Today I thought I'd answer a question that I often get from readers and aspiring writers: How do you stop from getting discouraged or losing motivation while writing? Answering this question (I will note here that, as with all writing advice, take it if you like it, forget about it if you don't. Writing is different for everyone.) requires thinking about writing at various different levels:
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On Monday I noted that in light of this post from two authors who were asked by an agent to de-gay their book, I was planning to do some statistics wrangling and see if I could quantify some of what's happening in LGBT YA publishing. Apparently my latent economics major is raring to go (or else I just really want to procrastinate, which is a distinct possibility), because I spent last night making pie charts. To get my data, I used this bibliography of LGBT YA compiled by librarian/researcher Christine Jenkins, which lists books published in English from 1969-2009. I supplemented that bibliography with information for 2009-2011 kindly given to me by researcher Michael Cart, who specializes in LGBT children's and YA books. Mr. Cart's data for 2011 was incomplete because the year isn't finished yet, but because I've been keeping track of LGBT YA novels for Diversity in YA, I topped off the list with a number of books I know have been published or will be published this year. ((After I compiled all these lists together, I sorted through it to identify trends/gaps. The bibliographies provided by Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Cart feature LGBT characters as main characters, as supporting characters, as parents, and sometimes they feature LGBT issues as a backstory.
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Since Huntress was published, I've noticed that some reviews mention that the reader didn't realize that many aspects of the fantasy world in the book are based in Chinese and Japanese culture, or that they only realized that because of the cover copy or the cover itself. This is really interesting and makes me think a few things.
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