Episode 8: The Concept of Perfection

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When I started my writing group, I was cautious.  I read a story, submitted a critique  before trying my own.  That my story was torn to shreds (the core concept and some description remains) didn’t really phase me.  I knew they were right.  My second story, same thing.  I accept criticism when the story will benefit from it.

When I started my first writing class, I felt good going into it.  So what if I was the least experience writer?  I’m smart, motivated, and open minded about my work.  Two writing exercises later, I knew exactly where I was, both in terms of the class, and in terms of the craft.  I was heart broken, with my skill and just how far I had to go.  It was hard to continue.

Writing — learning — is like that.  If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing yourself.  If all you get is feedback you discard and compliments you expected, then you’re in a place that’s worse than failure.  You’re not trying.  Not trying to grow, not trying to learn, and not trying to be a better writer.

Being a writer, requires only one thing.  Writing.  Putting pen on paper, or making your keyboard make that clackity noise.  Boom.  You’re a writer.  But anybody can do that.  Many people want to do that.  And many people do.  Are you one of those people who claims the title of writer, but writes once a month?  Writes one story?  Writes but never shares?  Never edits?

Failure is part of learning.  This is a very hard concept to learn.  This was an exceptionally hard concept for me to learn.  But being willing to fail is the only way to create art, and it’s the only way to learn.  And also, failure is not failure.  The word failure has a degree of finality to it.

A painter fails ever time he puts brush to canvas and does not create a masterpiece.  Said painter may do this thousands of times, and may never feel like that particular brush stroke was right or completes the work, even if what they have produced would be perfect in another person’s eyes.  We, the creator, are too much a part of what we create sometimes, to know that it is done, to know that it is perfect, or to know that it is “good enough”.

Pick up any work of art, literature, entertainment, or any form of creativity.  Pick it up, consume it, and acknowledge its perfection, and know that the artist that created it probably hated it.  They probably gave up, let it go, hit a deadline, or just knew it was as good as they could do.  No one ever looks at what they’ve done, and says “There is nothing that can be made better.”  There is always a caveat   If this isn’t part of human nature, it is at least a part of the shared soul of art.

When you — when I — write, we do so knowing that we will fail.  We will not be Faulkner, Huxley, Rothfus or Heller.  We will probably not even be Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer.  We will probably not even be that guy we all know, who writes things we detest.  A moderately bright 6th grader may out write us.  But, we learn.  We fail, and we learn.  And the more we fail, the more we learn, as long as we are willing to.

So, submit.  Give it to your writing group.  Submit to forums.  To contests.  To anthologies, and open calls and agents.  And accept those failures, and be glad for them.  Because they make you better.

Episode 7: Exploring the M.I.C.E. Quotient

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The M.I.C.E Quotient

People talk about the M.I.C.E. quotient in a number of different ways. I’m trying to wrap my head around the nuances enough to teach (yes, teach. Blind leading the blind) the M.I.C.E quotient to my local writing group. I am by no means an expert writer, or even a published one. So the contents of this article is not a lecture. This isn’t a recording of absolute truth. This is an exploration.

The four elements that Card identifies are Milieu, Idea, Character and Event. The quotient, ration with which these appear within a story affect various aspects. The most addressed by his book Character & Viewpoint, is characterization. Basically, different types of stories require different levels of characterization. You can’t have a character driven drama with a flat character, and you can’t have an amazing, deep and extremely interesting character when the point of the story is something else. Your interesting character risks overwhelming the actual core of your story. Card also illustrates how to use this to help frame your story, and to make sure that you are meeting the promises of the beginning.

Characters & Viewpoint: Orson Scott Card

Mary Robinette Kowal, both in the online workshop she runs, and on Writing Excuses, expands M.I.C.E a bit. I do not know how much of this she has gathered from other places, how much she learned from Card’s work and classes, and how much she created as part of her own work. But, she builds a true story framework out of the MICE quotient, using it as a way of tracking what is happening, what order it is happening in, and what this means in terms of plot, story and characters. I cannot match her eloquence. Go listen to the Writing Excuses podcast, and then wish they went far longer than 15 minutes on the topic.

Let’s launch into the thing itself now that I’ve acquainted you with my degree of familiarity, and how much of this I am pulling out of thin air. I am addressing these out of the usual order.

