Five reasons why I prefer YA over adult fiction.

A long and rambling tale…

I thought about putting this post on Need To Read, but it’s quite close to my heart. The story starts back when I was about thirteen. I was at the public library, it must’ve been summer because I didn’t read much during the school year, and I was browsing the shelves. Actually, I think I was looking for something in particular, and this was before computers so you just had to hunt for what you wanted on the shelf. Anyway, instead of finding what I wanted, I saw a novel (YA) that looked interesting called The Summer People by John Rowe Townsend (the link is something I wrote about it a couple of years ago).

I checked it out. I thought it was very unusual, being British, set near WWII (forgive me John, if I’ve chosen the wrong war…I haven’t read it in a while and I dropped my copy in the bath and need to replace it still), and it was quite the romance and also a coming of age story. I don’t suppose that I understood the half of it, at least not the British terms. Anyway, I told my mother she would like it, she read it, she loved it, we went back for more by the author. The library had about four or five even though the author had written twenty books or so. We loved them all.

Fast forward ten years. I was living in England then, near a small town in the north called Penrith. The town has a lovely independent bookstore (which I still love to visit), called Bluebell Bookshop and upstairs, in their fabulously well-stocked children’s section, they had more than a dozen John Rowe Townsend books that I’d never heard of. I bought them all! It occurred to me at the time that I might be able to get the others at the local library, and sure enough, they had the ones that I hadn’t read and couldn’t find to buy, including a new book called CRANFORD REVISITED. I read it, I loved it, and I had no idea at the time, or for years to come, that I had totally missed the point!

Fast forward one more year. I was back home and just on a whim, I decided to write my new favorite author, Mr. Townsend. Guess what? Yep. He wrote back. For the last seventeen years we have corresponded. Two years ago, when I was in England again, I went to Cambridge and met John and his partner, Jill Paton Walsh. They had me to their lovely home, fed me lunch, gave me a whirlwind tour of Cambridge, and John sent me on my way with my very own copy of CRANFORD REVISITED because it was the only book of his I didn’t have.

And now, I’m finally getting to the point of all this chit chat! Gosh, if this was a manuscript, my critique group would say, “That is all back story. When does your story actually start? You need to cut!” But my critique group is not getting their helpful paws on this story and I’ll blather if I want to! You can’t stop me! It’s my blog.

So…for those of you still reading…Here is what I found out when I looked a bit closer at JRT’s book CRANFORD REVISITED. It’s called “revisited” because it is exactly that. In the 1850s (or so), Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a lovely book about a fictional English village called Cranford. JRT’s book is a look at that fictional town, told in the 1980s in a modern style. It is a tribute of sorts. I finally, finally, finally got my hands on the original CRANFORD, read it over the last week, and then re-read JRT’s book. And guess what? By reading Gaskell’s book first, JRTs book is about ten times as enjoyable and charming as the first two times I read it, and it was great then!

If you’re wondering about Mrs. Gaskell’s work, and if it would suit you, I think it is a bit tamer (passion-wise) than Jane Austen, but certainly as funny, and funnier at times, but along those lines. It’s set half a century later, but people still visit and gossip and the aristocracy is still a big deal which allows people to move up or down, depending on their mettle or whims. All in all, extremely charming if that’s your sort of thing. And while reading JRT’s CRANFORD REVISITED is recommended no matter what, you’ll like it more if you read them both. If you can find his. If not, try John, himself.

Oh! And guess what I just discovered? I should really cast films. As I was reading JRT’s CR, I was thinking, “They should make a movie of this starring Judi Dench.” I just went to Amazon to get a copy of the cover of CRANFORD and guess what? Well, they haven’t made John’s book into a movie, but they did do Gaskell’s book as a mini-series. Starring….yep! Judi Dench! It gets five stars on Amazon, so I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time before the BBC lays their hands on John’s book and makes it into a mini-series too! One can always hope, anyway. It certainly couldn’t happen to a nicer man!

