Day two of my “posting every day” week, and already I’m groaning. But this is partially because I drove halfway across England today, and now I have to pack to get on a flight tomorrow.

So, let’s see how may questions I can get through before I have to go ask Oscar if he’s seen my passport. Oh, and I have Free Monkeys and the Wee Free Monkeys bags to pack!

DEPARTMENT OF INSTRUCTION

anonymous said…
I am insanely jealous of my English teacher, who is going to said English conference. Would you be totally terrified if a lady in her sixties came up to you and asked for a book signing for one of her seniors?

No! Nothing scares me, except the many, many things I have listed on my official Lists of Fears. I am happy to see EVERYONE who comes to a signing! Please have her stop by! Visitors are good! Otherwise I get bored and start playing “fort” under the skirts of the signing table.

laura said…
I have a Very Important Question to ask of you. My English teacher is very disapproving of YA literature. He saw I was reading Dramarama by E. Lockhart (and I’m sure you know full well how amazing E. Lockhart is) and actually scoffed at it. How can I convince him that all YA isn’t bad? That’s it’s actually quite a wonderful genre for teens, not just fluffy, mindless, dumbed down crap that he seems to think it is and that it’s not a waste of my time and intelligence?

Is this still going on? Really? Part of me (the part that isn’t done her laundry) wants Justine Larbalestier to answer this question, because she is a force of nature and the best advocate of YA literature I’ve ever met. This question needs a good answer. But let me have a quick crack at it.

First of all, it annoys me to no end that someone scoffed at Dramarama. He obviously hasn’t read it. I am glad YOU have.

I think people who object to YA . . . or THINK they object to YA, largely because they haven’t read much of it . . . do so because they have a problem with books that are a.) not specifically targeted at adults (though they can be read by adults), and b.) because they weren’t written over fifty years ago.

The first objection is crazy because some of the most acclaimed works of literature out there would technically fall under the category of YA if they were published now. Catcher in the Rye, for example, squarely hits the YA mark . . . as do Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist . . . most of Jane Austen, when you think about it . . .

So, let’s not worry about that. We’re left with the problem of the books being new, and that’s just as stupid. Great new books are written all the time, and EVERY book is a new book at some point.

Are there trashy YA books out there? Of course there are. But to say YA is a vast land of trash is an act of profound ignorance. Did he say WHY he thought this? Was it the covers? If it IS the covers . . . see my comments later on that subject!

kayli said…
I would like to know whether you’ve ever gotten lost while drinking tea.

Yes. It was in high school. I remember I had a cup of tea while I was riding in the back of a van with my insane sophomore year religion teacher, who was a 23 year-old ex-seminary student. I will call him Mr. Noodles.

Mr. Noodles wore huge red glasses and bright red sweaters. He was the kind of person who likes to tell you how smart they are—which is usually a pretty sure sign that they’re missing a critical chip somewhere in the personality sector. He liked to be very “progressive” by having us analyze U2 lyrics in class while he played the guitar. (Guitars in church or class are pretty much always the sign of doom.) And instead of our regulation religion textbook, we had to read Hidden Victory: A Novel of Christ. (All I remember about Hidden Victory was that I borrowed a copy from everyone in my homeroom one day, and then broke into my best friend’s locker, stole all the contents, and entirely replaced them with Hidden Victories . . . which she did NOT find funny because she’d been up until 3 AM doing a pre-Christmas shift and re-stocking session at her job at the Gap and she had to cram for a Spanish exam in the morning. So my little joke did not go down as well as I had hoped.)

Anyway . . . it was with this teacher that I went from being a little scared of telling anyone at my Catholic school that I wasn’t Catholic to advertising the fact every fourteen seconds, usually by prefacing my every remark with, “Well, I probably don’t understand this because I’m not Catholic, but . . .”

He was just one of those people who . . . I don’t know . . . PROVOKES you. You know what I mean? Makes you kind of . . . obnoxious? And you know you’re being obnoxious, but you JUST CAN’T STOP. I was pretty docile otherwise, as I remember it. But he just brought it out of me.

To be fair to teenage mj, this was a guy who claimed to have a mathematical formula that proved the existence of God. I asked to see it, and he said it was too complicated, and I said, “Well, I probably don’t understand this because I’m not Catholic, but . . . if you really have that . . . shouldn’t it be the only thing we ever learn, ever? I mean, shouldn’t we take every single math class under the sun to be able to understand it? Shouldn’t we put aside our copies of Hidden Victory: A Novel of Christ? And shouldn’t we be let out of gym FOR SURE?”

So, he hated me. Every time I raised my hand, I saw him lose minutes off his lifespan. What made me feel justified was that I could tell that he really thought I was some kind of lesser being for not being Catholic, and therefore, he needed to be taught tolerance. By me.

To get to the tea . . .

So we were going on retreat, which was a very long and tedious day spent off at the retired nuns’ home, watching videos with engaging titles like “Waiting for Love is Beautiful” and doing “sharing exercises” that were mostly just opportunities for our teachers to yell at us about our slouching knee socks in a woodland setting. He drove about seven of us. How I ended up in his van, I seriously have no idea. But, being progressive, he allowed us to have BEVERAGES. (Honestly, this is the kind of thing that passed for a HUGE DEAL in our school.) He got totally lost while driving along. It was clear that he had completely botched the instructions and we had no idea where we were—and he was starting to freak out when it appeared that we were heading towards the other side of the state.

Do you know that delivery company, Guaranteed Overnight Delivery? The one who have the G.O.D. logo on the side of their trucks? One of those drove past. And I leaned forward and said, “Hey, Mr. Noodles . . . there goes God. Why don’t you follow him?”

To his credit, he didn’t punch me in the face.

DEPARTMENT OF COVER STORIES

liz said…
MJ, I’m sorry, but that cover is AWFUL. The girl looks like she ducked her head in peroxide and proceeded attempt to put her hair in curls.
Do you have a lot of say in the covers of your books?

I see what you’re saying, Liz . . . but let me tell you some background, and that might make it clear why I like this so much. While people might have varying opinions on the model and pose, a lot of work went into getting the basic facts straight. Scarlett is blonde, has curly hair of exactly the length described, and both that black dress and red lipstick play a part in the story. It may not look exactly as it does in my head, or how it might in yours . . . but it’s RIGHT!

What excited me more (and which you can’t really this see very well, sadly), was that the art team went to the trouble of finding an Art Deco hotel in New York like the Hopewell Hotel (the story’s setting). That’s where the photo shoot took place. Even cooler . . . there’s Hopewell Hotel stationary on the back cover. When I saw that, I got a little crazy and called Daphne in excitement.

But you know what? Obviously, I want a nice cover, but the truth is . . . the cover has very little to do with what’s inside. In fact, it has nothing to do with what’s inside. I get annoyed by some covers too. Honestly, I just take them off. Feel free to replace them with the cover of another book. Or, even better, feel free to make your own!

I hope you like the story. I really think you will.

Okay. Oscar says he can’t find my passport, and the Wee Free Monkeys are flinging my socks around the room. I’ll be back tomorrow, probably from a plane. I won’t let you down!

Posted: Thursday, November 15th, 2007 @ 12:29 am
Categories: Uncategorized.
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