YA
BOOK DEAL NEWS!
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Some of you who are readers of either my blog or Amie Kaufman’s blog may know that we’ve been working on a collaborative novel together. We’ve been writing together in one form or another ever since we met a bit over six years ago, so it seemed like no big thing to evolve from that to writing a novel together, but—at the risk of sounding totally lame—once we started working on WRECKED, we knew it was something pretty awesome.
We finally finished the first draft at the end of October, though “first draft” is a bit misleading—through our collaboration we’d done a ton of editing for each other, so it was a much tighter draft than that implies. We gave it to our amazing agents (we knew being in the same agency would come in handy!) and they raced through it and gave us a weekend to make a few changes before they sent it off to editors.
Why YA?
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Sometimes when I have the “What do you do/I’m a writer/Oh, what do you write/Books for kids” conversation with new people, I get a Look that I’ve come to recognize. It’s the “Oh. For kids. So not real books” look. (It’s similar to the “Oh, fantasy” look, but that’s another blog post.) I always find it amusing–and a little sad–because it makes me realize that these people have forgotten what it was like to read books when they were a kid.