As always, this is not meant to be my bold-faced proclamations about This Particular Thing, but rather, twenty-five hopefully constructive and compelling talking points and thought bullets about the topic at hand. It is not meant to be gospel etched into stone, but notions — sometimes controversial — worth discussing. Let us begin.

[EDIT: It’s 28, now. Because, reasons.]

1. If You Say The Word “Genre,” I’m Going To Tear Gas Your Mother

Young Adult is not a genre. I hear that often — “the YA genre.” You’re wrong. Don’t call it that. Stop it. Young Adult is a proposed age range for those who wish to read a particular book. It is a demographic rather than an agglomeration of people who like to read stories about, say, Swashbuckling Dinosaur Princesses or Space Manatee Antiheroes or whatever the cool kid genres are these days. Repeat after me: Young Adult is not a genre designation. See? Not so hard.

2. And That Age Range Is…

“Teenager.” Young adult books are generally written for teenagers. I’ve seen 12-18, but really, just call it “teenager” and be done with it. (The age range before it is “middle grade,” which runs roughly from 8-12.) This is where someone in the back of the room grouses about how when he was a young reader they didn’t have young adult books and he read whatever he could get his hands on, by gum and by golly — he read the Bible and Tolkien and Stephen King and Henry Miller and Penthouse and he did it backwards, in the snow, besieged by ice tigers. “In my day we didn’t need teenage books! We took what books we had and liked it! I once read a soup can for days!” I’ll cover that in more detail, but for now, I’ll leave you with this lovely Nick Hornby quote: “I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of.”

3. Young Adult In Fact Runs Giggling Over Many, Many Genres

Young Adult can be whatever you want. It can be epic fantasy. It can be space opera. It can be (and often is) dystopia. It can be elf romance. It can be funny cancer. It can be ghosts and fast cars and serial killers and Nazi Germany and one might even say that it operates best when it karate-slaps all your genre conventions in the face, when genres run and swirl together like paint and make new colors and form new ideas and change the way you think about stories.

4. It Should Feature A Teen Protagonist

It’s not a completely bizarre thing to suggest that teen books should feature teenage characters. I mean, I guess it’s not essential, but I’m not sure that your book about an old man fighting raccoons in the park — young and sprightly as he may seem! — will really qualify. And here is where Cranky Old Crotchpants in the back says, “Them dang teenagers should read about more than just themselves! Selfish little boogers always stealing my flip-flops!” And here I say, the best thing about YA fiction is that it’s talking to what was once an under-served population: teenagers. It’s not saying, You will buy this book because you’re solipsistic little shitbirds but rather, it’s saying, I will write this book because finally someone’s going to start telling stories about all the things that are happening to you and your friends.

5. This Teen Protagonist Should Ideally Suffer From Teen Protagonist Problems

We write about teens to talk to teens. And you talk to teens by embracing their problems. Teen problems are — well, crap, do you remember being a teenager? Holy fuck was that ever a weird time. High school! Sex! Drugs! Drinking! Parents! First love! First breakup! Bullying! College planning! SATs! Pregnancy scares! The realization that your parents don’t know all the things you thought they knew! Even in a genre-based setting teen-specific problems can be reflected (quick plug for a friend’s book, out today: The Testing gets pitched as The Hunger Games meets the SATs). Young Adult fiction isn’t about selling books to teenagers. It’s about writing books that speak to them. And speaking to them means talking about their problems.

6. Sex, Drinking, Drugs

I mentioned it above, but it bears repeating here: sex, drinking and drugs are part of a teenager’s reality. This isn’t me suggesting every teenager has sex, or drinks, or does drugs — only that it’s there. It exists for them. And some adults may bluster — “Bluh, bleh, muh, not my teenager!” — to which I say, even Amish teenagers deal with this. The Amish. The Amish. So, I’m always dubious of any young adult book that doesn’t at least address one of these three in some way. Not saying they need to be drug-fueled drunken orgy-fests, mind you.

7. The Hormone Tornado And The Unfinished Brain

Read this: “The Teenage Brain Is A Work-In-Progress.” Their brains ain’t done cooking yet. They’re these unfinished masterpieces that are pliable in some ways, rigid in others, and whose emotional and intellectual development is driven by a drunken chimpanzee whacked-out on a cocktail of high-octane hormones. The teenage brain is like, NOW IT’S TIME TO KNOW SHIT AND DO SHIT AND HAVE SEX WITH STUFF AND KICK THINGS AND POUR YOUR HEART OUT AND DRIVE FAST AND AAAAAAAAAAAH. I’m not saying a teen protagonist has to act like a coked-up ferret, but it is important to recognize that the teen psyche is a really strange thing.

