Between Writing Reading

Apparently I should be reading Rose Fox's work over at Publishers Weekly more often, because she keeps coming out with really interesting articles. This time she's using her column to relate the difficulty YA authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith encountered when their (unnamed) literary agent attempted to force them to alter a gay character's orientation in their upcoming post-apocalyptic YA novel. In their own words: "Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing. An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us. The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation. Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand whi...

Tempest Rising by Tracy Deebs Tempest Maguire wants nothing more than to surf the killer waves near her California home; continue her steady relationship with her boyfriend, Mark; and take care of her brothers and surfer dad. But Tempest is half mermaid, and as her seventeenth birthday approaches, she will have to decide whether to remain on land or give herself to the ocean like her mother. The pull of the water becomes as insistent as her attraction to Kai, a gorgeous surfer whose uncanny abilities hint at an otherworldly identity as well. And when Tempest does finally give in to the water's temptation and enters a fantastical underwater world, she finds that a larger destiny awaits her-and that the entire ocean's future hangs in the balance. -Plot summary borrowed from Good Reads When I started with the mermaids theme for the summer, I really had expected more of them to be Paranormal Romances a la Twilight (love triangle, dark mysterious stranger, etc etc etc) an...