The Sparkle Project, or How I Intend to Drive Myself Mad with Paranormal YA.

[ceilidh_ann]

Twilight.

It can only truly be described as a phenomenon. It inspires equal amounts of excitement and rage in people, it inspires people to spend days camping outside a cinema waiting to catch a glimpse of greasy Pattinson hair or underage abs, it encourages lazy journalists to declare it the new Harry Potter and it's power in the YA literature

Comments

[glaciachan]

Well, good luck. You certainly have more guts than me to try this.

[ceilidh_ann]

Thank you dearie. You can live vicariously through my suffering. :P

[duckgirlie]

Are you looking for positive examples? I might suggest Damsel by S.E. Connolly, though it's more fantasy then paranormal. But it's about a female protaganist who's definitely the hero, not the romance, and written with definite feminist intent. And I can personally vouch for the intelligence of the author.

[ceilidh_ann]

It's mostly about books that have been influenced by Twilight and its success, directly or otherwise, but I will needs tons of good recommendations afterwards to cleanse my brain. There have been some good books to have come out of the sudden paranormal popularity surge - Beautiful Creatures is the one that comes to mind - so I'll need to keep my eye out for more. And I'll definitely be doing cover snark. What is it about ribbons that peopel find so sexy?

[textualdeviance]

FWIW, the YA fantasy novel I'm working on has a female protagonist who doesn't give three shits about romance. She has a vague love interest, but he gets about four pages at the beginning and another four at the end, and she doesn't think about him in between.

I suspect it may never get published.

[ceilidh_ann]

The 2 stories I'm currently planning out involve 1) a teen art thief blackmailed into helping a circle of black market vampires with ties to most of the major world powers and 2) a Disney princess style story where the princess is gay, wants to overthrow her useless king brother, has a vaugely psychotic fairy godfather and falls for the baddie.

Also no chance of being published sadly. Good luck with your book though!

[bergeronprocess]

Godspeed, you crazy person. I'd strangle myself halfway thru this whole endeavor. (Not endeavour :P Although apparently Ari spells his agency name Endeavour because he wants to be posh or something, I'm babbling) Like, I wrote a story about the whole vampire trend for my features class (here) and that made me go to Borders to look around--it too has a "dark fantasy" type section and even an entire corner of Twilight stuff. I weep for today's teenagers.

[ceilidh_ann]

I don't mind the genre itself - I really want to write my own vampire book (note about it; the heroine is a short haired teen art thief, the vampires are savvy businessmen with Republican leanings and the 136 year old that obsesses over the heroine is NOT a love interest, he's a creeper!) - but the market's become over-saturated and most of the stories are the same cut-and-paste formula and I blame Twilight for that. *shakes fist*

[bergeronprocess]

OMG I would so read that book. I love a GOOD vampire read. Make it a little sexy, but not Mormon-chaste or Anita Blake-rapey and I'm there. Hell, I seem to remember a K/R vampire ficlet where Keith needed to feed... :)

[67]

jesus. Good luck! also lol Cassandra Clare.

[ceilidh_ann]

As a Potter nerd I may not be able to review her in an unbiased manner. XD