Why can't stories just be about people?

Well, it's been ages since I last posted. Since then I've gone through summer classes, full time work, the start of my senior year of college, and grad school applications. Basically, I've been a bit busy. But I'll try to keep updating again, regularly.

Alright. Here we go.

I was recently introduced to the movie Imagine Me & You. Yes, I realize that I'm a little slow, since it came out in 2005, but give me a break.
Needless to say, I absolutely love it. It's now my favorite romantic comedy ever. And it's not even just a romantic comedy...it's a wonderful love story, that's also quite heartwarming (is everyone sick from my sweetness yet? I am. I can't help it; I have a new obsession!). Anyway, the point I'm trying to make, is that everyone should see this movie.
No, that's not really it. It's that Lena Headey and Piper Perabo make great (and quite attractive *cough*) lesbians. Seriously. They both played lesbians before, actually, Piper in Lost and Delirious and Lena in the BBC series Band of Gold about a bunch of women in the red light district.
But this is all beside the point.
Apart from the fact that I think everyone should watch Imagine Me & You (and not just lesbians, really), I think part of the reason I'm so drawn to it is because no one died.
Yes, I did say that right. No one died. In every other lesbian movie I've seen, one of the girls died, or decided she was suddenly straight, or any other number of horrible things. Plus, it's always about being gay. It's the same with almost every book (certainly young adult books). It's all about coming out, or being gay and misunderstood.
This plot is completely fine, but where are all of the other books, with regular plot lines, and gay characters? That's what the movie is about. It's just a love story, that ends up having a relationship between two women. It's not about being gay, and it's just a normal plot with gay people in it. That's part of what interested me, since some of my writing is like that, too. I feel as though there aren't enough books and movies with just gay characters. Particularly love stories. I like having love stories that are normal love stories that just happen to have two women. Or two men. Or anything else. Almost. But the point, is that it doesn't *have* to be about being gay! It can just be about being people. =). And watch that movie!

P.S. One other thing I noticed about the characters in that movie is that Rachel, Piper's character doesn't suddenly get all into "being gay" after she discovers Luce. She's just herself! And both characters are quite feminine, which is really just refreshing to me because I usually don't see that in media. Not that there's anything wrong with more masculine lesbians (I sure as hell know a lot of them), but this is far more applicable to my life, and my story, since that's how my girlfriend and I both are.

Also, would anyone be interested in reading my writing? Parts of my actual writing that I would post up here? Let me know!

That is, if anyone reads this...

The "will it get published?" rant.

It's been too long since my last post, courtesy of GRE prep, work, and summer school. What's been on my mind lately in my writing is the topics in young adult novels. That is, what's appropriate to write about? What's not? Or, more accurately, what's publishable?
Young adult novels are definitely getting darker and, true to history, breaking the barriers. There's been a crazy amount of "dead teenager" books put out in the last couple of years, what with If I Stay, Thirteen Reasons Why and various other books. Not to mention Hunger Games.

Last summer, I picked up the book Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson. Upon reading it, I couldn't decide wasn't sure whether I was pleased or not to find that the first accurate representation of anorexia I've ever read as a teenage novel. Is it right to write about (no pun intended. Okay, maybe a little one)? There are pros and cons to both. When I read it, for example, I found myself thinking about how amazing it would have been when I was going through an eating disorder to have read the book, had someone to relate to. On the other hand, I was really glad I hadn't been able to read the book, because just reading such a relatable story and being able to get into the main characters mind stirred up all my old anorexic thoughts, which I'd been able to squelch before. Then again, that's just my reaction. It's a tricky business.
Basically, regardless of all the heavy teenage books being published, there are still some rules to cover. Is it okay to write books with underage smoking? Drinking? Drugs? Is it okay to write about death, sexual abuse, eating disorders, sex? Mostly sex. What are the rules about sex with teenagers? What if the problem isn't the focus of the story, but just something that happens in it? Most of all, will it get published? Current day evidence says yes, but I just don't know. I'm concerned, and I know it's come up in conversation about writing with my girlfriend. But if it isn't okay, then what about books like Because I am Furnature or even older ones like Speak? I write what I write because it's a good story, because I feel it's important. And because I had to turn something in to my advanced fiction class. Not to mention the fact that one of my main characters visited me in my sleep.
Unwritten rules are so complicated.
On the bright side, if these things are allowable, I'm in the right niche.

