Top Ten Tuesday: Songs I Wish Were Books

Since I have some extra time on my hands for the first time in a long hand, I thought I'd give Top Ten Tuesday a shot. Top Ten Tuesday is run by The Broke and the Bookish. Check them out here. 

All right, let's get started! As I have an eclectic selective taste in music, be prepared for a weird mix of picks!


1. Viva la Vida, Coldplay 

There's just something lyrically brilliant about this song. "Sweep the streets I used to own." It's chilling and sad and retrospective. What with the crusader imagery, I would think this song would make a good fantasy read, or maybe even a contemporary about a failed action movie star.

2. Work This Body, WALK THE MOON

The music video for this peppy song just got released, and both it and the original song scream Middle Grade. It's not that far of a stretch, considering the lyrics and the video, but obviously the story would be about a kid showing his bullies who is the real talent, whether in sports or stage or music or whatever. It's a classic theme.

3. Lemonade, Chris Rice

So this is basically the sweetest song ever (yes, I intended that). It's the classic nervous boy meets out-of-his-league girl, and I love how the song balances the simplistic romantic without becoming sappy. As someone who isn't into dirtier romance, I'd prefer to see more YA with romantic elements like this.

4. Trees/Truce, Twenty-One Pilots

I put these two together because I usually listen to them right after the other. They have a similar sad, echoing vibe about faith, loneliness, and that haunting combination of hope and resignation about situation. It would fit a good tragic novel of any genre, but especially recent historical.

5. Mo Ghile Mear, Orla Fallon

This Gaelic song originally surrounds the sad story of a young woman whose true love of swept off into the war of Bonnie Prince Charlie. It's a beautiful tune and would definitely fit any costume-drama type novel set in Ireland. As a Irish history fanatic, I'd pick it up in a heartbeat.

6. Best Friend, Foster the People

This song is everything funky and different and strange and retro. I'm thinking a YA or NA set in the 70s or 80s, definitely centered around friendship as opposed to romance and involving art and politics or something like that.

7. Fine Fine Life, for KING AND COUNTRY

Every time I go on a road trip, I listen to this song. So obviously I picture it in book form as a road trip YA.

8. Car Radio, Twenty-One Pilots

I have a friend who can rap this entire song. When he introduced me to it, I was hit with how philosophical it is. I love how Twenty-One Pilots pulls the deep out of the everyday, and I think a book like this song would do the same.

9. For the Dreamers, for KING AND COUNTRY

This song has empowering lyrics and a driving energy that would fit well for a YA entrepreneur story, whether historical or contemporary.

10. Not Afraid Anymore, Leeland 

Oh wait... I'm writing this book...


Would you want to read a book inspired by one of these songs? What songs would you love to see turned into books?

So A Year Ago I Started This Blog

I was actually film editing, but we can pretend I'm blogging,  right? 

A year ago, I skipped my pre-calc, physiology, and British history for a day (I was homeschooled, and I doubled up the next day, no worries), spend too long on designing a format, and eventually clicked "Publish Blog."

Since then I have written 116 posts, garnered 30k page views, gone to college, hosted three blog hops, filmed a few vlogs and took a long break to finish a novel and to direct a college-themed Princess Bride parody, and have hopefully helped my readers in some way with their writing journey.

This year's most popular posts:

1. Need More Femininity

2. Why Boromir is the Most Underrated Lord of the Rings Character 

3. 25 Things Only Writers Will Understand 

4. The Rise of the Dude in Distress 

I'd love to hear from you which posts from me were your favorite. It helps me shape future output.

That aside, some goals for this year include more book reviews, more vlogs that feature fellow writers I've met here at Geneva, and a massive recommended literature list for homeschooling families (though non-homeschoolers are more than welcome to it!) with a guide to content and reading level, organized by age group from preschool to high school.

Now I want to thank all of you, my readers, for helping me make this blog take off and for following my posts! You are the best and I can't wait to see what happens in this next year!

I Love the Unlikable Character

"I just couldn't connect with your main character."

I've been told this a lot by people who have read only the first ten to twenty pages of two of my works. These two works happen to be my favorite, and it dismays me a little when people dislike it because they don't like the main character. Even the people who love it and have read much farther into the story tend to latch onto my supporting cast before backing up my main characters.

Why?

These characters are those that fall into the category of the Unlikable Character.

What makes them Unlikable? What makes them difficult to connect to?

It's not that they aren't human. It's not that they aren't sympathetic. My readers tell me that. They just. Don't. Like. Them.

Because in the beginning of Rachel's novels, they're mean. They're rude. They're selfish. They're brats. They're wretched. Often without circumstances to really excuse them.

They're basically Eustace Scrubb.

I guess people don't like reading about people like this. They prefer people like Maggie Stiefvater's Gansey, who she gave, as she put it, "Everything I could pull out of my drawer of heroic characteristics."

They prefer Sam Gamgee. They prefer Westley. They prefer the heroic kind I often myself gravitate toward in books.

I do have other main characters like that fit this more popular mold. But I'm not as fascinated by them.

