Don't let me do it!

With two books currently in progress, I just got another idea. Another young adult, this time suspense. I think. It's sketching itself out in my brain and slowly ... taking ... hold.

I absolutely cannot start writing it right now. I have to finish the ones I have. Have to. So, my friends, if I mention that I started anything else, you are to please beat me over the head with the manuscript to my current works. I will supply said manuscripts. (No, planning doesn't count because I have no control over when lovely ideas hit me. So there. :-P )

As Ally Carter said in a blog entry a while ago, if it's truly a good idea it'll still be with me when I reach the point when I can actually write it.

(But, oh, it's such a lovely idea... just sitting there... waiting)

Barnes & Noble on Young Adult fiction

Kristin Nelson posted today on hearing from an editor that BN will not be expanding their shelf space devoted to young adult fiction, despite the continued growth in the category.

This is depressing. Not just because I'm writing YA, which I am, but in general.

My ambitions of selling YA fiction aside, I think it's depressing to see how little shelf space there actually is for YA books. Don't we WANT kids reading? There is, in my opinion, a disproportionate amount of shelf space for adult fiction. Most nonfiction is geared toward adults as well. Young adult, when I've walked into BN and Borders, has a restricted amount of shelf space and little attention paid to it by the booksellers.

If they're worried about shelf space, maybe they should look at shrinking down their music and movie sections. We have stores for those products and they're usually cheaper elsewhere too.

Notes and tongue rings

Also known as characters who decide that they're going to do their own thing and you'd better just be happy with it.

Laura Bradford at Good Girls Kill for Money made a rather timely post on the subject of characters that just pop out of the woodwork and wave and say "hey, here I am, whether you like it or not." I say timely because I had that exact thing happen to me this weekend with my young adult. This girl just decided to grace me with her presence. She decided she knows what's going on and that she's going to have a little fun with me and the rest of my cast, by way of a totally cryptic note that wrote all on her own.

And now one of my MCs, who had been behaving herself quite nicely up to now (well, as nicely as can be expected of a college freshman), decides she's going to have a tongue ring. I wonder what it looks like... I'm thinking a little silver ball but Krista doesn't seem quite that traditional... probably something neon colored to match her outfits.

"Golden Age of Young Adult Literature"

From MediaBistro to Kelly Parra, Laurie McLean, and Nathan Bransford, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades. I can only hope that this holds true for a good, LONG while... while I finish my book, find an agent, find a publisher, go through revision, and get the book on shelves.

This being, of course, contingent on my (1) finishing my book, (2) finding an agent, and (3) finding a publisher...