Hello hello!

It’s been a while, but I have returned! And I’m getting back into the swing of things with a collaboration of sorts. R.M. Archer (link to her blog at the bottom) reached out on Instagram looking for authors interested in examining the topic of young authors who begin by writing YA and where they go as they get older. The questions she posed are fascinating, and I’m excited to dip into my story and how my age has affected my writing! I’m long winded today, so buckle in for a bit of a rant.

I started intentionally writing when I was eleven, and right away I dove into YA fantasy. I’ve always been fascinated with stories where there’s more to the world than meets the eye, where wonder is found in the quiet, hidden places. And I saw teenagers as the perfect protagonists for my fantastical adventures: young enough I could relate to them, but older and far more mature than I was (I always did think my characters needed to be more mature than me to handle what I put them through).

I published my first book when I was sixteen, and still my main characters were older than me (my FMC in my first book was supposedly several centuries old, though she comes across as a teenager). I wrote solidly YA, complete with your garden variety tropes and cheesy romances. But I kept pushing and pushing my characters a few years ahead of myself. I found that the starry eyes of a twelve-year old viewed sixteen as far more adult like than I actually felt at sixteen. And I discovered that the magical threshold of an eighteenth birthday didn’t really change more than a general legal status.

Looking back there were two main aspects of YA that drew me in as a reader and a writer: the idea that someone close to my age could take part in these marvelous adventures, and that it gave me access to vivid worlds I could fall into without reservation. When I began my author journey I saw adult fiction, particularly fantasy, as dangerous and perhaps a little dull: full of content I tried to avoid while not containing the vitality I craved.

Ironically, the first book I wrote that I believe pushed the definition of YA also featured the first main character I’d written who was younger than myself. In Born in Darkness, the second book of my Agonizomai Series, I delved into themes that were far deeper and darker than I’d dared go in my previous stories. And in so doing I unlocked a passion that…surprised me. Previously I had shied away from harder topics out of the belief that I was too young to handle them properly, and I suppose that hesitation was linked to my need to make my characters older than myself. Surely no one my age could live this sort of life. Surely no one would listen to someone so young talking about any subject that mattered.

It wasn’t until I was nineteen that I discovered, with fear and trembling, that I did have something to say about all the themes I’d avoided. I wasn’t too young. And perhaps I could use my vivid and fantastical worlds to say far more than I’d dared to previously. Once I unlocked that passion there was no going back, and the stories I wrote afterward were deeper and grittier than my first few books.

When it came to reading, though, I was happily camped in the YA section. I’d moved away from popular books with their love triangles and Dystopias (yes, I was one of the teenage girls obsessed with all the trilogies that followed Hunger Games) and was mostly reading Indie Authors I could trust to take me away from reality without inflicting me with all the content I’d spent years trying to avoid. Some were a light escape, some posed questions I pondered a long time. But they all left me with hope and satisfaction as I closed the cover, a result I still only trusted from YA and the classics.

I didn’t fully “graduate” from YA until I was twenty-two and writing Memories of Salt and Stone. I knew from the beginning that Ronan couldn’t be a teenager, nor was she a bright-eyed early-twenties heroine I had been writing. She’d seen too much, lost too much. So, once again, I set her a few years ahead of myself. At twenty-nine she is the oldest main character I’ve written (not counting those eternally young elves and fae). And while her age is the main reason I began marketing Salt and Stone as New Adult, the story grew into the category fairly neatly. I found a new freedom in the NA category to press even deeper into those more difficult topics, to explore themes of loss, repentance, and redemption that I was wary of handing to a young teen. And in writing my own NA, I discovered other books in the category that quickly earned a place on my “favorites” shelf.

Of course, I’m not finished with YA. Most of the books I happily devour still have that YA mark, and my current work in progress is a classic YA fairytale retelling (And here I’ll insert my shameless plug for Wolf Heart). But that choice is more intentional than it used to be. Dipping into NA has offered me a place to tell those darker (but still hopeful) stories, but it also allows me the space to step back and pursue those “younger” tales with new appreciation. I suppose you could say I now have dual citizenship, hopping back and forth as my stories demand.

I still tend to avoid “adult” fantasy. But who knows? Get back to me in a decade and I might have found my place on those shelves as well.

Links to the AWESOME authors taking part in this collab:

JD Wolfwrath – August 19th

R.M. Archer – August 20th

M.C. Kennedy – August 24th

Nicole Dust – August 25th