I call you friends because that’s honestly how I see you all.  Over the past two years or so that I’ve been blogging under the iggi&gabi name I feel like I’ve gotten to know you as writers and readers and I consider myself so very lucky to have such awesome people supporting this blog.  This is why this post is probably one of the hardest I’ve had to write.  Don’t worry.  I won’t get super-sentimental on you, but you’ll have to forgive me if I get a bit misty-eyed.

As many of you already know, I’m expecting a new addition to my little family: Lawyer-hubby and I are having a baby!  Originally, I thought I’d be able to juggle a soon-to-arrive new baby and a new business and this blog, but as I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that I’ll have to take more than just a two month hiatus from iggi&gabi.

See, Baby Peanut is not the only new addition to my life.  This past September I launched DIY MFA as a business and I have ambitious plans for it in 2012.  I don’t think of this hiatus from iggi&gabi as leaving the blogsphere altogether, but rather, I plan to consolidate everything under the DIY MFA umbrella.  So if you haven’t already done so, check out the DIY MFA blog.  I will continue posting there and have really exciting plans for the new year so stay tuned!

Also, for those of you who periodically need their iggi fix, fear not!  I will be keeping the iggi&gabi site up, I just won’t be posting updates for a while.

As for YA Cafe: Ghenet will continue posting YA-related awesomeness, so follow her blog All About Them Words for more YA Cafe.  The schedule may be a little different so check her blog for more details!

Most importantly, I wanted to say thank you to all of you for being such wonderful and supportive readers.  I’ve been so lucky to have such great people in my corner these past years.  I hope I see you over at DIY MFA so we can keep sharing our obsessions with writing and books!

As always, keep writing!  And keep being awesome!

November’s Theme: YA Appreciation Month!

Today’s Special: Book Club!  What YA Book are You Thankful For?

First of all, let me start by saying that when it comes to YA, I’m thankful for all of it.  The amazing books that shook me to my core.  The fun beach reads that kept me entertained on vacations.  Even some of those forgettable books that all blur together in my memory.  For me, YA is what I read and what I love, so I’m thankful for all of it: the good, the bad, and even the ugly.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

But if I had to choose one book that really resonated with me and turned my mind upside-down it would have to be Blankets by Craig Thompson.  First off, this gorgeous graphic novel instantly spoke to my visual side.  Add to that the part where Raina sews the quilt for Craig (which totally appealed to my love of all things craftsy) and I was sold.  But it was the whirlwind romance between Craig and Raina that resonated with me most.

In this book, we see how two teens can go from connecting like soul-mates to having that romance fall apart.  And this all takes place in the span of a few short weeks.  Their romance reminded me a lot of college romances.  Something about being together on a college campus speeds up the pace of relationships.  Add in the fact that most college students are either teens or in their very early twenties, and you get the kind of whirlwind relationships like the one you see in Blankets.  You can get together, fall in love, fall apart and never speak to each other again, all in a matter of days.

What spoke to me most in this book was (SPOILER ALERT) the end, where Craig and Raina break up for good and Craig destroys everything (minus the quilt) that reminds him of her.  Having grown up in a very tight family where loyalty is king, I’ve been raised with this mindset that you either love someone to pieces, or they’re dead to you.  There’s no in-between.  So when Craig destroys his mementos of Raina, I could relate to that impulse, that desire to get rid of all the memories and start fresh.  After all, that’s how I dealt with all my romantic relationships.  Until I met my husband.

Lawyer-hubby likes to joke about something I said to him early in our relationship.  I don’t remember this incident, but apparently on our second date, I told him that I didn’t break up with boyfriends, I “obliterated them from my life.”  I know… charming, right?

That was ten years ago, and I’ve learned a lot since then.  About forgiveness.  And second chances.  And shades of grey.  A lot of this learning has been thanks to this amazing man who’s stood by me despite my “moments.”  When I read Blankets in 2008, not only did this book remind me of relationships from my teen years, but it also showed me how far I’ve come since then.  And that’s a lot to be thankful for.

What about you?  What YA book are you thankful for?  Tell us in the comments or by tweeting with the #YAcafe hash tag.  And don’t forget to check out Ghenet’s post to see what YA book she’s thankful for!

