Ugh, I just read some kid's sophomore novel, and it's not very good, and I have to find a way to tell the kid, or the kid's editor. You know how writers use cop language when they're trying to sound grown up and authoritative? E.g., "Two months prior, I had relocated to San Diego." That's this book all over. Dull language propelling a dull plot. What a waste of everyone's time, and too late to rewrite.



I know that if I ever wrote a book, and it was as fun as this kid's first book was, I would slack my ass off on my second book, and maybe even use it as a platform for some of my sourest notions of how the world works, hoping that my Big Idea would drive the book so I wouldn't have to be super-careful on the language, especially since this would be the first book I ever wrote on deadline. I'd bang it out, get it in, and maybe get a bunch of help on it later like I did with my first book, though I won't. For this reason I am glad that I had an extremely fascinating social life when I was as young as this kid, and had really no notion of making myself into an artist or making statements to the world through anything but my clothing and music choices. Of course, I thought of myself as daring and political. The things I said and thought then, I believed. Now I know a lot of what I believed were transitional beliefs, things you have to think at some point in your life in order to be a well-rounded and tolerant person later on.