YA Around the Net (to the accompaniment of ramblings)

Agent Colleen Lindsay asks "Where are all the book proposals for adult fiction?", while SF Signal does a mind-meld on YA recommendations, of which my favorite comments come from Sharyn November--especially in terms of differentiating between YA books that adults are likely to enjoy and YA books they are not likely to enjoy. Just as there are children's books adults will like and others that will bore them stupid. This makes more sense to me than anything I've read in recent weeks about the YA category. Although I don't read widely in YA, I don't at ALL doubt that there is great reading there for adults as well--I know there is, because I have been entranced and delighted by things like the early Harry Potter books, the Dark Materials books, and many others. And I'm thankful for a list, as given in the SF Signal piece, that allows me to seek out more good reading. (Another great list comes from Gwenda Bond, through my interview with her on Amazon's book blog--she mentioned Margo Lanagan's new novel, which looks amazing!)However, it does bother me to read in the comments thread to Lindsay's post of a writer being advised they should basically take out some bits from an existing novel to make it YA-friendly. No, this is NOT what an editor is telling them to do, but it is a widely perceived idea of what it takes to be published as YA among beginning writers--and this idea has the potential to do harm to the work of writers who may be more sensible in their prose than in their artistic/career decisions. (Still, this has ever been true about something. I remember during the Great Vampire Craze of the mid-1980s, everyone was putting a vampire in their novels; alas, then, for the Great Vampire Bust of the early 1990s, during which vampires were excised from novels more swiftly than the time it takes to endure some outpatient surgical procedures.)I guess it also boggles the mind--my mind at least--that any writer, in the main, has any choice in what they write. I could no more sit down and write a YA novel--at least, with a teen protagonist-than build a car from scratch. Why? I will freely confess that I usually do not like to read stories or novels featuring teenagers. It doesn't matter whether they are protagonists in the adult fiction of Stephen King or if they are the protagonists of a novel marketed as YA. This has nothing to do with the quality of the work. I simply don't like teenage protagonists most of the time, just as I do not like reading about the characters in most Westerns. There is, to my mind, nothing wrong with this. Every reader has their own dislikes and likes and should be free to sample literature based on their own personal barometer of what gives them pleasure and what gives them intellectual stimulation.Despite all of the great press for YA during the past few months--and any publicity that focuses on reading and wonderful books is a good thing; even better, if it's about getting teens to read--it is, all the same, difficult for me to understand why someone should be faulted for thinking the adult fiction section is usually better suited for them if they read mostly adult fiction anyway. At least, it is for me--with the caveat that I love then to get reading lists for a category like YA, where I generally won't spend the time to browse, and where browsing won't really get me anywhere anyway. (A nitpicking categorization logic problem for me: "Young Adult" already speaks to an age class in a way that "Science Fiction", for example, does not. It makes a presumption of the main readership based on age rather than general subject. This is the genius or the fault of the marketplace, of course, but that doesn't make it any less true to most people.)As a teenager, I must admitI wouldn't have been much fun for marketers of YA: I couldn't wait to get out of the juvenile/children's section of anything. The thought of what lay ahead was too exciting--being a teenager was a passing phase, the transition to something else: to some future point when I would begin to have true control over my life, for better or worse. Surely, in fact, life was a progression of a kind? Not that the wisdom of the ages would suddenly shine down upon me, but that I would be a different person at the age of 40, for example, than at the age of 17, with different taste, goals, and desires, if only because I would have experienced more of the world, more of life. So, for example, when our classes took field trips to the library, I high-tailed it out of the juvenile section as soon as possible and went up to the adult stacks, which were mysterious and in many ways unknowable. That was their appeal. That was the point.