W

November’s Theme: YA Appreciation Month!
…and book club topic: What YA book are you most thankful for?  (Book Club is next week!)

Today’s Special: Why I Love Dark YA

These past few months, there has been a ton of buzz on twitter and the interwebs about dark YA.  It started with an article titled Darkness Too Visible which appeared in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in June.  Much discussion, disagreement, even outrage ensued, coming mostly from the teen lit community.  People took sides and a lot was said throughout the blogsphere about the various misconceptions presented in the article.

Here were some of the responses:
•  Janet Reid (AKA Query Shark) shared her straight-to-the-point response on her blog.
•  Misty from Nothing Cannot Happen Today raised an important point about the age-range for YA being much wider th an any other age group in children’s literature.
• Kate Hart from KateHart.net took a different approach and looked at the covers were for YA books published in 2010.  Her post is fascinating and shows that YA might not be as edgy (and definitely not as multicultural) as one would think.

Finally, the hashtag #YASaves, which started in response to the Wall Street Journal article, not only was the #3 trending topic on twitter the weekend it came out, but it’s continued as an active and vibrant community of YA writers and readers alike.  Many lovers of teen lit have posted links and responses with #YASaves, weighing in on why YA–but especially Dark YA–is important.

So what does this have to do with why I love Dark YA?

Dark YA makes us think.  It challenges us to reconsider our assumptions and view situations from alternative points of view.  Even YA books that aren’t necessarily “dark” per se, will often raise some sort of question or challenge that pushes readers outside of their comfort zone.

I'm Not Her by Janet Gurtler

Right now I’m reading I’m Not Her by Janet Gurtler.  Looking at the cover, it doesn’t appear to be a particularly dark book.  But as we soon discover, the story has more darkness to it than first it seemed.  For me, in particular, this book has been a challenge because (full disclosure here) one of my greatest fears since I was a child was that of losing a limb.  And one of the characters in I’m Not Her grapples with this very issue, trying to come to terms with what will happen if she loses her leg to bone cancer.

For other readers, this book might be “sad” or “tragic” but for me it has been a challenge, and a good challenge at that.  This book pushed me outside my comfort zone and forced me to face something that in the past has been very difficult for me to approach.  And for that reason, I am loving this book.  (In fact, I’m loving it so much, I’m reading it really slooooowly because I don’t want it to end.)

And why is it so important that Dark YA exists?  That one’s easy to answer.  Teens (the intended audience for these books) are at an age where they’re learning to stand up for their own thoughts and beliefs.  They need books that will challenge them and push them beyond their comfort zones.  If all books in teen lit were happy-go-lucky-everything-is-perfect types of books not only would these books be unbelievably boring but these books wouldn’t add anything that teens are not already experiencing in their own lives.

These days, teens deal with a lot of very real and very difficult situations.  Problem parents, bullies, coming to terms with their sexuality, violence, discrimination (which isn’t just based on race or sexual orientation but can occur for just about any reason imaginable).  You name it, there are teens out there dealing with it.  If YA didn’t represent that experience–both the good and the bad–then it would be a lie.

And we all know the purpose of fiction: while the stories and characters may be made-up, at the heart of it fiction always tells the TRUTH.

Check out Ghenet’s post today on why she loves Dark YA!  And don’t forget to share your book club pick next week!

November’s Theme: YA Appreciation Month!

In honor of Thanksgiving, coming up in just a few weeks, Ghenet and I wanted to spend this month talking about how awesome YA is and why we’re happy that this literature exists.  Because of the holiday, we’ll have our book club a bit earlier this month so start looking for the book you want to discuss.  This month’s book club topic: What YA book are you most thankful for?

Today’s Special: What Do I Love About YA?

1) YA is not boring.  Let’s face it, adult literature can get away with really boring stuff simply because adults are more willing to put up with boring books.  If a book for teens is boring, readers will put it away and read something else, while adults are more likely to suffer their way through.  How many adults slog through a book club pick despite being bored to tears simply because it’s gotten rave reviews and has some fancy sticker on the cover?  Teens don’t care about book club picks or fancy stickers.  As long as the characters are awesome and the story pulls you in, that’s all that matters.

