 So, hello, welcome to the panel that's put on by the Ravens Library team department today. It's on YA fiction and queer identity and just identity in general in YA fiction. We have some wonderful authors that I will introduce to you soon. But we're about to get started. So let's just hit a couple of things. One, it will be recorded so anything in the chat will show up as well. This panel is a part of our pride programming this month. Make sure to check out robbinslibrary.org slash events for all our other wonderful pride programming. There will be one more panel put on by the team department, which is a local drag artist, win Tram, who performs as Jane Jamison. She is usually our pride king, pride prom king. Unfortunately, we cannot hold pride prom this year, but we hope to do it again next year. And we will have Jane Jamison and Champagne back as our prom king and queen. But when we'll be showing up to give us a wonderful talk, check that out next week. And so let me introduce to you our wonderful panelists. We have Charlie Jane Anders, who has written fabulous victories greater than death. I'm so excited. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. Gorgeous. We have Meg Ellison, who wrote Find Layla, Finding Layla. Find Layla, right? Yep. I'm sorry. I keep thinking finding, but anyway, it's Nemo's fault. It is, which is a realistic fiction about just a lot of big, heavy feelings, but really good teen feelings. And then we have, last but not least at all, Darcy Little Badger, who wrote Elatsoe. And it's also beautiful. It's just so many beautiful books. I'm so excited. Thank you guys so much for doing this panel. I know it was sort of last minute and impulsive on my part. So thank you for participating. I'm so excited. If you would like to go around and do like a quick little summary of your book, please feel free. I'm very bad at summary, so I did not myself. We will start. I think we will go in order when I give you big questions. We'll go Charlie, Darcy, Meg, if that's okay. Okay. Sure. Works for me. Okay. I can fall on that sword. Yeah. So I'll just give a really quick, basically, victory is greater than death. If you're like me and you ever just wish that aliens would come down out of the sky and take you away from this honestly disappointing planet that we're on, that's what victory is greater than death is about. It's about this teenage girl named Tina, who's known, I guess it's her 12th birthday that she's actually secretly an alien who was left on Earth as a baby disguised as a human. And when she's old enough, when she's reached maturity, whatever that means, aliens are going to come and take her away and she's going to return to her life as an alien superhero. And so she's just been waiting and waiting and waiting for this to happen. And then it does. And it turns out that actually being an alien superhero is a little more complicated than she expected. And nothing is quite what she was hoping it would be. And she's actually turns out to be really lucky that she has like a found family of kids from Earth who are there with her to kind of help her get through this. Thank you. I guess it's my turn for summary. Hopefully y'all can hear me. Okay. I'm in a courtyard. So if there's background noise, that's what's going on. Yes. So Alataway is a fantasy mystery book. It's about a teenager named Ellie. And summer has just begun for her when she learns that her cousin has died. And in fact, she knows that he was murdered by a man named Abe Allerton. So it's not a who done it. She knows immediately who murdered him, but she doesn't know why. She doesn't know how. And so she spends that summer with the help of her friends and her family, and her ghost dog Kirby trying to solve this mystery and seek justice for her family. And in fact, Ellie has the ability to wake up the ghosts of animals. And these include Kirby, but they also include things like trilobites and mosquitoes. So it's a bit of a mismatch of ghosts and magic and stories that span generations. And I hope you all enjoy it. If you haven't read, Jackie. So find Leila is the story of a 14 year old girl experiencing extreme poverty in an urban environment in America. And it reflects on some of the difficulties of not only being poor, but working really hard to conceal how poor you are. And the kind of adulthood that comes early on kids who experience a life like that. And so I think it's a great experience. And most of it is written from my own experience, although not enough to hold up in court. It is in fact fiction. And it was really great to write it because I felt like it was a bunch of things I didn't have to carry anymore. And I sometimes get letters from people who are carrying something similar. And it's been great to connect with them because it is often an experience that makes you feel alone. Thank you all. Gosh, they're such good books. I'm going to go back to the questions. So I'm going to go back to the questions. We do have a very short Q and a session at the end. Feel free to throw your Q. Your questions into the box. And we will get to them at the end. If there's anything particularly brilliant that I didn't think of, I am going to steal the question and pretend it was my own. Let's start. I suppose. I do have a very hard hitting question for you all to start with. I would say, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I would say, yeah, for sure. Definitely. I was just doing my Portuguese class and I found out that in Brazilian Portuguese, the word for like cookies that are American soft cookies is cookies. Which I was like, why would you say biscoitos? And she was like, no, no, no, we say biscoitos for Brazilian cookies, but for American cookies, we say cookies. I was like, that's so confusing. Anyway. I love that. I love it. I love it. I love it. I still learned an hour ago. Oh boy. So this is a tough one because I can honestly see both perspectives just from my own personal biases. If I hear the word sandwich shop, I don't think they sell hot dogs. So I want to say no. But if you give me a good argument for yes, I'm not going to turn it down. So personally no. But okay, they could be anything. I don't know if it's a sandwich, but a corn dog is a ravioli. Whoa, wait, what? But it's on a stick. You don't have ravioli on a stick. You could like, there's no law. I mean, I guess. So anything between bread is a sandwich. Anything fully enveloped in a coating. Is a ravioli like a pop tart. I'm going to say. I'm going to say a corn dog is a scepter. I'm going to say a corn dog is a scepter. Oh, An edible scepter. Okay. Does that make like, like kebabs a scepter too? Cause those are sharper too. