• Young Adult. What is it?
  • FL: YA has burgeoned in the last decade. Books that have had younger protagonists and appealed to younger readers have always existed. The book was not different in the content or subject matter, but in the viewpoint of the character, and whether you are talking about something that is related at that time in life.
  • AE: I start by thinking: YA is about a teenager going through teen experiences. But then I think that my protagonist is really advanced, and dealing with stuff that teens don’t normally deal with. If a book merely has a teen protagonist, that doesn’t make it YA.
  • JR: middle-grade is targeted towards 8-12, and it’s a subject of children. YA is targeted for 13 and above, and it is really a subset of adult. The majority of YA readers are adults.
  • WC: A 1e-year old experience is vastly different than just a 19-year-old’s experience. You can’t just say “teen” and group it all together.
  • DM: it spans pre-pubescant to mature, sexually active adults.
• What is the purpose of the marketing? Is it for the parent? For the teen?
  • WC: Kids at 10 know all about sex.
  • FL: all sorts of violence are acceptable, but sex is not in a YA novel.
    • Got pushback from editor: couldn’t do YA because the male’s love interest was an older woman.
    • There is a line, but it’s really fuzzy.
    • With respect to sex: that lines is drawn in a more conservative way.
    • If the sexual experience is by two teenagers, then it can be a YA book.
  • JR: We’ve had all sorts of sexually things in a YA book, but they can’t just be a backdrop…the way sexual violence is in Game of Thrones. They have to be in the foreground and dealt with.
  • AE: My publisher pushed back more on my handling of violence. I had more explicit torture scenes, and then publisher wanted me to pull back and have those things off screen.
  • If there’s sex or violence in YA, it can’t be gratuitous, it has to advance the characters and the story.
    • WC: That should be true of all writing, not just YA.
• Do you approach YA differently then adult fiction?
  • FL: No, I just write it. And if there is pushback later, I’ll deal with it.
  • “Okay, give me the list: how many fucks and shits do I get to use?”
  • FL: Kids reach up. An advanced MG reader is reading into YA. They aren’t going to get and/or be ready for everything in YA.
• More women writing YA, more women reading YA. But men winning more awards in YA, even though they are minority of writers and readers.
• School librarians
  • Can be awesome, because they can get books into the hands of kids that wouldn’t otherwise get there.
  • But sometimes strange rules:
    • One library system: sex and torture is okay, but cussing of any kind is not allowed.
    • Another system: any amount of violence is okay, but no swearing or sex.
  • WC: I think you can tell any story without any fights, any sex, or any swearing, and still tell the same story. (I love fights scenes, but they aren’t necessary.)
  • JR: A good fight scene should still illuminate character.
  • FL: If you’re going to have violence, or sex, or swearing, it better serve the story, and you should put in just enough to do that.
• People who do teenage sex handled well in YA: Carrie Misrobian, Christina Ireland, Rae Carson.
• Q: How do you handle different reading levels? You can have a teenager who is mature and ready to deal with advanced topics, but not with adult reading level.
  • FL: I don’t. I just write what I write. But there is an organization out there who helps filter YA books by all of these criteria.
  • DM: Lexile rating helps categorize books for readers of certain abilities.

I glanced at my blog today and realized I’ve written very few posts lately. I’ve been working pretty hard on The Turing Exception. Between that work, my day job, and kids, I haven’t had a lot of time for blogging.

Most of January was spent working with my copyeditor. This is a bigger, more complex task that it might sound like. You might imagine that I turn my manuscript over to the copyeditor, and then get it back with a bunch of corrections, and it’s done.

In fact, what happens is closer to this:

• I send the manuscript.
• I get a bunch of questions in the beginning as my copyeditor goes to work.
• Then he goes radio-silent for two weeks as he gets deep into it.
• Then I get the manuscript back. This one contained about 4,000 changes.
• Some changes are easy to process: commas moved, spelling corrected, words replaced. I use Word’s change review, and it’s lots of clicking on “accept”. Still, it’s 4,000 changes, and it takes me several days of full-time work to review each change and accept it.
• Some changes are more difficult to handle. They might be a comment, like “you need more interior character dialogue here.” Then I need to go think about what the character is thinking about in that scene, and write a few paragraphs, keeping it consistent with everything going on around it.
• Some changes are widespread, like when I’ve described a single event several different ways over the course of a novel. Or used several different names to refer to one organization. I have to pick something, and then make sure it is consistent throughout.
• Some changes and comments I don’t understand, so I have to email back and forth with my copyeditor until I do, and then make the changes.
• When I’m done, I send the file back to the copyeditor, and now he can review my changes. There were about 300 on this last exchange.
• He accepts the ones that look good, but might have to make more corrections, which I then accept, and so on.

Eventually it’s done. The copyeditor and I are in agreement.

Then I get the manuscript to the proofreader. This is a second person who is focused on line-level items, like punctuation and spelling, although he’ll also catch some bigger issues. The manuscript came back from the proofreader with 800 changes. I basically go through all the same stuff as with the copyeditor. Some changes are straightforward, some are not.

If I make big changes, then it has to go back to the proofreader again for a second pass.

Along the way, I usually get feedback from beta readers who are getting back to me late. I hate to ignore feedback, so I do the best I can to address any issues they spotted, without breaking the copyediting / proofreading process.

Sometimes I’m trying to address beta reader feedback by changing only one or two words, to avoid having to do another round of proofreading. I remember this happening with The Last Firewall, where I think Brad Feld or Harper Reed said “I’m confused about what kind of vehicles exist in this world”. And so there’s a scene in the beginning of the book where Cat is crossing the street, and I had to get her to establish all the types of vehicles (ground cars, hover cars, and flying cars) in a single sentence, so that I didn’t make changes in multiple places.

I’m now one to three days away from finishing the proofreading cycle. When this is done, it will go to two different people for formatting: one person will generate the ebooks, and another will generate the PDF interior for the print book. Then I’ll need to carefully proofread both of those, to make sure nothing gets dropped, and no formatting errors or other mistakes are introduced.

It’s fairly intense work when the ball is in my court. But when it’s handed off to someone else, that’s my chance to do a little creative work. I’ve written about 15,000 words in Tomo, a new novel about privacy, social networks, and data profiling. No AI or robots…yet.

Last November, on a train ride to Seattle to see Ramez Naam and Greg Bear, I started book four of the Singularity series. Last Thursday, I finished the rough draft. I was very excited and did a little dance in my office. Of course, I’m not done. I’ve got to turn that draft into a cohesive story, polish that story into something that reads well, and get it edited, proofread, and then it goes into production (page layout, ebook conversion, cover design).

I’m excited to get it out, and I know other folks are excited to read it, but it’s still many months away from being available. I’m not sure exactly how long. It varies with each book, as I learn more, also depends on my work schedule. I’m making some small changes to my day job schedule that should give me more consecutive days of writing time, which will help me make steady progress.

For a few weeks though, I’ll be focused on other things: I’ve got to the second edition of Avogadro Corp fully out. I need to do some marketing work around my novel for kids ages 7 to 12, The Case of the Wilted Broccoli. I need to give a little attention to my Patreon campaign. And I’ve got blog posts I really want to write that I’ve put on the back burner while I worked on finishing the draft of book 4. At some point I also need to figure out a title for the fourth book.

But before the end of September, I should be back to work editing and revising.