I love YA. I read YA almost exclusively, have read YA since before I was technically supposed to be “allowed” to YA, and don’t plan on writing anything except YA. It’s the most fun, diverse, incredible genre of books on the market, because you can do anything and everything you want with it. In YA, you can make the rules, bend them and mold them. The great parter about writing for a younger audience is that they aren’t as jaded as adults, and don’t need every little detail to be absolutely real. Their suspension of disbelief is a little bit greater.

But for all that, it seems sometimes that, for all the great power that writing this genre gives us, a lot of YA (including my own) tends to fall back onto the old set of rules. More