I love characters like Mr. Darcy and Han Solo and Pierre Bezukhov and Jean Valjean and Edmund Pevensie who start off terribly unlikeable, borderline irredeemable, but turn out to be your favorite.

The thing is though, these three aforementioned gentlemen all either possess or quickly come to possess a certain charm that almost excuses their wrongdoings and faults. My unlikeable characters often don't. They're hardly eye candy and they say cruel things to other people and they stubbornly shove them down for their own goals.

But then as the story progresses, they begin to change.

Something I'm tired of is the whole "embrace your faults" movement that plagues especially literature. It had a good purpose but now it's gone beyond "accept your flaws and failures" to "just don't put any effort into becoming a better person because you're awesome even if you're nasty to other people."

I punish my characters for their awfulness. I let them suffer for their blunders. But then they learn to peel away their awfulness and to be kind to others. To put them first. They learn to become the heroic type. They learn how to be a Sam Gamgee.

They're basically Eustace Scrubb.

I think what I find so intriguing about said unlikeable characters is, as they develop, watching their transformation from wretchedness to heroism. Seeing their redemption, almost. Watching them painfully shed their downfalls as opposed to simply accepting them. Because I don't know about you, but I prefer reading about characters who start out awful with faults I myself can relate to in some way and then change into something better, as opposed to just reading about characters who already are something better.

Perhaps I can find a way to have my cake and eat it, too. To have such unlikeable characters who are nevertheless liked by readers. In the meantime, I'll probably always be writing them.

Why We Don't Need Any More Loner Characters... Especially in YA

 Ah, the loner. The lone ranger, the self-appointed outcast, the dark and brooding mysterious scavenger-warrior who wanders and waits for their time to come and more oft than not, refuses assistance except perhaps from one trusted friend. Such figures fill literature and film, and we recognize them immediately. Aragorn, Gandalf, Han Solo, Yoda, Halt, Batman, James Bond, Rey, Captain Jack Sparrow, the list could go on. Antagonists frequently fit into this category as well. Protagonist or antagonist, the point is, this character archetype frequents writing. While I used to find such a character appealing to read and to write, I'm now a little more cautious to use them in my work and in recommending using them to other writers. Why? In this social day and age, I would say the loner who chooses to be a loner is no longer a romantic ideal that readers, especially teen readers, find appealing.

I was watching The Maze Runner film last night for the first time and was trying to figure out what made the main character, Thomas, so different from other YA blockbuster stars. He is a type of outcast in the Maze, as he turns out to be the Special Snowflake and the other resent him for it, but it wasn't the same. Eventually, I laid my finger on it. In the past, I have said I preferred Maze Runner to Hunger Games because in Hunger Games, it's starving teen against starving teen, but in Maze Runner, it's Pack of Survivors against the Outside World. There's a brotherhood, a lack of individualism and a focus on friendship that Maze Runner has that its competitors lack. Instead of Me, it's Us. And Thomas, with a lot of help from Newt and his other friends, pushes for this group dynamic. He tries to bring the Gladers together, as opposed to fighting on his rebellious lonesome. Now some might argue that other Loner characters such as Katniss do bring people together, but what's lacking is a social friendship dynamic.

I think we need more characters like Thomas, who strive for interactive relationships with those around them, than loners in fiction, especially YA. We live in a social world where we interact constantly. Characters who find that unattractive and would rather live in an empty world without friends (except one or two friends they choose, which basically makes them social jerks [#sorrynotsorry]) are not as relatable. I know this for a fact because in my own work, The Red and the Scarlet, all of my betas found my main character Fyr, who starts out as one of these Loners, unrelatable and annoying, even, and gravitated toward my more social supporting characters. But as the story progresses and Fyr starts to reach out to those around her in an attempt to befriend people out of empathy as opposed to self-interest, my betas started rooting hard for her. For teens especially, the character reaching for friendship (whether successfully or unsuccessfully) as opposed to choosing to shut themselves out is more relatable.

#YayYA Entry #8: THE WATERFRONT GIRLS

Name: Rachel Stevenson (@whatshewrote)

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Title: The Waterfront Girls

Pitch: Blackbeard’s ghost fleet threatens modern Charleston again. Skateboarder Shalayla and her girlfriends agree to help quiet businessman Guy prevent a blockade, but as descendants of Blackbeard’s rival, only their blood will satisfy the dead pirate.

First 500: 

Charleston smiles. Charleston nods when you pass it. Shalayla smiled and nodded now at weaving tourists. Buttercream pastel Rainbow Row skipped behind her back.

            The gray-suited white guy wasn’t a tourist. Shalayla never saw him before. Didn’t matter. Nice view, she knew him, and he believed in pirate ghosts. He believed in the two-hundred-year old finger dangling off her throat.

His path wobbled as he skimmed the sights behind marching palmettos, glinting blue sunglasses, and his Starbucks cup. A car slowed as he wandered into the street, and he dashed to the curve, hand saluting an apology. He spotted her. His steps spread. His coffee’s shadow, visible through recycled paper thanks to morning sun, bounced in his grasp. Didn’t look like a nutcase. That complicated things.

