Reading Recap

I read like my boys eat--I gulp down so much, so fast, it's impossible to keep track of how much I've consumed. I have no idea how many books I read during 2010. A safe guesstimate would be fifty-two (one a week). Some I liked, some I didn't, but some absolutely stunned me. Here are the titles from that list:

My Best of 2010:

YA

1. THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE by Jandy Nelson
2. DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth (OK, this doesn't come out until May `11, but this one...omg, this one...It will be on your list next year.)
3. THE DUFF by Kody Keplinger
4. GIRL, STOLEN by April Henry
5. THE CLOCKWORK ANGEL by Cassandra Clare
6. THE BODY FINDER by Kimberly Derting
7. FORGET YOU by Jennifer Echols
8. THE DEMON'S COVENANT by Sarah Rees Brennan
9. NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL by Siobhan Vivian
10. CRESCENDO by Becca Fitzpatrick

Adult

1. A RELIABLE WIFE by Robert Goolrick
2. ONE DAY by David Nicholls

Non-Fiction

1. THE CYNICAL IDEALIST: A SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN LENNON by Gary Tillery
2. AT HOME: A SHORT HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE by Bill Bryson


I'm currently reading two books I'm certain would have made the list if I'd finished before typing this: JUST KIDS by Patti Smith and ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS by Stephanie Perkins.

Got any titles to add? Disagree with my choices? Tell me!

(I'll be busy finishing up a project over the next two weeks, so this is my last blog post of the year. Happy Holidays to everyone!! Thanks for reading!!)

Thankful for Inspiration

In my literature class, we've been talking about allusions, particularly with poets making reference to artists who came before and paved the way. In part, an allusion allows the writer to acknowledge her influences, to thank a mentor, to show literary genealogy.

I am so proud to write stories for young adults. I wouldn't be doing it, though, if not for these artists, whose influence is lasting and ongoing:

1. Judy Blume: During my middle school years, we spent part of every summer at my grandparents' house, 20 miles from my friends. I always brought a JB book with me--DEENIE and TIGER EYES were my favorites. I fell so completely in love with the stories I didn't notice the loneliness so much.

2. S.E. Hinton: I remember being completely blown away the first time I read THE OUTSIDERS, but TEX is my all time fave. It just felt so real. Reading Hinton was my first lesson in characterization (Paul Zindel, too. PARDON ME, YOU'RE STEPPING ON MY EYEBALL! is a good one).

3. John Irving/William Goldman: OK, technically not YA authors, but these guys taught me about plot, narrative structure, and how to manage reader expectations. In their books, you grow to know the characters so well, but what happens to those characters is constantly a surprise.

4. Sarah Dessen: I picked up a copy of DREAMLAND while I was writing my first YA novel. Dessen tells such a good story you don't notice the impact of the emotional journey until everything comes together in the final pages, and you realize how skillfully she's led you to that point. Her books are always so well structured, allowing the reader to become fully immersed in her heroine's world. (I'd put Meg McCafferty in this category as well--her book SLOPPY FIRSTS is just about perfect.)

5. Susan Isaacs: If you haven't read the book SHINING THROUGH (watching the craptastic movie version doesn't count) then grab your Borders coupon (50% off today!) and buy it! I've read ST four or five times over the past twenty years and I still don't want to put it down while reading. Why? A complex heroine you desperately want to succeed. A love interest that is quite her match. A familiar setting (WWII New York) that turns unfamiliar (Germany in the grip of the Nazis). All of Isaacs books taught me about how to engage a reader on multiple levels, and how to make it all work.

(I'd also like to add a few other YA authors whose artistry continues to inspire: Jandy Nelson, K.L. Going, Simone Elkeles, Jennifer Echols, Kody Keplinger, and Maureen Johnson. Thanks!)

So...how about you guys? Which authors do you give thanks to?

LoNyWriMo

I'm in.

Not officially (because I've already started my novel), BUT NaNoWriMo here I come.

