"The Prince Book" or, The Novel Formerly Known As (major plot point of original proposal recently deleted)

Those of you who know me in person or follow me on social media will know that I have been struggling mightily with my current YA novel. I sold it as part of a two-book deal, the first book being ANYTHING BUT OKAY, which came out in October, and the second book what I'm now calling "The Prince Book."

I started researching this book while writing ANYTHING BUT OKAY, but wasn't able to start it until later than I planned because: 1)Revisions for ABO went on longer than expected and 2) My husband suggested we sell our individual houses and buy one together like normal married people and I said "Yes, let's do that!" and thus ensued a great deal of insanity for several months. Note to self: NEVER, EVER, BUY AND SELL A HOUSE WHILE YOU ARE ON A TIGHT BOOK DEADLINE.

Immediately after turning in the first iteration of The (Former Plot Line) Book, I had to write THE TAMING OF THE SHOE, the third novel in my fractured fairy-tale series with S & S.

Given the circumstances, it's not entirely unsurprising that my first editorial letter for the Scholastic YA was 14 pages single-spaced. I basically threw out 95% of version 1 and rewrote the book from scratch. I still wasn't happy with the book I turned in as version 2. Neither was my editor. Editorial letter number 2 was 11 pages single-spaced.

By the time I got to version three, which wasn't a complete re-write but a MAJOR revision, I'd reverted to old-school plot attempts using colored index cards on the floor.

But it still wasn't right, and I knew it. We pushed the pub date back from Fall 2019 to Spring 2020. My first published novel came out in 2005. This YA is my 18th novel, and it's the first one for which I had to push back a pub date. It felt like a failure. I was complaining to my husband how much I hated this book and wish I'd never had the idea and sold it. It felt like I was beating my head against a wall, that I'd forgotten how to write, that all my previous 17 books were flukes, and that calling myself a writer was fraudulent.

Meanwhile, I had revisions of TAMING OF THE SHOE to do, so I had to take a much-needed break from headbanging on the YA. Working on the funny, lighthearted book, was good because I'd started to feel increasingly overwhelmed and depressed. It didn't help that I hadn't had a vacation in a very long time. We'd booked a week in December to go to Bonaire, on a scuba trip. I don't dive, but it worked out perfectly. I worked in the morning, while my man was out diving, and then he came back and we enjoyed time together.

My "office" in Bonaire.


I turned in the TAMING revision on Christmas Eve, allowed myself Christmas Day off, and then started thinking about what to do about this book the next day. I started feeling depressed again almost immediately. Something was really wrong with this book, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what to do. The brilliant and wonderful Laurie Halse Anderson spoke of having tools in our writer's toolbox and finding the right tools for each book
I'd already rewritten this book from scratch three times without figuring out the tools. It was a heavy, horrible feeling. I tried figuring it out on the train into the city to see my sister, talked about it with my poor long-suffering husband before bed, and went to sleep that night still not knowing the answer.

But then I woke up the next morning at 6am with an idea of how to completely restructure the novel. I wrote a new opening that I LOVED. Suddenly, I was excited about this book again. I emailed my editor the new opening, and we ended up having a phone conversation about it.

Today I wrote over 2500 words without sweat, and I'm still excited about where this book is going now.

So what the heck took me so long to figure it out?

I have no freaking clue. I'm just grateful that it's finally happened. I wish it had happened in May, so we didn't have to push back the pub date, but better late than never.

This is all a long-winded way of saying: If at first you don't succeed, try again, and again, and again, and again. #shepersisted

Writing novels doesn't seem to get any easier with practice.

Beyond "Thank You For Your Service"

This is the final post in the Veteran's Day series.



At 6pm this evening, there will be a random drawing for a set of 10 copies of ANYTHING BUT OKAY for your classroom or book club. You'll get an entry for retweeting this post (please tag me @sarahdarerlitt and hashtag #anythingbutokay) and additional entries for retweeting each of the posts between now and Veteran's Day. Rachel Alpine wrote a great teaching/reading guide, which you can download from my website.

