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)