Character

Character is probably the easiest to understand, on a instinctive storytelling level. Your character grows as part of your story. I’ve seen this broken down into Crisis, Conflict, and Climax, but it boils down to this: The character is unhappy and initiates change, meets resistance, and then either is successful with that change, or fails. If this sounds vague, that’s because it is. This change can be internal, making a change in themselves, or it can be external, making a change in their world and the status quo.

Event

These run the gamut of types of stories. Fairy tales, adventures, disasters, all can be viewed as Event stories. They boil down to: Something changes the status quo at the beginning, and in the end the status quo either reverts to what it was, or is accepted as the new status quo. This sounds kind of passive, but take it from the point of view of your characters. Something has changed, and it wasn’t your character that changed it. It doesn’t need to be a comet falling out of the sky, it can be the start of a distant war, the death of a family member or as direct as an antagonist kidnapping someone.

Milieu

You can just call this ‘setting’ if you get tired of fighting with how in the hell you spell it. It is the hardest of the four for me to really understand in terms of writing. Card seems more interested in telling you that you need only have a token character in this type of story. Your interest in the story, the actual character and star of the story, is the setting itself. The world is the primary focus of the story. There is always Milieu, it’s always there in the background, and that’s usually where we leave it, but the more unfamiliar it is to the reader and the character, the more it needs to be stepped up. When the setting is so strange and powerful that you can’t help but have it play a major part of the story, then you must let it come through. We can also view this as a change of the status quo, with the character entering the setting in the beginning, and exiting it at the end. I think this is predominantly true, but I think you might be able to have an exception if you are bringing the reader into the world instead of just the character. The character’s journey is the easiest way for the reader to also be brought in, but I think it does not need to be the only way it could work.

Idea

Finally, Ideas are mysteries. Idea stories are based around information. You can usually frame this story in the form of a question. Who committed the murder? Why is the house haunted? What if? The point, is one of discovery. If you just state answer the question, then it’s not a story. Either the reader, the character, or both are learning, exploring, or trying to solve the question throughout. When you get the answer, that’s the end of the story.

My Cheat Sheet

Milieu Idea Character Event
The setting as character The plot is a question The character drives change Change drives the story
Status quo There is a new place with its own (new to the character and reader) status quo Information that does, or could, change the status quo The Character changes the status quo, either in how they interact with it, or by changing the world External change creates a new status quo
At the Beginning… Enter the location State the question Show character discontent Something changes
…In the end. Leave the location State the answer The character acheives their goal or accepts defeat Change is either reversed or accepted
When it’s done right Will leave the reader loving the world Solves a mystery, gives a truth, or illustrates a point Leaves the reader emotionally satisfied Gives the reader a sense of catharsis from the event
When it’s done wrong The reader and character are trapped in a flat world Does now answer the question, and leaves the reader wondering Leaves emotions unresolved, or makes the character seem weak Provides no closure
Subversion In the end, the character does not leave, instead choosing to stay Answering the question with another, deeper, question The character either foils themselves, or finds that their motivations are not what they thought The new status quo is the same as the old, the old status quo was never all that good, or the event itself becomes the new status quo
Milieu Leave the world for yet another world? Settings within settings? Possible, but see Variations below. Your question involves going to another place, or the question is the other place The character is the reason the journey takes place The event forces things into a new world or setting. Stranded on an exotic island is both event, and milieu.
Idea Interesting settings are often filled with their own puzzles and mysteries. How to get home being the most common. Mysteries within mysteries. Think “Plot Twist”. Because of who the character is, he chooses to answer the question. Note that the Character initiation must happen before the question is asked. The event takes place, but why? how? and what can be done about it? Events often have the unspoken question of “What now?”
Character Character is the least developed in a Milieu story. Ideally, the character changes, but except for the need to go home, the character rarely drives the plot. People can be enigmas. It is hard to have your point of view character be part of the mystery, but here lies unreliable narrators. While trying to make one change, the character initiates additional change. It’s hard to change the status quo when it is already changing, but there are different status quos. While the character’s world is dealing with one thing, the character initiates some other change.
Event Create a world, establish what the status quo is for that world, and then disrupt it, try to resolve it, and then leave. Something happens while solving the question, but ultimately, you must get back to solving the question. Something disrupts the character’s plans. But, you must get back to resolving the character’s problems (or they were never all that important in the first place) Sure. Drop another rock on the character. Keep the character from finding up. Just don’t do it so often the reader can’t tell.
Variations Leaving Home (adventure as setting)A New (Magical or Literal) World

Utopias

City (or setting) as Character

Travelogue

 Mystery (Murder or otherwise)What If?