While interviewing veterans for ANYTHING BUT OKAY research, the question of the oft repeated phrase “Thank you for your service” came up. As with any group, active service people and veterans are not a monolith, and the viewpoints on civilians using that phrase garnered mixed reviews.

As for this civilian, I’ve said TYFYS, but it never seemed like enough — it felt more like lip service than genuine gratitude, which needed to be expressed in more concrete ways, like adopting a soldier or donating to IAVA.org, or, eventually, writing a book that will hopefully encourage young people who might not have much direct contact with < 0.5% of the U.S. population that is active duty military to discuss and think about the challenges faced by our returning soldiers and their families. As Colorado Army National Guard captain Karthik Venkatraj wrote in the Denver Bar Association Docket magazine, “Our nation continues to experience a groundswell of support for our veterans — a welcome change from the horrific treatment of our Vietnam-era veterans — but we still have much work to do. As a nation, we have to move beyond “thank you for your service” to a deep scrutiny of the issues impacting our veterans in order for our veterans to transition successfully.”

How, though, do we move toward that deeper scrutiny?

The first step to that is asking questions and starting a conversation, above and beyond the catchphrase. Wes Moore described some of the challenges of starting such conversations to Candy Crowley in this 2014 interview: “What we’re asking for is that the conversation doesn’t end there, because at times when you say “Thank you for your service” and then the conversation ends, we almost feel like you’re almost saying it for your benefit, not necessarily for our benefit. What we want is for people to be able to ask questions, for people to feel comfortable.” Moore goes on to discuss the transition with his own family, because family members weren’t sure what to ask and were afraid to say the wrong thing. As a result, in order to avoid offense or triggering, people might decide to say nothing. “The problem is that from our side, if a person simply says nothing, our interpretation is ‘you don’t care,’” Moore said.




It's also important for civilians to work to understand the issues that face our active duty troops and veterans. Here are IAVA.org’s Big Six:


1) Continue to combat suicide among troops and veterans - Just like Rob in Anything But Okay, a 2017 member survey found that 65% of IAVA members knew a post-9/11 veteran who attempted suicide, and 58% know a post-9/11 veteran that died by suicide.

2) Fully recognize and improve services for women veterans Back in 2012, I worked with The Center for Sexual Abuse and Crisis Counseling to bring The Invisible War to the CT. In addition to other issues, women have faced being raped by people they trusted to have their six, and then being re-victimized as they try to get justice through military channels.

3)Defend Veteran and Military education benefits the post 9/11 GI bill is under threat of cuts from Congress, and veterans are being targeted by predatory practices of the for-profit education sector.

4)Reform government for today’s veterans Like Rob, too many vets have suffered as a result of lack of VA accountability. 82% of IAVA members are enrolled in VA healthcare, and 76% use VA benefits other than healthcare.

5) Initiate support for injuries from burn pits and other toxic exposures Like my friend Rob Jordan, whose 2014 Facebook post was one of the inspirations for Anything But Okay, “80% of respondents [to a 2017 IAVA member survey] were exposed to burn pits during their deployments and over 60% of those exposed reported having symptoms.”

6) Initiate empowerment of Veterans who want to utilize cannabis While Rob in Anything But Okay is prescribed pharmaceutical relief for his PTSD, a large majority including 75% of IAVA members under 35, view medical marijuana as more natural solution to PTSD. As someone who has been prescribed Xanax for non-combat related PTSD, I know I'd rather use cannabis than pharmaceuticals.

But perhaps one of the most important ways we can support our active duty military and our veterans is to pay attention to government policy and not be afraid to question, rather than falling prey to blind “my country right or wrong” faux patriotism.

As Army officer John Q. Bolton wrote in a Memorial Day post earlier this year, “Perhaps by questioning the fundamentals—the “why” instead of the so often discussed “what” in military operations—the public would be in a better position to demand action from a Congress that, heretofore, has largely abdicated serious oversight of foreign policy. Perhaps the public, instead of asking “what” we need to break the stalemate in Afghanistan, could ask “why” there is a stalemate at all—and whether American forces can truly ameliorate the structural, cultural, and historical obstacles to achieving desired ends there.”

