New Adult...Again

There are things in the publishing industry that get talked about ad nauseum. And just when you think the conversation is over, it pops up again. Fortunately or unfortunately, the conversation about New Adult and what it is refuses to quiet... at all.

Just yesterday I was confronted by an author who defined New Adult based on sex--you know, like the media has been. The fact that it's the same media who poo-poos genre fiction (especially romance) and refers to erotica as "mommy porn" is not lost on me. It's why I shake my head at the media and move on, but when I see authors--who have been around the block for a while--falling into the same patterns, I kind of want to puke on their heads.

Saying New Adult is Young Adult with sex isn't much different than saying Young Adult is Chapter Books but with kissing. No. JUST NO!

*ahem* Forgive me, but this pisses me off.

I went to college. Was sex part of my life? Yes. But it didn't define my life at that time. It shouldn't define the genre either.

Things that do define it, kind of by definition?

• Age (or apparent age) of the main character(s)--18 to 25 is a generally accepted range, though the upper limit (in my opinion) depends greatly on where the characters are in life.
• Beginnings--Post high school is a time of new beginnings, whether it's going to college or getting the first real job, or just escaping from under the thumb of parents in whatever way possible. 

Um... yeah. There you go. Where Young Adult is about coming of age, New Adult is about self-discovery. (Granted, there are people like me who are much older that are still discovering who we are, but that's beside the point because it's different at this age than it was then.)

Yes, sex is a part of that time. So is leaving home. So is being broke (much of the time). So is legally drinking. So are... a lot of things. But they don't define that age group. There could easily be a book written about a young soldier in war that could be New Adult if written a certain way. No sex. No love interest. Just some hard truths about what it's like to be a soldier in another country, away from everything you know, where people around you are dying, and realizing you might be next. With the focus put on the life the soldier hasn't lived yet, it could most definitely speak to that whole "beginnings." It doesn't need sex for that.

To put it another way, getting older and a degree of growing up is required. Sex is optional.

/steps off soapbox and puts away megaphone

Until next time.

Young at Heart

Okay, I'm not old. I just turned 31, which I consider to be just barely old enough to justify me acting like an adult. And young enough to still call my parents for advice about stuff. I'm married, though, so that ups the relative age a few years. Given how many nights I stay in reading instead of going out and partying my youth away, I'm probably even older than I thought.

Plus I just got my first real wrinkle.

Oh god. I'm ancient.

*chugs a bottle of wine*

Okay, I'm better now. Normally, I could care less about age. I mean, on the internet, no one knows how old you are, right? And that's all that matters. Besides, in my day job, being older is an advantage (for some reason people get uppity about being charged $225 an hour to talk to someone who's younger than your grandchildren... and I can't say that I blame them!).

But I'm working on a Young Adult novel these days. And my heroine is in high school.

I barely remember high school. My overwhelming impression of it is that I couldn't wait for it to be over. I even considered graduating a year early to escape to college. I didn't, but man, I wanted to.

So how am I supposed to write a book with believable high school characters when I can barely remember what high school was like?

If I were older and had kids of my own, I'd pester them until they told me. If I had cousins or nieces or nephews that were in high school, you can count I'd be harassing them for the hip new things. But I don't. So short of hanging around the local high school until I get arrested, what's a girl an old lady perfectly aged female individual to do?

I do have some leeway because this is scifi YA, so a couple hundred years in the future, who knows what kids those days will be saying/doing? But attitude will probably stay the same (unfortunately!)

So I've been watching a lot of teen movies. Yeah, sure, they feature 20-somethings trying to pretend like they're high schoolers, but they do a pretty good job of getting across the stereotypical teenage drama. Any suggestions for movies or TV I should check out?

Otherwise, I'm up a creek until my non-existent children are conceived, born, and grow up.

Although I did just get a monster zit, so maybe I'm regressing. In no time, I'll remember what life in the super cool crowd in high school was like (Yeah, right. I was a nerdy loser back then. And now.)

Like, totes later, dudes!