Solving a Problem

Heists

Unreliable Narrators

 Character Changes SelfCharacter Changes the World

Character Fails in quest to change

Romances

 Heroic JourneyDisaster

Learning to Cope

Revenge

Nesting and Combining

You can see in my chart above, I include a quick cross reference of what it might look like to say… have an Event happen within and Idea. There is no quick or easy or tried and true combination of these, and the examples I give are just off the top of my head. The variations of these combinations are infinite, and really, combining them is how you get to every story ever told. Sometimes, you can wrap them together, and event that leaves the character in a new milieu, can be both Event and Milieu, and then the Character may have to drive change and solve Ideas in order to fix the event and get home. The more of these elements you have that are strong, the more words it’s going to take to do them well, and the harder it may be to balance them out.

Additionally, the order and way you introduce these elements matters in how you resolve them. Mary Robinette Kowal describes them as nesting within each other like HTML tags. I’m a programmer, so I get that, but to describe it another way, you must resolve the more recent unfinished thing first. Start with Character, and throw in an Idea and then an Event, and you must resolve the Event, then the Idea, and then finally the character. As writers, we do this instinctively sometimes. The easiest way of doing this is to begin with our character, and show that characters discontent with life. Then, at the end, after the story has been told, we flash to the character now happy. We show the progress of the story through the characters eyes. It works often, because we usually treat all stories as human stories. Strong characters are a hallmark of modern writing. But, sometimes it doesn’t’ work. You watch a movie, and the final scene ties off things introduced about the character in the first scene, but it’s wrong. Something’s off. That is usually because somewhere along the way, a tag got lost. An Idea was not answered, an Event was not dealt with, or the Character element has just been tacked on without being needed or tied into the story.

I don’t know that the order is always 100% important, especially when you get into subplots, and more complex interactions (if you’ve got 10 mysteries in a novel, I don’t know that they each need to be answered in turn). The most important thing to make sure of, is that everything does get answered.

Promises

If you ask a question, you have to answer it. That’s fairly obvious. Or is it? The example I’ve heard from Mary, is that of a mystery and a romance intertwined. If the romance dominates, and the writer forgets to answer that question, it will absolutely ruin the story. That’s not to say you can’t have romantic detectives, but you must be careful how they interact with mysteries. If they don’t get to solve them, you’ll have to broadcast that. The others though… how do you answer those promises. Mostly, it is through the power of the status quo. Your story has disrupted the status quo in some way, either by changing it (Event), having the character change it (Character), introducing a new one (Milieu), or asking questions that must be resolved before you can return to it (Idea).

Status quo is something that we as readers are not often directly aware of, but we notice it. The status quo must be established, otherwise you are left with a story you don’t understand. You won’t get the world, or understand why it matters that the character is doing things. The status quo must also change in some way, and then either we must see the character adapt to that change, or the status quo must be returned in some way. If not, then nothing has changed, and you’ve written a story about nothing. It must also take effort to do this, either the emotional effort of acceptance and survival, or effort to change the world back. At the end of your story, you need to address the status quo again, and show it’s change.

Be aware of the promises that you make at the beginning of the story. Be aware of the character drives that a reader will want to see resolved. Be aware of the possibly subtle changes that may be throughout the story, that may accidentally become mysteries to the reader. If your character’s dog goes missing, then by god you gotta tell us where the dog went eventually, or that question will drive the reader nuts. If it’s not important to solve where the dog went, then was it important for the dog to go missing in the first place?

Promising More

All that said, you don’t need to resolve everything into a nice little bow. Especially in a short story, that can be impossible. Sometimes questions have no answers. Sometimes there is no satisfaction to be had. Maybe there is no answer to the mystery? Maybe there was never a mystery in the beginning and it was all a misunderstanding?

This isn’t a death knell. It is possible. I think, the answer is to end your story promising more. Hint at the changes that are coming, hint that the character’s resolve will hold, or that the mystery will be solved right around the corner. Solve the mystery, but add another question. Leave the world of Oz, just to end up in the world of Alice. Show growth, show progress, show resolution, but don’t resolve everything. Resolve what must be resolved, but leave enough life to the story that the reader can see the world keep going. If everything had to be solved at the end of every story, there would never be a sequel.