I'm about 20,000 words in on my latest. I figure it'll finish somewhere between 60 and 70,000, which means I'll write roughly the same amount of words as an official participant.

I've always been a little conflicted about NaNoWriMo. Maybe I'm a little uptight about slapping words on the page to make my daily count. Maybe it feels too much like quality takes a back seat. I'm an "edit as I go" kind of writer. It's hard for me to type without thinking too hard, which is--let's face it--what I'll have to do if I want to get 50,000 more words on paper. But hey, Kerouac wrote ON THE ROAD in three weeks. Of course, he was fueled by benzedrine. I'll be using green tea and fun size candy bars.

I'll post word count occasionally, and I encourage you guys to do so as well. Good luck! I'm definitely going to need it!

This is the end...well, sort of

I just finished a (mostly) fantastic YA mystery. The story was compelling, the voice incredible, the plot kept me on my toes. I kept thinking, I am LOVING this! Yay!

Until I got to the end. If one can even call it that. When I was almost done, I could feel the scant pages left and I wondered how in the world the author was going to tie everything up.

I shouldn't have given it a thought, because--I kid you not--the last page read to be continued.

Loose ends were not tied, the threads were simply cut. If I want an explanation, I need to buy the next book. Which, let's face it, I probably will. So, from a marketing perspective, the technique worked.

As a reader, I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I'm pretty angry. I feel manipulated. On the other hand, I'm intrigued, and still thinking about the book overall.

So what do you guys think? Does the writer have an obligation to the reader to complete the story? Should books in a series stand alone?

Hard Times

(OK, epic fail on the unplugging thing. I still twittered. I might have facebooked once or twice, and I read a few fabulous blog posts. But I did get over the hump with my latest project, and I feel a lot better about the revision as a whole. So much better that I could actually write something else. Here it is...)


Tara Kelly, author of the fantastic novel HARMONIC FEEDBACK, recently tweeted this: "What I need to see more of in YA: non-white MCs, poor kids, kids who have to work, girls who have curves, girls who don't, gay MCs."

Amen, sister. On all fronts. This blog post, though, will concentrate on the first three.

Our country is in a state of economic transition. Ok, that was probably a bit mild. Our economy is in the shitter and will be for quite some time. I realize that isn't exactly earth-shattering news. We all know people who have lost jobs. Maybe you've lost yours. At the very least the thought of being "let go" is probably swimming laps in your brain, surfacing steadily, rhythmically.

The official unemployment rate is currently 9.6 percent. That figure doesn't include the underemployed, the people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits, the folks who can't take it anymore and have just given up. So the unofficial rate, according to a variety of sources, hovers around 16 percent.

Yes, that's awful. But do you know what the unemployment rate is for young adults (the age group 16-21)? 26.3 percent, according to the Department of Labor. Based on purely anecdotal evidence, I'd say it's much higher for minority teens. Just to give a little perspective, at the height of the Great Depression one out of every four men was out of work. 25 percent.

Teens are not adults. I get that. They aren't chiefly responsible for paying the rent or mortgage, the grocery bill, the utilities. The thing is, though, as more and more adults are losing their jobs, teens are increasingly responsible for helping to keep their families afloat. Some teens have always lived their lives like this. For some, economic instability is a new kind of pain. Add it to the everyday strain of adolescence and you get some stressed out kids.

And that added stress dramatically ups the risk of those kids dropping out of school, suffering abuse, drinking and drugging, making unwise sexual choices, etc. This is their reality.

But back to Tara's tweet. Should we be writing about this? Or better yet, do teens want to read about it?

During the Great Depression, people flocked to the movies for escapist fare--screwball comedies, musicals, stories about cute kids. In contrast, the top selling novels of the era reflected the desperation of the times more accurately: THE GOOD EARTH, THE YEARLING, and Steinbeck's story of the Oklahoma Joads fleeing the Dust Bowl in search of a better life in The GRAPES OF WRATH. (Incidentally, all of these books still show up regularly in high school teachers' lesson plans.)

