Month: August 2012

Welcome back to the Dark Side, YA Genre

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In the last few years, I turned away from the YA genre.  I attributed this to two things – 1) I’m now an adult and 2) the YA genre lost quite a bit of its darkness.  When I was younger, the books for YA were much darker in themes and characterizations.  I recall reading R. L. Stine’s Fear Street Sagas and seeing the villains win the day and the gory plot twists penned by Christopher Pike.  Blood, guts, and devilish deals were par for the course.  While fluffier fare has always been dominant in the YA section, the darker stories have been fewer and far between in recent times.  The Hunger Games felt like a throwback to those times.  But recently I decided to pick up the YA fantasy Finnikin of the Rock and its sequel Froi of the Exiles by Melina Marchetta, and I was blown away by the amazing world building and use of language she employs.  She was able to deftly convey through euphemisms and minor specific instances the darkest and most brutal parts of human nature – rape, slavery, subversion, mass murder, and the near destruction of a civilization.  It was nothing short of brilliant.  Unfortunately, the third and final book, Quintana of Charyn, comes out in Australia next month but the American release won’t be until 2013.  Oh well, I should be done working on my novel and doing my homework for three courses until then.

Now on shelves are at least two books featuring teen girl assassins, Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas and Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers.  The former is YA fantasy and the latter is historical paranormal fiction.  Also coming soon is the sequel to Cornelia Funke’s novel Reckless (which I think doesn’t belong in YA because everyone in that story is well over 18 years old, and falls into the same nebulous YA/adult borderline fantasy category that Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett often find themselves in), currently listed as Fearless on GoodReads.  Reckless is Supernatural (Seasons 1 & 2) and the Brothers Grimm meets Through the Looking Glass.  I haven’t had the chance to check out Cassandra Clare yet and my reading list is still a mile high.  In general, I’ve noticed a greater shift toward adventurous, epic YA fantasy novels this past year.  I hope this keeps up, because I’m enjoying every minute of it.

Setting Your Sites

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One of the most difficult things I’ve found when starting to create my web-self is choosing which website I want to use for my main profile.  I have a Twitter and Facebook page, but those are social media sites, not the actual home base.

Let’s start off with some basics – I don’t know anything about designing my own site.  But I need to know where I plan to host my blog and other writings, and as much as LJ is cool, it can’t do all those things the right way.  There are dozens of little things you need to pick up along the way before you can even think about taking on an endeavor like this (you’ll need lots of stock images and an idea how you want your site to look among other things).  After beta-testing a large number of sites, I’ve narrowed it down to Weebly and WordPress.  I really liked Webs.com but they don’t have a module for CSS and you can only use some of a limited number of templates.  Though I liked this site design the best, the maintenance would be hardest of the three.  Don’t discount how long this process can actually take, I’ve got some down time for the summer and it’s almost like a full time job trying to do this.  Also, I’ve blogged using different sites before and I’ve started to know what do and don’t like.

Right now, I’m split between WordPress (which I’ve used in the past) and Weebly.  There are some serious pros and cons that I still can’t decide on.  Overall, I would say I find that Weebly is pretty amazing for my purposes.  Its free offerings make it easier to decide whether or not I want them.  With WordPress, CSS is a paid feature and the the site builder tools are not on par with Weebly’s which also happen to be free.  Well, I have a few more test runs before I make my final choice.  At this point, it’s doubtful there will be any other ride in candidates because testing too many sites on this level will end up wasting my time.

The Big 1,000

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Whoa, it’s been a year since I wrote on WordPress. Well, it’s because I was busy with grad school and work stuff. But let’s kick this return off!

I never really kept track of how many books I’ve read over the last quarter of a century I’ve been around. Reading has always been a regular habit with me, like breathing, so I never thought to actually count how many books I’d read over my lifetime. While I suspected it was a large number, it wasn’t until I finally started a GoodReads account this year that I realized just how many. My current GoodReads number is in the 800 ballpark, but the thing is, I’m not done backlogging the books I’ve read and I know there are a large number of books I’m not remembering off the top of my head (I’m kind of caught between if I want to root through physical/online/GR collections for missing books I didn’t tag or just letting it go at the current stat). Plus, books I’ve read that aren’t “officially published” but posted online is somewhere in the range of ~200 if my collection of links and tags is up to scratch. So, all things considered, I might have hit the 1,000 mark somewhere late last year or early this year.

The craziest thing is trying to wrap my head around it… 1,000 books?! ONE THOUSAND BOOKS. WTF?

