I woke up this morning to find Twitter a’twitter about the latest awards debacle. I hope this story puts things into perspective for those people for whom an ‘awards scandal’ means a result they personally wouldn’t have voted for.

The National Book Awards (in the US) have covered themselves in the very opposite of glory this week, when a misheard phone conversation (WTF, seriously) led to the wrong book being included in their five book shortlist for young people’s literature. This book, Lauren Myracle’s SHINE, deals with serious issues to do with gay hate crimes, and is highly regarded by many, but it was Franny Billingsley’s CHIME that had been intended for the huge, career-changing honour.

The embarrassing situation was not helped by the vacillations of those behind the award, who began by insisting all six books were worthy, and later backflipped, asking Myracle to withdraw her own book for consideration “to preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work.”

I feel so bad for her! It goes to show how one moment of incompetence can completely ruin someone else’s week, and how insensitivity can only compound the hurt and humiliation.

Libba Bray’s insider rant has been quite rightly linked to all around the traps, and I think she says it best.

The LA Times talks about the important themes dealt with in Myracle’s book as well as the awards debacle.

Nicola Griffith reports the story with an added helping of angry author perspective.

Tobias Buckell talks about why he bought Lauren’s book today.

At Myracle’s request, the National Book Awards have made a $5000 donation in her name to the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

It feels sooooo strange to be posting without a word count bar at the top. It’s going to be March now before I’m back to writing first draft stuff. Straaange. But like everything else, I’m sure it will be here pretty damned fast.

Despite NaNo commitments and all the Last Short Storying, I managed to read 8 books in the last month, which is only two short of my monthly target.

The three I loved best were Derby Girl by Shauna Cross, Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer and Rampant by Diana Peterfreund (I’ll link to my review of that one when ASif posts it).

I also very much enjoyed Luv Ya Bunches by Lauren Myracle and I’m afraid rather dragged myself through Vacations From Hell, a YA short story collection which was not nearly as diverting as Prom Nights From Hell.

I really liked The It Girl: Adored, one of the Gossip Girl spin off Jenny-Humphrey-goes-to-boarding-school books, though I’ll admit I don’t remember much about it. This is my favourite Gossip Girl series. I also went back to the classics by reading the second of the ‘real’ Gossip Girl books, You Know You Love Me, which is kind of… weird to be reading now, after seeing the series. Alternate history!

Yes, I’m hoping to get to more crunchy books in future months as my post-baby fatigue ebbs away but I do love my YA…

I read The New Space Opera II, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, as part of my final round up of stories for LSS (favourite stories recced here) and that totally counts toward my book total even though the 200,000 odd words of Shadow Unit doesn’t… sigh. I enjoyed TNSOII though overall the stories were less exciting/inventive/generally wondrous than in Eclipse 3, also edited by Jonathan, which I did not read this month, but which may well be my anthology of the year… I’ll let you know on Dec 31st!

TNSOII does have the distinction of being the first entire book I read on the iPod, via Stanza, which may well change the way I read in the future. Considering the wealth of e-material we receive for LSS can I just say… YAY! The iPod touch is remarkably easy to read even in a sunny playground, and I love the page turny facility of Stanza even if it does turn docs into random chapters. Also it makes reading while a) breastfeeding, b) babyjoggling, c) big girl cuddling, d) cooking, e) driving (KIDDING) awfully easy.

Finally I have a reason to develop a love affair with Project Gutenberg!

As a final note, Glenda Larke is guest blogging over at Ripping Ozzie Reads, about her experience as a pro writer tackling NaNoWriMo for the first time. Go check it out!

I was reading Locus Magazine this morning over my porridge and nag-the-child-into-getting-through-morning-chores ritual. There were many pleasant aspects of it, not least the fact that I have caught up enough with my  lastshortstory reading that I was able to have a dialogue with the short story columns (yes this does mean reading bits I agree/disagree with aloud).