2) There’s something for everyone in YA.  OK, let’s get one thing straight: YA is not a genre.  It’s a category, a slice of the literary pie, a set of books with a common target audience, but it’s not a genre.  Why?  Because within YA there are dozens of different genres, just like there are different genres for adult literature.  Within YA you have romance, sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, horror, thrillers, literary fiction and historical fiction, just to name a few genres under the YA umbrella.  What brings all these books together in the YA category is three things:

• The primary target audience is teens.
• The protagonist is (usually) a teen between the ages of 14 and 18.
• The book has a “YA voice” which is nearly impossible to describe but readers know it when they see it.

What this means is that there’s variety in YA and regardless of a teen’s tastes in books, chances are, they’ll find something that will appeal to them.

3) YA crosses boundaries and takes risks.  There’s a lot of risk-taking and sophisticated writing that goes on in YA these days.  It’s not all Babysitter’s Club (not that there’s anything wrong with the Babysitter’s Club per se, but for some reason I don’t quite understand, most non-YA-readers seem to think of YA as being limited to that style and they don’t see all the variety YA has to offer).  Some literary risks that you see in YA:

• Reinventing language in the use of vernacular (see Tyrell by Coe Booth and Feed by M.T. Anderson).
• Interesting use of point of view (see The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, where the book is narrated in an omniscient 1st person.  I mean, talk about a daring POV choice).
• Approaching tough issues, such as dealing with being transgender (Luna by Julie Ann Peters), homelessness and parental neglect (again, Tyrell) and the age-old issue of needing to fit in (Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky), just to name a few.

4) YA brings readers together.  The community of YA readers and writers is something unique that I have not seen in any other area of literature.  Just look at the #YASaves campaign on Twitter that not only illustrated the impact that YA books have had on readers, but also brought of the YA community.  (It was one of the top trending topics on Twitter the weekend it began.)

In the end, I love YA because it reaches readers during a critical age when books really matter.  I didn’t have YA growing up, at least not the YA that we see in bookstores today.  And even if I had had these books available to me, I’m not sure I would have been able to read them.  (As a teen I went to a hoity-toity school where all you read was Shakespeare and Chaucer or that sort of thing.)  In fact, even in college where I could have chosen English courses that were less… traditional, I always tended toward the “old stuff” because it had been hammered so deeply into my brain.

It was only years later when I started writing that I discovered YA.  I kept trying to write stories that were “literary” but the voice never seemed to fit.  It was always too young, too snarky or too fun to be stories for adults.  Then I stumbled on YA and started reading, and before I knew it I was obsessed.  It was like I had been switched at birth and shoved into the wrong literary family and now I had finally come home.

So, really, that’s why I love YA.  Because it feels like home.

Check out Ghenet’s post about what she loves about YA: All About Them Words.  And don’t forget to tell us what you love on Twitter with the #YAcafe hash tag!

Second, I’m really excited about how DIY MFA is going and I don’t want to lose momentum. Speaking of DIY MFA, if you haven’t checked it out yet, this week is a good one to do so. Not only am I giving away a FREE workbook to all mailing list subscribers, I’m also going to be launching a FREE webinar this November and will be sharing details on the site soon!

Back to the ROW80 Check-In. From here on out, I’ll continue with my plan except for the WIP revisions. This week, I wrote a ton of DIY MFA content (at least 2k not counting blog posts, though I can’t give exact word counts because a lot of it included revision and formatting/design.) This coming week will include a lot of webinar work as well as marketing so I suspect the word count this week will also be a tad fuzzy.

Anyone out there doing NaNoWriMo this November? I’m not but I’ll be cheering you guys on!

W

Today’s Special: The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin

This month we talked about FEAR in YA and for today’s book club, Ghenet and I have chosen out books that we think represent this topic.  For my pick, I selected The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin, a psychological thriller with a bit of a paranormal twist.

