It’s getting “drafty” in here…

The one thing I should never do is read my first drafts before they’re finished, because I always think they’re crap. And by and large, they kind of are.

To think, I was actually going to query my first draft of the WIP I’m working at some point. I told myself  ”self, this is good stuff! This is stuff that could get published today! And then, after like two months, we’d get a movie deal! Oh, Demi Lovato could star! And It could totally be her first ‘quasi-adult’ role, and I could launch her into the stratusphere of superstardom, and then I’d get like JK Rowling famous…”

…As you can see, this train of thought only had one stop; Delusion.

Seriously, Demi's my homegirl. Honest. Mostly.

This WIP started life as a NaNoWriMo novel–I gave it one pass through, a quick edit (which consisted mainly of finding all the -ly and “justs” and hitting delete), then started amassing my lists of potential agents. I would get accepted, and people would bid over my work, and agents would be setting up cage matches to get a piece of action. You know why? Because I’m that awesome. That’s right, I was officially Kanye Westing it. My huge ass ego took over and I figured–

I'm sorry KC, you're writing a good blog, imma let you finish, BUT CARA DELIZIA IS THE BEST DISNEY CHANNEL STAR OF ALL TIME! ALL TIME!

Uh…okay then Kanye…so…where was I again?

Oh, right. My expectations of my novel far exceeded what was actually within the realm of possibility of it. If I had queried that “second draft” of my novel, I would’ve gotten more rejections than I could handle. It would’ve made me quit and I would’ve stopped writing, possibly forever. It would’ve been pretty well devastating for me.

Drafting, for some reason, is an oddly new concept for me. I’ve been writing since I was old enough to know how to load WordPerfect…in MS-DOS. Yes, MS-DOS. I had to know how to do MS-DOS to write when I was like, five. I don’t miss those times. But in all that time, writing new drafts of something I knew was not something that happened very often. Most of this had a lot to do with the fact that I never finished anything. But the few things I did finish, I never thought about redrafting.

Which is one of the many reasons I cringe when I read anything pre-NaNoWriMo “I need to get my shit together, I want to do this for a living” revelation. Those stories are hard to look at sometime–it’s all about the potential and the disappointment. “Wow, when I first wrote this, I thought it was awesome. But really, this is just shit!”

This isn’t quite the case I’ve found with my current WIP. But after putting it away for a little while and tinkering with other things and coming back to it, my shiny golden ticket to the big time looked more like a bronze, slightly tarnished bus token. I still loved it, but it seemed to be missing something.

At first, I thought it was just the beginning. As long as I fixed my hook and first chapter at the beginning, then the rest of the story would just work. And then I woke up again, and realized that there were bigger things to do, and a way to make the story even better than before.

So I broke down, and started rewriting the whole damn thing. This is my official second draft, and now, I’m even more in love with my little novel that could. And I’m looking forward to starting the draft after this, when everything is nice and in place and I can start polishing.

I still get that nagging feeling that my first drafts will end up unpolishable turds–I’ve been trying to not get that nagging feeling, because usually that means I don’t finish. The first drafts are always the hardest; not because they’re not easy to write, and not because  they’re not good. Mainly because they force us to look at the objectively once we’re done with them and realize that they may not be as awesome as we originally thought, which is always, like, the worse thought. We want to think that everything we’ve ever written has been sunshine and rainbows.

Those first drafts are there to humble us and make us better. Also, to shatter the dreams that we will ever co-star in a movie based on our novel with Shadia Simmons and then go on to have a storybook romance with her.

Le sigh...

KC

Book Banning and Forced Reading

My mother let me read whatever I want, and I will always love her deeply for that.

There was never a time when a book me or my sister wanted to read was kept from us. Oh sure, she was more strict about music (I’m twenty-two and I still get nagged about buying music with a parental advisory sticker), movies (she’s made me return inappropriate things to the store) and games (we she was probably the most strict about). But books? Oh no, my mother would never make me put down a book I didn’t want to read. The reason for this is something that I believe more parents should take into consideration.

Namely, if your child is reading A BOOK, why take it away? Why make book reading a chore an ordeal?

While I’ve always enjoyed reading and loved it (and as a proud graduate of the “Hooked On Phonics School Of Learning”), I always liked reading on my own. I absolutely despised reading in school, hated being force to read books I didn’t like, and hated looking for the “hidden meaning” or subtext of all these people’s books. In school, reading went from being something I loved doing to something that was like pulling teeth.

