It's no secret that I have three teenage boys that live at home plus a twenty year old that's out of the house, but nonetheless, they have or are going through the growing pains of being a teenager.
I deal with teenage girls on a daily basis because when you have that many boys in the house, you have to multiply that by 4 because that is how many more teenage boys are in my house THEN you have to multiply that by 7 because that is how many girls will be here at a given time.
When I say I'm around teenagers all the time. . .I meant that I'm literally around teenagers ALL. THE. TIME!
I don't mind. My hubby and I would much rather them be under our roof than somewhere else not knowing where they are. Plus the girls are fun. They like me and give me the girly time I need to thank God that he didn't give me girls *grin*. And my boys think it's cool that the girls at school really like their mom and the teens think it's cool I'm a writer.
Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, always asks me why I don't write Young Adult. My standard response, "ARE YOU KIDDING? I live with it 24/7. Why would I want to write about it?"
Five years later. . .I did it.
I wrote and finished a Young Adult novel.
My niece, for those of you who don't know me~I LOVE LOVE LOVE my niece and nephew like my own and they are 14 and 16 so the same ages as my guys~anyways (see my mind works like a teen), my niece and her high school friends have been my peer audience. Final verdict~THEY LOVED IT!
One of the girls said that she was completely in love with the hot hunky hero! Shh....secretly I am too!
Still...it's a novel that has all the teen angst, sex, social issues that include drugs, drinking and being bullied. BUT it's a Tonya Kappes novel. You know what that means! There is totally a fun loving, eccentric character along with some paranormal.
I have to say that I learned a lot about the teens of today and surprised how truly there isn't a whole lot of difference from when I was a teen (which was well over twenty years ago) in the way they think, social settings, and sex.
Pretty In Pink, which happens to be one mine and my guys fav movies, is truly NOT that far off from today's teens. The boys are still goofy, the girls are still too mature for their age, the partying is still going on with the drinking and sex but the clothes have changed.
I guess you can say that I have pretty good research material when it came to writing the Young Adult. Surprisingly I found that I have a true writer's voice for the genre and really enjoyed writing it.
Do you read Young Adult? What do you like about it?
Leave a comment and I will send the winner an ARC copy of A GHOSTLY UNDERTAKING and some swag!