Teens Do Read - Take That, Anti-Hoody People!

As the mother of two hoodies, I take exception to frequent put-downs of teenagers - the sort that reduce their complexity to 'feral thugs who live on advertising jingles and drugs'.

So you can imagine my urge to say I TOLD YEW SO when Newsweek declared that teen writing is the 'one bright spot' in a flat children's publishing market.

Contrary to the depressing proclamations that American teens aren't reading, the surprising truth is they are reading novels in unprecedented numbers. Young-adult fiction (ages 12-18) is enjoying a bona fide boom with sales up more than 25 percent in the past few years, according to a Children's Book Council sales survey. Virtually every major publishing house now has a teen imprint, many bookstores and libraries have created teen reading groups and an infusion of talented new authors has energized the genre.

Libraries and booksellers are taking teenage books out of the kiddy section and putting them in their own spaces.

YA Author (and executive editorial director of Scholastic Inc) David Leviathan goes so far as to call it a 'second golden age'. This, he says, is the "most exciting time for young-adult literature since the late 1960s and 1970s when 'The Chocolate War' [by Robert Cormier] and 'Forever' [by Judy Blume] were published."

Wehey!

Leviathan and others point to the increased sophistication and emotional maturity of teenagers as well as the fact that:

... young-adult books are simply better and more diverse than ever, and readers are responding.

I guess it's a double edged sword.

On the one hand, the books are better, the kids are reading more. On the other hand, kids are turning to books partly to escape the fact that contemporary teenage life is more challenging and more stressful.

What can we do?

Write better. Write well. They so deserve it.

(Important Question: Will the good news trickle across the Atlantic to the UK?)

Thanks to Achockablog for the heads-up.

Authors and Websites: What You Need to Know

Before anything else, a bit more shameless publicity: I'll be doing a two hour workshop at the British SCBWI annual conference on 22-23 November. I haven't got a title yet but I've pretty much decided that it's going to be in the format of a web designer/client meeting going through step-by-step what the client needs to know about putting up a website. The tragedy is that my workshop is at the same time as a workshop on character and plot headlined by my friend Miriam Halahmy, uber creative writing guru. Drat.

Anyway. Speaking of the internet. I keep finding myself in little conversations with friends about author websites.

Do authors really need them? What's the point if you're writing picture books for little kids who don't go online? Should authors blog? Aren't there too many blogs in the world already? Aren't MySpace and Facebook just a big waste of time?

And what if THIS is the sum total of our computer savviness:

It's a big, big subject. And if I wrote too comprehensively about it, nobody will ever invite me to speak at their conferences again.

So instead of giving everything away, here's a list of things that authors who are thinking about getting a website need to consider:

1. Which gatekeepers are you targeting? The look and feel of your website is determined by your audience. Are you at a stage in your career where you need to present a professional face to publishers or stir up the interest of readers? Are you trying to get librarians and booksellers interested in your book or are you trying to meet like-minded people for support and contacts?

2. It's not about you, it's about them. The internet is no longer a world of static homepages. The internet-user is used to being able comment, upload, download and engage with a site in a million different ways. If your website can't engage with your visitor, you might as well print out a flyer.

3. It takes five visits to make a sale. I don't know where that fact comes from but it comes up time and again in reference to website effectivity. Whatever it is you are selling (your book? yourself?), ask yourself: how do you get someone to return five times? The answer is what will make your website successful.

4. Nobody can drive it but you. Content management is the bugbear of author websites. You see a lot of author websites that were last updated in the previous century. Ask your web designer, how am I going to update this without you? These days, you don't have to learn code anymore to be in control. The reason blogs are so popular is because blogs are just websites with easy-to-use content management systems. You don't have to be a blogger to have a blog.

5. Write the book. You can blog, you can facebook, you can myspace ... you can do everything possible online but your web efforts are nothing if your product doesn't measure up. At the end of the day, the internet cannot save a bad book.

So go write.

And write well.

Shots rang out, as shots are known to do

My writing pal Christopher Klimowitz forwarded this hilarious list of similes and metaphors formulated by kids in school essays - makes you revise that manuscript a bit more closely!

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are known to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.