My book baby, LOVE, SAX, AND ALL THAT JAZZ finally has a home! *Cue confetti* It will be published next year with Elk Lake and I am truly grateful. YA Christian contemporary fiction has become a hard sell, but after revising this novel from general market to the Christian market, I grew even more in love with the story and the message and believe in its importance. I am so glad I will get to share it with the world soon. Once I have order links, you will be able to find that on the About page, but as I have mentioned before, the best way to stay on top of the latest is my Substack or Instagram.
Substack
Hello! Here’s another post from the great beyond to let you know you can now find updates on me through Substack. I’m still not abandoning my webpage because there’s so much history to it and I still love the look of it, plus I hope one day I’ll be able to add links to buy my books and such. But since I’m here, I’ll give a brief update. My book has been on submission for about a year now through my agent. In that year I have received full requests that ended in rejections and flat-out rejections, but no one has critiqued my writing itself. My book is still out there and I still have hope that Love, Sax, and All That Jazz will find the right home! While it’s been a year of this process, there are months that can pass by when someone is looking at your book before they give you a yes or no, so it’s a long game for sure!
I have been trying to work on a new book, but this time last year I found out I was pregnant with our second child, and she came in November, right after Thanksgiving! I’m still figuring out life as a SAHM to an extremely active preschooler and a chill baby and the time to write. It’s not as much as I would like, but I feel that when I do it and make myself focus, I can get some words down, and progress is progress. I’m liking this current project, a YA murder mystery with friends to lovers adapated from Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?. I occassionally share snippets about it on my Instagram, where is the place you’ll find me most these days.
Delayed News
If you told me a decade ago that I would be writing my blog post sharing such exciting news three months after it happened, I would have been dumbfounded. But such is the sad state of my blog. But trust me, I’ve shared this elsewhere.
I have an agent!
*Cue confetti*
I signed with Stephanie Cardel of Lighthouse Literary in December, and we hit the ground running. Over the holidays and all through January I was revising, last month we sent our first round of proposals to publishers, and for now it’s just obsessing waiting and brainstorming/plotting/writing new and revised story ideas.
I have added a sign-up form on my About page for my newsletter, which I have been sending once a month since January. Get signed up to stay in the loop, since you know I’m not going to be prompt on here. Perhaps one day I’ll write out a “how I got my agent” post, but the short of it is that while I did not have to query long, this was a long process in terms of the years of hard work I put into getting this book in the best shape I could before I queried, wanting to be sure that I did not repeat my first attempt in 2017 of not being nearly as ready as I had hoped and believed.
I’m very hopeful for what’s to come. 🙂
The Changing State of YA
I have lately seen an outcry in the Bookstagram community from some that YA has become too mature. I can’t deny that this is true. I have had to become more careful over the years when I choose YA books to read because the spectrum of clean to explicit content is more all over the map in the genre than I believe it was 10 years ago. But this didn’t happen overnight. The writing has been on the wall for a while. Not to mention, a lot of previous YA-heavy readers abandoned ship a few years ago because they wanted something more mature.
I know that for me, while I am writing YA and still love pockets of it, I have slowly gravitated away from a lot of it as well. For me it’s not about YA being too immature, though there are YA books out there like that for me, but it feels too much like a minefield amongst the newer and unknown-to-me authors in the genre in terms of content. One of the things that gravitated me towards YA when I got back into reading a decade ago was that it was generally cleaner. Now that it’s harder to guarantee that, sometimes I just prefer to pick up something I know without a doubt will be clean.
What exactly defines clean is a whole other topic that could be discussed, but it’s not something I wanted to get into for this post.
As someone who is trying to break into YA publishing, it’s a little concerning for me to realize I might be a little bit “behind,” because the YA I want to write is closer to YA that was published in 2017 than YA being published in 2022. Though it’s not exclusively the case. For example, Caroline George is a good example of an author whose footsteps I would like to follow. And the truth is not that I can’t keep up with reading in the current market, and I still do have my pulse on pockets of it as previously stated, but the reader I am targeting is the one who preferred the style of YA books we were getting a few years ago (but seem like decades ago in 2022 publishing world). Does this make me outdated? I’m sure some would say so, but I see a lot of interest for this within the bookish community. Like I saw friends on Facebook asking for dystopia recommendations years after publishers were releasing new material in the genre.
A lot of clean YA fantasy authors are thriving with their works being self-published or published at Enclave, but there doesn’t seem to be the same community for contemporary. Again, I do believe the readers are there. There just hasn’t been a coalition of YA authors who write clean contemporary that have been formed that I am aware of. If you know of one, please let me know in the comments!
In case it sounds like I’m obsessed with exclusively squeaky clean books, that’s not the case. But there is something to be said about continuing to publish these books for the people who want them. As Charles Shulz once said, “There’s always a market for innocence.” I don’t think clean and innocence are necessarily interchangeable, but I do think there is something to that.
So yes, it’s my first blog post in two years and again, no promises that I am back regularly, but it felt high time to revamp things around here. So take a look around, and don’t forget to follow me on Instagram, where I’m at entirely too much.
Happy reading, friends! Let me know what you think in the comments about the current state of YA.
A Much Overdue Update
*Taps microphone*
Is this thing on?
This corner of the internet that I have neglected has remained in the back of my mind for the past year and a half, but when I half-heartedly renewed my domain again, I thought it was really and truly time to hop back on and post. I don’t know if anyone is reading this and I’m not promising regular content, but I did want to clear out the virtual cobwebs.
So we don’t have to go into the craziness of 2020, we’re all living it, but the other major life update I can share is that in May 2019 I welcomed my beautiful daughter in the world and obviously nothing has been the same since – both in the best way and the hardest way. She is now a crazy smart, crazy active, and crazy cute fourteen month old who wears me out and lights up my life all at the same time.
I am still actively reading, but it has slowed down quite a bit (unless we count my daily consumption of the works of Sandra Boynton as well as Corduroy’s Colors and whatever else baby girl’s favorite is that week). I am starting to feel burned out on YA, at least newer YA, as well as some of the negativity of the culture in general, and I am trying to get more into non-fiction, but have not actually read much of it yet. I think starting next month I will start a monthly goal of reading 1 YA fiction, 1 non-fiction, and 1 other fiction and see how that goes.
I am also on and off with writing lately, but since I am back in rotation with my writing critique group I need to get my act together and get back into that. Things have just been kind of crazy in my personal life these past couple of weeks, with my husband’s grandfather’s health failing (not technically COVID-releated, though I think being in lockdown didn’t help him), a less-than-relaxing vacation, and then my husband’s grandfather ultimately passing away. I am ready for things to normalize again, as much as they can these days anyway.
I would like to occasionally post again, but I’m not sure what it will look like if I do. 2019 feels so long ago I can’t imagine doing a post on my top reads of the year, and I’m not enthusiastic enough about my reads of 2020 to discuss what I’ve read so far this year. Mostly, this is just a little wave into hyperspace, to let you know I’m here. I’ve slowed down my activity on Twitter and somewhat on Instagram, but you can still find me there, @acshawya.
See you around…