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think possibly either a scepter or a weapon, depending on if it's a metal skewer, it could be like a, you know, anyway, these are, these are really, really intense. Philosophical philosophical questions that we're dealing with. All of your books are, you know, Very good, but all very different. I feel like identity plays a huge part in all of them though. So how did your personal identity. Any aspect of it, like. Any aspect of how you identify in society or just for yourself, how did that inform your novel? And how did it inform your. Your personal identity. It was more about your main character. And do you think it was more your team. Identity or your identity now that really like shaped it. Wow. And I'm going to answer this one first. Okay. Yeah. So I mean, there's a whole kind of stew of identity. Invictus here to the death. It's like, you know, obviously, like I said, it kind of comes out of my teenage, especially as a teenager and like having a learning disability being a super nerdy kid with a learning disability is like super fun because like you're nerdy but you're bad at school so you gotta get the worst of both situations and you know and just like the the kind of the yeah all the discomfort and alienation I felt as a teenager is kind of all in the book although you know it's not as right on the surface as it was in earlier drafts but it's still in there I think um you know obviously my identity as a trans person is is important in the book there's like one major trans character there's also other characters who are queer in the book you know pretty much all the humans in the book are either canonically queer or kind of like you know their queerness is kind of implicit I feel like um and I this was the thing that you know it's so funny like when I started working on this book in 2016 I was like oh is this going to get me in trouble and by the time the book was coming out in 2021 there'd been a flood of queer YA and also trans teens were suddenly under this huge onslaught of of assaults and suddenly this thing that I kind of thought of as like saying I was gonna have to keep apologizing for became it's like that I told my agent hey I just don't want to freak you out but there's a lot of criticism in this book like I hope you know please don't freak out agent and he was like whatever I don't care um he was like do what you gotta do basically but I thought it was gonna say I was gonna have to apologize for and instead it kind of became you know something that I was kind of proclaiming as like this is a thing in this book that I'm really happy is in here because it feels timely um but also I mean you know uh I'm somebody who like I said I had to learn disability I have like a lot of like anxiety about dealing with people sometimes and I feel like that kind of comes out in the character of Rachel who's this kind of hermit introvert artist who has to hide away from people I'm not as extreme in that as Rachel I'm as obviously very capable of getting in front of a giant crowd and just talking and just you know whatever but um but I have that side to me that's that's huge where I'm just like ah people almost run away and you know when I'm at conventions and other things like that I do have like get overwhelmed and have to run and hide my room pretty often and so you know so I think that there's like various aspects of who I am embedded in this book yeah that was a really beautiful answer a tough one to follow yeah that's the thing with being on a panel of amazing people is you're always like it engrossed in the answers and they're like oh man it's my turn um but yeah it lets away the main character I guess shares two components of my identity first she's lip on Apache I'm also lip on Apache I do like to say like I'm biracial my father's Irish American my mother is Apache but that I'm still all lip on Apache because it's not the sort of thing that we we say we're half of anything so culturally she shares a lot of the culture that I grew up in including when when I discuss ghosts and alats away the the way that ghosts kind of manifest themselves both animals and people is just strongly based on our understanding of the afterlife and ghosts and on the other hand she is asexual actually Ellie is aero ace so aromantic asexual I'm asexual myself I'm engaged to another asexual native tea their Navajo I'm Apache we both have Irish American fathers I don't know how that works out but it's very fun um but when I think about there's a couple reasons why Ellie has these these components of my identity and first surely when I was growing up I didn't read a lot of books that that had either and I don't just mean as main characters I mean as any character I don't think I ever read a book with a lip on Apache character in it um I can't remember as a teenager finding any books with ace characters fortunately that's become it's become better with time um but there's still a long way to go because I remember when I first written alats away and I was going to I was publishing it as a YA book a young adult book and I was told that young adult readers wouldn't want to read about a book without a romance and I know that's not true because young readers want to read about many things so I think sometimes people think they know the minds of young readers without actually knowing it um but I'm glad I didn't take that advice um because I have heard back from a lot of ace readers who are like well I'm seeing myself in this adventure yeah so I'm reading the comments yeah it's it's tricky they wanted me to sell it as a middle grade I was like no this deals with a lot of like it's a very solidly YA book the main character 17 the themes are are kind of dark sometimes it goes into death and revenge and justice and and grieving um but so so yeah um yeah and it's it's also you know it's just I wrote it as a YA book um so so yeah uh the other hand I also it's so much easier to write what you know than to research something else so in terms of making Ellie live on a patchy I mean that's just what I grew up as that's what I know I don't have to try to research what would it be like to be someone who who isn't live on uh so it's kind of also