8. What Were You Like As A Teen?

Write What You Know is one of those roasted chestnuts of writing advice that fails to tell the whole story — it sounds like a proclamation, that it’s the Only Thing You Should Do, but it’s not. It’s just one of the things you can do. And given that most of the people writing young adult fiction are not themselves young adults it behooves us to not just study teenagers like we’re Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey (“I am hiding in the teenage human’s locker. This locker smells suspiciously of gym socks, weed, Cheetos, and desperation”) but rather to look back our own time doing battle in the Teenage Arena. Rip off the old gnarly Band-Aid and let the memories flow. What were your teenage years like? What did you deal with? Remember! And write.

9. The Prevalence Of First-Person Point-Of-View

YA fiction is often told in a first-person point-of-view. One could intuit reasons for this: first-person tends to be a faster and more forthright read, teenagers often embrace their own first-person narratives (from handwritten journals to, say, Tumblr), teens might be more inwardly-focused than adults. The first-person POV is not a necessity, to be clear — nobody will beat you with a copy of Divergent if you write in, say, close third.

10. The Preponderance Of Present Tense

YA fiction is also frequently given over to the present tense. One might suggest reasons for this: present tense is a snappier, sharper read (more “cinematic” as the saying goes); it also provides a more urgent read; the teen mind lives more in the present than in the past, and so narrative tense should reflect it. Again, present tense is not a requirement, just a frequent feature.

11. Shorter, Punchier Books

You won’t find many Young Adult books that are big enough to derail an Amtrak train or to bludgeon a silverback gorilla. The average Young Adult novel probably hovers around the 70,000 word mark — shorter if it leans away from genre and toward literary, I think. That’s not to say you won’t or can’t see BIG GIANT GALLUMPHING TEEN EPICS, but it isn’t really the norm. Particularly for the first in a series.

12. Pacier, Chattier Books

They also tend to be more quickly paced and with a great deal of dialogue. I’ve read some young adult books that read with almost the spare elegance of a really sharp, elegant screenplay.

13. The Role Of The Adult Character

Adults are rarely the main characters of a young adult book. Why would they be? They don’t have teen problems. They’re witnesses, at best. That said, adults can be the supporting characters (though usually still peripheral to the teen world — teachers, parents, older siblings) and they can certainly be the villains (which is true to the teen mold because sometimes, when you’re a teenager, the adults in your life can be giant, cankerous assholes). What I mean to say is, TEENS RULE, ADULTS DROOL *flushes Dad’s toupee down the toilet and sets fire to the house*

14. The Teens Sound Like Adults

Sometimes the teens you read in young adult books sound like adults. They speak with intelligence and wit. I’ve seen this as a criticism against YA fiction, but hey, fuck that. I write with the assumption that — drum roll please — teenagers are capable of intelligence and wit.

15. But They Should Always Act Like Teens

Just the same, teenagers in your young adult stories are best when they actually act like teenagers. Teens do stupid shit. I look back over my teenage years and it’s like… oooh, oh, wow, yeah, I made some poor life choices. Driving way too fast. Unprotected sex. Disputing authority even when authority might’ve actually been right. Doing things because they seemed “cool” rather than because it was actually a good goddamn idea. I once punched a locker based on misappropriated jealousy (still have the scar). I once accidentally shot a hole in our kitchen ceiling with a .22 rifle. I was once in a car with a friend who tried to circumvent like, five minutes of traffic by driving on the side of the road, thus breaking the car on a giant drainage block. I could probably do a lecture on all the really teenagey things I did as a teenager, and I didn’t even drink in high school (it took me till college to learn the love of the sauce).

16. Riskier Stories

Personal opinion time: some of the bravest, strangest, coolest stories right now are being told in the young adult space. It’s stuff that doesn’t fly by tropes or adhere to rules — appropriate, perhaps, since young adults tend to flick cigarettes in the eyes of the rules and don’t play by social norms as much as adults do. (Though teens certainly have their own social codes, too.) I wish adult fiction so frequently took risks on the material at hand, but it doesn’t. And as a person (relatively) new to the young adult spectrum, I used to assume it was all Twilight: generic pap. But then you read John Green, or Libba Bray, or Maureen Johnson — or holy shit, have you read Code Name: Verity?! — and your eyes start to go all boggly. Amazing storytelling in this realm. Amazing! I’ll wait here while you go read it all. *stares*

17. More “Adult” Stories

Young adult stories are encouraged to deal with some heavy shit when needed. Suicide, racism, misogyny, teen pregnancy, depression, cancer, rape, school shootings, and so forth. Don’t feel like it needs to be all cushy and cozy and given over to some Hollywood notion of what it’s like being a teenager. Sometimes YA books get called “children’s fiction,” which makes it sound like it stars characters looking for their next cotton candy fix while trying to stop the playground bullies from stealing their truck toys. Young adults still deal with some particularly adult things.