We can support our troops and thank them for their service by being engaged and informed citizens, who pressure our representatives in Congress to do their job - providing oversight and checks on unfettered Executive branch authority. We can lobby them on the issues that are important to veterans. Change won’t happen without our involvement. As Stella eventually learns in Anything But Okay, “They can’t do it without us.”

Finding the courage to question

On Veteran's Day, at 6pm, there will be a random drawing for a set of 10 copies of ANYTHING BUT OKAY for your classroom or book club. You'll get an entry for retweeting this post (please tag me @sarahdarerlitt and hashtag #anythingbutokay) and additional entries for retweeting each of the posts between now and Veteran's Day. Rachel Alpine wrote a great teaching/reading guide, which you can download from my website.


For over 14 years, I wrote political opinion columns - for the Hearst CT papers (Greenwich Time/Stamford Advocate) and then for CTNewsJunkie. I stopped writing regularly in mid-2017, because the toxicity of being a woman writing opinion online was starting to affect my ability to write fiction. Getting sent rape threats and pictures of concentration camps can do that to a person. I had to preserve the mental space and creativity to write what actually pays my bills.

It wasn't a decision I felt good about, because in allowing my voice to be silenced, it felt like letting the trolls win. But not entirely, as it turns out, because ANYTHING BUT OKAY turned out to be one of the most political books I've ever written.

One of the questions I was determined to explore in this book was "What is a patriot?" It's one I've been pondering for a long time, because I have been called unpatriotic so many times as a journalist, merely for asking questions about government policy. I wrote about that in this column dated July 8th, 2008. (click here for full size PDF for easier reading.)

A few days later, this Letter to the Editor appeared in the paper, written by a Greenwich resident and WWII veteran named Richard P. Petrizzi.

To the editor:
I am a veteran of World War II (U.S. Army).I have many friends who are veterans who have never worn a flag on their lapels or flow flags in front of their homes.

Yet these same people went to war to fight the dictators who were trying to conquer the world. We fought at that time to preserve our freedoms, including freedom of speech.

I urge Sarah Darer Littman to keep writing her column and standing up for what democracy is really all about.

Richard P. Petrizzi, Greenwich

His words meant so much to me. I cut that letter out and pinned it above my desk. Whenever I felt like giving up, or people warned me to be careful about pissing off too many powerful people, I'd look up at his letter and keep going. I wish, more than anything, I'd written to him at the time to tell him how much what he said meant to me, and how his words gave me courage. Unfortunately, by the time I tried to contact him he had already passed.


There's a lesson here: Don't wait to tell people when they've influenced your life for good.

But more than that, there's the idea that patriotism isn't about outward trappings. It's not about how big of a flag you wave, or simply calling yourself a patriot in your Twitter handle and then sending hate speech to everyone who doesn't agree with you. It's not about "My Country - Right or Wrong." Rather it's about what Senator Carl Schurz said in a speech on October 17th, 1899:

“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”—Schurz, “The Policy of Imperialism,” Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, vol. 6, pp. 119–20 (1913).

Stella, the main character in ANYTHING BUT OKAY wonders about patriotism - what it is and who gets to define it. Her parents both served in the first Gulf War, and her older brother is an Afghanistan vet. She asks some of her parents' veteran friends how they define being a patriot.

Here's one of the answers:

To me, being a patriot means not being afraid to asks questions. Questioning doesn't mean a lack of love for one's country. It means the exact opposite.

Passed Down PTSD - A 2nd generation veteran perspective. Guest Post by Diane Van Hook

Rob, one of the main characters in my latest Scholastic novel, ANYTHING BUT OKAY, is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He struggling with PTSD, and in the book we see how it affects the entire family, including his sister Stella.