just the the easy way as me as a writer um but it was cool putting this book out and seeing for the first time that many different readers not necessarily native readers or ace readers just readers of all sorts for connecting with the characters and I think that's really cool and it goes to show that young readers they want to read about a variety of experiences and they don't have to be their own necessarily to connect with them I have some similar things to say I I definitely was frustrated as a kid that there weren't any models for the kind of poverty that I was experiencing I remember a number of notable examples I remember the book Blue Willow which is about a kid whose parents whose parents are itinerant farm workers and deals with the realities of eviction and of extreme economic oppression I remember uh The Great Gilly Hopkins by Kasper Patterson which is about a kid who winds up in foster care who loses control of her destiny in much the same way that I did as a kid and then more recently I read a wonderful book by Rex Chapman called Free Launch and it's it focuses specifically on the humiliation grade school kids and elementary and middle school kids endure when everybody realizes how disadvantaged they really are so this is not to say these books don't exist it's just that I've not run across them and I always want to be corrected in that I'm never going to say I'm the first but there aren't as many as there should be and there certainly weren't any kids as poor as I was on TV I was really into Roseanne because at least they had their power turned off sometimes but you know they owned a house so I I lived through like a number of life-altering cataclysmic evictions and periods of living unhoused and food insecurity and stuff that kids in the books that I read and I loved that they got to go to wizard school and have adventures but I couldn't always relate so it was important to me to write a book that represented that experience in a very visceral and real way so that if you know you know if you've been there you can see that I I know where of I speak and then the other thing I'm thinking about specifically with respect to this panel is there is an expectation among queer people that we will always be the best dressed and most fabulous person in the room I love that and I want to live it every day but damn does it take money so there was immediately within my soul a terrible clamor as a kid when I realized the people who I wanted to be like and be with I was never going to be cool enough and it wasn't because I didn't belong and it wasn't because I wasn't one of them is because I couldn't put it together I couldn't look as though I belonged and that is complicated by race and gender and definitely class and I mean the shape of your body by all things so by the time I had the idea of the character of Layla I was mostly writing about a kid who had to hide almost everything about who she was and while it's not directly about my experience of realizing I was queer at a very young age it's definitely in there I didn't even really think about yeah having to try and present as queer while being very very poor like that is such a an interesting thing to think about well you all sort of touched on my second question and I guess that's sort of the the hazard of getting very smart people on a panel together but I'm going to ask it anyway and it's uh that YA very specifically so Melinda Lowe is an Arlington native and she used to do the queer YA like survey and seeing how many books were queer versus not and it has been trending upwards very you know quick quickly but not fast enough for my taste but we are getting more and more um but especially like you were talking about Charlie Charlie Jane you were like saying that when you were writing it in 2016 you were worried that maybe it would have more pushback but now in 20 and 21 it's sort of you know I'm I'm sure you might still get pushback but like there's there's more books to even like hold up with your book that have queer and trans protagonists and you know even aliens representing it um sorry I lost my train of thought basically can you talk to like were you consciously trying to to fill a hole that you wanted to see in young adult fiction yeah I mean uh it's complicated obviously I mean I think it's it's definitely true that in terms of trans people writing YA about trans characters it's there's been just like a huge explosion the last couple years uh similar to what there's been in science fiction actually in like in adult science fiction fantasy um you know I wrote a thing for Teen Vogue back at the start of the year where I was like here's the books here's some books coming out this year YA books from trans and non-binary authors with trans and non-binary characters and I there were too many books for me to include in that article I had to kind of pick and choose a little bit because that was such a you know there was there was so much and I had a work count limit and uh so that was really exciting but you know if you look at the American Library Association I guess does a list of banned and challenged books every year books that are banned and challenged and you know it used to be kind of you know 1984 or you know some other books that are kind of or Brave New World or whatever and if you look at the last like several years it's all books for kids and teenagers about trans people it's people like Alex Dino and other authors like that like the books that are most banned and challenged now are books for for kids about transness that is the thing that they are going after the hardest right now so it is it's a fraught time and you know I think it's on all of us to kind of really support that kind of writing uh in terms of like my thought process in like making the characters as queer as they are in the book I never I never really think of it from a standpoint of like you know what can I do to be more inclusive I think of it from a standpoint of just like what's interesting about this character what what can I get into about this character what can I find about this character that I like or that I can relate to and sometimes I will you know for some of my previous books I would have a character where I experimented with like adding more or less queerness and it was about what serves the character best and what works in the story and what works with the world you're doing and so you know sometimes you don't quite get