Next up: it's high time for a preview. A sample of my writing!

Officially getting GRE'd...before taking it.

Let's talk for a minute about Grad School. Or, more importantly, what I'm doing to get into Grad School. I've been reading through a GRE exam book, and slowly having confirmed what I've suspected all along:

• The GRE is not a good indication of how well you will do in Grad School.
• The GRE is not fair.
• The GRE is not a good test of your knowledge.

Most importantly, figuring out these facts have lead me to one simple conclusion:

• The GRE is a test of how well you can take the GRE.

This is why I'm spending my traveling hours on public transportation reading a GRE book that teaches me not new material, but specific techniques to be able to answer the questions.

I've been reading voraciously (a GRE word?) since I was a little thing, and I'd like to think I have a pretty large vocabulary (even if it's not always projected in this blog. Hey, a writer has to have some place to vent sometimes, right?). But reading through the vocabulary "Hit List" as my book calls it, there's absolutely no way I know all the definitions for those words.

Another big problem with the GRE is that it's computer adaptive. If you speak like a normal person and have no idea what this means, it means that the computer you take the GRE exam on is mean, and far too smart. It assumes you have the average score for a particular section, and, depending on whether you answer a question right or wrong, asks you a harder or easier question next. Let's put this into perspective.
Let's say you're taking the verbal section, and the average score is 450. Let's just pretend. This means the first question the computer gives you is an "average" question for that section. If you get that question right, it raises you score some percent, and gives you a harder question. If you get it wrong, it lowers your score, and gives you an easier question, most likely of the same type you got wrong so that it can pound your misery into you over and over again. Anyway. This type of testing means the questions not only get harder, but the percent by which it raises or lowers your score also gets smaller. This means that the first questions are worth more than the last.
And that's my long-winded rant about the GRE exam.

Does it make me less of an author because I keep getting lower scores on the Verbal part of my practice tests than the Math section? Or does it just mean that I don't know the third listed definition of "catholic" in the dictionary?

p.s. More Grad School posts to come that actually have to do with the schools. But the next blog will be once again about writing.

p.p.s I do not own that comic. It's property of the website posted at the bottom of it.

In which I notice that my writing is quite similar to Sara Ryan's

The first subject is that I've discovered that my writing is oddly like Sara Ryan's in a lot of ways. It's also not in a lot of ways, but the characters she has in Empress of the World hold just the right amount of wit, insight, sarcasm and, of course, dorkiness to be delightfully cutting. When I first read the book, years ago, I wasn't sure I liked it. But as I've gotten older and reread it, I find that I like it more and more as time goes on. I'm not sure yet how I feel about her second novel, The Rules for Hearts, but the first one is enjoyable. It's possible that part of this is due to the fact that it's one of the first books involving gay teenagers that I've read that isn't about being gay. That is, it's not a coming out novel. It's a "coming of age novel" if I must put a name to it, that happens to have a gay main character. I don't see very many novels like that, and it's refreshing. So many gay novels are just about coming out. More on that later, as I think the subject deserves its own blog post.
Anyway, if you have time, you should read it, and let me know what you think! It's fairly short. I'm starting to think I should do more book/author plugs in this blog as well as my own, boring personal life.

Also, prepare for it, you guys. The next blog I write is going to be on...*insert ominous music here* GRAD SCHOOL.

Getting involved.