***SPOILER ALERT: This post may contain spoilers!***

First, let me set the scene for my esperience reading it.  I pulled this book off the shelf the weekend Hurricane Irene hit in New York, thinking “We’ll be stuck inside all weekend and the power might go out so I need something really good for hurricane reading.”  We live in a highrise with wall-to-wall windows and while we didn’t have to evacuate, we were advised to brave the hurricane in some part of the apartment far from the windows.  Since the worst of the storm was at night, we pulled out our sleeping bags and curled up in the hallway for an indoor camping adventure.

Anyone who’s ever spent a hurricane in a highrise knows how loud those storms can be.  There was no way I was getting any sleep, so I pulled out The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer and my reading light and I started reading.  And I couldn’t stop.  I read almost the whole thing in that one night as the wind whooshed around the building and the rain pelted the windows.

What makes this book so scary and suspenseful?

It has an unexpected villain.  For most of the book, the protagonist Mara Dyer is her own worst enemy.  The story starts with her waking up in the hospital with no memory of how she got there and discovering that her best friends are dead.  As the book continues, Mara begins regaining bits and pieces of her memory, leading her to believe that maybe she was responsible for her friends’ deaths.  As readers, we’re used to thrillers where the antagonist is a character apart from the protagonist, but in this story, it appears that Mara is both protagonist and antagonist, which is a unique twist.

The author takes major risks in terms of TRUST, but the payoff is worth it.  Last week when we talked about suspense, I emphasized how important it is for the reader to trust the author.  In this book, Michelle Hodkin takes some big risks in terms of playing with our trust.  First off, because Mara can’t remember key events in the story, we can’t fully trust her as the protagonist and narrator.  An unreliable narrator is always risky.

But that’s not the only risk the author takes.  Characters we think are the “good guys” turn out to be more sinister than we thought and characters we’re convinced are evil turn out to be in Mara’s corner.  No one is what they seem to be.  This is a risky move for an author because we can’t trust the narrator/protagonist and we can’t really trust the secondary characters either. So, who do we trust?

We trust the author.  Ultimately, this is what all good writing comes down to: you don’t have to trust any of the characters as long as you know the author is in control and knows what she’s doing.  This trust is what allowed me to keep turning pages, even when I had no idea where the story was going or which character I should be rooting for.  I knew I could trust the author to pull it all together at the end.

Speaking of endings… this ending had one crazy cliffhanger.  Normally, a cliffhanger ending would really annoy me as a reader.  I like having some sort of closure when I finish a book, even if I know it’s part of a series.  With this book, though, the cliffhanger ending didn’t bother me as much.  Again, it all comes down to trust; by the time I reached the ending, I knew I could trust that the author had a master-plan in mind, so I was able to accept the cliffhanger.  Because the author did such a good job of earning my reader-trust, I was willing to give the ending the benefit of the doubt, trusting that there is some good reason for that cliffhanger.

What about you?  What scary book did you choose to read this month?  Tweet the title using the #YAcafe hash tag!

Check out Ghenet’s book club post on her blog: All About Them Words.  And don’t forget to join the conversation on twitter!

Last week has been a slow slog.  I’ve been working hard putting together the first DIY MFA workbook, which will be available starting November 4 to anyone who signs up for the newsletter: Writer Fuel.  This workbook has gone through several rounds of revision in just the one week, but it’s finally looking to be in good shape.

This coming week promises to be full of new DIY MFA content because aside from the posts and Writer Fuel content, I’ll also be working writing content for a webinar that I’ll be offering in November.

So that’s it.  A slow week last week and I don’t have exact word counts because I was doing a lot of revising, editing and formatting so it’s hard to tell how many words I actually wrote.  But otherwise, it was a productive week.

How has ROW80 been treating all of you?

Each Friday we pick from a menu of topics and share our thoughts on our respective blogs. We’ve also got plans brewing for interviews, events and even some exciting giveaways, so stay tuned! Join the discussion by responding in the comments, on your own blogs or on twitter using the hash tag #YAcafe.

Today’s Special: Building Suspense

Suspense isn’t something reserved just for teen literature, but let’s face it teens and kids are much less forgiving as readers than most adults are.  When writing for adults you can get away with long flowery descriptions or entire chapters where nothing really happens but the language is pretty anyway.  In teen lit and kid lit… not so much.  If you don’t keep the pages turning, chances are your readers will put the book down altogether.