“No,I don’t know what the subtext behind Hamlet is! Isn’t this a play? Isn’t this just supposed to be a story!? WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO HAVE A SECRET MEANING!”

It’s always said that teenagers don’t read, but I think the issue is more complex than that. Teenagers do read, and I think they like to read. But when you ake something that’s supposed to be for leisure and entertainment and turn it into dissecting the vast mysterious of the literary universe, it’s no wonder people get frustrated. It’s no surprise that reading books in high school could turn people off of books when you consider that most high school English classes make reading into a big “THING”, something your parents force you to do so you can finish your homework.

Which is more disheartening when you read things like people wanting to ban something as innocuous as The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson being attacked, or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie getting banned because it mentions masurbation or Looking for Alaska getting challenged because of “graphic language and sexual content” (and there is no truly explicit sexual content, as someone who read and loved Looking for Alaska can attest to), or even a classic book like To Kill a Mockingbird being threatened be banned for silly reasons.

I understand the need for parents to not want to expose their children tocertain things, but they must also understand that my mother never stopped be from reading a book that I wanted to read. Reading books, more than watching movies/TV or listening to music, is supposed to be about broading your horizons. It’s supposed to be about living vicariously through someone else and hopefully taking the lessons they learn for yourself.

Sheltering kids from things you may find “unsavory” doesn’t really protect them fro those things, at some point and sometime those people will be forced to confront them. Trying to ban the sexually explicit content doesn’t stop the fact that we as humans are bombarded with sex pretty much every we go and with everything we do, somehow, some way. Just go look at a magazine rack and your seemingly innocent grocery store. Nor will hiding dirty language hide the fact that most people fuckin’ curse, they just have the good sense to not curse around people who might be offended by said fucking cursing, nor does hiding books about racism, sexism, ism-isms, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy and uterus biting hide kids from the fact that these things occur.

…Okay, not that last thing.

When we treat books like they’re a taboo thing, we hurt their intergrity, and make reading books an inherently bad thing. When we do that on top of forcing children and teens to read books they may or may not like, we send the message that the books that were banned are bad, but the crud we’re forced to read in school is supposed to be the good stuff.

We also teach that reading books is a much more complicated process than it is. How many people have struggled to find out what the subtext is behind a book, what the plot behind the plot is supposed to be? Is there really some meaning behind The Great Gatsby? Why can’t Catcher In The Rye just be a story about adolescene (and not even a really great one at that)? I can’t even understand what’s being said in Their Eyes Were Watching God, now you expecting me to write at length about it?

What ends up happening isn’t so much that people are deeply affected by those books (thought they can be), as they reguritate whatever their teacher’s tell them is important, or the sputter on and on in essays about something that doesn’t make much sense to them or their teachers. I never did really well in school, but one of the good things I always could do is mimic the tone of my teachers, because in general teachers like hearing what they said regurtitated back at them.

The aspect of “reading is done as entertainment” is lost in school–instead it’s “reading is done to make you a more worldly, deeper thinking person”, which isn’t necessarily a terrible idea, until you consider that a lot of these great authors weren’t planning on having teenagers plumb the debts. Most writers will tell you that their intention isn’t to add symbolism and metaphors that you can’t see unless you squint really really hard. Most authors would tell you they were more concerned with writing a story that lots and lots of people liked.

And I could add another thousand words talking about how much summer reading sucks. Just what kids want, to be studying all summer for a test! That’ll get ‘em reading!

The best thing we could do would be not to ban certain books in schools but to allow students to read whatever books they want, as long as their age appropriate. Making kids read something they want to read would go a long way towards encouraging long term readership and a thriving book industry. The people that read today will probably read tomorrow. Well, they will until they realize how silly and pretensious a lot of contemporary adult fiction is, and then they’ll keep on reading YA, which is where the action is out anyway.

But bannings books and then forcing kids to read could very well contribute to decreasing readership and people stop buying books AND THE FALL OF PUBLISHING AS WE KNOW IT! And that’s no good for me, because I hope to have a very long career in writing novels. And even if I don’t, I will instill the same “read whatever you want” thought process in my children that my mother did in me.

KC

Where’s The Line?

