Can you please stop using the word "sexy" in relation to YA novels?

I have noticed this trend of every flipping YA paranormal romance or urban fantasy or dystopia being described as 'sexy' in the blurb or in the puff piece. I have noticed it creeping into contemporary YA, too, now. I don't get it. Here are some reasons why:

1. The characters are like 16, 17. The person writing the blurb or puff piece is 95% of the time a grown woman. I don't care that they're fictional. It's weird. It's creepy. It's just... strange. Oh, so the angel-vampire whatever guy is sexy? I do not get how that matters. Seriously, this is something people care about? God, I've been approaching this writing business all wrong.

2. How exactly is the book sexy? It just seems like an odd adjective to apply. (It's important to remember I am not from your planet and as a result understand very few of your human concepts.)

3. Do you not think we already rampantly overuse the word 'sexy'? Do you not think the entire notion of 'sexy' is focused on far too much in our society? Do you not think these twelve-year-olds (and up) reading YA are not really invested in how 'sexy' a book is? Do you not think YA is geared far too much towards grown women now?

4. I legitimately understand nothing.

5. 'Like such-and-such book but sexier.' I AM THROWING YOU ACROSS THE ROOM NOW, BOOK.

6. To be fair, I was incensed and appalled by The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Thirteen and three quarters or whatever it is, what an awkwardly long title, at the age of ten because there was kissing in it. Disgusting! I've not changed much in the past nine years, to be honest. I don't think YA has to be devoid of sex but 'books that are sexy' and 'books that realistically depict teenage sexuality' are two different things.

7. Just stop it already. I refuse to read any book that has 'sexy' mentioned on the cover, or in the blurb, or by whatever other author is talking about how goddamn 'sexy' it is, especially if it's a YA novel. This is for ages twelve plus, guys. I know basically middle-aged women have hijacked it as a genre but I WILL NOT kowtow to their RIDICULOUS demands of SEXINESS in books about/for TEENAGERS okay?

8. Kowtow, what a weird word. Did you know it's borrowed from kòu tóu in Mandarin Chinese? Neither did I. Thanks, Wikipedia.

9. Don't use the word sexy, really. There are so many other, far superior, adjectives. If anyone cares to explain the meteoric/moronic rise of sexy in the description of EVERY YA NOVEL EVER, please share. Is this what the teenagers demand from their novels now? Has someone done focus groups? Please explain.

How to be nice to your author friend, for non-writer folks

1. If you have a book dedicated to you, you should probably read it. It's generally a nice thing to do. If a book is dedicated to your memory, try floating your ghostly presence towards someone who is reading the book, or become a poltergeist so you can manipulate physical objects. If you have gone straight to heaven, do not pass go, do not collect $200, see if you can order it online. Maybe Amazon ships there? I don't know, it might be pricey. (You know when shipping on a book costs as much as the book itself? That's annoying.) (ARE YOU READING THIS BLOG POST FROM THE ASTRAL PLANE? KNOCK TWICE FOR YES.)

2. It really is incredibly lovely to buy a copy of your friend's book when it is published. I understand if you are poor, though, so maybe just borrow it from the library and then tell all of your rich friends how wonderful it is. Yeah, I don't have rich friends either. Just yell about it on the internet.

3. If you have a friend who has a book published, and you read that book, and you think it's the worst thing ever written, and you value the friendship, try to lie convincingly when asked what you thought of it. You don't have to say you loved it if you didn't, but soften the truth a little. "It's not really my kind of book" is not really an acceptable answer. I think "I am so proud of you" is better, and not technically a lie (assuming you are proud). 

4. That said, don't review your friend's book positively on the internet if you didn't actually like it or even read it. It's very obvious when someone's mates are boosting their ratings on particular sites. (Maybe a little bit of this is okay? I don't know, it's a slippery slope.) And don't get in arguments with people on the internet (generally a waste of time, but you know this), especially over negative reviews (it reflects poorly on the author. And you love the author, so you don't want that).

5. Don't ask how many books your author friend has sold. No author knows the exact number! If you obsess about these things you go mad! I actually have an amazing superpower where the lightning-bolt shaped scar on my head burns every time someone buys my book, but I'm bad at keeping track. Other unappreciated questions include "How much money have you earned?" and "Are you a bestseller?" How much money a writer earns is largely out of their control. You work really, really hard at the writing bit and at the promotional bit but that doesn't guarantee you're going to do well. There's a lot of hoping for the best.

6. Do not alert your author friend every time an awards longlist is released that they are not on, or every festival program they are not part of, or the success of other authors generally. They probably already know about these things. There are a lot of ways to feel lame when you are a writer, and I don't think writers require much help in that department.