…

And speaking of promising more, it’s impossible for me to get all of my thoughts together on this in a single blog post. You’ll note, that I did not list a single example of this above. The reason being that I want time to think, and do it right, and give complete breakdowns. It’s easy to say that Dune and Alice in Wonderland are Milieu stories, and much harder to say how exactly they’re different. Why are Dune’s characters deep and complex, with intrigues, and mysteries and catastrophes spread throughout, whereas Alice is a simple tale, about a girl. Consider this the first in a series.

Disagree with me? Feel free to comment. I’m by no means an expert. Just exploring the ideas.

Notes and Sources

Orson Scott Card’s Character and Viewpoint

Writing Excuses 6.11: Scott Card’s M.I.C.E. Quotient

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/08/07/writing-excuses-6-10-scott-cards-m-i-c-e-quotient/

Mary Robinette Kowal’s excellent online workshop: Writing on the Fast Track

http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/

Science Fictionwriting: Presentation by Dr. John L. Flynn

http://triton.towson.edu/~schmitt/311/pages/tsld001.htm

The M.I.C.E Quotient: Sean Malstrom http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/the-m-i-c-e-quotient/

And finally, Karen Woodward has a number of posts, which are excellent and in depth:

http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2012/10/orson-scott-card-mice-quotient-how-to.html

http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2012/10/mary-robinette-kowal-and-mysteries-of.html

http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2012/10/the-mysteries-of-outlining-and-nesting.html

Episode 6: Confidence and Criticism

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This is not a “People didn’t like my work and it hurt my confidence” post.

This is a “I thought I knew what I was doing, and people helped me” post.

I am not a rampant egotist, no more than anyone who sets out to create worlds, populate them, and then expect people to spend time reading the result, let alone pay money for the honor.  Nor am I ignorant of writing.  I’ve listened to podcasts, read a lot, read books by authors, and tried my hand at writing enough that I knew what I was doing, even if what I was doing was mostly learning.  This was actually a case of Dunning-Kruger effect.  Simply put, the less you know about something, the easier it seems.  And I knew very little.

I wrote a novel, knew it wasn’t good, and moved on to learn more.  I wrote short stories, feeling progress.  I edited these short stories, every pass of the red pen making that story better in plot, character and writing.  I started a new novel, with an outline and a plan.  I joined a writing group…

And learned a little bit about how little I knew.  I critiqued work without problem, and feel I do okay at that.  I presented a work I had edited a number of times, thinking that I would get some good criticism back that would make it into a better story.  I got the criticism that I needed, and the story will be better… when I re-write the whole damn thing.  It’s been a month, and I can hardly look at it.  Now that I’ve heard how bad it is, I can see, taste, how bad it is.  I managed to write an entire story without conflict, character development, and apparently ignorant of the themes that I was actually working with, or the promises that I was making.  My writing group partners were of course tactful in this delivery, but the truth is the truth, and when I do re-write this story, it will be far better for the criticism.

And so will I.  It took a night of whiskey writing to get myself back in line, and stop feeling like every line I wrote was crap, but I’m back in the saddle, and doing my best to learn.  I recognize that I’m still at the bottom of the ladder, and that I’ll be here for a while.  But, it’s a ladder, and I know what direction I’m going in.

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For more on critiquing, writing groups, and alpha readers, check out these resources:

Mary Robinette Kowal: How and Why I use Online Alpha Readers While Writing Novels

Writing Excuses: 5.33 – Alpha Readers

Episode 5: Practicing What I Know: Writing the Other

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Rewind back to the beginning of NaNoWriMo, and my first write in.  Aside from meeting a few local authors in the area, and getting a couple thousand words down, the experience paid for itself in advice.

Here is the situation.  One of my characters is a bisexual seventeen year old boy.  This seemed like a great idea at the time of coming up with characters.  I think bringing different points of view into your writing is important, and that it can help make characters more grounding and interesting.  I also am a firm believer in the concept of Queering SFF, bringing characters of different sexual identities and preferences into genre writing.  If only because every novel can’t center around a straight white American male.

The issue started, when I got to the point where I first am exploring this character’s attraction to another man in an awkward situation.  Suddenly, this seemed like a very bad idea.  I’m not gay, I don’t find men attractive, and in general, don’t understand what does attract men or women to men physically.  I found myself in an alien head, where before I had been writing a perfectly satisfactory kid that I could understand.