18. Very Hard To Compare To Film Ratings

A lot of young adult books hover somewhere between PG-13 and R in terms of how you might translate it to a film rating — but that’s ultimately a broken comparison because of, well, how broken film ratings happen to be. For example: if you were to film The Hunger Games as close to the book as you could make it, it would almost certainly be an R-Rated film for the depiction of violence. Some of the sex in young adult books would similarly earn an R-rating or — given our deeply Puritanical roots — something closer to NC-17 (GASP TEENS HAVE SEX OH GOD BURN THE BRIDGES SINK THE BOATS). The takeaway is, you can get away with some profanity and some sex in young adult fiction — though, I have seen talk of some libraries, teachers and booksellers refusing to promote certain books to teenagers because of edgy content found within. This is, as always, a YMMV issue.

19. Adults Like It

Adults read a lot of young adult fiction, particularly “cross-over” fiction that leans toward the higher end of that teen age range. One might speculate adults like it because it recaptures some part of their youth. Or that adults are frequently not as grown up as they’d prefer these days. Or that they get some vicarious thrill. Mostly, if I’m being honest, I think it’s because of what I said in #13 and #14 — some of the bravest, most “adult” storytelling is happening in the young adult space. They’re gravitating to the quality. Or so I like to hope. At the very least, those who claim young adult books are there to play off of adult nostalgia for the age have never read a young adult book. (“Teen suicide. Remember those good times? Like a Norman Rockwell painting!”)

20. Something-Something New Adult

Now there’s this other thing called “new adult,” which I think is maybe like “diet adult,” or “adult, now with zero calories?” I dunno. My understanding is that it’s maybe just a sexed-up version of young adult? Or that it’s the next age range after young adult for, say, 19-25 year olds? (Soon we’ll be writing books based on your birth month. “THIS BOOK RECOMMENDED FOR THOSE BORN IN JUNE OF 1984.”) I always thought that 19-25 year olds were just regular old adults by then, but maybe I’m that crotchety old crotchbasket on the lawn yelling at you kids to stop trampling his begonias.

21. As Always, Hell With Trends

THE TREND RIGHT NOW IS TEEN MUMMY UTOPIAS FEATURING SPUNKY CHARACTERS LOCKED IN TURBULENT LOVE RHOMBUSES. Whatever. Fuck trends. You can’t really beat trends. You can’t really write to them either. Trends are boring. Write what you want to write and make it as awesome as you can make it. Set the trend instead of following it.

22. You Are Reading Young Adult, Right?

If you’re gonna write it, you better be reading it.

23. Of Waning Snobbery

I was once a young adult snob. I was that old dude on his front porch yelling at the wind — “I don’t need your stinky young adult fictions! I read Ender’s Game when it was just a book and the author wasn’t a homophobic Tea Party sociopath! It’s just a marketing category! I’ll fill your hide with rock salt from my shotgun MARTHA GET ME MY SHOTGUN.” But I think that’s changing. In part because folks like myself acquiesced and actually starting reading what was prematurely condemned. I’m happy to be seeing fewer and fewer essays elsewhere about how YA is too dark or too puerile or how adult fiction is just fine, thanks, shut up — as if the presence of young adult fiction somehow eats away adult fiction instead of contributing to the overall health of a great book market. Go read that Nick Hornby quote again.

24. Teen Self-Publishing Squad

I don’t really know how self-publishing impacts young adult fiction or vice versa. I did self-publish an “edgy YA” (Bait Dog) which did well over Kickstarter and has since sold fine enough since (well enough that Amazon picked it and a sequel up to publish with Skyscape starting next year). Trends have been that teen readers preferred physical books as they did not often own their own e-readers — though, I’ve heard they’re inheriting e-readers now, thus opening them to the digital space more easily. Good for indie publishing types, I think.

25. You’re Not My Mom!

We as adults have a tendency to talk down to children and adolescents. “Eat this. Don’t eat that. Get good grades. If you pee in the pool, the pool filter will release piranha. Don’t do drugs. Definitely don’t steal Daddy’s drugs. If you masturbate too often, your fingers will turn white and fall off.” Don’t do this in your books. These books aren’t lesson plans. You’re not preaching from the Adult-Sized Podium. (This is true of all books, by the way — you should be telling stories while within your audience, not from outside it. I just think the tendency to get all teachy-and-preachy is stronger when writing for teens.)

26. Big-Ass Market Share

The young adult market is strapping and robust, like a young Russian lad thick on borscht and vodka. Last year sales in young adult were up 13%, and up 117% in e-books which is more than twice the digital growth in adult markets — plus, by most reports, young adult fiction yields bigger advances, too. And it’s these bigger advances right now that maybe suggests young adult authors are better leaning toward more traditional publishing than self-publishing (whereas in other areas, like in romance, the reverse may be true).