I think tastes in literature and film in the Great Recession will prove similar to the past. A movie like Grown-Ups takes in 160 million, while Stieg Larsson's stark DRAGON TATTOO series tops the bestseller lists. My explanation for the disconnect is this: sitting in a movie theater is a group experience in entertainment--you laugh/cry/boo with others. A book, even if one reads it on a cold, hard Kindle, is much more intimate. You might be reading in bed. Or at the breakfast table. It feels safer to open a few more emotional doors.

There are a lot of stories grounded in realism out there, waiting to be read. And there is an audience for them, a nation of teens looking for acknowledgment, looking to connect to their reality through literature. Let's make sure they have the opportunity.

Where Am I?

I'm at WriteOnCon.com! And I'll be there, soaking up advice from a ton of publishing industry professionals, from August 10-12. Go check it out!

Why You Need to Pre-Order THE DUFF

We take a break from our regularly scheduled Freaky Friday...

My head is spinning with the amazing books coming out in the next few months. MOCKINGJAY and THE CLOCKWORK ANGEL are atop my list, but the book I'm most excited about is THE DUFF by Kody Keplinger*.

"DUFF" is an acronym for Designated Ugly Fat Friend. Uh-huh. In any group of girls there is the one who is "not quite", as in, not quite as popular, not quite as pretty, not quite as fit. To gain the sympathy of the more attractive girls, guys who want to score befriend The Duff.

So a guy gets a hottie and the homely Duff gets a little attention--win/win, right?

Not exactly.

When man-ho Wesley Rush sidles up to "Duffy" Bianca Piper she throws a Coke in his face. Then she, um, kisses him. This is only the start of a very complex, secret relationship, where self-identity and motivation and desire all come into play.

Bianca is an absolutely fascinating character. She's angry. She makes questionable choices. She messes up. But still, I was wishing so hard for her eventual happiness. She made me laugh (often), cry, and sometimes want to throttle her. This girl is feisty, and you'll love her for it.

Wesley is also not your standard two-dimensional romantic interest. Just like Bianca, Wes is not the character equivalent of a shallow kiddie pool, but a guy working through some very real issues. Bianca starts to see the many layers hiding under Wesley's playboy exterior, and, because of Keplinger's skill, it's as surprising to the reader as it is to our heroine.

I finished THE DUFF wishing I had a teenage daughter to share it with. THE DUFF is not a book you finish with a sigh and return to your bookshelf--you'll want to carry it around and talk to your friends about it until the wee hours. We've all felt like the Duff as some point in our lives, have we not? It's this message that elevates THE DUFF from a great teen romance to a classic young adult book of lasting importance.



*Full disclosure: Kody and I share an agent and I think she's a fabulous person. BUT, even if she was a complete stranger I would love, love, love this book. It's really so very good.

From the Vault: Moms and Dads

I've seen a lot of discussion lately about the depiction of parents in YA literature. Most of the opinions I've read are basically complaints: the moms and dads we see (when they're not conveniently dead) are cartoonishly self-centered, and often absent until they're needed to help the plot along by providing a ridiculous obstacle.

The arguments against this either find examples of richly drawn parental figures (Hello, Zarr, Dessen, and Caletti!) or explain that in a YA novel we're seeing the world through a teen's eyes, which would, at the very least, keep the focus on the teenager, not the concerns of her parents.

As a YA writer, I've been giving a lot of thought to this issue. How do I present realistic parents without taking anything away from my teen protags?

I'm a reader, and I usually to search out my answers through reading, but I think a lot of my ideas regarding character development came from television. In the 70s and 80s YA pickings were slim in the library, but television was full of stories about young people AND their parents. I can think of five off the top of my head that focused on teen concerns without skimping on adult character development. And though my examples come from TVland where the characters had at least an entire season to develop, I think if you separated out one episode, you'd still see a rich and realistic depictions of parent-teen relationships. Here goes:

1. Family Ties: Ex-hippies Elyse and Steven Keaton deal with raising (gasp) an uptight Republican son and two daughters, a tween and a teen. The show never falls into the traps you'd think--it's not preachy or dogmatic, but instead richly explores issues still important to teens: sex and pregnancy, drugs, body image, and identity crisis.