there with the character because it just isn't clicking and you know I can go into that more if you all want but with with Victor is greater than death it just for various reasons that every time I was creating a character they just started getting more queer in my mind and like having Elsa this sort of travesty trans character from Brazil she just kind of took out a life of her own and it was so fun to write her and like other characters like you know one of the things that really helped me to get into my protagonist Tina is like early on she says someone to someone casually yeah my sexual orientation is that I'm really picky and like I felt like that was such a teeny thing to say that she's not she doesn't identify as like by our parents she identifies as picky like she's she's she's not ace or arrow she just she has a hard time finding people that she's into and and they can be any gender but she's really picky and I thought that was a really fun way of putting it so I just stuff like that just kind of you know anything that I'm always just kind of trying to get a handheld of my characters anything that will make me want to write about them want to know more about them and sometimes that's more queerness and when that happens I'm delighted but it just really is you know it's it's not something that I can consciously kind of steer towards or away from I think yeah in terms of the whole I I guess I was conscious when I wrote elapsed away of this lack of native science fiction fantasy YA books then you add that the main characters ace that that's even more rare so I was conscious of that and sometimes it was actually intimidating but I just wrote the book because I felt like it and I figured like whether it's published or not at least I wrote the story of my heart and when it was published that was just really cool what I what I am most really happy with though it is just the reception from readers because for me that's what's most important so I don't know if I'll ever like get a multimillion dollar deal off of writing about ace natives but I certainly have already connected with readers which is like as a writer I I think for most of us that's what really is important I would definitely say that in my case it was an intentional choice throughout my career my modus operandi has been to think what's the book you really wish you were reading right now and can you find that no do you have to write it now yes so everything that I have written has arisen out of a desire for that book to exist for me personally but also for people other than me someone actually just said something in the chat which which brought it to me very simply and it's there is someone out there who needs to read a book about a person like the character you're creating they need it badly they need it to become themselves they need it to live I found those books I have found the books that I have needed to live and I've it's been the thrill of my life better by far than getting a royalty check but don't tell my publisher I said that to hear from people who say that my book helped them in some way to accept themselves or to accept someone close to them and to understand an experience I mean that's what novels are for they're for empathy so it's been the greatest gift to know that that can happen and does sometimes happen because of the hallucinations I put down on a page just like tearing up over here but that was wonderful part of what I like about being a librarian is connecting with kids like me and helping them find books that will bring that about so I really connect with yeah just trying to help people find themselves in fiction and that's wonderful so there's something that I often find in YA because I'm reading so much so often for both pleasure and for work is that there are just some authors that when they're writing YA novels you can tell they just haven't talked to a teenager probably since they were a teenager and the the voice of the main character and even the novel can feel very inauthentic to teenagehood of modern day or just in general so how I felt very like strongly connected to all of your characters it felt like very teenage even if you're an alien or you know just they they felt very teenage to me as someone who who works with many many teenagers I could imagine them in my library so like how how'd y'all do that how did you find that that voice to make it feel genuine wow I mean that's one of the hardest parts for me about writing YA because I wanted to do a good job I feel like you know YA I love YA I'm a huge fan of YA and I didn't want to disgrace the genre by doing a kind of you know half-assed job or whatever um so you know I in terms of like the writing style and the narrative voice I kind of sat down with a bunch of YA books and just kind of looked through them and just like looked through which one's our first person which brings our third person past tense present tense how are they you know how are they kind of approaching the opening page but also some of the big moments and just kind of tried to kind of get the soak in all of the genre and actually the sequel to Victor's Greater Than Death is third person so it's a little bit different but you know getting Tina's voice was really important to me and having like I love a really snarky kind of like you know uh opinionated kind of like you know slightly obnoxious narrator and so that's always really fun to write there I do uh and Ali my partner lives with uh lives in the house with a couple of kids what if whom is a teenager now and is you know we hang out a lot and so that's been really good and I have a nephew who's now I think just turned 13 but you know mostly I just tried to like you know pay attention to the kids around me and also the thing I think that people often don't understand about teenagers I think is that teenagers can be very serious they can be very almost solemn they can be very kind of like you know and I think that one of the failure modes of adults ready teenagers is that they have to just be a sarcastic all the time or that they just have to be like nothing matters I don't care about anything and like when I was a teenager when you know when I the teenagers I know now often are just like heartbreakingly serious in a way that adults maybe would would would have like some defense mechanism around like I'm not going to actually say what I'm really thinking or feeling because like but teenagers sometimes