Snow, plot building, and YA readership

We have snow!! Okay, so truth be told, it snowed yesterday and last night and we had snow on the ground, but it's not quite cold enough to keep. So now the ground is just muddy. But (shh--don't tell the kids!) that's okay. It's nigh impossible to push a stroller through the snow, and since that's how I shop, I'd really prefer not to have a snowy winter.

The weather, though, makes me want to hole up and read. I've got Gatty, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, on hold at the library, and after flipping through it in the bookstore I'm very eager to start reading, despite the German. What I should do instead is get back to the WIP. I've had kind of a long hiatus while revising Heron. That was good for the WIP. I think I've figured out some of the bits I was trying to get straight before. But now that I have, I've got to do a restructuring to take that into account. This sort of thing makes me feel like I need modeling clay in different colors. I see plot as a built sort of thing. Hmm, maybe a lego representation of the story? That way I could wear the mom AND the writer hat....

And, there was an interesting discussion at Nathan Bransford's blog yesterday on YA and who reads it. It seems that a lot of writer folks turn up their noses at YA (YA writers not included, of course). "Well, I certainly never read YA! I went straight to adult books at age 12!" As if reading YA would give them a disease we don't talk about or something. Yes, I remember maxing out my library's offerings around that age, too, but it didn't mean I gave up on YA. I knew it was out there, even if my particular library hadn't had an acquisitions budget since Reconstruction. That was the time when I bought a lot of books.

Maybe part of the problem is that there really wasn't such a wide selection available Way Back When. Maybe that's why people assume that YA is synonymous with flippant beach reads. There's certainly a place for light and fun. But there are so many kinds of YA books out there that it's ridiculous to dismiss it all as pulpy fluff. Octavian Nothing? House of the Scorpion? The Book Thief? River Secrets (the strongest pro-peace book I've read in a long time)? Speak? Kevin Crossley-Holland's books? Um, they're not fluff. Entertaining to read, yes. Well-written, yes. But not fluff.

And teens today do read YA. Buy it. Borrow it. I work with these people, and had great book conversations with them. My books that teens have borrowed from me have come back considerably uh, well-loved, shall we say. (Which delights me.) And if the rising frequency of big advances for YA isn't a sign that the industry expects more people to buy these books, I don't know what is. Pull your heads out of the sand, O ye adults, and behold the teens reading around you.

Yeah, the comments trail really hit a nerve with me.