What happens when your muses move out?

My inspiration

My world is changing at the moment. Gorgeous daughter is getting married in less than two weeks and youngest son moves out to live with his girlfriend next week. Think eldest son will be moving out very soon too also to live with his girlfriend. I will have an empty nest. What has that got to do with my writing. Quite a bit actually because they were my inspiration. They are part of the reason I wrote young adult fiction.

But as you can gather from above they are all in their 20s now so are at the top end of YA anyway. Does that mean I need to change my writing? Do I have a right to continue writing YAF? What happens when your muses move out? Will I be able to still write? Rachel Ward wrote a insightful post on a similar idea this week on Author Allsorts Blog. I have no idea what the answer to these questions are going to be. It will be a wait a see moment.

As you know from last week I have a new story to write and though it has a young adult protagonist it is very different from anything I have written so far. I am loving writing and am very inspired by it but have yet to find out whether IC thinks it is working and worth pursuing. IC and I were having a conversation this week about writing (we weren't supposed to be talking about that but we had gone off at a tangent as we do oh so frequently!). We were talking about the need to maintain momentum if you get published. You need another book (or at least a good idea) there ready. But of course there some people who don't want to write anymore. They have had their one book published and that's all they wanted. This I find very difficult to understand. I have to write, or at the very least I constantly have ideas going round in my head, and I know from some of my writerly friends they feel the same. I cannot imagine just writing one story. I watch people and make up stories about them. I look at artefacts and think about what has happened to them, what might they have seen? My world is full of 'what ifs?' just like Rachel.

I am hoping that with my empty house I will have 'a room of one's own' to write in.I also hope this will give me the head space to create wonderful narratives. And even though my muses will have gone the stories will still flow because, like Rachel Ward, I find teenagers fascinating. I love to see them trying to work out who they are and developing such strong identities with their whole lives ahead of them. However, I must continue to keep an eye on teenage culture, continue to read young adult fiction and watch what is making their world turn.

Yesterday I had to set up a royalites account for an academic book I am about to write. That is pretty daunting too. All very grown up. It is based on elements of my PhD but also a lot more. I will be relieved to have the space to research and write it in too.

Time to embrace the new world and fight the fear. Please excuse the obvious sentimentality of this but they may be moving out and starting wonderful, well deserved new lives but they will always 'still belong to me'. Thank you for being the best children anyone could ever wish for CH, LH and TH and good luck for the future gorgeous people. I am so proud of you all. (Oops is that vomit sounds I can hear?!)

Sex in Young Adult Fiction - Move along people nothing new to see here!

A bit of sex, drugs and rock and roll

Last week in the Telegraph there was a considered article by Alice Vincent entitled 'Sex in Young Adult Fiction - a rising trend?' For me it was a particularly interesting read as my PhD was all about the representation of sex in young adult fiction so I thought I would add my penny's worth. In particular, Vincent is talking about the rise of New Adult fiction - apparently young adult fiction with extra bits. In this case a bit of raunch or so called 'steamies.' The focus of the article does appear to be on books from the US. Perhaps this idea of New Adult Fiction is a way of getting contentious subjects through the strict regulations of some parts of the US - the home of Banned Book Week after all! It is worth noting that later in the article it is highlighted how several of these books were self published first, therefore, avoiding the publishing/editorial gatekeepers. Publishers are only picking them up once they see they are successful and it is fairly difficult for them to change to the content at that stage. I think there is probably a whole blog post just in those two sentences which I will leave for another day.

Sex is, as Dr Lucy Pearson, stated nothing new. She notes that there was a change following the publication of Judy Blume's Forever in 1975. Once again that is a US book. Sex has been portrayed in books for young adults for many years in the UK (you could potentially go back to Penelope Aubin and her books in the Eighteenth Century where her main characters are often young teenagers and sexually active). Another example is Aidan Chambers' book Breaktime (1978) where he split the page in two when he explored his main characters' first experience. On one side the sex was described from the perspective of Dr Spock's A Young Person's Guide to Life and Love while on the other it was how they actually felt. It was an honest and considered approached that pulled the reader in. In my own research, which focused on British young adult fiction from 1996, I noticed a distinct change in representation. It came out from under the metaphorical covers (literally in Melvin Burgess's Junk, where the sex is implied and happens in a sleeping bag) to being pretty full on in books like Burgess's Doing It, Malorie Blackman's Boys Don't Cry, Noel Clarke's Kidulthood, Judy Waite's Game Girls,  William Nicholson's Rich & Mad, Rachel Ward's Numbers and Tabitha Suzuma's Forbidden. This is just a brief sample and they provide a wide range of sexual experiences from the gentle and exploratory in Rich & Mad  to the offer of oral sex in exchange for drugs to sell so they can buy new dresses in Kidulthood.  This is just the tip of the iceberg. I explore it far more in my thesis. An important point that I noted in my research was that the more graphic sex did not represent an increase in sex among teenagers necessarily, instead it seemed to reflect a reaction by author's to the availability of information and influences of youth culture.

In my opinion, sex in young adult fiction does have its place if it fits in with the story. I have said this many times before, it is all about being in context. I have quoted both Pullman and Burgess ad nauseum about this so won't do it again. But it is all about the vicarious experience. (See this TED talk by Dan Gilbert which talks about this too)  Giving teenagers somewhere safe to go to and explore. However, I do have concerns when the publishers state they want to capture 'Fifty Shades of Grey effect for teenagers'. Do we really want girls (or boys even) to think that it is perfectly acceptable to be treated like this? Or maybe I am just an old fashioned feminist who is not overly keen on being in an abusive relationship.

And here is Jake Bugg with his song 'Two Fingers'