27. Genres Being Codified

I always poke around the Barnes & Noble YA shelves and I’ve noticed that the big bookstore has begun to lump YA into weird, clumsy genres. What I used to love about that shelf is that it was once just YOUNG ADULT. No “general fiction,” no “mystery,” no “SFF,” just — boom, here’s all the awesome books, please dispense of your genre tropes and judgments. That’s changing. Now it’s like, “Teen Adventure!” and “Teen Romance!” and “Teen Boondoggles With Drugs And Dystopias!” and blah blah blah. I don’t like it. I also don’t like that the shelving seems almost arbitrary, like someone let my toddler do it.

28. Good Story Is Good Story No Matter The Age Range

Young Adult is not just some easy space to jump in and make a quick buck. It’s a place for great storytelling and no matter what the rules are now or what they become for this age range, good story is always good story. I’m not so blindly optimistic to suggest that you can’t lose with a good story (nor would I say you can’t win with a bad one because, well, c’mon), but just the same: put your best foot forward with the best story you can tell. If it’s a story about teens or toddlers or geriatric dudes or koalas or space koalas or teenage space koalas, fuck it: slam your best effort down on the table. Write a killer story. The end.

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Matt Smith is done being The Doctor.

Which means it is now time to introduce a female Doctor.

This apparently upsets some of you.

Don’t worry — it won’t happen. You’ve already won. You can be sure that right now they have suggested and summarily dismissed an actress for the role. (See also: Idris Elba.)

But I’m going to tell you why that’s fucked up.

So, I said on the Twitters like I just said here: it’s time for a female Doctor. I even mentioned what I felt was a good choice — Imogen Poots (Google her), who I think might carry on the same kind of gleeful anarchy and smoldering emotional intensity The Doctor so requires. Others mentioned Tilda Swinton — which I think also works! She’s maybe a little praying-mantisy, but she’s also really well in line with what Christopher Eccleston brought to the table, so hell yeah.

In response, I got a lot of folks saying that this was “PC tokenism.” That it would just be marketing. Falsely trying to balance — well, who gives a shit. You know the drill.

It’s nonsense.

Crap of the highest order.

You’re going to defend it as being against the story. Like it’s a money or culture decision made ahead of the interests of the narrative. Here’s why that’s wrong: the cultural status quo and the financial weight lies with keeping things the same. The Doctor of Doctor Who has always been a white dude. Cultural inertia and financial interest is stronger when that remains true.

(Plus, making the character female opens up new story avenues.)

You say, it’s “tokenism.” But tokenism isn’t what you think it is. Some people said — “Well, why not make the supporting characters be strong female characters?” That’s tokenism. Putting a black dude in your TV show — oh, ho, ho, not as the lead character, mind you — because you need a black dude for your “demographics,” that’s tokenism. Tokenism is a dismissive, hand-wavey gesture. Tokenism is, “Here, happy now? We’re eating bread, but you enjoy these crusts. HEY IT’S BETTER THAN NOTHING, SHADDAP.” Making your titular character — in this case, making the Doctor a woman — isn’t a token. It’s a nuclear bomb. 

You might say, well, it has nothing to do with the story, so why do it at all? But that’s part of the magic, here. Doctor Who is a show about a character whose very flesh is transitive. This character has carried across multiple iterations so far — this role is tailor-made to see actors and actresses who are not White Dudes. It’d be one thing if the character’s “maleness” was key to the role, right? You could make a case that says, this or that story — Ulysses, Fight Club, whatever — has its roots in a kind of male experience, and changing that might alter the story so much it’s not worth the genderflip. But this is Doctor Who. It is, as its heart, a show for kids and family. It should not be protected by some kind of geeky jurisdiction. The Doctor is practically already without gender. The romances are barely that; the sonic screwdriver is not a metaphor for some dude’s wang. If we can’t give the role of a flesh-changing alien to a woman and instead relegate the actresses only to the “girl groupies,” that’s kinda fucked up, isn’t it? What kind of message is that for the families who are watching the show? Not the adult geeks of Whovian fandom, but kids who dig the character and all its assorted fictions?

And it’s that last point that matters most for me; this is a show where kids are watching. Little boys. Little girls. Do we really want to say to little girls, “You can never be The Doctor? You are forever relegated to The Companion?” And do you really want that same message for boys? “You will always be The Doctor. Girls are forever your Companions.” Fuck that noise. I want my son to grow up in a world where women can be real doctors and imaginary Time Lord Space Doctors.

So, now I ask you —

Who would be a great female Doctor?

Note that I’m not asking to have a conversation about whether the Doctor should or should not be played by a woman. You want to have that conversation, have it somewhere else.

(Sidenote: I’m told the Corsair proves it possible for Time Lords to flip the gender, thus showing how the Doctor could do the same. I’m honestly not a Super-Fan of the show, more just a casual watcher, but YEAH WHATEVER LET’S DO IT LADY WHO WOOOOOOOO)

BEA, baby. Book Expo America.