will just you know especially with each other they will just put it out there and they will be real and they will actually you know share their thoughts and feelings in a way and and be kind of like very serious and I find that you know really amazing and awesome and I wish more adults were like that so I don't know that's all I got yeah I was just thinking that when I was a teenager I didn't talk to teenagers because so my family moved a lot and when we when I was 12 we moved from Iowa to Vermont and that's kind of when I lost friends so throughout my teenage years throughout middle school and high school I didn't have any friends so I didn't I genuinely was like selectively muted at school I didn't talk to my peers for my entire teenage years um so that that gave me a kind of interesting I I never really grew up socializing with people my age until college but then again that's not uncommon there are lots of people like me there are lots of teenagers right now who are struggling with bullying who might not have friends and that was my experience um but of course when I when I write now trying to think of what the voice of my character should be um it makes it difficult because not only did I lack that kind of socialization when I was a teenager now I am a I am a no spring chicken I'm in my 30s so I'm not going to try to pretend like fellow kids and all that um so it helps writing things in alternate universes like a lots away and a snake falls to earth take place in a in a world similar to ours but I don't have to worry too much about trying to remain current um with with certain like linguistic trends that might come and go in the matter of like a few years um on the other hand I I don't like patronize teenagers because like teenagers are like complex and intelligent and and just when I write a character both teenage and adult like I try to write people and I'm not going to to to like I don't know think of think of age as some sort of like different species once 10 years younger than me you must you must not be like no of course not we're all human um and yeah just thinking about when I was young that was a very like painful time for me but it was also a time when I was thinking about philosophy of like life and just all these really grand and complex subjects uh so yeah if anything like I I don't know if my if my voice in terms of like language is always as current as this is necessarily should be but I hopefully I that respect I have for teenagers comes through if there's any teenagers watching um I you know I I respect you all right I agree with everything said so far I do think that there is a tendency for YA authors especially the ones who are who primarily identify as the parents of teenagers to make them into a character rather than a person because parents experience the brunt of the worst part of that of that period I get that I do but I'm a champion eavesdropper it's how I write all of my dialogue I love being where people are and listening to the way they talk and picking up their idiom and their their specific dialect and when I eavesdrop on teenagers and I don't mean to say that I invade anybody's privacy I only do this in public spaces like I overhear the best Starbucks or a library but uh Charlie Jane and Darcy are both right they are concerned with politics and cosmology and philosophy and they're really trying to make sense of the universe they are at times shockingly emotionally vulnerable with one another many of them have the tendencies of a much younger child when they are not sure how to handle their biggest feelings when they're lonely or scared or grieving and at other times they'll be incredibly adult they'll be pragmatic and they'll see the big picture and they'll see straight to the solution of something and it is that mixture of childhood and adulthood and the godawful stew of hormones that that period in your life puts you through that makes them so interesting to listen to but really the answer is listening it is the only way to do it and not to just the kid in your house who won't clean their room but to all kinds of kids and to figure out what the voice of a teenager is really like I did fall a little bit into the trap of remembering what it was like when I was that age and I got very good help and this is something that I recommend to anybody who wants to be a writer I have a writer's group and they were able to point out and say that kids don't use this word anymore it doesn't mean what you think it means look it up under a dictionary stop saying that and it was great to get that kind of feedback and to put it to work but I cannot recommend eavesdropping enough yes I also want to know what the word was that you use it was vision oh you know I gotta I gotta say that like I very much tried not to have current teen slang in my book because I was like a it'll be dated by the time like if I'm writing it and starting to write in 2017 and it's published in 2021 it'll be dated by the time it comes out and somebody might buy it like three years after it comes out and it'll be dated but also I didn't want to be that like older person being like yeah I'm using all the latest lingo that the kids are using and like I just I felt like it was a minefield so I was just like you know I'm just gonna like write I'm just gonna not have a lot of slang in the book and like have pop culture references but not slang that was like I don't know that's that's honestly one of the best ways to do it nothing really dates a YA book quite like like just trying to use teen slang and yeah I have read many books where I'm like oh I can tell exactly what month of what year this book was being written in they're all the kids and they just wouldn't stop dabbing there was a particular book that I read and I don't want to call out the author or anything but the teenagers kept just making references to yogi bear and it was supposed to be like modern day and I was very taken out of the book it was very strange so yes thank you for thinking about teenagers just a just a little bit they really are great human beings I've based my career around them so I'm biased but speaking of which my last question before we get to the Q&A is a very self-indulgent one but what role did libraries or did you wish libraries had played in your own teenagehood you know I mean gosh I did spend a lot of time in the library when I was with a little kid and a teenager like my parents would just drop me