For the record, I think it’s fine for YA covers to show characters in sexual situations, and I have no problem with either of those covers; Invincible Summer’s cover does nothing for me personally but I’m sure it will draw in plenty of teens, and I’ve always thought all the Perfect Chemistry covers are gorgeous, this one very much included.)

But all this talk made me wonder how I would feel if a cover of a book I wrote wound up featuring sexual imagery. My first thought, which is slightly embarrassing, was that my parents would be freaked. My second thought was that I would very much like to sell some books, and if my someday-publisher thinks putting sexiness on the cover will sell more of them, then that’s fine with me. I don’t think any teen will be any more likely to engage in sex because they saw it depicted on a YA cover, and if by chance they are, well, hopefully their school offers non-abstinence-only-based sex education and they know how to protect themselves.

But I don’t think this is ever likely to be an issue in my career. Because I really doubt any book of mine would ever get a sexual cover. Because I write YA books about LGBT people.

Gay YA book covers (in the U.S. at least) tend to feature hand-holding, or close-ups of the protagonist alone, or shots of multiple people standing with an acceptable distance between them, or completely generic imagery. The only LGBT YA cover I know of with sexual imagery is the original cover for Brent Hartinger’s The Order of the Poison Oak, and from what I’ve heard, its sales were not so good. Sadly, it’s now out of print (though you can get it on Kindle, yay, with a cover featuring some very nonsexual marshmallows), whereas the book that precedes it, which doesn’t feature boys stripping on its cover, is still available.

I am not complaining about these trends. Not per se. Books have to sell, first to bookstores, then to customers (which in the case of YA includes parents). Two girls kissing on a YA cover might sell, all right, but not necessarily to the book’s target audience. And then there’s the problem of kids being afraid to be seen carrying around a book with overt gayness on the cover, and that’s no small concern; I remember well the days of being afraid to be seen walking around carrying a shopping bag from Lambda Rising, and those days continued well past my high school years.

The book I have currently out on submission has a transgender main character, so I know for sure I don’t need to worry about winding up with a sexual cover for that one. In fact, books about trans characters seem to be the only YAs still clinging to the faceless-people YA cover rule of the 2000s. (Which is, I suppose, still a step up from the original covers of Luna and Parrotfish which both featured drawings of symbolic animals.)

And my current WIP has no sex in it, so a sexual cover would be very strange and misleading. So I’m safe there, too.

But most of my future books are likely to have some sexiness in them (alas, that’s just how I roll). So I suppose someday, assuming the YA LGBT market evolves a little, I can dream about having a cover as gorgeous as Chain Reaction’s.

(Although I do wonder about the scene that the cover is presumably depicting. Why are those two crazy kids wearing their clothes in the shower? Is this a thing all the cool kids are doing now? Am I out of touch with my audience? Shoot, maybe I should go add a clothed-shower scene to my WIP after all…)

On characters who ‘just happen’ to be LGBT (or people of color, or disabled, or what have you)

Last night I got mildly frustrated watching the #kidlitchat about diversity on Twitter and posted a string of tweets of my own:

I get tired of hearing people say they want to read books where the characters “just happen” to be LGBT/people of color/disabled/etc.

But that they don’t want the book to be “about” that aspect of the character’s life.

As though any good YA novels are only about one single aspect of a character’s life.

As though it’s possible to write a good YA book about a character and not address a major aspect of that character’s identity.

Now, I understand where people are coming from when they say they want to read more books about characters who “just happen” to fall into these categories. I too certainly would like to see more diversity across the board among all YA characters. What I don’t understand is what YA books people have been reading thus far that are actually guilty of being only “about” the main character’s “other”-ness, whether that be race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or something else.

I’ve seen this line of argument come up in many chats that touch on diversity issues, and it was said over and over during the #YAlitchat that centered on LGBT fiction a while back, too.

Where is this epidemic of books that are only about this one aspect of the main character’s life? I’ve never read one. At least not one written above picture book level. Am I just supremely lucky in that I have avoided all these bad books?

The Years, They Are a-Changing

2010 was the year I got really serious about writing. I’d already been writing for several years prior, but around December of last year, something just clicked, and in 2010 my whole writing life changed. I started writing every day. I wrote a brand-new book, start to finish, and it was a book I thoroughly loved. I got an agent and went out on submission. I began tiptoeing into the world of blogging and tweeting as my writer-self, and I got to know some other writers. Also in 2010, I started a fantastic new day job, and had some other positive non-writing-life developments.