2. Good Times: The Evans kids, J.J., Thelma, and Michael, try to manage growing up amidst the violence and economic instability of the Cabrini-Green housing projects. Their parents weren't consistently around, but their presence was always felt.

3. Little House on the Prairie: Half-pint's relationship with her Pa was the heart of this series.

4. Eight is Enough: Seven of the eight were teenagers. The focus was the kids' shenanigans, but Mr. Bradford always seemed like a real--if kind of harried--dad, and Abby, the stepmom, is hardly evil and earns her PhD over the course of the show. Seriously!

5. My So-Called Life...is from the 90s, but is the freaking gold standard for creating richly drawn adult characters in a teen driven series.



I missed a ton, I know. Care to add any to the list?

Sex, Drugs, and Goodreads

I've noticed a disturbing trend in Goodreads reviews: people are giving one or two stars to YA books because they include instances of teen sex (and sometimes drinking and/or drug use). Reviewers often complain that a book provides poor role models, is immoral and offensive, or simply is not reflective of modern teen life.

When I read these reviews I want to type in the comment box, do you actually know any teens? According to the National Survey of Family Growth (sponsored in part by the CDC), 42% of teen girls and 43% of teen boys are sexually active. Contrary to the myth that teens are having a lot less sex, these numbers have remained steady for the past ten years.

The adults posting these reviews know this. Maybe their teen isn't having sex, which is well and good, and let's face it, preferable. But there are millions of other teens who have decided to do the deed, often quite responsibly--is it so hard to admit a novel may be reflective of that reality? And, that it may have value as a work of art because it does?

Now, I should cut the teens writing these reviews some slack. And I will. Because the more I read them the more I lose faith in our school systems, not our young people.

Increasingly, these reviews contain no mention of character, plot, or even a gut-reaction like or dislike. The sole reason for giving a book a low rating is the inclusion of sex. Judging a novel on that basis illustrates a definite lack of critical thinking skills. Expecting novels to only reflect your system of values is expecting them to cease to be art.

Good art has always challenged, provoked, reinforced, reflected. Good art investigates what it means to be human. This is something one used to learn in high school. But (sweeping generalization alert) it seems we're focused on training kids to only search out what art means to them personally. There is a place for that response, but there is also a price for using it as the only evaluative tool. We're not teaching our kids to look for a book's impact on society or to appreciate an author's skill. We're not showing them that though a book may infuriate, it may also instruct. We ask, how do you feel about this? and leave it at that.

This is a type of close-mindedness. It creates narrow thinking, a terrible trait to develop as our kids face the challenges ahead.

Online KidLit Conference? I'm In!

Some of the biggest names in the YA Lit world--writers, editors, agents, bloggers--are conducting an online writer's conference on August 10-12. It's FREE. Yep, free. And you don't have to find a babysitter or money for a flight or the will to change out of your pajamas because it's all ONLINE. Registration starts July 1. Click here for more info!

From the Vault

My husband is going to see the poor man's Dead this weekend, otherwise known as Phish. Feel free to make fun of him in the comment box, as I haven't done nearly enough teasing the past few days.

I was a deadhead in college. Not totally. I mean, I still went to college, and pretty much stayed in one place, but I never cut my hair and wore too much tie-dye and stacked those colorful woven bracelets on my arms. I hung out in the parking lots before and after all the Chicago area shows, thankfully (miraculously) staying out of major trouble. I was at Jerry Garcia's final show in `95, and that was...it. I still listen to the music when I'm stressed, but that phase of my life was definitely for a younger me.