This is often refereed to as ‘writing the other’, and below I’ve posted a few examples of people talking about this.  The fact is, if I didn’t push myself to ‘write the other’ then I’d be stuck writing about straight white suburbanite software engineers.  And frankly, they are boring (which is why I’m writing).  I want to challenge myself, I want to adopt other personas and characters that I am unfamiliar with.

So, I bring this up in conversation with the other NaNoWriMo writers at the Write-in, and they helped me through the process.  Oddly, the questions they asked were not about ‘gayness’ but about the character, about the situation, about what makes the situation special or different and about what the character is feeling while things  are happening.  Because, while I may not be familiar with being gay, I am familiar with being a teen boy.  The situation the character is in is not a good one.  He’s orphaned, desperate, and being asked to make moral decisions for the survival of himself and his brother.  The scene in question has him being used as a sexual distraction for a business man who is being conned.  While the character has been getting used to the idea of using con games to help feed himself and his brother, this is a different animal.  He’s being asked to pose as a prostitute, possibly even be a prostitute to get the con to succeed.  It is not an equitable or healthy sexual situation, and he is intimidated despite his anticipation and vice versa.

I had to step back from just the raw idea of ‘what does it mean to be attracted to a man’ and look at the character.  The raw physical characteristics are almost entirely unimportant when I look at the emotions of the situation and what needs to happen for both the growth of the story and the character.  The advice that I’m used to, is to be respectful of your character, and treat them as a person, not as a stereotype of a minority.  It took some thought to get myself through that moment of panic and unfamiliarity.  Once I applied that to the situation, it all worked out.

So how did it work?  It came out short, mostly non-sexual and non-physical, focused on the emotions all people have in such a situation.  In the end, I think this ends up being a very satisfying scene, and unexpectedly becomes pivotal to the character (Tune in soon, for explanations of just how broken this character is, and why my novel progress bar hasn’t moved much.)

Other references:

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi

Writing Excuses 7.40: Writing the Other - A great episode dealing primarily with race, the pit falls that often come up with race, and how to respect your characters enough that they are not stereotypes.

Writing Excuses 6.16: Gender Roles–Black, White, and Gray - Writing excuses doesn’t dig into gender identity or sexual orientation very often.  This podcast is more about defining gender identity, but gets into view points of characters, and some of gender roles.  It’s a great and inspirational episode… but in regards to “The Other” it’s just a footnote.

Writing Excuses 6.15: Writing Other Cultures - Again, primarily racially and culturally focused, but goes into some ways to handle things with respect and

Writing Excuses 5.5: Writing the Unfamiliar - A general approach to writing anything you don’t know

 

Episode 4: On New Beginnings and Priorities

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Priorities are funny things aren’t they?

I can say writing is my highest priority, but doesn’t mean I can ignore the whining dog who really wants to go for a walk.  Nor does it mean I can ignore my job, or the roof it keeps over my head.  Or the wife who, while supportive, would rightfully divorce my ass if I put writing ahead of interacting with her.

Worse yet, like the whining dog, sometimes things which have a lower priority end up detracting from the thing you want to be working on.  Things like ‘reading’ or ‘thinking’ or — gasp — ‘learning’.

Or blogging.  You may have noticed, that there is a large gap between the below post and this one.  You should also then notice the word count widget that I have added to the right hand corner of the blog, which shows a nice even 70,000 words as of this writing.  That word count is both a positive and a negative in my book.  First off, good on me for adding another 20,000 words in the month of December, through holidays, parties, cleaning and my normally atrocious work schedule.  That said, my goal was 75,000 words.  That is a failure in my priorities and goals.  So is the dead air on the blog.

I’m trying very hard to not beat myself up over what could have been done in a single writing session on a weekend.  I’m also trying to temper that expectation with the fact that I am making a lot of mistakes, and therefor learning.  Learning so much in fact  that there is a raw need to consume anything that I can that will help.  I am humbled before the art of writing, and throw myself on the wisdom of others, acknowledging that maybe my ears were not open wide enough before to understand.

So, I am embracing the new year.  Or more accurately  I am embracing the knowledge of others in the new year.  I’m shoving myself through classes, books and writing groups, and I am listening.  If I’ve learned one thing before now, it’s that it is okay to suck.  Now I need to learn the rest of it.  Fortunately, I like learning.

