Speaking of which, the Kickstarter is at 53% funded and only has 8 days to go. If we can get a couple more surges like we had at the beginning it should still be doable, but I really need your help! Please consider spreading the word on social media, in person to people who might enjoy the book, and anywhere else you can think of. (Here's the short link to help you spread the word: http://kck.st/1xyBEAC; here's a tweet all composed for you to use if twitter is your thing -or you could modify it for use on facebook etc.- "Female badasses overthrowing patriarchal asshattery + #indienovel. Supporting http://kck.st/1xyBEAC = officially sticking it to the man."
And, if you think you might enjoy the book yourself, please check it out here:
Also, Blade's Edge the webserial is still going strong at Jukepop Serials and has over 330 +votes for September so far putting it at #9 for the month. And it's up to #60 for all time rankings with 882 +votes. That's pretty exciting. A lot of new chapters have gone up over the past week, (chapter 42 went up last night) and the last two chapters will go up today and tomorrow, so if you haven't had a chance to catch up lately now would be an excellent time. The voting for September closes tomorrow night so now is a great time to read and plus vote and help keep Blade's Edge in the top 10!
Ok, so that's Blade's Edge for now.
There are two blog posts that I've had floating around in my head for a while and I can't decide which one to write about, or whether I should save them for later.
One is about why it's important to support independent authors, and the other is about the gripe that people have with YA. For those not familiar with book category abbreviations YA stands for young adult. They both feel important to me at the moment because a. I'm an indie author and b. Blade's Edge is technically YA.
I say technically because I never wrote Blade's Edge intentionally as a YA novel. It never occurred to me that my target audience would be teenagers, and I'm not sure that it is. In fact, I didn't even realize it was YA until I was clicking the little boxes on Jukepop to categorize it and my husband looked over my shoulder and said, "You should check YA. Aren't the main characters under 18? Doesn't that make it YA?"
Does it?
To be honest, I'm not sure what makes a novel YA. Yeah, Taka and Mishi are both under 18 for the duration of the book, so I guess that makes it YA, but at no time have I decided to write the story differently than I would any other story. Are there people who won't read it because it's YA? Are there people who seek it out because it's YA? Are there special rules to the YA category that I don't know about and am constantly breaking?
I don't know the answer to any of those questions, except the first one. Yes. There are definitely people who will avoid reading the story because I ticked the box that says YA. Which bums me out a bit, to be honest, because I don't even know what YA means. There has been a lot of hype on the internet lately about YA as a category and why it's good/bad/indifferent. Here's an excellent blog post that clarifies what I'm talking about if you haven't had a chance to read any of this. (I hadn't been in on what was happening until late last week.)
Ultimately, the question I keep asking myself is this: if all that YA actually stands for is a target age group then why are we even talking about it? My guess is that many people think it means quite a bit more than that. In my case, it's not even a target age group, it just happens to be the age group of my main characters, and on the thought that teenagers might enjoy reading about characters their own age, I checked the YA box.
But Mishi and Taka are far from typical teenagers, so I don't even know if they're relatable as such.
I guess I kind of went ahead with the YA topic, didn't I?
Well, later this week perhaps I will tackle the supporting of indie authors (and artists in general) and in the meantime I leave you with this:
Fall is here and it's rather pretty.
Also, be advised that on Wednesday I will be guest blogging on the NaNoWriMo Support Squad. I will post the link here when it happens.
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