7. Don't bring up the fact that they've been working on their book for two years, and that lots of other writers manage to bring out a book a year. It takes a long time, all right? You can't rush it.

8. Continue to encourage your author friend to leave the house at regular intervals and communicate with other human beings. (If the author you know is an extrovert, I feel they will be much easier to maintain a relationship with. I think they're a rare breed, especially among the novelists.)

Brisbane Writers Festival! The State Library! Awards for young writers!

1. Guess who's going to be part of the Brisbane Writers Festival this year? Me! I am very excited. I have a session in the online literature festival for grades 8-10 on Thursday September 5 at 11am. (You can book here.) (Yes it is still three months off the kids' program has been announced now so I couldn't not tell you.)

2. The State Library of Queensland is spectacularly excellent. For instance, on Saturday afternoon, I went there for a reading event run by the Queensland Writers Centre and had a rather lovely time and drank rather a lot of tea. (It was a special 'young writers' event, which is always wonderful.)

Also, the SLQ's Young Writers Award is currently open for entries! So if you're a Queenslander, writer and aged between eighteen and twenty-five, you should have a look at this (Submit a short story of 2,500 words or less! $2000 first prize!).

3. I really like this state. I think people underestimate Queensland. There are lots of wonderful arts initiatives and festivals and things for youth, at least in this corner. I find it is a nice place to be a YA writer. There is less noise and less of a scene to get caught up in, but still enough going on and enough of a writing community about that you don't feel cut off from everything. I am going to go write a proper blog post now. (And I should probably work on that novel. Damn you, internet. So very distracting.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

1. I'll be at the State Library of Queensland in the Library Cafe this Saturday (the 8th), for the Queensland Writers Centre's Whispers reading salon event. It's from three until five in the afternoon and there will be readings from me and four other emerging writers. More details here. If you are in Brisbane it would be wonderful if you came along. (I am a bit nervous about it.)

2. I have just returned from Voices on the Coast Youth Literature Festival on the Sunshine Coast. This was my second time at the festival (I was there in 2011, also). It is always nice to be invited back. It is a really fun festival. I took my camera but I got so caught up having a wonderful time and speaking to all the delightful kids that I only took three photos and they were all of the view from the balcony of where I was staying, which probably isn't very interesting to you (plus I also took near-identical photos two years ago. It's a nice view, up at Alexandra Headland). I didn't think I would ever enjoy speaking and being at festivals but I think my comfort zone may be expanding. It is fairly brilliant to get to speak to roomfuls of kids (lots of whom are keen readers) about books and writing, and meet lots of authors and illustrators. Plus the food was really good.

3. Here is my talk from TEDx St Hilda's School back at the start of May (it is rather hilarious watching myself speak. I am also getting to the point now where the sound of my own voice doesn't make me recoil in horror, which is a good thing). It's about the way teenagers are portrayed in the media vs. how great teenagers actually are (the audience was about 95% teenage girls):


4. Here is an interview that the very lovely kids at Voiceworks magazine did with me while I was in Melbourne (I say they are kids when really they are 20-somethings and older than me, but it's a youth literary magazine so I think I can get away with it) (The last question is my favourite one):

Voix interview: Steph Bowe from Voiceworks Magazine on Vimeo.

5. It is difficult to write about what you've been up to on the internet without it coming across as bragging, and it is sort of un-Australian (I have no idea where to put the capital in that word, or if there even should be one) to talk about yourself too much. I tend to be very self-deprecating generally, so the business of self-promotion is a very odd one to me. My next post isn't all about me, I promise.

Wildlife by Fiona Wood

Wildlife is lovely, lovely and a bit more grown-up than Six Impossible Things. I suppose it is a sequel, or a companion novel, and I daresay I like Wildlife even better.

I have been in Melbourne for almost two weeks and I only brought the one book with me (I have been very busy sitting on trains and trams and thinking about things, so one book was enough) and it is not an especially long novel so I have been rather dragging out the process of reading it. You know how difficult trying to spend two weeks reading such a splendid novel? Very difficult. I wanted to read it all at once, but in an amazing example of self-control I took my time. It is a beautifully written novel, worth the three-year wait since Six Impossible Things.

Oh, here's the blurb:

Boarding for a term in the wilderness, sixteen-year-old Sibylla expects the gruesome outdoor education program – but friendship complications, and love that goes wrong? They’re extra-curricula.