So how do you build suspense and keep it going throughout the book or story?  Here are a few tips I’ve learned from my reading and writing.

1)  Raise the stakes.  (WARNING: The Hunger Games spoilers in this section.)  Let’s look at that fabulous example of suspense-building: Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.  Notice how the stakes constantly go up throughout the book.  First Prim gets selected as a tribute, making the games suddenly very personal for protagonist Katniss.  Next, she takes her sister’s place as tribute making the life-and-death stakes even more personal.

Then as Katniss prepares for the games, we see her avoid forming bonds with the other tributes.  After all, to survive, she will have to kill them.  Then she finds out Peeta is in love with her.  Stakes = even higher.  Skip ahead to the last third of the book where she starts falling for Peeta but learns that there’s a chance they can both survive… stakes go up but not so much.  Then she discovers the rules have changed and it’s either her or Peeta who can survive.  At that point, the stakes are as high as they can get (which is good because that scene happens to be the book’s climax.)

Notice how the stakes keep going up.  Every time we readers start getting comfortable with the stakes, the author ratchets up the tension by raising the stakes.

2)  Avoid red herrings.  Red herrings are when you “trick” the reader into thinking the stakes are really high but then *surprise* it’s not really the case.  The classic red herring is the “it was all a dream” trick, where we get all this suspense and then suddenly the character wakes up and we realize that none of it was real.  Why are red herrings so bad?  They make the reader lose trust in you and that can be a problem because when you really want to raise suspense, the reader might not believe you.

Suspense depends a lot on trust.  For the reader to truly buy into the situation you’re crafting you have to get the reader to trust you.  If the reader doesn’t trust you as the writer, then it will be all the more difficult to draw the reader into the suspenseful situation you’re creating.  Don’t break that trust by playing tricks on your reader.

3)  Play with pacing.  One great technique for increasing suspense is to either speed up the pacing to a breakneck pace or slow it down so we can feel every heartbeat, every breath.  We see the latter technique often in first-kiss scenes.  There we are, reading along, dying for the hero and the love interest to have that first kiss but dagnammit they just won’t kiss.  They inch closer and closer together.  Their eyes are locked in a steady gaze.  The sexual tension is through the roof, their lips are inches apart but the author keeps us waiting just a few more sentences before that kiss.  Talk about building suspense.  (Which brings me to the most important point about suspense.)

4)  Suspense does NOT mean “not knowing.”  Contrary to popular belief, suspense doesn’t mean that the author keeps you guessing.  In fact, a lot of the time you know exactly what’s going to happen, but you keep flipping page after page and can’t put the book down.  Suspense isn’t always about unexpected plot twists (though it can be).  Rather, suspense is about the author gripping you by the hand and pulling you into the story.

Suspense isn’t about what is going to happen in the story, but how it’s going to happen.  Take The Hunger Games.  We know from the minute that Katniss becomes a tribute that she will have to survive.  How do we know?  For starters, she’s narrating the story so if she dies, the series is over.  Secondly, from the very first scene where we see Katniss hunting in the woods, we know she’s a survivor.  The question isn’t whether or not Katniss will die because we’re already pretty sure of the answer.  So how does Collins keep us reading page after page?  She hooks us by making us want to find out how it will all unfold.

In the spirit of Halloween and all things creepy, what’s the most suspenseful book you’ve read lately?  I’ll share my pick next week when we have our Book Club discussion!

For more on Suspense in YA, check out Ghenet’s post!  And don’t forget the book club discussion next wee on October 28.  The topic is flexible: just choose a book that you think is scary, then your thoughts by joining the discussion!  (And just in time for Halloween… muhahaha!)

The reason for this lapse so early in the challenge is that an vibrant member of my personal writing community passed away this past week.  I guess, as a writer, the way I grieve is through my writing.  It’s been difficult to write anything more than the bare minimum, given everything that’s happened.  But I know soon enough my grief will turn into determination and I’ll start writing in a frenzy again.  This time, with new purpose: because my friend would have wanted me to keep pushing forward on my work.  She would not want me to give up to grief.  Even so, I’ve given myself a week off becase right now it’s still too raw.