I came. I wandered. I got swag.

This was my first. My BEA cherry is now popped.

Let’s talk about what I learned.

1. BEA is not actually a Bea Arthur cosplay convention. My Maude outfit — which was, forgive my ego, exquisite — landed like an iron turd. I tried to segue and pretend I was doing some riff on “50 Shades Of Grey-Haired Ladies,” but that just weirded people out even more.

2. People will step on their nieces and grandmothers to get certain swag offerings. Like, at first I thought, “BEA is like a polite, bookish version of Comic-Con,” and that largely remains true. People are generally quite polite and professional. Until — until — it comes time to procure a highly sought-after advanced reader copy of an upcoming book, particularly if you could also get it signed. I think I saw a few sharpened toothbrushes. One librarian had trained peregrine falcons to go for the eyes of anybody reaching for a book she wanted. What also enraged folks: the fact that some ARCs were not produced and made available. The fact that Veronica Roth’s newest did not have a galley copy on the floor drove one librarian into twerking as if possessed by a twerking demon, and those who got close to her were incinerated in holy fire. It’s possible I’m making this up. I did, after all, consume hallucinogens with Mister Tyrus Books Himself. We made LSD from library paste. It was, as the kids say, “off the chain.”

3. People in publishing are frequently demonized, but this to me remains largely unfair. Demonize the industry all you like (and it has done things worthy of the exorcisms and excrement thrown at times), but generally the people who work in publishing love it. They love books. They love authors. They love selling books and promoting authors. Sometimes they might not be as good at it as we want. Sometimes they might be mired in thinking that sometimes seems “backwards,” but that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of people I meet working in the industry are there because they actually love the shit out of books.

4. Grumpy Cat brings all the boys to the yard. Seriously, like, I think Grumpy Cat’s line was longer than that of most of the celebrity authors who were there.

5. FUCK YES LIBRARIANS AND TEACHERS AND BOOK WORKERS. And book bloggers! I’ve seen commentary that dismisses them in favor of the generic “reader,” but that misses some things. First, it misses that librarians and teachers and book workers are readers. Second, it misses that these people can also be a book and author’s avatars into the world — they are not “middle men” fit to be excised but rather they are connective tissue that helps ensure that books (physical books and digital books) find hands. Anybody who cheers the demise of libraries or bookstores shouldn’t be allowed to write books and should in fact be slathered with tuna and thrown into a pit beneath Jabba’s Palace with a starving Grumpy Cat. GRUMPY CAT GONNA EAT YOUR FACE, FOOLS.

6. The BEA exhibitor floor is like a really boring labyrinth. (In the middle is not an angry minotaur but rather some tired guy trying to give away inspirational Christian cookbooks.) It’s amazing how I can get lost in a basic grid but after a while it’s like the streets of Los Angeles — it all starts to blur together and you start seeing the same corners and book hawkers and generic covers and next thing I know I’m drooling and pirouetting and peeing in a Starbucks cup. Then again, that might’ve been the library paste LSD? Hard to say.

7. If you’re a service trying to do outreach for authors and you want to step into the chain of authorial existence by adding yourself as a link, you need to have data. I spoke to a few services aimed at self-publishers (and they were admittedly free, to be clear, and were very nice), but they all balked when it came time to ask about data. No bells or whistles make a louder sound than a big-ass foghorn pushing back the haze with a trumpeting oomph of data. Have data. HAVE DATA. Authors across all forms of publishing NEED MORE DATA. Where are we selling? To whom are we selling? Who buys what where? Where are my pants? Where is the cheapest bottle of Basil Hayden bourbon in Manhattan? Details, please. Hopefully folks like Bookigee will do just that. Also, some companies will claim to want to cut out the middle-man while clearly inserting themselves as a new middle-man. See also: self-publishers who decry publishing while somehow missing the irony of creating their own small press publishing companies. If you’re going to tell me I don’t need a publisher, you probably shouldn’t then tell me you’re starting your own publishing company. Pro-tip, from me to you.

8. Given how many books they give away for free during this event, it’s amazing anybody worries at all about piracy. I’m not interested in a nuanced argument about the differences between targeted free marketing that you control and the lack of control one has over piracy — they’re different. I grok that. But for real, publishers give away a metric fuckliter of books. Effectively, to boot. Seems then that it would be best to find a way to utilize and steer torrenting and piracy (or in some cases, “piracy”) in a way where it adds value. Then again, what do I know?