Starting today, in the lead up to Veteran's Day, I'll be posting a series of pieces about some of the issues our military personnel face when they return from combat.

On Veteran's Day, at 6pm, there will be a random drawing for a set of 10 copies of ANYTHING BUT OKAY for your classroom or book club. You'll get an entry for retweeting this post (please tag me @sarahdarerlitt and hashtag #anythingbutokay) and additional entries for retweeting each of the posts between now and Veteran's Day. Rachel Alpine wrote a great teaching/reading guide, which you can download from my website.


Today I'm happy to welcome Diane Van Hook, veteran and graduate of the low-residency MFA program at WCSU.

I went in to the Army with PTSD.

It wasn’t diagnosed at the time, and wouldn’t be until after I’d already left active duty. I also had depression and anxiety, which continue to this day.
I don’t know of many other service members that sought mental health care while on active duty. I knew I had issues that needed addressing, so for the last two years of active duty, I saw a non-military therapist on post.

But when I left active duty, I didn’t entirely trust Veterans Affairs to help me, especially since my PTSD wasn’t service related.
That had a lot to do with my dad.

I’m a second generation Army veteran, and my father was a Vietnam veteran. Some might say that my mental health issues were an inevitability because his service. It’s a somewhat frequent trope in fiction: the child of veterans from the older wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc) suffering some sort of abuse from the service member. The thing is, Dad’s service wasn’t the issue. At least, it didn’t help the issues that were already there. And it definitely added to them.
The issue was my father’s inability to handle his own mental health issues. There’s no doubt in my mind my father had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Unfortunately, there were far too many sources that contributed to it.

Maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of the stigma for seeking help he obviously needed. Maybe he thought it was a weakness he needed to overcome by himself. I couldn’t tell you, and I couldn’t ask him if I wanted to. He passed away a couple of weeks before I finished Basic Training.
In any case, he’d made his opinion of the VA clear: he didn’t trust them for anything past his yearly physical and sending him his medications. He spent a lot of time disparaging various groups and organizations, but he took care to specify he didn’t trust the mental health personnel.
And despite my efforts in trying to purge myself of the vitriol I’d heard him spew over the years, I couldn’t shake everything. So I carried that residual distrust of the mental health staff when it came time to confront the fact that I had depression and anxiety, and needed to be on medication for them. And instead of seeing a therapist employed by the VA, I chose a civilian one.

And for a few years, the combination of therapy and medication helped.

But as anyone who’s taken any sort of medication long term knows, taking the same dosage over time ceases to be as effective as it once was. When the time came to increase the dosage of my antidepressants, I was required to speak with one of the psychiatric personnel.

In 2010, a few months after I’d initially left active duty and had begun pursuing my degree, I received mobilization orders; in other words, I’d been recalled to active duty. Once I’d reported, I knew I’d need to continue with the therapy I’d started before and I needed to make sure that the higher ups understood why this was a priority for me. The last thing I needed was to get deployed and have an old issue crop up mid-firefight.

A two hour conversation and many tears later, I’d given the mental health Army doctor the truncated version of the series of unfortunate events that had been my life. Needless to say, the physician thought it’d best if I didn’t return to active duty. I received the official diagnosis for depression, the recommendation of therapy, and the orders sending me back home for good.

Flash forward to a year ago, when I was talking to the VA psychiatrist as to why I needed an increase in dosage. At that point, I was well practiced giving the Reader’s Digest version of events, because I didn’t have two hours to spare.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I don’t require nearly as much help as some of the other veterans I’ve become acquainted with over the years. One vet friend, who’d retired from the US Navy and was on disability, had been prescribed meds prescribed that conflicted badly with each other. This affected him so badly that at times he wanted to go to sleep and didn’t want to wake up again.