All in all, 2010 was a good year for me, and one I’ll remember for a long time to come. But 2010 is over now! So, I’m looking back and looking forward at the same time.

Writing

In 2010, I wrote a book I loved, via a writing process that was, to my shock, thoroughly enjoyable (I actually finished ahead of my self-imposed deadline, which is something that had never happened to me before and I doubt will ever happen again). And then I got an agent for it. I somehow did all that while I was in the process of working really hard at my old job, job-hunting, and then starting a new job, which looking back on I kind of can’t believe.

And now I’m working on another book that I quite like, the Historical Novel. Being uncontracted means I basically have the freedom to write whatever the hell I want, so I’m trying to take advantage of that. (Of course it also means I have no money coming in from my writing, but details, details.)

My big writing resolutions for 2011 are to finish the Historical Novel (which thus far has been much slower going than my previous book, but I think that’s because it’s historical, not because the book itself is necessary harder), and to get a healthy start on my next project after that. I have an idea for what that project might be that came to me on Christmas Eve, but we’ll see; past experience has shown that I tend to go through several promising-sounding book ideas before settling on The One. (In fact, while I was in the process of writing this post, I got another idea that I want to explore. I am such an idea slut.) Now, the book that’s currently on submission might require rewrites in 2011, which could throw all my plans into upheaval, but I hope to finish the Historical Novel regardless of what else comes my way.

I also resolve to not feel guilty about time spent thinking about my WIP, researching my WIP, reading other books that help me figure out what I need to do with my WIP, tweaking the outline to my WIP, and doing other stuff that doesn’t add to my daily word count but that is nevertheless essential to the writing process. And not to feel too guilty about time spent thinking about or making notes on other projects (which I think of as “other women”) while I’m supposed to be working on my WIP, either. The book I wrote in 2010 got its start as an “other woman” while I was working on the book that came before it. The notes I made on that project when I was supposed to be working on the other one were what made that book so easy to write when I finally did finish the first project.

Reading

Some of my favorite books out of those I read this year were Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher, The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan, Treasure Map of Boys by E. Lockhart, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, The Explosionist by Jenny Davidson, Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott, She’s Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan, What I Saw And How I Lied by Judy Blundell, the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, and The Cheerleader by Ruth Doan MacDougall.

As you can tell by the fact that, um, none of those books was actually released in 2010 (except for Mockingjay which is the exception to everything), I am bad about reading books soon after they come out. However, I have some 2010 books on my Kindle that I am psyched to read in 2011: Freefall by Mindi Scott, When the Stars Go Blue by Caridad Ferrer, Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins, Real Live Boyfriends by E. Lockhart, and Jumpstart the World by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

I’m a slow reader, and I tend to feel like I should spend as much of my reading time as possible on books that directly relate to what I’m writing (either for research or to better acquaint myself with that particular segment of the market), and that books that I read “just for fun” are indulgences. Hence, I read a lot of contemporary YA, especially contemporary YA about LGBT characters, and less paranormal/dystopian YA and adult fiction of all kinds, even though I quite enjoy those as well. And right now I’m reading a nonfiction book called From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, which, though fascinating, isn’t exactly making my heart race with love for the characters and anxiety about their fate. The fact that I am able to read it while aware that Real Live Boyfriends is sitting on my Kindle is a mark of either my obsessive dedication or my basic lack of sanity.

So, I would like to do more reading “for fun” in 2011, even if that reading is (gasp) outside my genre. And I’d like to read newer books, so I’m setting a resolution to read at least 10 books published in 2011 during the actual year 2011. I’m also going to start tracking my reading for the first time, either on Goodreads or somewhere else, so I can see where the other gaps are that I might need to fill in.

Writerly Socializing

In 2010 I got to know other writers, really for the first time since I started this whole writing thing. I also started blogging and tweeting, which was quite fun, though I’d like to blog more than I have been (darn that pesky day job, taking up valuable blogging time!).

In 2011 I’m looking forward to attending my first writer’s conference (SCBWI in New York in ― oh, just a couple of weeks, guess I should get some bus tickets, eh?). And hopefully to meeting a lot more writers, both online and off!