Please, please, please, before my head explodes, will everyone please stop calling The Giver a YA book? I don’t know why this offends me so much except for the fact that The Giver is SO CLEARLY a middle grade novel. The protagonist is twelve. The word count is 43,600. It is commonly assigned to middle schoolers. All kidlit genre indicators… View Post
Recently I finished revising a YA Contemporary novel I wrote a few years back. I was excited for about five minutes. Then I freaked out. I’m forty years old. What the heck do I know about “kids these days”? Plus there’s COVID to consider, which makes writing contemporary fiction all the more complicated. Should I do another revision, putting my characters… View Post
Recently I happened upon this interview with YA author Lish McBride, which I published back in 2014 on my old website. A lot has happened since then, obviously. At the time, Lish’s third YA fantasy book, Firebug, was about to come out, and now Lish has written and published two more YA novels: a sequel to Firebug, called Pyromantic, and,… View Post
**Updated December 2021** I recently met with highly successful literary agent Fiona Kenshole of Transatlantic Agency, and she gave me some query tips that truly blew my mind. I am, unfortunately, no stranger to the query game; I thought by this point I knew everything about writing query letters. As it turns out, I had more to learn. There are… View Post
Back in 2014 and 2015, when I was living in Minneapolis, I created a small writers group. Monica Gomez-Hira was in the group, and she was working on a funny YA contemporary about a Latinx girl who gets a job as a party princess and has to play Belle opposite her “beastly” ex-boyfriend. Imagine my delight when, years later,… View Post