I started going to the shows in high school, when it had only been 20 years since Woodstock. I often wonder how those experiences shaped my teenage life. My parents were mega-strict, and hanging out with people whose goals for the day were making baba ghanoush and God's eyes felt pretty good. I didn't think about the future much, and, besides my super low paying job at a local bakery, my responsibilities were nil. I had the time to explore and think and daydream and yes, experiment.

The teens I know today would think I wasted my time. They get up at 5 am and head to football practice or yoga or band. They stay after school to squeeze in a weightlifting session or to tutor a struggling student. They come home and stay up until midnight completing their own homework. Weekends are spent playing organized sports, hanging out with their families, or attending an aggressively chaperoned school dance. Sometimes I feel like they are more mature than I am. I know they have better discipline.

What does this mean when it comes to writing about about these young adults? I haven't figured it out yet. I'm definitely mindful as I build my characters. This is definitely a more responsible generation, do you agree?

The Dessen!

As reported in Persnickety Snark, and confirmed via Twitter by Sarah Dessen herself:

From Publisher's Weekly:

Deals: Week of 5/10/10: "Hayes Buys ‘Cut and Run’
Agent Leigh Feldman, of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman, sold a new YA novel by Sarah Dessen to Viking Children’s Books. Regina Hayes bought world rights to Cut and Run, about a high school senior who, after her parents’ divorce, has taken up the practice of assuming a new identity in each of the four towns she’s lived in. Dessen, according to Penguin, has sold more than four million copies of her nine previous titles, which include the New York Times bestsellers Along for the Ride and Lock & Key. Cut and Run is scheduled for May 2011."

Anyone who reads this blog knows how much I love Sarah Dessen's work. All of her books are deeply heartfelt coming of age stories, but this title looks like Dessen's return to some darker material, which is exciting. Like Elizabeth Scott and Deb Caletti, Sarah Dessen is quite gifted at creating realistic, relatable characters and I can't wait to see what she does with this fabulous idea.

(BTW, If you aren't reading Persnickety Snark on a regular basis, then you are really missing out. Adele over at PS interviews great writers, writes honest book reviews, and offers a unique take on YA in general. Check her out!)

All the Young Dudes

I've written a bunch of chapters for my third book, though I'm still putting the finishing touches on my second. I know, I know, not too smart, but sometimes characters just won't shut up and a person just has to get writing.

My third novel is a story told from--OMG, what the hell am I thinking--four different perspectives. I've got three of the voices down, but the fourth is really kicking my derriere. Kevin is a really guyish guy--the kind of guy I never hung around with in high school, the kind of guy who wouldn't have wanted to hang with me if I asked. He's not a jerk, just so different from me, and I didn't want to fall into the trap of making a 17 year old boy sound like a thirty-something woman masquerading as one.

So what does a writer do when she's having a little trouble? She reads. A lot. And I've had the pleasure of reading these great narratives told--very realistically--from a teenage guy's point of view:

The Secret Year by Jennifer Hubbard
Destroy All Cars by Blake Nelson
The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp
King of the Screw-Ups by K. L. Going
Anything by John Green

Got any to add? I need all inspiration I can get...

The Nuns Were Wrong

I went to a Catholic all-girls high school. Um...yeah.

So I heard a lot about God smiting me if I so much as let a boy's hand travel up my back while dancing. I heard about girls getting pregnant from toilet seats. I heard about the shame which would fall upon my family if I rolled my skirt at the waist so my knees would show.

At first, this constant barrage of nunsense meant sex and guilt seemed a natural combination. It didn't take long, though, for me to realize having sex did not necessarily have to result in a scenario worthy of a hand-wringing after school special. (Actually all it took was one really hot boy.) I was around seventeen when I figured this out. And I think kids today, if they even have the heaviness of this particular guilt stuck to their shoulders, figure it out much, much earlier.

So why do so many books directed at this age group still equate sex with punishment? Believe me, I'm not saying sex isn't a big deal--at any age--but I think contemporary teen fiction should reflect the realities of teen life. Cory Doctorow has a great, common sense take on this topic. Check it out here.