off at the library and it'd be like you know I wouldn't even know how long they were gone I was just like oh yeah okay I live here now this is great you know there's books there's you know I'm not gonna run out of stuff to read anytime soon but so that was pretty much like I have like all these memories of just basically just like hanging out at the library and like you know that was like it was it was really important to me and like I don't know when I was in a teenager you know I had all this aside reading that was like this giant kind of like so I would kind of cheat on the books I was supposed to be reading for school and just kind of go to the library and just like haha I'm gonna read these other and I don't know there were books that I was just like obsessed with as a teenager that I would just like suck up at the library like you know all of the um you know these like fantasy series that was obsessively reading so I don't know that's that's all that's all I've got I guess but I love libraries I love librarians and I love spending time in them and I'm glad that we're finally getting back to being able to go into them again yeah I was thinking libraries um from when I was a kid in elementary school up through high school and then like into college and obviously now um so they've always been one of my favorite places uh reading was really uh one of the sources of joy that I've always had like growing up since I I learned how to read when I was very young uh and I have to say like in terms of my family libraries were also important to my mother who grew up uh in McAllen Texas of her father actually worked at a Goodyear store she had you know before he passed away um she had many siblings and the library was the one safe place they could go because it was quite dangerous where they lived so they would go to this library my mother would sneak out into the sci-fi fantasy section uh and not only is that where she really learned English and cultivated um uh that language skill it it's also where she learned to have this love for sci-fi and fantasy that was passed on to me and now I write the stuff so um really libraries like in generation uh to generation have been so important uh to to me and to my mother like just growing up um so yeah I just just thank you for all that you do as a librarian I also grew up in libraries it is uh it is difficult to overstate how useful a library is to the poorest people in a community there is so much access and so many resources that are available through public libraries that once you find out about you just never stop using them and it's the best thing so I caught on to that at a very early age my family was itinerant because my father was military and then just because poverty is often itinerant and everywhere I went I knew that there would be a public library where I was authorized to exist without having any money which is amazing if you can just hang out there and read books and there's a bathroom and it's clean and it's safe and there's a a water fountain so I wrote into Layla the concept of where can I hide out during the day when I don't have anywhere to be when I need to charge my phone when uh there is no one in charge of me and no one who is friendly to my existence and the answer to that is the library and I am very proud to uh to belong to and to support my local libraries now and also to live with a partner whose job is in public libraries and to be supported by it in turn cannot say enough good things about that also everybody thinks it's adorable when they say well what do you do when I say I'm a writer and they say well what does your partner do and I say he's a librarian and they're like oh I mean that is absolutely adorable okay I'm gonna read some of these questions because they're very good questions we only have two but again very good questions so first one comes from Noah who's been in the chat hi guys I'm Noah and I really want to be a writer I don't know how to start my book how do you come up with a first sentence it seems impossible lots of love your teenage envy and then there's a rainbow on a heart uh sorry I'm just muted yeah I mean you know getting started is really hard and opening sentences are often it's just like you're staring at like a blank document or a blank screen or whatever and it's or a blank piece of paper and just like getting into it is really hard and you know um I mean sometimes I just pretend that I'm telling a story to a friend and I'm like you know gosh I was just minding my own business and this thing fell out of the sky on top of me or you know I was just gosh you know I like just trying to kind of start at the beginning I guess and like you know when I'm writing I always know that the first draft is going to be kind of rough around the edges I'm going to be just kind of putting down some stuff and I'm going to be figuring out like even if I kind of know what the story is in events I mean they're figuring it out as I go a lot and so it's going to just be a process of you know it's the first draft is going to be kind of a rough draft it's going to be a it's going to be kind of rough around the edges and I know that I'm going to go back and change it and often the first sentence that I write like is not the actual first sentence that's going to be the first sentence of the thing when it's you know when I share it with other people necessarily that's usually not the case like I'm trying to remember if it's ever if I've ever used the first sentence that I wrote like I don't think I have I think if you you know if you looked at like my early drafts of all the words of the sky or a victory's greater than death the first sentence was very different in fact I posted somewhere about how the first sentence of all the words of this guy had changed and the original first sentence was not that great to be honest I feel like the thing that a first sentence has to do for me personally as the writer is make me want to know what the second sentence is like you know I don't have to I don't have to know what it is but I have to want to know I feel like okay that first sentence that I just wrote I really need to know what happens after this has to make me curious because I feel like the thing that writing just like reading you want to know what happens next and what comes after this and so the first sentence should lead to a really interesting second sentence which should lead to a really interesting