Enter Lou from Six Impossible Things – the reluctant new girl for this term in the great outdoors. Fragile behind an implacable mask, she is grieving a death that occurred almost a year ago. Despite herself, Lou becomes intrigued by the unfolding drama between her housemates Sibylla and Holly, and has to decide whether to end her self-imposed detachment and join the fray.

And as Sibylla confronts a tangle of betrayal, she needs to renegotiate everything she thought she knew about surviving in the wild.

It is really wonderfully, beautifully written and heartfelt, and my favourite character (and the one I related to most) was probably Michael. It's only shortfalls in my eyes would be the occasional sense of a little too much learning lessons/growing up/figuring out (I have this issue with lots of coming-of-age novels though - nothing ever feels big or significant or life-changing as you experience it, 'personal growth' tends to only be noticed in retrospect in real life) and the obviousness of the toxicity of Holly's relationship with Sibylla (though, really, that's fairly realistic). I found the relationships between the characters to be very authentically teenaged (I love Sibylla and her over-thinking and her self-conscious teenagedness. Teenageryness? Teenness? Those aren't words, but I hope you understand what I mean). Lou's grief was very, very well written (Lou is my other favourite. I was sad that Fred and Estelle and co were 'off-page', but I did love that they were mentioned, even though they were away in France).

Here's a rather lengthy excerpt from the publisher's website, and here it is on Goodreads. This review would be longer but I am on a computer at a library and they only give you sixty minutes and I've spent rather a lot of time thinking and staring out the window while sitting here. I have also just noticed what a noisy typist I am. Anyway! In conclusion - Wildlife, lovely, beautiful contemporary Australian YA. File under 'books I wish I had written'.

On what literature is really about, and being a "serious" writer

Literary snobs annoy me. They annoy me a lot.

I tire of the idea that the only "serious" writers are the ones writing literary fiction.

I tire of the idea that I am less real as a writer or work less hard or am somehow less important because I write books for teenagers.

And I think it is absolutely absurd when people say things like "That isn't what literature is about."

Like, the only stories of worth have to examine the human condition and be about death and some middle-class white bloke wandering about doing nothing for four hundred pages (as written by some narcissistic middle-class white bloke).

About 90% of the time when I read a critically-acclaimed, award-winning novel I am just baffled. (Generally of the books-for-adults variety. I usually like the YA award winners.)

A great deal of literary fiction seems to be about literary fiction which, to me, is very odd. It's like an entire genre of in-jokes.

I dislike the idea that all the important stories must be depressing. I think that literature can and should be about a lot of things. Entertainment and comfort and whatever it is the reader wants out of it. I don't know, I think there's enough depressing in the real world without every novel of "value" (how do we ascribe this value? how does this work?) being so incredibly depressing.

I think the idea of "serious" and "non-serious" writers is stupidly linear. (Maybe I should add "unserious writer" to my bio. I'm not sure I could ever be, or be considered, a "serious" writer.) I am, however, very uncool and not really part of any literary scene and likely not a future award-winner, so perhaps I am not the best person to listen to.

To sum up:
1. I have forgotten how to write blog posts.
2. People who talk about "serious" fiction are irritating.
3. Lots of novels are important and have value and bring people joy and make them think! Stories, I love them all! Stop acting like your genre is by default superior to mine!

Life in Outer Space by Melissa Keil

The first novel published through Hardie Grant Egmont's new Ampersand Project, an imprint dedicated to debut YA novels, Life In Outer Space is just the loveliest. As a result, I am very much looking forward to what the Ampersand Project discovers next.

Reminiscent of Six Impossible Things by Fiona Wood in terms of adorable romance (and a little bit Shirley Marr's Preloved too), Life In Outer Space is just nice, you know? I don't know how to express this properly (if we could mind-meld you'd get it - how much easier everything would be if we could mind-meld), but sometimes I tire of all the edgy, and the gritty, and the ever-present overly masculine and borderline-disturbing love interest (I mean, really) and I just want to read a novel with people I can relate to in it. It's like a YA novel version of a rom-com with all these socially awkward nerdy kids in it (who are actually really cool and awesome, despite their professed geekiness).

It's funny and endearing and chock full of movie references (do you think I've used the phrase 'chock full' on this blog before?) and there's a little bit of World of Warcraft in there, too. It's not groundbreaking - just boy-meets-girl, boy-is-socially-awkward, boy-eventually-realises-he-loves-girl but it's so darn nice/adorably funny. I love Camilla myself, and I also love Melissa Keil and I'd quite like it if another Keil novel were published very soon (why must it take so long for books to be written? Again, mind-melds, they'd be handy).

Here it is on Goodreads, should you care for a blurb or a second opinion.