Every day I write YA, I struggle to straddle that fine line, between writing what is acceptable for YA, and what would be acceptable for a Kevin Smith film. After all, Kevin Smith is a big part of the reason I write today; I started working on more raunchy, Smith-esque, dialogue heavy screenplays before I turned back to writing novels. One of the best things I think I’ve written is a screenplay in that vein–all in all I wrote two complete screenplays, both of which I’m proud of, and both of which are currently rotting on my old busted hard drive and I need to recover.

When I started to write YA again, it was hard getting out of that mindset–toning down the raunch, paring down the dialogue and trying to get to the heart of the story. The thing about writing screenplays as opposed to novels is that there’s a little bit more  room for ambiguoity–you can leave a lot of stuff out, and there’s a LOT more room for pouring on the raunch and hoping it works.

In YA? Not so much.

My main character Fiona is something of a tomboy, and she certainly has a potty mouth. This is part of her character, and in general I feel like language in YA isn’t a that big a deal. Not to mention that her best friend is constantly scolding her for her bad language. But once again, I find myself struggling to find the line between “this is how teenagers talk and act” and “this belongs in a Judd Apatow movie”. It’s so akward for me to be writing a teenage, female, sexually active person and not feel as though I’m being slightly creepy while doing so, or feeling like people will think that.

In general, YA treats sex fairly well. There’s books like Twilight, which are nothing but huge, long allegories about not fucking and starting to pump out babies the second you get married. (Not that I’m biased or anything.) There’s books like Kendra by Coe Booth, or Lost It by Kristin Tracy or The Virginity Club, which handle it extremely well, leaving just enough there to get the idea, but not crossing the line on top of it. Even the much maligned Gossip Girl isn’t super descriptive about sex.

It’s the constant question of where the line is, between mature and appropriate for teenagers, and dipping over into adult content. For example, after being involved in some backseat shennigans with a boy, my MC Fiona shouted out “Ewww, you came all over my stomach!”

And suddenly, in my flurry of writing instead of working, I had to stop. Suddenly I asked “okay, is this over the line?”.  It’s not like I haven’t heard teenage girls use that terminology before. The argument that girls are pretty little angels who only giggle and talk innocently about sex is GREATLY exaggerated. As someone who sat with four VERY sexually active teenage girls in high school, I could tell you some stories that would make your brains ooze from you ear.

But I would never write those things down in a book. They’re way too much. I try to be aware of what will and won’t sell, and while this is probably a Bad Thing for upcoming author, I’m not sure I could put what those girls said in this novel, even in the context of it being somewhat centered around sex.

I try my best to find the line, and maybe walk a little left of center of it, but I never think I cross it. Until I got to that sentence. And that word, “came”, used in that context…for some reason, it stopped me cold. It was totally within the realm of something Fiona would say; she’s nothing if not blunt to a fault. But still, it felt a bit…whoa.

I had to step away from it and think, not would “adults be offended by this” (because let’s face it, adults are predisposed to be offended by EVERYTHING), but would potential readers be offended by it. The answer came back most of them wouldn’t but some would. Still, it worked, but something about the phrasing bugged me.

It’s that damned line. That line that I’ve been treading, ever since the idea “Girl who once had STI returns to school and tries to start sex-education club in her fundementally Christian town”. The line that I think most people that write what might be considered “edgy YA” walk and try desperately not to cross.

Or, maybe I just stress about it. As Coe Booth herself once told me, it’s probably me procrastinating–I just need to finish.

*sigh* I hate it when published authors are right.

*slinks off the keep writing*

S-E-X in YA

Writing hot scenes in YA is difficult. Even though I have some intense scenes in my WIP’s I always find myself restraining myself from being too graphic. Then again, “too graphic” is always so friggin’ subjective. I’ve read the way some YA writes up sex scenes, and most of it’s handled with a “the less you talk about the better” fashion, or with fades to black, which is what I tend to do. But there’s always still the question of “how hot is too hot”.

One thing I find a do is that when I’m writing a male protagonist (either in third-person limited or first person), things tend to be more graphic. Not too graphic, but it’s a little bit more about what the character does, where as when I’m doing things from the female prospective, it’s a little bit more about what’s happening and how it feels. It’s a weird switch, but I do think that’s how guys and girls talk in general.