But it was Cory Doctorow’s column (also available online) that caught my eye. Cory’s column is usually about platforms rather than content – copyright issues, freeware, publishing, new media, that whole Doctorow grab-bag of goodies. This month, though, it’s very much about content: it’s about the complaints he has received about his YA novel Little Brother, and specifically the complaints about the 17-year-old protagonist having sex. Not, he takes pains to point out, that the book is remotely sexually explicit:

I admit that I remain baffled by adults who object to the sex in this book. Not because it’s prudish to object, but because the off-camera sex occurs in the middle of a story that features rioting, graphic torture, and detailed instructions for successful truancy.

Young Adult fiction fascinates me, largely because it has formed a good three quarters of my novel-reading material for the last several years. There are a whole lot of interesting meta-stories that go along with YA fiction and publishing – the hip, popular authors who blog and tweet and tour and all seem to be friends with each other like a colossal literary sitcom, the enthusiastic teens and their responses to the books, and then… there are the parents.

I feel rather as if there should have been ominous chords at that point.

It seems like you can’t turn around in the blogosphere these days without some kind of drama or protest or scandal about what teenagers are reading, and what certain people would like to prevent them from reading.

I’m pretty sure it’s a win when teenagers are reading at all, right?

Sure, there are dangerous books in the world. By all accounts (I haven’t read it yet), Little Brother comes down on the side of dangerous books for teens, dealing with lots of controversial ideas and themes. But is it still really that controversial to depict two seventeen-year-olds in a loving, long-term (by teenage standards) relationship having sex? Especially if that sex takes place off stage, with no graphic description.

It seems, though, that no matter what pains YA writers take to be responsible in the writing of scenes depicting sex or other disapprove-worthy behaviour, there are always complainers who would prefer that those scenes not be written at all – indeed, that the topics be completely left out of any books intended to be read by teens.

The recent Lauren Myracle-Scholastic started with the mega-company asking that Lauren edit the fact that one of her 10 yr old protagonists had two moms, and the protest only died down when they decided to distribute her book anyway – but only to middle school audiences, not to the age group the book was meant for. Before that there was the British newspaper reaction to Margo’s admittedly difficult novel Tender Morsels, declaring that even older teenagers should be sheltered from such concepts as rape and incest, regardless of how tastefully said themes were depicted in a work of literature. There have been many more examples, for as long as this YA boom has been around. People – and not just parents – seem determined to try and control what teens read, as if books somehow are going to be their main source of troubling themes and information in the current age of new media.

Possibly I’ve said all this before. But the thing that gets me is that – if it’s the fact of sex, or drugs, or underage drinking, or whatever, that gets the anti-book brigade into such a flap, then it doesn’t actually matter whether the authors deal with said issues responsibly. In Cory Doctorow’s column he said that all the complaints about Little Brother boiled down to one question “Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don’t you punish them for doing this?”

Hmm. Is that why all those horror movies tended to kill off the teenage girls right after they had sex? Suddenly it all seems so clear. The important thing is to punish them fictional characters for making parentally-disapproved choices. Yep, that’s going to drag the teens away from their mobile phones and back into the libraries, now isn’t it?

Today, standing out on a oval in the middle of my daughter’s sports day (yes the second in the same week, comes from having daycare + school each two days a week) I watched her interacting with the kids around her – five year olds, for the most part. It was delightful chaos, but there was also politicking going on – pecking order, which kids were friends, which ones slyly kicked others or blatantly cheated at the egg and spoon race…

In particular, I watch my daughter interacting with other girls, trying to pick which ones are real friends who genuinely like her, which ones make her feel bad about themselves, which ones are barely aware of her existence… it’s not like high school, it’s not. But I can see the beginnings of it already. I want to cuddle her pre-emptively about all the ups and downs she has ahead of her. All I can do is hope she finds the mates who stick with her, and make her feel vaguely sane as she navigates her school years.

With these thoughts in mind, it was fairly appropriate that I finished reading Lauren Myracle’s Luv Ya Bunches this afternoon. Lauren writes for various age groups, from primary (elementary for Americans) school through to YA, and her novels generally focus on the dynamics of friendship groups, as well as strongly featuring pop culture references, internet and media trends. Love Ya Bunches features (I think) her youngest protagonists to date, a group of ten-year-olds just about to start fifth grade. Yes, my friends, we are entering the Valley of the Tweens.

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