So there you have it, my ROW80 check-in (2).  Not much accomplished this week, but that’s OK.  All things considered, I think I’ll survive one week of not writing.

Each Friday we pick from a menu of topics and share our thoughts on our respective blogs. We’ve also got plans brewing for interviews, events and even some exciting giveaways, so stay tuned! Join the discussion by responding in the comments, on your own blogs or on twitter using the hash tag #YAcafe.

Today’s Special: Villains and Antagonists

First of all, let’s start off by clarifying the difference between a villain and an antagonist.  A villain is the “bad guy” in the story, the character who’s responsible for bad things happening.  An antagonist is a broader category so while all villains fall under the antagonist umbrella, not all antagonists are villains.  The antagonist is the person or thing that gets in the way of the protagonist getting what he or she wants.  Remember how every writing teacher under the sun says that the protagonist has to want something?  Well, the antagonist is the thing that gets in the way.

The antagonist does not have to be human, it can be a whole society of people or even a natural or supernatural force.  Your antagonist could be a natural disaster or the bully who lives down the street.  Villains, however, are by definition human and they are characters in the story.  So now that we’ve got that cleared up, how do we make our antagonists or villains the most evil and effective they can be?

3 Tips for a Super-Evil, Super-Awesome Antagonist or Villain

1) Give him/her/it a motivation.  Oftentimes, writers take great pains to determine the motivation of their main characters, but the antagonist’s motivation falls by the wayside.  The truth is, if the antagonist has a reason for doing what she’s doing, it makes her all the more real to the reader.

For instance, in The Hunger Games trilogy, the government of Panem is the antagonist and its motivation for creating these games is to maintain order in this shattered world.  What makes this trilogy so intriguing is that the main character, Katniss (and the reader), never quite knows which side is the “good guys,” even at the very end.  This technique of giving both sides of the conflict legitimate motivations is one of the things that keeps the reader hooked to the very last page.

2) Give him/her/it a soft side.  Aside from the motivation, it also helps to give the antagonist a glimmer of goodness.  Think of Darth Vader.  Sure, he’s evil and wears that big helmet thing, but when it comes right down to it, he cares about his son and doesn’t want to kill him.  The same is true in teen literature.  Just think of any book with a “mean girl” character.

Sure, the writer can make that character mean and rotten to the core, but the story becomes all the more compelling if the mean girl has a soft side.  Think of Massie and Claire in The Clique.  At first, we want to root for Claire because she’s the underdog and the outsider and Massie is popular and mean.  But as the story develops, we realize that Claire is not as nicey-nicey as she first appears and Massie is not pure evil.  These contradictions are what keep the story interesting and keep the reader… well, reading.

3) Not all antagonists or villains need to be “well-rounded.”  Sometimes, what the antagonist did is just so bad and the protagonist is in so much pain because of it that you don’t have to give the antagonist any motivation or a soft side.  In fact, sometimes it’s just better if you let the antagonist be flat.  A perfect example of this is Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.

In this book, the antagonist has no good side, at least none that we can see.  For most of the novel, he doesn’t even have a proper name with Melinda (the protagonist) calling him “IT” or “Beast.”  In fact, he’s such a forgettable character that after reading the book, I hardly remembered anything about him.  But that’s because the book is not about him as a character.  It’s about the protagonist and the horrible thing he did to her.  In that type of situation, you don’t need the antagonist to be “well-rounded.”

Take-home Message: In the end, the writer needs to decide whether the antagonist should be a fully fleshed-out character or not and this will depend on whether the antagonist needs to be sympathetic on some level or not.  If the antagonist does not need to be at all sympathetic, then it’s OK to leave him or her flat to serve the story.  On the other hand, if the writer does want the antagonist to be sympathetic, that’s when you have to give him or her a motivation and a soft side.

For more on Villains and Antagonists in YA, check out Ghenet’s post!  And don’t forget the book club discussion coming up on October 28.  The topic is pretty flexible, so go ahead and choose a book, then think about how the book you picked is scary to you.  Then join the discussion on the 28th!  (Just in time for Halloween… muhahaha!)