. . . may be habit forming.
I’m beginning to make good progress on MAGE STORM (about 5000 words since Saturday). And, as I’m writing a first draft, ideas are flowing again, some of them for MAGE STORM, some for the abandoned SEVEN STARS. With the new ideas, it’s starting to look like SEVEN STARS might turn out to by young adult, too. Or maybe what one publisher calls “new adult”, as in those people who’ve outgrown young adult, but haven’t quite started in on the regular adult fiction, yet. (There’s not really a set of shelves for that in the book stores, yet.) It all depends on the age of my protagonist when I start the story. I could swing it either way.
The original version of SEVEN STARS was a long way from young adult, but I like these ideas better. My protagonist won’t have to be quite so hardened. That’ll make him a little more accessible, hopefully.
Oddly, I find myself reassessing some of my other works to see if they could work as young adult. THE SHAMAN’S CURSE definitely could, as written. It starts with the protagonist at fifteen. Of course, he’s about twenty-three at the end, but he does face a number of young adult issues along the way. The difficulty there is that it’s the first of a series. When THE IGNORED PROPHECY starts, the protagonist is twenty-three. At the end of the last book, he should be about thirty and have six kids, which doesn’t quite feel young adult to me anymore.
BLOOD WILL TELL probably comfortably fits into that “new adult” classification, with a protagonist who’s twenty-five. It wouldn’t work if she were much younger.
DREAMER’S ROSE would have to change significantly if I wanted to reframe it as young adult, I think. There’s definitely a subplot I would want to leave out. And at least one scene–no two–that would have to change markedly, if not be deleted. And I’m not sure I can do without one of those scenes.
I worry about the overly fine distinctions in readership categories created and fostered by book marketers. Were the classics written for such narrow reader demographics? Surely not. I would seem that a really good piece of literature will appeal to a wide set of readers. Can we free ourselves of the excessive control of marketers and make better literature?
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Philosophically, I don’t disagree. For the record, I would never be any less rigorous in my writing because it’s “Young Adult”, although I will pay attention to slightly different expectations concerning pacing, length, etc. I would hope the story would be interesting to other age groups, too. There have been a few of those in recent years.
As I understand it (and goodness knows I could be wrong), the distinctions have more to do with where the book will be shelved in the bookstores.
Also, since many agents specialize in certain types of fiction, the categorization helps to determine which agents to query. The list of agents I have or will query for BLOOD WILL TELL (urban fantasy) is different than the list was for THE SHAMAN’S CURSE (second world fantasy) and will be different again for MAGE STORM.
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