9. The show isn’t super e-book friendly. Some publishers are getting there — they’ll give e-ARCs by scanning badges, which is a cool feature. (I saw a few recaps lamenting the lack of QR codes on the show floor — no, no, no, a thousand times no. If you tout the awesomeness of QR codes, you go on the “Grave Distrust” list. You’ve seen the handy helpful flowchart to help you decide when to use a QR code, right?) Generally, though, you still get the vibe that e-books aren’t “real” books. I heard more about how e-books were “cooling down,” which is like saying, “This 747 has reached its cruising altitude of 30,000 feet.” Yeah, it’s still 30,000 feet. It’s not crashing. E-books are a giant part of the ecosystem now so let’s not pretend they’re not. Also, publishers, it’s really, honestly, seriously time: if I buy the physical copy of your book, give me the e-book. Just do it. Take that leap of faith. Realize that this will sell more books, not fewer books. Add value. Do not limit it. If you don’t do it first, Amazon will.

10. BEA felt like a battle of cynicism versus enthusiasm — on the publishing industry side, it’s easy to see that cynicism at play (and that cynicism is, despite appearances otherwise, because many of the people in publishing love books so much and yet have to operate in what is presumed to be the best interests of the industry rather than the best interests of the art). But then in meeting the people who come for the books you get a face full of wide-eyed enthusiasm: people are excited as fuck about books. If there’s anything to take away from all the Monday Morning Quarterbacking and Grumpy BEA Wrap-Up Bloggery, it’s exactly that: we should embrace an industry that can support thousands of people descending upon a single place (whether as angels or as vultures) to feast upon Publishing in all its splendors and glories and frailties. People love stories! This is a place where people come to demonstrate that love and, ideally, carry that love back to classrooms and libraries and bookstores — and beyond. And this is why I will always embrace the enthusiasm rather than celebrate the cynicism. Meeting fans and readers and even publishers gave me energy going forward.

My Own BEA

A more personal look — had a great trip to NYC, met lots of great people, enjoyed the time spent with my publishers. Finally got to put faces to Twitter handles (Liberty! Shecky! Pabkins!). Finally got to meet writers I admire and adore (Erin Morgenstern! Robin Wasserman! T.L Costa!). Got to meet old friends (Dave “Eel Penis” Turner! Joelle “The Testing” Charbonneau! John Hornor “Twelve-Fingered” Jacobs!”). And more that I’m forgetting since I’m dizzy and tired and probably still half-drunk on books and fancy cocktails. I signed hundreds and hundreds of books for folks, which was wild — many of them seemed to actually be fans of this very blog or my Twitter feed. And the Blue Blazes launch at the mighty mighty Singularity & Co. in Brooklyn was bad-ass — wine! Charcuterie! An electrical fire outside! Bumsiders!

Good times.

Sleep now.

All right! This week’s challenge is late — I’d written one to post on Friday but WordPress… ate it? I don’t know. It was there one day, then the next it wasn’t. And by then I was at BEA partying with Grumpy Cat, so, it was too late.

Just the same, I’ve had a few folks email me and ask me to still do one.

SO HERE WE ARE.

Your challenge this week:

Pick three words from the list of ten.

Incorporate these words into your story.

Ready?

1. Scarecrow
2. Mint
3. Epidemic
4. Tongue
5. Republic
6. Scorpion
7. Divorce
8. Moon
9. Holiday
10. Legend

Again: three words. Incorporate into the tale. Which doesn’t mean simply using those words — it means making them parts of the plot, characters, or motifs found within. You can choose these words randomly (d10 or random number generator) or eschew chaos and hand-pick ’em.

You’ve got (less than) one week.

Due by Friday, June 7th, noon EST.

Write ~1000 words at your online space. Link back here.

CHOOSE YOUR WORDS AND WRITE.

Sometimes you get a book that has some buzz with it, a book you really want to tear into soon as you get a chance — for me, this is one of them, because it sounds right in my narrative sweet spot. Here’s author John Mantooth talking about his newest, The Year Of The Storm:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m a southern boy, born in Georgia, raised in Alabama.  I’m a dad, a husband, a teacher, and a writer.  In past lives I coached basketball, drove a school bus, played bass in a rock and roll band, and loafed with such effortless grace some observers called it sublime (others called it something else).

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Nine months after Danny’s mother and sister disappear in the woods behind his house, a tortured Vietnam vet shows up at his door claiming to know their whereabouts.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I think it comes from wanting to write a story that actually explains where missing people go.  I mean, I think I know where they go.  Logic tells us that a missing person has moved on with their life somewhere else, been abducted, or they’ve been murdered.  Illogically, I’ve always wanted there to be another option.  I wanted there to be a “slip” that people sometimes could stumble upon, and when they did, it would take them somewhere else, some “other” world.  So, I suppose that’s why I wrote the story.  That, and I had an old painting that one of my grandmother’s sisters had done years ago that captured my imagination.  It was of a little cabin at dusk, sitting on the outskirts of what appeared to be a swamp.  That painting influenced the book probably more than anything else.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

