and by tonight, i meant tomorrow morning.

Good morning!

The moment has arrived! Our random.org-drawn winners of a signed copy of Article 5 are:

*drumrrrrolll*

Anonymous {look at you go, Anonymous! Haha.}

and

Sarah Pearson!

Congrats to you both! I am emailing you right now. And then I'm hitting the road for Knoxville, and the most fun afternoon ever.

Yay books!

teenagers?

Guess what I'm NOT forgetting to post about today?!

It's Tuesday (...right?), and I'm going to talk about YA. Or maybe teenagers.

I'm going to talk about myself as a teenager, and why some YA is lost on me.

There I am on the left {in blue}, at the tender age of 14. Here is what I remember thinking about back then:

~my friends.

~theatre.

~my beliefs.

~how to relate to people.

~differences.

~does anyone like me?

~do I fit in?

~my values.

~storytelling.

~helping others.

As I got older, the thoughts expanded to include:

~homework.

~college.

~boys.

Boys were low on the list. My heartbroken days wouldn't happen until college. But as a teen? It was about my friends. I had a ton of guy friends. They were my brothers. I cared about them. Sure, I had crushes, too, but they meant less in the grand scheme, even then. They existed for the sole purpose of being thought about, not talked to. And if a crush and a friend overlapped? I did what I thought was best. I tried to turn it off. I kept up the friendships. I devoted myself to what I valued most {God and theatre}.

I don't know why I was like this. I may have been prudish. Naive. I shrug off those accusations, though, because I was living the way I wanted to. I won't deny that I got emotional and overwhelmed and pined after the occasional boy who would never know my name. And I won't deny that I struggled majorly with social norms, and that I put way too much pressure on myself to be "good." Yet, somehow, I remember understanding my place in life a little better than I now realize is normal.

If normal is based on teenagers in books, that is. I often wonder what sixteen-year-old me would have done if any book premise had been real. What if I had been selected for The Hunger Games? The real me from 2001, and not some archetypal teenage figurehead. Sixteen-year-old Julie would have either screamed and panicked and tried to run away, or walked forward like a martyr, with absolutely no hope or expectation of surviving. Maybe a little of both. I was no Katniss.

What if seventeen-year-old Julie had found herself surrounded by, oh I don't know, werewolves or faeries or something? What would she have done? First, the reality would have taken a long time to sink in. There would have been mixed feelings of, "Is this entirely true? Am I completely losing it?" and, "I knew fantasy was real, I knew it I knew it I knew it." Also, "how can I work this into a college application? Because that would be awesome."

However!, if some hot werewolf boy had come forward and immediately pledged his undying love, replete with possessive undertones, I would have made this face:

or something equally offensive.

And perhaps that is why there is a chunk of YA that just does not connect with me. I was never that girl. I don't know how to relate to her. 

I'm tired of reading books about teenagers that propagate adult fantasies. You know? It's fine if you like that, and I'm not saying I don't enjoy the odd romp through such things, but what exactly are you trying to say?

A question: Are you writing about kids? Or adults in wish-fulfilling teenage bodies? Not saying one is better than the other, just saying we should stop fooling ourselves. You're going to make money either way. Maybe.

Wow. Snarkfest, out.

{{In other news, Article 5 winners to be announced tonight!}}