Why Don't Boys Read YA - and Concert Photos

art way through the 51 day marathon and my word counts per day have dropped to about 400 instead of 600. But, look at me! It's 8 am on a Saturday and I'm already up, ready to begin typing all the 1000s of words that are filling up three notebooks. Just in time to enter the Teen Novel Contest from Wyvern Publications, that I found out about from Aubrie.

Meanwhile, 19 year old author of Young Adult and Middle Grade books, Hannah, discusses why boys don't read YA; they skip from MG to regular adult books. Now, I'm against this sort of labelling in the first place (having read The Lord of the Rings, A Wrinkle in Time, Charlotte's Web and a host of other books all in about the same year, when I was 10-11), but it's the way the industry seems to work now (even if individual readers might not) and I go along with it while querying.

Hannah suggests that one of the reasons for this might be that YA novels stereotype boys into wimpy, nerdy, goody-two-shoes types. The novel I'm querying for at the moment, The Face of A Lion, might be more MG than YA; protagonist Austin is 12 going on 13, but he's neither a nerd nor a wimp and certainly not a gay foil for some strong willed female! He (and Kedi with him) runs the show and the two females both turn out to be villains. Maybe I should age him by a year or so and start marketing it as "a new non wimpy YA for boys"!

On a lighter note - you know, rather than repeating the same old question "why haven't I landed an agent yet?" - here are some shots from the Crowded House concert last week, at which I stood in nearly the same spot in front of the stage as the last time I saw Neil Finn (solo). Brilliant!

Also, I've made more YouTube playlists, this time for The Divine Comedy, who are touring and, as usual, never coming to Montreal.

Here's the one for A Short Album About Love:



In other music news, The Fallstars have a new song out!