Auth Guest Post with Mark Schreiber, Amanda911

What’s it like to be a teen influencer? Sixteen-year-old Amanda Dizon is an ordinary girl in an ordinary town in Iowa. But when she falls into an abandoned well in her backyard during presidential primary campaign season, the national media post the story; the candidates visit her in the hospital, and she becomes a star on the new social media platform, PingPong.

Welcome to the September 30th stop on the blog tour for Amanda911 by Mark Schreiber with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, author guest posts & interviews, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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Author Guest Post

6 Pros and 4 Cons of Writing YA

PROS:

1. Booksellers know what shelf to put your book on.

2. Everyone says teens don’t read, but those who do are passionate about books, and their parents are happy to buy books for them.

3. Lots of adults read YA.

4. YA authors can make a real impact on kids and be a positive influence in their lives.

5. Hollywood, Netflix and other streaming companies. My novel Princes in Exile didn’t have an adult lead, and that made it hard to sell for film in the 80s. It was eventually produced as a limited theatrical film and Canadian TV Movie of the Week in 1991. Now, however, YA is box office and young stars like Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games can carry a big-budget film.

6. As an adult you get to revisit and reimagine your teen years. Or maybe this should be a con?

CONS:

1. Your readers grow up. Well, some of them. There will be some fans who read your latest work when they’re in their 20s and 30s, but a lot will move into adult genres, or literary fiction, or find with work and family they have less time to read.

2. School. One of the biggest challenges in writing fiction, I believe, is to write a fresh school scene. Classrooms with anal teachers, institutional cafeterias with coteries, basketball games, lockers crashing shut. We’ve seen it all before. But this is where teens spend their days. Imagine if all adult workers worked in a single type of setting: lawyers, nurses, spies all confined to the same architecture. How boring would that be? Exactly. So congrats to every YA writer who finds a new angle. In Princes in Exile I ignored school completely by setting the story at a summer camp. In Amanda911 I have very limited, short scenes at her school.

3. Other constraints. There are many limitations besides the school setting in YA. Teens don’t have money. They can’t just hop on a plane. Under 16 or 18 and they can’t even drive. Think if that were the case for the lead in the last adult book you read or film you saw. If they couldn’t even buy their own groceries. Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher, solves this problem elegantly by having Clay ride around town on his bicycle and working in a movie theater for pocket money. Lack of agency is another constraint. Teens are just too dependent and restricted to be able to control their own lives. And that’s a challenge for writers, who need to make their protagonist their own person.

4. Parents. How do you deal with parents? Children’s authors don’t have this problem because they kill off the parents. Or at least that’s the trope with fairy tales, where kids are usually orphans. Or in a book like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, the child inhabits her own world, and her parents are peripheral. But one of the problems for teens is their inability to escape their parents. Teen-parent conflict is a rite-of-passage of adolescence, as kids struggle to exert agency while at the same time lacking the skills and finances to live on their own. It’s hard in YA to gauge how much to include the parents, and how to make them round characters, not stereotypes. I handled this dilemma in Amanda911 by making her grandfather an intermediary character, who is both enabler and authority figure.

In conclusion, I think there are more pros than cons. When I wrote Princes in Exile, Young Adult didn’t exist. My agent sent it to 35 publishers over the course of a year. Finally I received two offers, one from a new publisher called Beaufort, as general adult fiction. Another from Putnam’s, as Young Adult. I went with Beaufort, which promptly went out of business. Putnam’s, I hear, is still around. As is Young Adult.

About the Book

Amanda911
by Mark Schreiber

Publishing 1 October 2021
Pleasure Boat Studio

Genre: YA Contemporary
Page Count: 342
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

“Sixteen-year-old Iowa schoolgirl Amanda Dizon may be the nation’s most unremarkable teenager, until she falls down a well and finds herself instantaneously transformed from irrelevant to influencer.  Mark Schreiber’s sly, rollicking masterpiece, Amanda911, follows Amanda’s escapades and sends up the craven, fame-obsessed virtual culture of today’s adolescents.   As insightful as Dickens and as innovative as Heller, Schreiber is the definitive satirist of the social media generation.”—Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House

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Excerpt

The Influencer Festival was the brainchild of Emerson Frost, a Silicon Valley billionaire who thought Burning Man contained the wrong-colored sand and not nearly enough water. The 150 influencers and their guests were comped their trip, and the models, celebrity chefs and musicians were paid. He sold sponsorships and documentary rights, but the festival wasn’t meant to make a profit. Rather he used it as a tax-deductible party and a way to promote his cloud data company.

He had built thatched-roof huts; communal showers and toilets; an amphitheater; a windowless e-sports auditorium equipped with rows of consoles and big screens; an indoor disco with a bar;

three restaurants in white tents, with bars of their own; a swimming pool with bar service; and a dedicated cell tower. All behind a secluded white sand beach. And there was a dock long enough to moor his yacht, and other pleasure boats. And a helipad.

Wow! said Amanda as we were driven through the gate. This is like a camp for rich people.

About the Author

Mark Schreiber was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1960, graduated high school at age fifteen and began writing novels full-time. Princes in Exile, which explores a prodigy’s struggle to accept his own mortality at a summer camp for kids with cancer, was published in 1984 and made into a feature film in 1991. It has been published in ten countries, received two awards in Europe and was shortlisted for the Austria Prize. Carnelian, a fantasy, was published by Facet in Belgium. Starcrossed, a rebuttal to Romeo and Juliet, was published by Flux and translated into French and Turkish. His illustrated science book, How to Build an Elephant, was published as an Apple app by Swag Soft. He has written over forty books and received two State of Ohio Individual Writer Fellowships. For the last seven years he has been a digital nomad, living on four continents. He currently resides in Costa Rica.

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