Oh that’s a tough one.  I suppose I’d say it’s southern, it’s gritty, and it has a speculative element.  It also has a sort of hopefulness in the face of the hard (and inevitable) knowledge that the world can be a cruel and unforgiving place.  I don’t necessarily set out to get that in my stories, and I hesitate to call it a theme, but it’s difficult to read any of my work without getting at least a whiff of it.  I like to think of it as a sort of tough grace.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

The ending.  I must have rewritten it a dozen times, and when I say the ending, I mean the last fourth of the book.  Endings are extremely difficult for me.  It was important that the ending didn’t just resolve the action of the story, but also resolved or at least attempted to resolve the over arching emotional concerns of the novel.  This was especially challenging because this novel called for a touch of ambiguity to tie it all together.  But yeah, the ending kicked my ass.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

I learned that I can get it right.  I think in the past when a novel got hard, I just quit and moved on to something else.  I learned that this is a terrible mistake because whatever you move on to is going to be just as hard in time.  You have to work through the difficulties.  Take a small break if necessary, but don’t abandon it.  Others probably have different opinions on this, but for me, I’ve got to push through and make it the story I envisioned.  Starting another story isn’t a solution.  It’s a delaying tactic.  Every story is hard in its own way.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

I love the narrative voice.  It’s told by an adult looking back on his childhood.  I think it’s a voice I do particularly well.  It seems natural to me, easy to write.  I also love the setting.  It’s no particular place except rural Alabama, but when I reread sections, I feel like I got it right, if not in specifics, at least in tone.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Write it faster.  The book took me three years.  Part of that was a result of teaching full time, having small kids, and getting my master’s in library science.  My kids are older now.  The master’s is done.  The next one is going to be faster.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

This takes place near the opening of the novel.  Danny, the narrator, wonders if the strange man in his front yard might somehow be related to the legends he’d grown up hearing.

“I’d been hearing the stories about these woods since I was a kid. Most of them were the generic campfire variety, the same urban legends reshuffled and personalized for different times, different settings, but one story was more than that. One story had the ring of authenticity. It was unique to these woods, and unlike the tales of hook hands and insane asylum escapees, it never seemed to fade away. Two girls, Tina and Rachel, lost in the woods behind our house. I grew up knowing their names just like I knew anything else. They were a part of the landscape, a part of the place where I lived. It didn’t matter if I’d never seen them or heard them speak or even gotten the whole story straight about their disappearances. I felt their presences intimately, and their loss settled on the woods like a heavy fog. When I walked through the darkest parts behind my house near dusk, sometimes I thought I saw them in the gloom, floating, transparent, made from spiders’ webs and dying streaks of light mingled with shadow. Their sad visages slithering round tree trunks and drifting past blooming moonvines. I shuddered, thinking that the man responsible for these disappearances might be standing in my front yard.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Working on the next novel.  I’m not going to say what it’s about because I’m superstitious like that and don’t want to jinx it.

Thanks for the interview, Chuck!

John Mantooth: Website / @busfulloflosers

The Year Of The Storm: Amazon / B&N

Comes a time in every writer’s life that he’s gotta look at the work in front of him and he’s got to say, “This thing is thick with peacocks. Pretty, pretty peacocks.”

Then he’s gottta take a meat cleaver and start cutting up those pretty, pretty peacocks*.

Because those peacocks, pretty as they are, stand out. They’ve got them ostentatious tails. Those little tickly tiaras of alien antenna-feathers. They’re a color blue you don’t see anywhere except blue raspberry popsicles. They preen. They preen all the goddamn time. And they strut around like they own the place. They warble like motherfuckers. And, if we’re being honest, they shit up everything. They’re just shitting machines, those peacocks.

Of course, all this is me being metaphorical.

What I’m saying is, you write a story, you’re eventually going to come across some darlings.

Darlings are those elements of your story that fulfill two qualifications: first, you love them dearly, and second, your love isn’t enough to justify their existence. Some people misconstrue the darling. They say, “If you love it, kill it,” which is fucked up advice from any angle (“I LOVE YOU, HONEY, BUT SOME WRITER ONLINE SAID I HAVE TO MURDER YOU NOW”). Don’t destroy the parts of your work you love just because you love them.

No, we must destroy those things that we love that also unfortunately don’t belong.

Like, say, an ugly hat everyone tells you will get you beat up.

And you’re like, “But it’s fantastic. It has a propeller. And it houses squirrels.”

And everyone’s like, “But squirrels are pests.”

But you don’t listen and you walk outside the house and then a bunch of squirrel-hating squirrelophobes come out of the shrubs and beat you half to death with mailbox posts. And then your friends are like “We told you so. We told you about that hat.”

Point is, your love is not enough to save these darlings.

They are too precious to live.