third sentence and so it's just like what would make you personally curious about the story and that's a thing that only you can answer but like what is it that like that first sentence is just gonna be like oh I want to see where this goes you know and like I said you could change it later but just that's how you just pulling yourself into the story is kind of the job of it and just getting over that kind of fear of putting stuff on that page and like not being perfect because it's not going to be perfect. Yeah just to reiterate what Charlie Jayne just said I'm thinking of my next book it's it's called A Snake Falls to Earth and it's coming this October and I'm like how many times did the beginning change so actually I wrote I wrote the book then I edited it and then I edited it again and that's when I decided to put a whole new first chapter into the book and oftentimes like I do have trouble with the introduction or the very end of a book length project because like there's so many different possibilities and sometimes you kind of psych yourself out with how how significant that intro can be introducing people to the story and just when my head gets into that place of not knowing what to write I just don't write it and usually once I proceed with a story it gets easier and easier to write and then suddenly one day it'll come to be the way I want to begin this book or this story and sometimes that does change like it did with A Snake Falls to Earth and I have to say I rewrote the end for that six different times and these weren't these weren't little rewrites these are like significant rewrites and that's what I love about editing because it gives you that second chance to just really consider what you want your book to be and I have to say that it's really cool that you want to be a writer and good luck because the world needs your stories. 100% that please write stories that only you can write get into it be a writer it is the best job on earth that I don't want to do anything else. First sentences are really hard and as Charlie Jane said most of the time the sentence you start with is not going to make it you're just priming the pop you're just getting yourself going. I often steal I will take the first line of something else that I really liked and use it just as the jumping off point I know I'm going to delete it anyway so it doesn't matter if I open the story with Call Me Ishmael. There are a couple of my books and stories where you can see the fingerprints of the line that I stole my third novel the book of flora opens with a direct reference to last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again from DiMaria's Rebecca which is one of the best opening sentences of all time because for once I came back to it and said oh that's actually not bad I should keep that so once you do that once you're a fancy thief you can call it homage but I cannot recommend enough that you imitate the voices of writers you'd like to be like and steal because it is how we all begin. I love that I want I want to like just write that down if you're fancy enough homage okay love it stealing that from you Meg. Our second question comes from Tessa Fisher YA as a genre is rapidly gaining a reputation for inclusiveness what might it take to expand this inclusiveness into other genres and the larger literary publishing worlds dang Tessa don't pull those punches. I mean I think that across the board there's more inclusiveness the last like you know several years through the hard work of you know folks like you know the folks behind we do diverse books and you know other movements to try to like drag publishing and the book world kicking and screaming into you know the population as it exists in you know in the world and in this country we have a I think YA has a long way to go I think YA is still if you look at like the the kind of who's who's getting like the the most attention to YA and like the preponderance of YA books it's still not what it should be I think YA still has a long way to go you know when you look at how hard it was for you know the hate you give to find a publisher like I think she went through like dozens of publishers and that book is just what were these people thinking what were these people thinking I think that you know so YA still has a long way to go definitely as someone who's steeped in kind of adult science fiction fantasy they have a long way to go uh I I don't know if YA is more inclusive at this point than you know adult genres I feel like that's a really tough question that I don't feel qualified to answer uh I think that they neither neither a YA nor adult genres are diverse enough or inclusive enough and I think that you know unfortunately it really has to happen more behind the scenes I think that the problem that we're having is you know similar to a lot of other things where it's like you have inclusion in front of the camera or inclusion in like the front lines but not behind the scenes enough like I think that you know publishing is still extremely white extremely cis extremely het extremely kind of you know middle class extremely like you know probably there's like I don't even know I don't want to get but publishing I I love many of the people who work in publishing like I would say most people who work in publishing are among my favorite people because they love books and they are such beautiful you know creative people who just are like pouring their hearts into making great books happen but they will be the first to tell you that publishing has a real problem with not being inclusive enough behind the scenes and it's we're never going to get enough inclusiveness or the right kind of inclusiveness on the names on the fronts of the books if the names of the backs of the books don't change so that's what we really need to work on across the board yeah I just gotta say I agree and I'm a big horror fan I read a lot of horror I watch a lot of horror and there is a lot of room for improvement in that genre in particular and I do think that if we had more editors more published publishing people like like Charlie said behind the camera you know that would help so I I know of some projects some horror anthologies that are edited by really cool teams that I'm really looking forward to so I I am optimistic about the future and it's something that we just keep need to keep pushing for I want to go one step further I agree that publishing is overwhelmingly