And, now, back to the WIP...

The Falcon and the Snowed

I couldn't look at my news page without seeing Falcon, the six year old boy we thought might have flown away in a homemade hot air balloon, and his father, the one who thought exploiting his children in the name of a reality show was a good idea.

It got me thinking about reality, and our collective definition of the word. We've come to accept reality as being subject to editing, and, though that's super attractive to my writerly soul, it lessens our appreciation of basic human experience. Love, friendship, family, career, food--all of the elements of our day-to-day existence are now subject to documentation and manipulation. This destructive media influence goes beyond peppering fashion mags with models so severely photoshopped their heads are wider than their hips, it confuses the lines of what is natural and contrived until we just can't tell anymore.

Contemporary, realistic YA fiction offers one antidote to this. Stephanie Kuehnert, author of The Ballads of Suburbia, discusses this in a recent blog post. As she says, the characters depicted in these novels may undergo completely different experiences from those of the teens who pick them up at the bookstore, but the dialogue that follows validates the realities of the readers' individual experiences. Yes, we're talking fiction, but teens are classic "reader response" critics--their understanding of literature relies heavily on what they know of the world, and what they're curious about. They make it all about them, and in this case, I think that's a good thing.

I wonder, for these teens, how growing up in the age of created realities will affect how they view themselves and the world, as adults. What do you think?

Freaky Friday

(Sorry for the light posting this week--I've been a busy little bee!)


My five bits of randomness this week:


1. The Sookie and Eric bedroom scene in True Blood. I don't care if he pings my gal Lainey's highly developed gaydar, that man is hetero-hotness on a platter. How tall is Alexsander Sarsgard? OK, I looked it up. Six-freaking-four. And most of it was visible last Sunday on HBO. Oooh, la-la!

2. No exercise plus too many on-the-go meals equals one grumpy Loretta. Unlike most people, I put weight on in the summer and take it off in the fall and winter, when the kids are in school and I actually have time to work out. I miss my endorphins. School needs to start, pronto!

3. If you have allergies and want to stay away from anti-histamines for a while (or just take a break for a year), start eating bee pollen right now, a little bit every day. By spring you won't be sneezing--seriously! It works the same way an allergy shot does, without the ouch! I've been ordering jars of cappings (pollen & propolis) from Really Raw Honey for years. Good stuff, but not for the squeamish. I often have to pick a bee carcass out from the jar before eating!

4. I'm a total Francophile. (Anglophile, too. In fact I would be perfectly happy taking the chunnel back and forth from London-to-Paris, Paris-to-London...). I play French music in my car on the way to work and sing along, top volume, because during that hour I can always manage to convince myself I speak French fluently, when in actuality I only took one disastrous semester in college. I've slipped and done this in front of people, but thankfully to friends who just say, Oh, Loretta, and assume I'm speaking in tongues. One day, though, I know I'll start singing in front of my friend Catherine, a real live French person, who will probably just laugh, but still, mucho embarrassing...I have to keep myself in check.

5. What's up with the recent spate of YA books about preacher's daughters? (OK, just typing that has me singing Son of a Preacher Man using my Dusty Springfield voice--in English, not Francais.) I'm excited about the amazing Sara Zarr's Once Was Lost, but I feel like she's coming in at the end of a trend. Not fair, I know. But I've heard of at least two other titles with similar themes, and more using religious communities as the primary setting. I loved Eileen Cook's What Would Emma Do? but I'm not sure about some of the others. Have any of you guys read Pure by Terra Elan McVoy? Whatja think?

Mean Girls Are People, Too!

I recently showed my nine-year-old son a group photo from my *mumble* year high school reunion. His first question? "Who were the mean girls?" He's only in 4th grade and he already knows. And I know how he knows. I've worked in his classroom; I've seen junior mean girls in action. The warfare is already strictly psychological. Some examples, all said with pointed looks toward shorter/less attractive/chubbier victims: "Eww, what's that smell?" "Why are your pants so short?" "How fast did you run the mile?"