Now, I like to dispense great heaps and mounds of dubious writing advice here in the vaunted halls of Terribleminds University, and the majority of that advice comes from my own (mis)adventures with the written word, and this one is no different. And so I present to you:

A TRUE TALE OF DARLING-KILLING

So, as you may have heard (since I was pretty noisy about it, sorry):

THE BLUE BLAZES is now out.

This book took a lot of work to bring out of my head. I swung for the fences on this one. It was at the time the longest thing I’d ever written, topping out at 100,000 words. It’s got an immeasurable fuck-sack of world-building in there — I tried not to borrow too much from previous sources and instead conjured my own version of what Hell would look like under the streets and tunnels of New York City (and, in some ways, above it, too). Between the gangs, the crime families, the Sandhog union, the goblins, the snakefaces, the daemon families —

Well, there’s a lot of stuff I threw at the wall.

And by golly, I loved it all.

I mean, sometimes I hated it, as is a writer’s wont. You careen drunkenly between obsessive love and infernal hate for your work on a daily — shit, even hourly — basis. But for the most part what I was throwing out was stuff I liked and was ready to defend by its end.

Case in point, the first:

The open and close of the book.

The first and last chapters of the book you (er, hopefully) have in your hands is not the first and last chapters as I wrote them initially. When I wrote them I wanted to introduce Mookie as a kind of monster figure, a human minotaur at the heart of his own labyrinth, right? An unexpected protagonist. So, I had this drunk guy (an outsider, really) who’d been kicked out of his house by his wife stumble into Mookie’s not-actually-open bar looking for a drink. And Mookie basically scares the shit out of him and kicks his ass a little and is about to throw him out — but there’s this moment where the two sad-sacks recognize each other’s sad-sackedness and while they don’t exactly commiserate, Mookie and he share a drink.

Then he kicks him out and the scene with Mookie’s daughter ensues.

Cut to the end where Mookie comes back to the bar and he’s alone — but he turns on the OPEN sign and who wanders in at midnight but that same guy, and we see how he ended up, and then there’s the hint of some commiseration. Two sad bastards. Drinking.

I liked it. It did things I dug. It bookended the piece.

And it didn’t work.

It took up too much time. It delayed the story. It was perpendicular to the point of the tale — while it leaned on some of the themes, thematic embrace is by no means enough for me. It has to do more to survive. Every inch of the work has to be willing to work double-duty lest it get:

A HOWITZER TO THE FACE.

It was easy enough to get rid of. He was a peripheral character. He had two chapters.

His death was clean and elegant. Extracting the body: effortless.

And then came Cassie Morgan.

Cassie was a full-fledged supporting character — a top-tier one, at that. She was daughter to Sandhog Davey Morgan, this young girl trying to prove herself among the Sandhogs but in doing so accidentally falls in with Mookie and his grim mission.  I had her in there as a surrogate daughter to Mookie — a foil to Nora, the real daughter, the daughter trying to hurt him.

She ended up in like, the whole goddamn book. She was everywhere. Instrumental in parts. Wound through the plot, braided in with other characters. And yet…

She had very little agency. She felt swept along.

Her journey felt incomplete.

And I was like, “Okay, that’s fine, I’ll just… fix it.” And as I tried to fix it — untangling the snarled threads, really — I just ended up knotting things up worse. Until at the end I was like a cat who had strangled itself half-to-death with its own ball of yarn. It was ugly business.

I realized that as a character, she felt redundant. I already had a daughter figure: Mookie’s actual daughter, Nora. Nora needed more page-time. Nora needed a complete arc that didn’t duplicate beats found in Cassie’s tale. Cassie felt peripheral. A hanger-on; a poser in the tale.

BUT I LIKED CASSIE. She was fun! Plucky! Tough! And… and…

And finally I said to my agent, “I think I need to let Cassie go.”

And she had the class not to say, “I knew this all along but you needed to figure this out on your own because otherwise you just would’ve made frowny-faces.”

She instead agreed politely.

And thus began the unsnarling, the untangling. I had to cut free the knots that formed from the enmeshing of Cassie into the plot. This is harder than you think. It’s not so simple as just summoning her name through the Find Text spell and quietly excising her from the tapestry — she had cause and effect. She was wedded to events, objects, timelines. Every snip saw another piece threaten to unravel — and I had to retie all the threads that connected to her originally.

It was messy.

I hated it.

I did it anyway.

And the book felt tighter. More meaningful. It put more emphasis on Nora. It gave the story more room, more pep, didn’t feel like it was tripping on its own characters.

It was an essential darling to murder.

A critical peacock to behead and put on display for all the other pretty, pretty peacocks.

So, my advice to you is the same that I have to take — this is the medicine, folks:

Kill your darlings. Two to the chest. One to the head. Shed your tears but never look back.

* —> P.S. we used to have a peacock growing up and it was murdered by a raccoon which is very sad so I don’t actually condone ACTUAL PEACOCK MURDER.