Zen gardening, insane cats and the written word

Most of the ideas I have are for what would most likely be YA stories, since almost all of my stories have teens as main characters. I just find writing and writing about teens more interesting that adults.

I also read quite a bit of YA compared to other works, although not really anything advertised at romance first.

As for the violence, I'm confused a bit on that level. A few years ago, I would have said you'd have to cut it down quite a bit, but than I read The Hunger Games trilogy, which obviously had quite a bit of violence, including targeting children and teens. The Maze Runner is another one, which has a scene which pretty graphically describes a teen getting shot with a bow and arrow in the cheek, not to mention other deaths.

With few exceptions, the line seems to be no guns, unless they're wielding by bad guys.

Additionally, if the victims are not human, you seem to be able to get away with more. In several Young Wizards books, the main characters literally explode several enemy aliens. Also, the Redwall books, which are all about animals, have countless rats, stoats, weasels and the like getting beheaded, cut in twain, stabbed, sliced or otherwise eviscerated. The resulting mess isn't given in much detail, although the protagonists do have to wipe blood and gore from their swords on occasion.

I would love to copy this out and pasted it into my writers' group. I agree, YA can get away with more and more (though I'm seeing a huge backlash from parents on that but then again what do teens care what their parents think?)

I keep pointing out that my books aren't nearly as violent as The Hunger Games and it's just not registering with a few of them. I swear they're confusing YA with Juvenile.

That's how I read YA too, trying to find ones NOT advertised as romance is getting harder (or at least on Goodreads giveaways and my library). I know it seems silly for someone working within a romance subgenre not being thrilled with romance but that's the truth. I prefer romance as the subplot which is mostly how I write it.

The older I get, the harder it seems to get for me to get in touch with my inner teen. I do have two YA novels (Non-erotic) done and I did send one of those to the Harper Voyager open call. That's almost over with, with no word but then again, I didn't really expect there to be.

Feel free to post it wherever you like.

I do like romance as a subplot, as I tend to ship characters in my head no matter what I'm reading. I also have to agree with you on the romance takeover. At B&N they have an entire two rows for Paranormal Teen Romance and about half that space for Teen.

if it comes up again, I will (that or I'll mail him a link to the hunger games....)

Yes I think many readers ship the characters regardless. I am not entirely surprised about the romance take over. They assume the bulk of teen readers are girls and they assume that's all we want to read about. I'm assuming sales is bearing that theory out.

Ooh, those are fascinating points about violence! I'd already noticed the "wholesale slaughter of nonhumans is perfectly fine" issue before (robots, aliens, zombies, fierce beasts, etc), but I had never noticed that it's a factor whether the characters are using guns or not -- now that I think about it, though, I can't come up, off the top of my head, with a single YA that involves the characters using firearms (as opposed to bows, knives, magic, etc). For hunting, sometimes. But not offensively.

Innnnnteresting.

it is an interesting point. I've never really thought about the no guns but everything else is okay thing either. But like you I can't think of one where they had a gun except I think maybe in Steifvater's The Raven Boys (But I think they took it off the bad guy and at this point it might have been a knife. I read too fast and remember too little)

Make it gel, indeed.

What Marlex said. Pretty much all of it.

you and I have had the violence talks before. It's enough to make me want to bash my head on the ground

But that'd be too violent.

probably