From: Cookiesss at aol.com <Cookiesss>
Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 11:32:33 EDT

One of the perks of being a YA writer is that I get to meet and be friends with lots of other YA writers. I feel like I've been invited to join the club I would most like to belong to. They are a truly generous, creative, smart, funny, and passionate bunch of people. I talk a lot of shop with these folks, and I have never once heard a single one of them say that they were writing a certain book because they were trying to supply teens with "edgier" material. Although many of the books that they write are indeed edgy.

But I don't think any of us are interested in writing a certain story simply in order to fill a marketing niche. We write our stories because our stories are the ones that are asking to be told. We've got to write what we've got to write. And if what we are writing is a good story, someone will want to publish it, be it edgy or not.

I'm probably hopelessly naive, but I don't think publishers sit around planning their lists saying, "This list is a tad lean on edgy novels. Anyone got one to fill in the edgy slot?" I think they publish the best books they can find, and if some of them are edgy, then some of them are edgy.

Apropos to this discussion (with some shameless self-promotion thrown in) the title of my upcoming novel-in-verse is ONE OF THOSE HIDEOUS BOOKS WHERE THE MOTHER DIES. The main character is an avid reader who says,

I Love to Read

But my life better not turn out to be like one of those hideous books where the mother dies and so the girl has to go live with her absentee father and he turns out to be an alcoholic heroin addict who brutally beats her and sexually molests her thereby causing her to become a bulimic axe murderer.

I love to read, but I can't stand books like that.

And I flat out refuse to have one of those lives that I wouldn't even want to read about.

Sonya Sones
Received on Tue 06 May 2003 10:32:33 AM CDT