Reading.

Yesterday I went to the library to pay my fines (I'd gotten in a bad way post-surgery and neglected to return a big stack of books), enjoy the air conditioning, and pick out a new stack of novels.  Being able to walk four blocks to my local library definitely ranks high on my list of things to love about city life, hence why I was appalled that my convalescence, followed by my late fine issues, contributed to my only finishing four (!) books so far this year.

Mind you, there are others that I've started and not finished, but that hardly counts.  Any artist worth her salt knows you've got to expose yourself to what's out there if you want to succeed.  Even if you're creating work that's wholly original, it still exists in our cultural context and in the larger canon of People Doing Work in Similar Genres.  So even if no one's doing performance art quite like yours, there are still thousands of performance artists out there and you'd damn well better know what a a bunch of them are doing.

To that end, I've been trying to take in a healthy dose of young adult fiction.  Part of me feels very reassured by what I'm reading, in that even though this is published work, I feel I could still mark it up and give plenty of editorial suggestions.  Also, when I work on my own manuscript I feel more and more like it's developing the proper tone for a young adult novel.

The only hang-up is, sometimes I find young adult fiction a bit patronizing or superficial or just plain, well, juvenile.  And that's not what I want for my work—at all.  So I feel I need to walk a fine line between addressing "adult" issues and content in a way that's accessible for younger (i.e. late teen) readers and producing high-caliber writing.

As an aside, remember how I read a 472-page book in one sitting a while back?  I've already finished one book since 3:00 yesterday afternoon and I'm well into another.  This is a genre I tend to plow through like snack food at an all-day conference: after going back a few times I realize I've eaten way more than anyone could consider dignified.  I'm offsetting this by also reading The Tempest and a real and true grown-up novel that kept catching my eye on the library shelves.

While we're on the subject of books, here's an open call: of the young adult fiction I read, much of it has (spoiler alert!) LGBT themes.  If you've got any favorites, especially ones that focus on the 'B' in LGBT (underrepresented, you don't have to tell me), please let me know!