Bec Zugor

Today I'm delighted to welcome science fiction author, R B Harkess, whose Young Adult novel Aphrodite's Dawn has just been published by Proxima. I've already enjoyed some of his fiction, and I'm looking forward to reading more. Thanks for visiting, R B.

R B Harkess:

What’s in a name?

When a friend in my writing group suggested my style would work well with YA stories, I didn’t give it much thought and carried on beating my head against the thing I was working on at the time – ultimately unsuccessfully.

Several months later, I was beating my head against the keyboard again. It was time to start a new story. I had a good idea but wouldn’t plot – no matter how I tried. Then I remembered the YA comment and the story fell into place in, quite literally, a five minute epiphany. I spent the rest of the holiday I was on scribbling detailed plot notes and thoroughly annoying my wife.

So I went off and wrote the story, and it ended up being my debut novel. It’s called Aphrodite’s Dawn, and it has just been launched as an e-book.

But it wasn’t until I had actually sold the story I realised I didn’t have a clue what ‘Young Adult’ was all about. I remembered what I enjoyed reading when I had turned the corner into my teens and I’d read a few examples in the genre before I’d started writing, but that hardly constituted a definition. So I went looking.

And ended up really confused and somewhat surprised. YA doesn’t seem to know what it is. It is a world of extremes, ranging from the overtly moralistic through to tough, angry stories that even made me wince, and yet were included in the genre because the main character was in his or her teens and/or the tale involved ‘rites of passage’. It can’t even decide what age range it encompasses, with the younger boundary being between ten and thirteen, and the ‘older’ end being anything from seventeen to twenty-two!

And, eventually, I realised that this hugely open definition is actually one of the strengths of the ‘Young Adult’ label. People that age are hugely smarter than adults often give them credit for. OK, there is a lack of real-word experience, but they aren’t stupid (on the whole). I remember my ‘youth’, and I still remember the step change when I had read just about every book in the children’s section of the Bristol Central Lending library. I was not quite twelve when they handed me my full adult tickets. And suddenly I’m reading about very grown-up issues. There was no middle ground, not that anyone could point me towards and say ‘you might want to try those first’.

The ‘Young Adult’ genre offers a migration path, lets people progress through at a pace they’re comfortable with, without necessarily diving off the deep end. Every genre and style is there in the YA marketplace, and at just about every intensity you could need.

Many people brush the genre off as just being a marketing ploy, or a simple guide to tell the bookstore which shelf to put the book on. I think ‘Young Adult’ is more than that, and I’m really happy to be contributing to it.

(R B Harkess blogs at www.rbharkess.co.uk. Find his other contact details there. Aphrodite’s Dawn is published by Proxima Books, and is available from Amazon)

Time for a guest blogger! Today I’m honoured to have Lee Thompson stopping off at my ironing board. I was recently awestruck by Lee’s writing in his novelette As I Embrace My Jagged Edges, so I can’t wait to read more of his work. Welcome, Lee!

On Persevering…

I used to be extremely impulsive. Still am, to a degree. But waiting isn't so bad when the payoff is great. And that's something I try to keep in mind. Yeah, there's pain in rejection with anything we have hopes for, each one a dandelion on our lawns, but we have to keep sifting through them if we want to find our four leaf clover. It takes sustained effort, hard work, total commitment and faith to get lucky and be successful in any endeavor.

When I started writing I knocked out a novel a year that only my buddy Greg saw. They were crap novels. It was only after reading Writer's Digest that I thought ''Hey! I'd love to get paid for this great art I'm creating!'' (Only it wasn't great art. They were the scribbling of an idiot. In high school I was as interested in English class as most teens are in getting gang raped.) But I thought I had some game. I wanted to believe. I'd spent most of my childhood dreaming of doing something special (for at least me, but mostly for the whole damn world. I was idealistic.) But it takes a lot of skill to write a gripping and seemingly effortless story. And it still isn't going to change the world. But it can touch one heart and mind at a time. That in itself is beautiful. 

I've had more rejections than I can count in the last two years. Most of the time it was my fault, either because I didn't read the magazine, or I just rushed and sent the story out before it was ready. Now I have a much clearer idea of what I want in tone, structure, and conflict before even putting pen to paper. Then I get to tighten it up further when I type it. It works for me. I like it. *Smiley face* 

But I still get rejections. All the time. I usually have ten stories out at a time looking for homes. And it hurts when I get a handful of rejections in a row. But I think about the excitement of the story I'm working on and plow ahead. I've learned to set some stories aside after they've been rejected a half dozen times. I can come back to them later, see where I went wrong, got off track, clouded the story with useless words. 

I'm a firm believer in the 10,000 hour rule. Practice is only practice (going through the motions) without focused effort and working on a set of skills. Musicians do it. Athletes. Chess players. Artists. Writing's not any different. And lots of people give up before they ever reach that mark where most skills are second nature and before it appears effortless. 

To persevere you have to have a lot of faith in yourself. So how do you get it? You read and write and learn and revise. You find honest people who can give you an answer to Why the story didn't work for them, or simply what section, paragraph, or sentence. And you step back and are honest with yourself. Brutally so. 

Stories are fragile and robust. Just like us. They need a lot of work.  

My characters in NURSERY RHYMES 4 DEAD CHILDREN persevere. The deck is stacked against them in nearly every area of their lives: John McDonnell was writing Romance novels until his girlfriend and some other people told him he needs a regular job, so he takes on the job of Division's deputy even though he can't stand the sheriff, Pat Andrews, and like most people he wants to do what he wants to do even if everyone thinks he's a fool for it; John finds some slaughtered girls in the woods and a key that was buried with his brother inside one of their hollowed out chest cavities; he carries a lot of guilt over knocking his brother from the boat on the Loyalsock River and watching him drown; and a lot of things he doesn't understand start happening and he has to deal with them, they affect his quality of life, his happiness, peace, and self-respect. 

The deck is stacked against them, and they persevere… which is cool, because it's when we're near our breaking point that our character and ideals are tested, we can glimpse the primal face beneath the cracked skin of those we've fashioned to show the world. 

-Lee Thompson

http://alongthispathsodarkly.blogspot.com