Ask any guy who has had sex which it’s like to have sex and they’ll tell you what they did, or what  a girl did to them. But as someone who spent most of his junior and senior high school years sitting with a group of highly sexually active teenage girls, I find that girls are for more apt to talk about the sex actually feels. I’d also like to take the opportunity to clear up the rumor that girls do not talk about sex, because they do, ALL THE TIME. They’re just more adept at waiting for guys to not be around before they talk about it, but they definately do talk about it.

I’ve also realized that even though most of the novels I’ve written have some kind of sexual content, in most of those situations, the sex itself isn’t particularly spectacular, which I think is a HUGE difference between YA books and TV aimed at teens. You’d think a show like The Secret Life Of The American Teenager would be a cautionary tale, since the main character get pregnant in the first season on the show. But everyone, EVERYONE on that show has sex, which I find kind of odd. I mean the main character on the show had a kid. Obviously they showed what one of the consequences of sex when you’re a teenager can be, but it’s almost completely negated by the fact that everyone on that show is having sex all willy-nilly with little to no consequence.

Meanwhile most of the scenes I’ve seen in YA books are tame and a good portion of them are awkward and/or bad. It’s why it’s so funny when people trying to get books like “The Bermudez Triangle” by Maureen Johnson banned when it contains absolutely no sex scenes. None. Of read it, twice. The closest it comes to one is two girls kissing, but the only kiss, and that’s that. Or even funnier still is the difference between “Gossip Girl” the book, which is relatively tame when it comes to sex if nothing else, and Gossip Girl the TV show, in which Blair’s sole goal in life comes for Chuck to pork her. (Which flies in the face of the books, but I try and not be a “THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN IN THE BOOKS!” fanboy too often). If you watch pretty much any show that’s not Degrassi: The Next Generation that’s geared towards teenagers, sex is treated like this mystical, magical thing. And don’t get me wrong, it is awesome, but it seems like the thought process sometimes it’s that it’s much more detrimental for a fourteen-year-old girl to read about sex than it is for her to watch it on TV.

Most of the first times and sex scenes I’ve read in YA books are clumsy, awkward affairs, and when you think about it, sex really is  clumsy, awkward affair anyway. In general writing is more honest than TV in that we delve into ourselves somewhat and remember this awkward first times and experiences and place them on the page, rather than presenting a super idealized version of something. My characters are but an extension of me; maybe a slightly younger version of me, but me none the less. Some ultimately do get down to the business of sexing, but I like to think that I don’t write them fooling around for the sake of them fooling around.

I mean if it was up to TV execs they’d just flash boobs cross a screen for thirty minutes.

So I work in the vain of trying to present sex in it’s actual state rather than the lofty dreams and fuzzy lighted glory you might seen on the television. But it’s tough, balancing that line between the ideal and actuality, between what’s cheesy and what’s clinical, between choosing to describe what’s happening or just describing how it feels, and if I do either of those how do I avoid going into purple prose mode without being so crude I’ll turn people off? Is the word “straddled” way to sexy for YA or is it just a normal adjective?

My goal is to be realistic without being graphically so, which is a lot harder than it sounds. What words are off limits? Can I say “dick”? I mean he said “dick” without it actually meaning penis. How far is too far? SOMEONE TELL ME!

*sigh* I guess the general rule of thumb to follow is that “if you think it’s going to far, it probably is”. I like to think that’s worked pretty well for me thus far, so I should stick with that.. Almost every thing I’ve read has been very tasteful in handling it, so I should take a cue from them.

Or, I could just fade to black, like “Breaking Dawn.” Because no one was actually WAITING for Bella and Edward to go at it, and no one actually wanted to read that. Right? RIGHT?

Does anyone have in general rules of thumb when it comes to writing sex in YA? Do you avoid it altogether? What’s the protocol, hmm?

KC

(Not) Doing It

Me and my best friend E. Lynn are not doing it.

Yes, I understand why you may not want to hear about the act that I’m not having sex with some one. At least if I was having sex with someone you would be somewhat entertained as I regailed you with tales of my raccous lovemaking. That or you’d find the quickest way to leave my blog and you’d do it rather effing quickly, but I promise I will keep you somewhat invested in this endeavor.

Me and my best friend E. Lynn have known each other for about ten years now, but only in the last couple years have we actually become best friends in the entire universe. That’s right, THE WHOLE UNIVERSE. We lost touch in high school because she was being chatised and ridiculed for being “different” (read: not a bitch, not concerned with popularity, well read and well spoken and creative, which we knows is pretty much the curse of death in the realm of politics) and I was too busy being getting my self-esteem beaten into a bloody pulp by a series of increasingly insane girls.