NaNoWriMo Update: The Final Stretch

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My commitment to update my blog regularly has not been as firm as my commitment to win my first NaNoWriMo.

As it stands, I am sitting at 47,000 words and will likely hit my 50k mark tonight.  Then I will have a celebratory glass of whiskey, submit my draft, and start seriously thinking about what is next.  The commitment to writing has been my big take away.  My previous novel, still unfinished, took a year to get to the 100k mark, and then I became overwhelmed by doubt, confusion, ‘the end’ and the mental image of the revision process.  This time, I have the first 50k of what will likely end up being a 75k novel, and I feel damned good about it.  Not just good about finishing this novel, or about the experience, but also about being able to revise this novel into something I can be proud of as a first completed work.  Proving to myself that I can write twelve times faster than I previously thought means I shouldn’t fear that word count anymore.

But that is maybe my second biggest take away: I obsess over word count.  Even last night, I sat looking at my word counter and was filled with panic about having to write the remaining five thousand words by Friday.  Any time this month that I found myself thinking about word count, I have panicked.   Instead, I’ve found I can bite off small chunks, two, three, or five hundred words at a go, a scene in a sitting, a chapter in a night and half an act in a week.  But it starts with that two hundred word snippet.   I get there, and draw a new line, celebrate a small victory and repeat.

The final major thing that I’ve learned, is that I love outlining.  Through this experience, I think I have developed the draft of my writing process, and it hinges on sprints of writing, directed by chapter and half-act narrative outlines.  I will of course have more on that later, after that celebratory glass of whiskey I mentioned.

The last thing I’ll say about NaNoWriMo for now, is that though it has been exhausting, it has built a tremendous amount of momentum for me that I don’t want to lose.  Once I get to that 50k, I am sitting down and committing to new deadlines, new word counts, and new goals.  These goals will not be as break-neck, but will still be ambitious.

Also, please check out Howard’s NaNoWriMo “Pep” talk at Writing Excuses: NaNoWriMo 2012 Bonus Episode 3, with Howard.  It may be a little disheartening to listen to if you won’t hit that goal, but I think it’s a good way to view the NaNoWriMo as a means to an end, and to re-up that commitment to writing.

Episode 3: Why YA? What YA?

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I am currently struggling my way through my first NaNoWriMo (no, I will not post my current word count) and I’m pretty sure that I’m writing a YA.  I have teen protagonists who are finding out who they are, romance, morality decisions, and enough questionable sex and violence that I wonder if I’m really aiming for the write genre.  Am I limiting myself because I’m aiming for YA?  Am I weakening my story?  Or am I going to end up with a story that is really an adult story anyway, just with elements adults don’t want to read?

While this article does not answer all my questions, it does help comfort me that the themes I’m working with, the questions of morality, the definition of character  the romantic and sexual issues, are on target for the YA audience.  If I can convince an editor of that… well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

Writing Fiction for the Young Adult Audience

There some good points about the teen mindset, about how young adults are exploring their dark sides, their gender roles and preferences, and explore their world and their place in it.  I just happen to be doing that with magic.  Better than vampires.

The questions that I don’t know the answers to, and I probably won’t until I have a finished product, is how ‘adult’ is too much for ‘young adult’, or, put another way, do you have to handle that content in special ways to make it  Death for example, can happen in a young adult novel without question, but how you show that death, how graphic it is, and how emotional it is ends up being a sliding scale.  In The Hunger Games , although there was death, and the morality of that death and the horrifying consequences were real and presented in ways that hit hard, but the death was never graphic and the violence never overly intense.  That said, even Clive Barker is writing YA these days.

Unfortunately, I have not read nearly enough Young Adult fantasy.  It’s different from when I was a kid.  Dragon Lance… sure, that’s young adult.  There was over the top cartoon violence, romantic love rather than sexual tension, and most of the bad guys were monsters anyway.  Now, I watch the Vampire Diaries, or the Secret Circle, and wonder if they are just miss-targeted at the YA genre, and that the writers wouldn’t have preferred their characters to be in their 20′s.

I will admit though, that my largest doubt at the moment is in regards to my bi-sexual character.  As he explores his own romantic options, do I risk alienating my market?

Or does it end up being perfect for the market?