The thing is, in a group shot of over a hundred people, I could pick the mean girls out quickly, efficiently, definitively. How could I do this after so many years? Because those junior mean girls, for the most part, grew up to be thirty-something mean girls. Some, either battered by life or surprised by its goodness, evolved into decent people. Most, though, flashed their large diamonds in the faces of women who obviously struggled financially, elbowed their way to the front of every photo op, spread nasty stories about women who weren't there, and couldn't defend themselves.

Mean girls are tough to write about. They shouldn't be. Every high school has them, as do most YA books about those years. When someone is mean to us, we remember the transgression in minute detail. This should make it easy to pull sensory images from real life when writing, but maybe this is the problem. Those instances become almost mythical for writers and can turn into caricature when we are loosely recreating them on paper.

I have a mean girl, Nina, in my novel. In my (super-smart) agent's revision notes, she wrote, why doesn't Nina get any closure? My first reaction was, because Nina doesn't deserve any! But then, I thought about it, and decided I was being a mean writer. And a short-sighted one. Do I still hate the mean girls, even though I now figure they all have inferiority complexes or unhappy marriages or personality disorders? Yes. Does it mean, from a writer's perspective, they aren't deserving of being treated as whole, multi-dimensional characters? No.

What do you guys think?

What's In A Name?

When I was a freshman in high school, my friend Chris invited me for a sleepover party. This was mucho exciting because 1. Chris had 11 brothers and sisters, which meant parental supervision was spotty, and 2. Two of the 11 siblings were only a few years older than us, male, and HOT. Sleepover at Chris's house? Oh, yeah.



So I arrived for fun and games. But when Chris introduced me to the hottie bros, they mumbled "Get back, Loretta" and giggled to themselves. I had no freaking clue what they were talking about. Every time I saw them that weekend--passing through the hallway, eating in the kitchen, sitting on the front stoop--they'd repeat it, "Get back, Loretta", until I thought for sure I'd done something wrong, or they just didn't want a geek like me hanging around their house and were trying to get me to go home. Finally, I asked Chris.


"You know what they're talking about, don't you?"


I told her I didn't.


"It's the Beatles," she explained. "Get Back is a song, you idiot."


My parents were not music people. My mom had some Elvis albums from when she was a kid, and my dad played Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff occasionally, but that was pretty much it. I wasn't much better. There was a brief, unfulfilled flirtation with Michael Jackson in junior high. A fascination with Madonna. A longing to slip my hands in the back pockets of Springsteen's jeans after viewing the album cover for Born in the USA. I thought Duran Duran was as close to pop perfection as I would see in my lifetime. But the Beatles? I knew who Paul McCartney was (He did Say, Say, Say with MJ, right?) and I thought he was cute. I also had a vague recollection of John Lennon's death, and memories of watching Yellow Submarine on TV in the 70s. That was it.

Something told me I needed to find out more, though, so I went a-searching at Wax Trax Records in Evanston, and came home with a bunch of albums (yes--vinyl): Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper.

You know that scene in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy wakes up and everything is in Technicolor? That was precisely my experience when I first heard what John, Paul, George and Ringo had done, more than 20 years before I placed those albums on my dad's turntable. Those four boys handed me a new life, one of creativity, imagination, freedom.

Good art can do that. The door opens, you pass through, and when you get to the other side you are still you, only better, enhanced.

I can only hope my writing can do this for someone someday.

I write books for young adults because high school is the time when there are so many doors, so many chances to grow, to choose, to start building who you want to be. It's an exciting time. Much has happened in my life since then, but those experiences are so fresh in my memory, and age has given me the opportunity to see how they continue to shape the woman I've become.


So, without any more ancient stories from the 80s, I hereby inaugurate this blog, in which I will discuss writing, life, music, joy, and what-not. Mostly what-not.