I'm heading off to Ireland at the end of
the week where I'll be largely without Internet and so
won't be posting again until I'm back in June. Generally
the Irish are just as addicted to the Internet
as anyone but it happens that my in-laws are sans connection.
To be honest, I think every year that we visit it gets
a little harder for me to say goodbye to our free-flowing
home Internet connection. It's begun to feel more and
more like drinkable water, like something surely everyone
has on tap which I realize is a pretty darn over-privileged
sentiment because not everyone actually has constant
access to things like clean water, Internet, or health
care.
And yet here I am wondering how uncomfortable it will be to spend just over two weeks without ready access...that's not right on multiple levels. So, yeah, I think I need to start spending less time on the net. It's a world of information but then, so is the actual world!
Before I get busy packing and stuff I want to thank everyone who has expressed an interest in Come See About Me. It's going through copy-editing at the moment and I can't wait to get it out into the world. It's been very cool to see NA Alley, a blog devoted to New Adult fiction, spring up recently. A couple of days ago they posted a terrific entry explaining that the new adult category is a response to agents, editors and publishers who routinely turn down novels (or request aging characters up or down) with main characters deemed too young for adult but too old for YA.
It does seem that if we left the fate of books with twenty-year-old main characters solely in the hands of traditional publishing there would be precious few. So while I can understand people not warming up to the idea of an NA category because it may seem like pigeonholing, I think the pigeonholing has already happened around new adult fiction, leaving a gap. Can that gap be filled without putting a label on it when YA and adult fiction seem to already have been strictly defined to omit characters nineteen through their early twenties or would eschewing the label just mean those characters continue to be a rarity in traditional publishing?
In any case I'm happy to see writers taking matters into their own hands and releasing stories about young characters that neither fall under the heading of YA nor adult. Slán go fóill.
And yet here I am wondering how uncomfortable it will be to spend just over two weeks without ready access...that's not right on multiple levels. So, yeah, I think I need to start spending less time on the net. It's a world of information but then, so is the actual world!
Before I get busy packing and stuff I want to thank everyone who has expressed an interest in Come See About Me. It's going through copy-editing at the moment and I can't wait to get it out into the world. It's been very cool to see NA Alley, a blog devoted to New Adult fiction, spring up recently. A couple of days ago they posted a terrific entry explaining that the new adult category is a response to agents, editors and publishers who routinely turn down novels (or request aging characters up or down) with main characters deemed too young for adult but too old for YA.
It does seem that if we left the fate of books with twenty-year-old main characters solely in the hands of traditional publishing there would be precious few. So while I can understand people not warming up to the idea of an NA category because it may seem like pigeonholing, I think the pigeonholing has already happened around new adult fiction, leaving a gap. Can that gap be filled without putting a label on it when YA and adult fiction seem to already have been strictly defined to omit characters nineteen through their early twenties or would eschewing the label just mean those characters continue to be a rarity in traditional publishing?
In any case I'm happy to see writers taking matters into their own hands and releasing stories about young characters that neither fall under the heading of YA nor adult. Slán go fóill.
