There is a lot of buzz going on about boys not reading. Authors, publishers, librarians, booksellers, they all rack their brains to find ways to get them to read. Particularly young adult boys seem to have fallen in a deep and dark literature-less pit. I’m an inveterate optimist if it comes to reading, even when it concerns boys. They do read. But there are some preconditions. First of all the book needs to be good. It needs to be a stories about stuff they’re interested in. Young adult boys have a vast range of topics that appeal to them: girls, scooters or cars, experimenting, hanging about… Not necessarily in that order. Just kidding. There are way more issues that grab them. The young adult…
Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing
Posts from the “YA books” Category
Recently Google announced and launched its social network platform: Google+. It’s a cross-over between Facebook and Twitter and lots of people put in a word or two about it. Some like it, some don’t, some love it, some hate it. But whatever you feel, it’s there and you can’t evade it. For me the important question was: do I genuinely need another social network to add to my visibility? That seems an easy question. Right? You could argue that, in order to get as much buzz around The Writer Known As Mina Witteman as possible, I should jump at Google+. Eventually, Google+ will lure in public from Facebook, just like the Zuckerberg trap lured in public from MySpace and Hyves. It will, no doubt,…
Tagged: Facebook, Google+, Mina Witteman, platform presence, Twitter, Zuckerberg
The Marbury Lens. I’m not sure anymore who recommended it to me, I think it was on the Kobo site. In any case: I bought the book and read it. Wow! I love scare and horror, but this was way beyond scare and horror. This was like ending up in your very own nightmare, never to wake up again. Sixteen-year-old Jack Whitmore celebrates the end of the school year at a party thrown by his best friend Connor, who will also join him on a two week vacation to London. It is a good party and Jack gets blind drunk. Staggering the six miles back home — that’s when you’re still happy that he didn’t take the car — he falls asleep on a…
Tagged: Andrew Smith, Book Review, Literature, Mina Witteman, The Marbury Lens, YA
Paranormal is a big word these days, a controversial word, if you will. There are believers and there are non-believers. Me? I am a believer pur sang. I dig the fact that there is more to this world than meets the eye. So when my friend E.D. led me to Lish McBride’s Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, I felt no objections reading it. Good choice! It grabbed me right away or rather the protagonist Sam LaCroix grabbed me, not in the least because his full name is Samhain Corvux LaCroix. A guy named after my favorite bird? That bode well. Sam LaCroix is a Seattle college dropout and now flips burgers at a local fast food joint. While playing a game of potato hockey in…
It’s nearing, they say, the end of the world. I have no idea who ‘they’ are, but they’re quite convinced that it/us will end tomorrow, May 21. I beg to differ. I think we have a future ahead of us and even a bright one, we just have to look for it and make it work. Last Wednesday Lydia Davis was in Amsterdam. Wim Brands interviewed her and had her tell us where to look. It’s right there, she said. And she told us about the observations she makes at home or traveling; observations that form the source of her ultra short stories. When she looks out of the window and across the street from her home she sees green hilly pastures, a red barn…
Tagged: Amsterdam, Cows, Lydia Davis, SLAA, the end of the world, Wim Brands
Last August was my first time at the annual SCBWI Summer Conference. SCBWI stands for the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. It’s a mouthful and the acronym is not much of a help, but notwithstanding the name, the society itself is a gem. I had never seen so many people together (over 1,100) working towards that same goal: writing and/or illustrating the best possible book. Overwhelming as it was, I let myself go with the flow and learned more in those four days than in the past couple of years sweating at my desk, working on new manuscripts. Needless to say, I left the conference with dozens of ideas for new books, and with dozens of new friends, writers and illustrators from…
Tagged: 40th Anniversary, Amsterdam, hen & ink, John Green, Jon Sciezska, SCBWI, Summer Conference
It was a gorgeous summer day in Paris, even though spring only just knocked on our doors, chasing away the winter gloom. I was preparing for a party at my agent’s, Erzsi Deàk of Hen & Ink. Her quarters are in the always buzzing midst of Paris, a stone’s throw away from the Jardin des Tuileries and the famous Louvre and a stroll away from Place des Victoires. The summery temperature held me away from the Louvre and its hordes (actually, almost everything keeps me away from the Louvre hordes, not just the sun). I strolled the streets and ended up at the much more exciting Jeu de Paume, in the northwest corner of the Jardin des Tuileries. Nothing can keep me away from…
Mina Witteman 