So…there you are, writing away, and suddenly your character boards a plane for Pretoria, South Africa (can you even fly there? I have no idea…it might be a tiny village for all I know, or a huge metropolis) or your character’s father lives in Albuquerque (which you chose because it’s a great word). But what do Pretoria or Albuquerque look like? Well, have I got the website for you!

My husband is a photographer and he just joined a network of blogs linking together over five hundred photographers who are taking daily pictures of various locations worldwide. Every day, amateur and professional photographers in these rural areas, towns, villages, cities, and sometimes even specific neighbourhoods, take a single photo and post it on their blog. To find the blog for the place you’re interested in, go to City Daily Photo. One of the particularly cool things is that as people post, it is updated every hour with new photos. That means if you just want to look for interesting places, you can do it by photos. And if you want to look for specific places, you can do a search or use their interactive world map.

I think as a writer this is a fantastic resource! And if you want to see my husband’s blog for our island, click this link. Oh, and by the way, yes…I did have his permission to use the photo on this post. Just…you know…so you don’t think I violated his copyright (the way he sometimes does by snagging pictures I took and saying, “Oh, I’m sure I took this one…look how good it is!“).

  Just for fun, here are five things that just seem so easy for everyone else, but pose a challenge for me.

1. Typing in those random letters to prove I’m not spam. XKKlefhp It always takes me two or three tries to get my posts to take on blogspot because if it’s not a real word, I can’t really type it!

2. Looking at a crowd and estimating how many people are there. When someone says, “Oh, you were at XXXX last night? How many people showed up?” I seriously have no idea. I can’t tell you if there were ten or fifty or five hundred. Okay, maybe if there were only ten, I could make a reasonable guess.

3.  Peel, cut, and core an apple into even pieces. I figured that once I became a mom, I’d automatically be able to do it, but since I am only a mom to my kitties and they don’t like apples, the magic has not happened!

4.  Fry tofu. Okay, maybe not everyone can do this but I am a cook, a vegetarian, AND I watched Tyler Florence on the Food Network do a whole episode of Food 911 just about cooking tofu. Cooking is something I’m good at. Why can’t I do this?

5.  Find Waldo.

Click here to find out!

Adult Fiction - At first, I was just going to leave it at WOW, but then I decided I couldn’t. This truly is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It has everything. And I mean everything. A unique perspective, a strong voice, humour, drama, love, friendship, loyalty… I truly can’t recommend this book enough.

From a writer’s point of view, it is beautifully crafted. I hesitate to say that lest you think it’s contrived, but I don’t mean that at all. I just mean that I can appreciate and see things because I know (in theory) how to put a novel together and he’s done a stunning job. I am definitely going to get my hands on his other books.

Several times while reading, I stopped and read a passage aloud to my husband. I only do that if I know he’s not going to read the book OR I can read a particular passage without giving anything away. In this case, I am sure he will read the book someday (although it has to go back to the library because someone else has requested it, so he can’t read it right now), but the book is sprinkled with these lovely passages that one can read aloud and not spoil anything. There is a great paragraph about how people don’t listen to each other. I would love to type it in here, but I’m not really sure if that’s kosher. Anyway, after hearing it, my husband said, “The book is worth reading just for that passage. Everyone should read this book.” I couldn’t agree more.

Read the amazing story of this book’s rocky road to publication here.

See the book trailer here.

P.S. If you’re a dog-lover, you MUST read this book, but if you’re just a dog-tolerator or a dog-liker (as I am), you should read it too. You might find that you see dogs a little differently after reading this book.

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WOW!!!!!

More about this book

Yay! My agent loves my revision. And we now have a title too! It only took me three months, yes, three months to come up with it. And it was last night, when I was adding a final chapter to the book (we had cut the epilogue, but my agent thought I needed some of it as a last chapter) and I got to the last line of the book that the title hit me! Wooohooo! You have no idea how much of a relief this is to me because NO ONE who had read it could come up with anything for a new title. The old title was HANDSOME MOLLY, which we loved and worked well, but seemed too old fashioned. The new one is a secret for now!

And this also means I can start my new project that has been percolating. Yay me! I’m finally writing again and it feels good. What’s your good news this week?