Getting Ready, Excited, and Nervous

So… I announced my second novel a few days ago. I’ve been keeping it to myself for so long, that it’s good to have its title and synopsis out in the air. An Absolute Mind is on its way soon, as the realization struck me not only on the day of the announcement, but also two days ago when I noticed that I’m two months away from its release. Many emotions are coming to me as I continue to get ready, but excitement and nervousness are the primaries.

This isn’t so much another update on the novel, as it is a personal extension of last week’s post about second novels. While I did incorporate my own experience briefly into it, today I want to elaborate more on that. I want to show just how those points I addressed apply in my case.

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Analyzing Books in the Classroom

If I ask you if you’ve read books such as Of Mice and Men, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, The Joy Luck Club, The Grapes of Wrath, and other books of a similar kind, chances are you might say yes. However, if I asked you if you’ve read these books in your spare time, chances are a majority of you are going to say no, and likely say that these were reading assignments for your high school English classes. You might have been asked to read a certain number of pages for homework assignments and then discuss them in class the following day. You might have had to keep an eye out for things like key vocabulary words, use of symbolism, and certain dialogue for you to annotate. You might have had to take quizzes to test your comprehension on said book, conduct group discussions about the text and then present your findings, and maybe even go as far as doing a book report on it.

Many of us can recall doing this so many times in school, that it’s a norm. But now, after having written and published a book myself, I look upon those past assignments in a different light and consider all that’s worth considering what analyzing books in the classroom.

Thoughts About Young Adult Fiction

There was a piece that was published on the Cosmopolitan website that I stumbled across on Twitter a few weeks back that I couldn’t help but find rather interesting.  It was an opinion piece written by author John Green (yes, as in the one who wrote the much talked about, New York Times bestseller, soon-to-be-released-as-a-film novel, The Fault in Our Stars) about why many of us continue to read young adult books, even long after we grow out of our teenage years.