Let it also be known that I have loved this girl since our eighth grade field trip to New York, at which point I stood out in the rain with her for the entirety of a ferry ride because I didn’t want her to be lonely, and because I had spent the better part of two days trying to stare at her ass and it give me a rather good opportunity to do so. Over the years this unrequited love has grown from middle school crush to high school crush to me being so hopeless that I would literally beg her, BEG her to date me in college. Said conversations went something like this;

KC: DATE ME PLEASE!

E.Lynn: No.

KC: WHY NOT!?

E. Lynn: Because I think of you as a friend.

KC: You know, you’re only saying that because <insert psychobabble bullshit here, usually revolving around her parents>, you really do like me!

And so on and so forth. Over the last couple years I’ve finally calmed down and while I still love her dearly and would date her the second she asked me to because she’s that fucking awesome, it’s starting to become that more friendshipy “we can flirt while not wanting to date each other” kind of love, and that’s not a terrible place to be. But with that being said, I must say this.

Me and my best friend E. Lynn are not doing it.

It’s not for lack of trying. We hang out every couple of weeks. Every couple weeks she totally winds me up and test my will. Every couple weeks I try and vain to turn her on. As of yet, in one hundred or so attempts I’ve succeeded maybe ONCE. For the most part it’s harmless fun though, and since we both have buckets of pent up sexual tension it serves as a nice outlet to work some of those things out without burning out wires or having our hands cramp.

That being said, we are NOT doing it.

No one believes us when we say we aren’t doing it. Her parents, my parents, her brother, my aunt, my cousin, our friends. Everyone either thinks we are or should be shagging (mostly the former).

We are not. We are not doing it.

An argument can be made that we should be, but we are not. And we can’t convince anyone we’re not. Neither of us understand why–we are not outwardly affectionate with each other when we’re in public or in the company of others. We are not boyfriend and girlfriend. We share the occasional cuddle and the occasional grope, but we are not dating.

And we are certainly not doing it.

I would tell people if we were doing it. I would shout it from the heavens. You do not hide the fact that you’re sleeping with a person this beautiful from the world.

WOULD YOU DENY DOING IT WITH HER!?

But we are not doing it.

We may have touched each others unmentionables exactly once, but we are not doing it.

So this post has some kind of point (mostly it’s just a rant because people automatically assume we do it), one of the characters in my novel Fiona has kind of the same problem–she is constantly told that she likes one boy, when she doesn’t like one boy.

She just wants to do it with him.

She doesn’t want a relationship or some long-term fling. She fancies a shag and then wants to get on with her life. All around her, her friends tell her that she wants something more from this guy, but she doesn’t. The boy is a jerk who’s only redeeming quality is that he’s attractive and may be in good in bed.

She does not want to date him. She just wants to do it.

It’s even something that might be lost on my readers, hich I have to work on. I don’t think it’s ever happened that way, that a main character only wants to hop in the sack with another. Maybe I’m being original!

I mean, probably not, but maybe.

I love E. Lynn dearly. I don’t know what I’d do without her in my life, besides being miserable. I can talk to her and she can talk to me. We call each other on our bullshit. I still hold out the vague hope that one day we “can be”, whatever that means, but I’m getting better. I’d rather have her be a friend today than an ex-girlfriend sometime down the line–I don’t know what I’d do if that happened.

But, we are not doing it. Seriously. To anyone of my friends who might be reading it, WE ARE NOT DOING IT. I have me it perfectly clear that if I even get close, I will be the first one on my roof screaming “I FUCKED E. LYNN! I HAVE WALKED THE PATH TO EL DORADO, THE CITY OF GOLD, AND I HAVE DRANK AND BATHED IN IT’S FOUNTAINS!”. This is no lie. The police will have to be called. I will have to be carted away in the back of a police car, and the whole time I will be going “I have lived a good life, I have gotten into those knickers with the skull and the crossbones, lock me away forever, I can die happy, even though I’m terrified of dying”. I would say that, but I never will.

Because me and my best friend E. Lynn are not doing it. And as long as it keeps our friendship the way it is, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Awwwwwwwwww....

At least until we are doing it. Then I’d prefer to get it whenever I can.

KC

P.S. What the hell was this post about? There goes the goodwill I built with the whitewashing and Twilight posts…