Shalayla pulled her cap’s sweaty rim further over her eyes and leaned her back on bubblegum pink wall, stretching crossed legs and balancing, sitting on her skateboard.

            “Hi,” said Guy Allamby Bonnet. He stood over her, his shadow tangling with the pink house’s, and offered a hand. Probably to help her up. Shalayla shook it. He pocketed his fingers awkwardly. “Um. Thanks for meeting me.”

            “No problem. Don’t know why it couldn’t be at the candy shop, though.”

            “It’d take too long.” Guy Allamby Bonnet ran a hand over his day’s worth of white man stubble. “Miss…”

            “Shalayla, but sure as heck you don’t call me Shay, Mister Bonnet.”

            “Sounds good, if you call me Guy. My grandpa’s house is not far from here, but I figured the pink house was an easy meeting place.”

            “That’s fine.” Shalayla stood, slinging her board over her shoulder and ignoring his offered white hand again. “There’s one thing you gotta know though.”

            “I’ll pay you want you want.”

            “Not that.” Shalayla flung her orange braids behind her. “I’ve got friends. Four of them.”

            “Oh, right. You mentioned Julia.”

            “They’re in on this, and they will be the whole time, or no deal.”

            Guy shifted on his leg and sampled his coffee. “Okay, deal. Now let’s go.”

            He gestured for her to go first. Her skateboard’s silhouette swayed back and forth under her sauntering feet. Together they walked in I-just-met you silence under the palmettos, past a kissing selfie couple, Confederate flags, praline shops leaking cinnamon-sugared steam into the street. The Waterfront parted the buildings framing the streets like a curtain just ahead, but they turned into a gravel driveway.

Shalayla leaned on her skateboard as Guy fiddled with the custom iron fence, its bars a-swirl with pineapple patterns. Above them rose a Greek revivalist mansion, its white pillars and bubbling porches poised and polished.

“Ah ha.” Guy swung the gate open and let her in first. Gravel ground under Shalayla’s converses.

            “So this is your granddad’s house?” she asked. The words were half out of her wire-corested mouth when something fluttered in an upper window. A curtain. A face. Shalayla paused and Guy passed her and rocking chairs to the door.

            “Yeah,” he said, scrubbing his feet on a scuffed Gamecocks welcome mat. The kind you buy at Walmart in the back of the store, where everything is motor oil reek and bike racks

#YayYA Entry #7: #HOWTOBEASUPERSTAR

Name: Elaine Henshaw @MPinchwife

Genre:Contemporary YA

Title: #HowtobeaSuperstar

Lulu Molloy -fit,funny 14 year old wannabe. When she drags her bf to auditions, she doesn't expect her to be the better actress. Just how low would you go to get THAT part?

It's not right the way that Mondays come straight after Sundays. In an ideal world, well in my ideal world, there'd be another, extra day, a sort of Sunday Plus, that would give you time to suck all the mess back up that it took you most of Sunday to spread around the house. Failing that,  get yourself a pair of ear -plugs so that you can't hear your mum stomping around and going into a 'get-yourself- ready -for- school frenzy', making lists and freaking poor old Norman out so much that he hops upstairs in his weird three-legged way and hides in the bottom of the wardrobe with his head buried in Dad's old dressing-gown. If I could fit in it I'd get in there with him. The wardrobe that is.

'Lulu! Lu-LU?' Mum is standing at the bottom of the stairs, bellowing up. I put my earphones in and turn the volume up to the setting that should be marked 'starting to hurt your ears'. I am just pushing a pile of clothes with my toe when Mum bursts into my room , without even knocking.

'Lou-ise!'

Use Of Full Name is always a danger signal and I try to look innocent and busy at the same time.

'If you are not going to help me to take down the Christmas decorations, you could at least get your stuff ready for school. '

Her eyes sweep over the tidal wave of grunge that has accumulated in my room since Christmas Day.

'Per-lease! Supper will be ready in twenty minutes, Louise. Twenty minutes!'

When I see her standing there looking at the scrunched- up heaps of ripped Christmas paper, the dirty tights, hair tongs, sweet wrappers, but most of all clothes, she suddenly looks like a little girl who might start crying if you put your tongue out at her. I wouldn't even be that surprised if she did. TBH Christmas has been pants this year and the best bit was being signed on by the Casting Agency this afternoon. If only Dad hadn't been stuck in the snow, in deepest, coldest France, it could have been a brilliant Christmas. Mum is obviously a mind-reader.

'Pants!'

She says it like it's a question.

I take my ear phones out.

'Pants?'

She is not a mind-reader after all. She is a parent. 100%, all- the- way- through- like- a- stick- of- rock Parent. She is pointing to the pile of clothes I wriggled out of before I showered and got into the pink pig onesie Mum bought me for Christmas.

On top of the biggest heap of clothes, is the tangle of shorts, tights and pants that I managed to take off all in one go. Actually I think it quite a feat and probably could get the Turner Prize or star in an exhibition of modern art if it had the right title.

'Gross!' seems to be mum's suggestion . And/or 'Get it tidied up NOW!'