Tag: YA fiction

Keep Your Popcorn Kisses to Yourself

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This mustard is now plowed under. It’s such a short but gorgeous season, the mustard fields in Sonoma County.

This is only Tuesday but it’s already shaping up to be a brutal work week. The company I work for is moving locations from a private garage to a bona-fide commercial builing. This is a really good thing, actually. It’s pretty creepy working in the garage of someone’s home, crammed in like illegal sardines. However, this means packing up the place. We’re not shutting down the company website so orders will come in all week and we’ll just be desperately trying to unpack and set up while customers build up heads of angry steam and it will be us peons who get blamed for whatever doesn’t get done in an impossible situation.

The incredible thing about human beings is their stalwart belief that if you give other human beings money of any kind you have the right to expect them to become magical benders of time and space – expected to turn acrid sweat into expensive wine with a large market share.

I spent all weekend trying to set up my new commercial website for Winters Apothecary. It is not a labor of love (in case anyone is hoping to hear a romantic spin on starting a small business). I am doing it with the full expectation that I will crank out a living from this gig. I’m taking all the steps necessary and trying not to be overwhelmed nor destroyed by self-doubt. I make great potions and remedies, all I have to do is find enough customers to make the whole thing thrive. Enough business will mean quitting my day job and sustaining my family while still having time and energy to write.

I’m concentrating on little good things these days to get me through the crummy days, the inertial that overtakes me in the afternoons and evenings.

The yellow mustard fields. The first rose to bloom in my garden (Abraham D’Arby). The first California poppy to open in my garden. The mandarin blossoms. The sound of mourning doves in the morning. The leaves of my potted fig unfurling tentatively like infant hands. Fruit trees in blossom. Max playing with the foster cat, Jax. A perfectly formed pancake.

Last thought before I go off to the day-job trenches: I read an excerpt of a YA book on twitter that was the description of a kiss between two teens. I think it was supposed to be “sweet” and “romantic” but it describe a boy as tasting like popcorn an cologne and maybe face wash? NO. I don’t know what adults pine for their teen years of bad kisses with young boys, but I worry about you. I really do. Even when I was a teen I would have been grossed out by a kiss tasting like popcorn. Ugh.

So maybe if you write YA fiction with a romance as part of your story, bear in mind that some nostalgia is just icky. Even for your target age group.

Am I the only person in the world who found the groping and newness of teen make-outs unsatisfying and unromantic?  In my own experience sex didn’t get good until the 20’s when everyone’s had a little more experience and matured to the point where neither partner smells like bubblegum or popcorn. Kisses aren’t good until it’s backed up by some living and some maturity.

It does occur to me that since 99% of the population has a bigger sex drive than I do, they might not particularly care about quality as long as long as there’s lots of it.

Anyway, keep your sloppy snack-tasting adolescent kissing between the covers of your book when trying to appeal to an adult crowd.*

*Twitter.