Today, I realized that I get very involved in my characters lives. I'm like a nagging mother or something. I don't stop until I find out absolutely everything about them, their lives, their favorite food, the shoes they wear normally, and what they were doing last night, young lady. I also discovered that I can't really help it, they interest me. I've also somehow convinced myself that if I figure out more about my characters, I'll write them better. This might very well be true, but it's mostly caused me to fill my notebook with random notes here and there, interspersed with my school notes: "Luc Tuymans painted his first painting in ...I bet Ari would wear flat black leather boots."

A very good example of this idea came to life today in Ikea. Having just moved into a new apartment, my girlfriend and I have been looking for furniture. We were looking at our new chairs, and realizing that since they're plain wood, we could paint or stain them. My immediate thought, then, was "Oh, what was painted on the chairs of my characters' kitchen?"

On the bright side, one exercise I had myself do was to write vignettes about my characters lives when they were younger, prior to the book. These have been working out so well, I might be able to publish those instead. We'll have to see.

WARNING: LOST SPOILER ALERT! (if you don't want to know, don't read this next paragraph): Now, on a slightly unrelated note: the ending of Lost was so disappointing. I actually almost cried from disappointment. It seem like such a cop out ending, which I never would have gotten published had I proposed it. I did like to see everyone reunited, that was cool. But the everyone being dead thing? Just seems like cheating.

Getting back to the point. Am I the only one who gets so deeply involved in my characters lives? Do you prefer to get involved, or just write 'em and leave 'em?

I propose a new genre of fiction!

Now that I'm posting, I'm on a roll, and I'm creating my third post in the last half hour. Or ten minutes. Whatever.

I'm struggling with The Age Problem(™). Basically, one of the novels I'm currently working on is about college students. The problem with this, is that it's the particularly nasty age where the characters I'm writing about are older than teenagers, but since readers (particularly teenagers) generally read up, my readers would probably be in their late teens. The question, really, is do I try and publish as Young Adult, or Adult Fiction? It's a tough call, really. I think that my characters, still being fairly young, are easily related to by teenagers. The problem is that they aren't teenagers.

Why can't they just have a "College Age Fiction" genre?

What the crap and other nonsense

As long as I'm writing here, I'll get right down to business. That business is swearing. The novel I'm writing involves realistic young adult characters, and therefore has swearing in it. Naturally, I did this without thinking about it, given that my own vocabulary consists of a countless amount of swear words (particularly when I find myself in a difficult work situation, i.e. having to carry a 30 pound CRT monitor across campus, going on a particularly long trek to replace a computer only to find that the door's locked and I have no key, etc). Upon rereading the drafts of my work, and, more importantly, having other people workshop my work, I began wondering if I should include swearing at all. This post and this post on kidlit made me realize that I'm not alone, but didn't make me feel any better about the prospects of getting my work published.

While I was reading through the posts, however, I noticed a link to Gayle Forman's blog post, which was definitely my saving grace in this area. If you haven't read it, you should. It's brilliant, particularly if you're a young adult author struggling with this issue. Knowing that a published and popular author such as herself has characters swear made me feel that my prospects of getting published were not dashed away with every four-letter word (just dashed away by potentially bad writing). Her post made me feel better, and now the characters that should swear in my book are swearing. Because, after all, as Gayle Forman says:

"As a writer, it just feels wrong to sub a crap for a shit when shit is the word that sounds right. Or a darn for a damn. I mean, really, darn? What 18-year-old says darn? I am not writing about the Amish."

Damn straight.

Every story needs a beginning, I suppose

I've been planning, for ages, on making a writing blog, but never actually got around to it. I created this blog about a year ago, and got so busy with school and everything else, I never wrote in it. I feel now, however, that since I'm in the process of getting really serious about my writing (I'm working on what I hope will be a first novel, though I've written countless short stories at this point) I should get on posting. I'm an aspiring young adult novelist (like so many others), attending college and hoping to get into Grad School within the next year or so. I'm 20, unpublished, owe money in school loans, and just moved into an apartment. So, basically, I'm like any other aspiring 20 year old.

Now that we've gotten the introductions out of the way, down to blogging business. Or, if you have any other questions about me, feel free to ask!