My friends and family rolled eyes at my announcement, to them that was hardly a surprising turn of events. They asked if I was out of stuff to read and were offering suggestions, but the truth is that I don’t feel like I’ve read all the books I’ve set out to read. There are tons of books still on my to-read list (i.e. A Song of Fire and Ice, Mistborn, Wheel of Time, etc.). But now every book read will feel anti-climatic.

At the end of the day what does this number mean to me? I never cared before about how much I read and thought about my reading in terms of numbers. Maybe I’ll just work to 5,000 from here? I doubt I’ll be reading as much as I do now when other life factors come into play. But I did manage to read 1,000 books in about a quarter of a century, and considering I couldn’t read for the first three years, I’d say that’s not too shabby.

Every Journey Begins with a Single Step… And a Stumble or Two…

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Most great stories begin with an event that shakes the hero (or heroine!) out of the usual grind and into an unforeseen adventure.  I would say my moment occurred when I was twelve years old when I decided to start writing fiction.  I had been obsessed with books from the very beginning, I always had one nearby even when I wasn’t old enough to read.  As I grew up, I used to act out stories with my toys or I’d have some tall tale to tell until someone would frustratingly say I ought to take all my ideas and write them down.  One day, I had an idea and decided to give it a try.  My first story was a young adult space opera story that I wrote by hand and finished in junior high school, which fell short of my goal of writing a whole novel but I did finish the whole story.  Since that moment, I’ve had assassins playing with politics in ancient Greece, rogue government agents trying to choose sides in a cyberpunk setting, a steampunk Cinderella and much more…

During high school, I wrote day and night filling page after page of words and comments of how crazy I might just be.  It became a way of experiencing life – if I could write about it, I could make sense of it.  I looked at every incident and instance that occurred around me as a story in the making.  Then, another important twist happened when I started college.  I stopped writing as much.  Considering that writing was such a huge part of my life, it was also a point when I had to choose between writing and experiencing new things.  I went with the latter because I knew that in the end, seeing more of the world would make me a better writer.  During that time, I worked on a young adult coming of age trilogy called The Destroyers, which followed a girl through three major points in her life – senior year of high school, the summer before her last year in college when her sister gets married, and ending with her best friend’s wedding the summer after she graduates from law school.  The manuscript was long and scattered all over the place.

By the time I graduated from college, I had problems writing again more steadily.  A friend of mine suggested using fan fiction as training wheels to get back on track, so I spent some time dabbling in it until I felt ready to get back on the horse to the road to becoming an author.  Earlier this year, I felt the urge to take the leap once again and stick with it.  I have all these amazing stories I want to share, I just have to make the effort.

And with these words I make not my first step, but a return to the road I wish to travel.

Every Journey Begins with a Single Step… And a Stumble or Two…

Leave a comment

Most great stories begin with an event that shakes the hero (or heroine!) out of the usual grind and into an unforeseen adventure.  I would say my moment occurred when I was twelve years old when I decided to start writing fiction.  I had been obsessed with books from the very beginning, I always had one nearby even when I wasn't old enough to read.  As I grew up, I used to act out stories with my toys or I'd have some tall tale to tell until someone would frustratingly say I ought to take all my ideas and write them down.  One day, I had an idea and decided to give it a try.  My first story was a young adult space opera story that I wrote by hand and finished in junior high school, which fell short of my goal of writing a whole novel but I did finish the whole story.  Since that moment, I've had assassins playing with politics in ancient Greece, rogue government agents trying to choose sides in a cyberpunk setting, a steampunk Cinderella and much more…

During high school, I wrote day and night filling page after page of words and comments of how crazy I might just be.  It became a way of experiencing life – if I could write about it, I could make sense of it.  I looked at every incident and instance that occurred around me as a story in the making.  Then, another important twist happened when I started college.  I stopped writing as much.  Considering that writing was such a huge part of my life, it was also a point when I had to choose between writing and experiencing new things.  I went with the latter because I knew that in the end, seeing more of the world would make me a better writer.  During that time, I worked on a young adult coming of age trilogy called The Destroyers, which followed a girl through three major points in her life – senior year of high school, the summer before her last year in college when her sister gets married, and ending with her best friend's wedding the summer after she graduates from law school.  The manuscript was long and scattered all over the place.

By the time I graduated from college, I had problems writing again more steadily.  A friend of mine suggested using fan fiction as training wheels to get back on track, so I spent some time dabbling in it until I felt ready to get back on the horse to the road to becoming an author.  Earlier this year, I felt the urge to take the leap once again and stick with it.  I have all these amazing stories I want to share, I just have to make the effort. 

And with these words I make not my first step, but a return to the road I wish to travel.