road trip wednesday: 13 goals for ’13
Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway‘s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic. This Week’s Topic is: What are your goals for the new year—for reading, writing, or other? Perhaps goal #1 ought to be something about keeping up with this blog. Whoopsie?... Read More
long time no see
Holy Christmas, I haven’t posted in four months! I’m really sorry, y’all. I have been working super hard to get my novel done, on top of life just generally hating me, as life is wont to do. But hey, it’s October! The most wonderful time of the year! And so, I’m going to try and post more often, as I did last year for this lovely month. And hey, I’ll be participating in a blog hop, too! Isn’t that exciting? The... Read More
the state of the novel
Hey, so…Writing is hard. Did you realize that? Because I seem to forget this every so often, and then I try to get back into writing, and then I remember and I give up again. That’s been the past five months for me. A lot of starting and stopping, which results in a rather sad 14,000 words, give or take a few hundred. I’ve never really been a finisher. I have the start to dozens of stories, and they’re all rather decent starts.... Read More
a word about romance
Stop it. No, not whatever you’re doing now. I’m asking writers of YA fiction to kindly stop with the whole Bad Boy But Really a Secret Teddy Bear thing. It’s just not cool. Okay that’s a lie, it is kind of cool, but in small, manageable doses. When this theme pops up in every single book? It becomes grating. Okay, yes, I know it’s not every YA book. But you must admit, it’s a damned lot of them. It’s in a... Read More
rating ya books is a terrible idea
Do I really even need to write the rest of this post? The title says it all, really. Currently, there’s a small debate in place about whether or not young adult books need to have a rating system in place. This system would be something akin to movie or video game ratings in order to shield young eyes from the terrors of words like “hell” or “shit.” According to an article from USA Today, only 5 books out of dozens studied... Read More
