Fellow #1: Hi, I'm a scoundrely rogue! The heroine will meet me first and be put off by my bad manners ( Read more... )

Have you guys been checking out the amazing tweets with the #VeryRealisticYA hashtag? It's a beautiful mix of things that would make terrible books (goodbye, exciting plot; hello, actual high school experience) and things that I'd love to see in more books (not everybody is white, straight, and gorgeous? MIND BLOWN).

A few of my favorites:

Hero ( Read more... )

Courtesy of all the girl-centric YA thrillers I've been reading at the gym lately, and of my amusement at this list of signs you are a YA protagonist and this list of ways to know you are in a gothic horror novel.

How to Tell if You are the Heroine of a YA ThrillerYou have just moved to a new town. You moved here either to attend boarding school ( Read more... )

So, when you talk about events that take place in a book, you use present tense, right? As in, "Howl throws a magical hissy fit and there's green slime everywhere." But what is the protocol for describing your reaction to a book's event? Sometimes, it works okay to put your reaction in present tense: "It cracks me up when Howl throws that ( Read more... )

That's right, I mean you, character in a YA or middle-grade novel. Do your parents know you're out fighting evil at this time of night? And/or solving mysteries, and/or romancing and being romanced ( Read more... )

It has come to my attention that today is Appreciate a Dragon Day. (Although really, shouldn't every day be?) So, I had to think about some dragons that I appreciate. Want to know which ones I came up with? No? Oh, okay. PSYCH, you're hearing about them anyway! (Deep inside, you know that's what you wanted.)

• The various dragons kind enough ( Read more... )

Hello all!

Just thought you should be alerted to a couple of things. One, a cool contest that could win your short story publication in an anthology put out by HarperTeen, and two, Figment, the writing site to which this contest alerted me. (If anyone's curious, my entry in the anthology contest - a fantasy called "Foxhunt" that's a bit of a ( Read more... )

I recently read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. (My book group discussed it yesterday. Discussable it definitely is.) Some spoilers to follow, I suppose, though nothing too dramatic ( Read more... )

For my Popular Materials class, a partner and I presented on the fantasy genre. To kick off our presentation, I handed out a quiz I'd written - not to be collected or graded, which might have gotten me assassinated, but to show classmates that they already knew more about fantasy than they might have thought ( Read more... )