white overwhelmingly cis white women for some reason it's just like running publishing and and it's really difficult for them to to recognize good work when they see it if it's too far from their own experience or to know that market absolutely exists that cannot wait to fork over their money for it so I agree that publishing needs to diversify needs to diversify not only at the bottom not only with interns and slush pile readers but with acquiring editors managers and editors and chief most of all beyond that we need to destroy capitalism so that publishing doesn't work the way that it does so that everybody makes enough to live on so that we all have universal basic income and writers don't worry about the wolf the door so that publishers don't fret about something never selling because we wouldn't be stuck in this horrible way so yes and destroy capitalism yeah I'm a big land back first I gotta say I see a question about these earrings and these were gifts but I think they're from Etsy um and I know that Meg said earlier you knew of that you can get these things like these on Etsy so I'm gonna say probably there but yeah most of my cool stuff are gifts from my fiance so I have the exact same earrings which is what I was telling Darcy except the rosin's bottom is red instead of turquoise which you know suits me but if you just search skull cameo earrings you will find them I have to say I am I'm proud that uh this panel has ended up in destroy capitalism it's that makes my heart very warm and happy um Darcy I just you touched on land back and it's one of my like pet favorite kind of like things and I tell people about it all the time would you mind just like going into it just a little I would love to have it just talked about oh well I could oh sorry someone's tried to call me I have to decline them all right there I go I'm back I have to say from my perspective so I'm lip on Apache and in the the mid to hundreds essentially um that's when you know after Texas became a state and the federal government decided that they were going to take our land and kill us um so because we were to for the most part go on a reservation there are some lip on people who are suffering from who did go on to a reservation um but most of most of them my ancestors in particular resisted and we were subject to massacres from both the united states and Mexico and what we end up now is that we have no our homeland is we're struggling um I know my mother just for the first time in her entire life she's 65 she finally has land in Texas and it took her entire life just to be able to live without renting the land of our people um and so the lip on Apache people um we're we're currently in a battle to receive um more recognition to receive more resources but what we really need right now is our land because this is our homeland and we should not have to rent it from our colonizers so that's what I mean when I mean land back I mean that for indigenous people it is so important that we are connected to our land and right now too many of us are are are still suffering from that period of colonization uh so it's very personal and I actually get into it in my second book um oh my fiance's here does everyone want to see come say hi to the people team yes hi but yeah I could I could go on but but yeah I do um so yeah help the lip on people we need we need support um now I know we went through a very tough period during the pandemic so that was something that I was really involved with trying to get uh you know resources to our people that would keep us safe and there was a lot of suffering and and so yeah it's ongoing um that that period of colonization it's terrible impacts have not ended they're they're still impacting us today so sorry to take this to the in a completely different non-wa direction but yes thank you so much for for indulging me there I just I wanted to touch on that more um I guess we are going to wrap up if you all wouldn't mind saying where we could find you on the internet um if you have anything you'd want to plug besides your book or also your book um and if you want to say anything to the teens watching please do yeah uh you know please keep writing please keep reading and like dreaming of different better worlds and like help us to destroy capitalism uh I'm on twitter at uh charlie jane uh my website is charliejane.com I have another book coming out in august because why I don't know I have a book coming out in august called never say you can't survive how to get through hard times by making up stories and it's you know writing advice so if if you all want more advice about writing there's a whole book of it coming out in august uh and then in november I've got a short story collection coming out called even greater mistakes and then the the second book in the the trilogy of victories greater than death comes out in next april you're not busy at all or anything oh my gosh that's so exciting to hear um yeah I'm I guess I'm most active on on twitter in terms of social media but I also have an instagram uh twitter I'm shining comic and on instagram I'm doctor period little badger because I do have a phd in oceanography so I have a doctorated oceanography so that's I'm doctor ocean uh and my next book is a snake falls to earth um this october oh thank you yeah I like posting pictures of my of of of me my family and my pets on instagram um but yeah I think that's the next big thing exciting uh thank you so much for for having me on this panel and for listening to to everything that I had to say to any teens who are listening try the dance right write your stories make your art dance your dances don't let anybody talk you out of the things you know are true I have been working for the last 20 years to regain what I knew was true when I was 15 because the world will try to beat it out of you don't let them if you're interested in more of my work I have a a silly little blog at meggylisten.com I'm meggylisten on twitter I'm meggylisten on instagram I am meggylisten on patreon it's been a real pleasure to be with you here today and uh thank you for being here with me oh we lost we lost Charlie Jane for a second but I just I wanted to say thank you all the three of you it's been absolutely wonderful thank T for making a brief cameo that was wonderful um yeah thank you so much this was so this was such a good thing to get to listen to and do today um I hope the rest of your day goes well