I lose 22 comrades-in-arms, my camo brothers and sisters to suicide everyday. That fact is beyond a travesty. It’s a shameful stain on the government that branded us their property. We signed a contract, agreeing to sacrifice our time, our families, and our lives in service to our country, with the reciprocation being if something happened to us, we’d be taken care of. But the support system set up to assist us seems to do more harm than good in its dysfunction. And not all of the blame can be laid at the feet of the current administration. They just managed to make a broken system worse.
I’ve been asked in the past how non-military people can help active duty, veterans, and their immediate families. I can’t give a definitive answer because we all differ in our experiences. What would help me probably wouldn’t work for someone else. The best answer I can give is to keep asking the question: how can I help? Ask any veteran you meet that you know needs some sort of assistance.

That might mean lending an ear, a helping hand, a kind word, or something else entirely. Holding responsible those who use veterans as pawns for political gain. Demanding inquiries as to why the standard of care is so abysmal.

The price of freedom isn’t free, and some of us have paid more than others.
But when do we stop paying?
When is it enough?
When are we enough?

Diane Van Hook is a second generation Army veteran recently graduated from Western Connecticut State University with her MFA. She currently resides in Connecticut, and has more books than bookcases. Read her piece Frag Out at Militaryexperience.org.

Join us for the #IReadYA #FindyourStory Tour tomorrow in Bethesda MD

Join us tomorrow, Monday October 29th for the @IreadYA #findyourstory Tour. Should be a really interesting discussion!

ANYTHING BUT OKAY pre-order giveaway

My latest YA Novel, ANYTHING BUT OKAY, comes out from Scholastic Press on October 9th.

I'm really excited for this book to come out in the world, and to encourage you to pre-order, I will send you a signed bookmark, a personalized bookplate, and these awesome temporary tattoos to sport when you get involved (and VOTE, if you're old enough!) in the mid-term elections. Unfortunately, I have to make this US and Canada only. Sorry international readers... Pre-order giveaway ends on October 8th.

The temporary tattoos read:

If that's not enough to convince you, for each pre-order entry, I'll make a donation of 5% of your cost of purchase to your choice of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, The League of Women Voters or HIAS.

But wait — there's more! All pre-orders will be entered into a raffle to win copies of IN CASE YOU MISSED IT and BACKLASH.

How do you get this swag? It's easy! Just email me at sdlgiveaways@gmail.com with a proof of purchase and your mailing address.



As with most of my books, the idea for ANYTHING BUT OKAY started with questions that were knocking around my brain.

The first one was inspired by my friend Rob Jordan, a USAF veteran.

Back in December 2014, Rob made a post on Facebook about the problems he had getting disability for the health issues he'd developed as a result of serving in Afghanistan, at bases where there were burn pits. His post made me angry about the way we treat our veterans - I wrote about it here.

Seeing Rob and so many other of our veterans struggle to get help from the Veteran’s Administration after having served our country with pride got me wondering: Why is our country so quick to send troops off to war regardless of the cost, but when our vets come home struggling with the emotional and physical costs of fighting it, the focus is suddenly switched to reducing taxes and a deficit swollen by the costs of prosecuting that war?

I had a write a novel to work that one out, and it's dedicated to Rob.

The second question was “What is a patriot?” and the related question of who gets to define that. I spent fourteen years writing political opinion columns,. and count George Orwell as one of my major influences. Hearing our government using the euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” for torture was a perfect example of what Orwell warned of in his essay, Politics and the English Language: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” Yet because of the views expressed in my 650-word columns, I was called un-American, and a terrorist lover, which was confusing because I thought I was doing my job as a journalist and my duty as an American.

The news was another inspiration for ANYTHING BUT OKAY. Watching politicians use rhetoric to portray different groups as “animals”, and working to restrict the ability of refugees to seek asylum has a disturbingly familiar ring for someone who grew up in a family with Holocaust trauma. Teachers and librarians described how that rhetoric 'trickled down' to their schools, both virtually on social media and in real life bullying. My heart broke as I heard about students in tears concerned for the safety of their families. I read the news stories about white, privileged kids from the suburbs shouting racist chants when they play teams from schools with a more diverse makeup. This made me wonder how we can help create more understanding and empathy; how we can start conversations and bridge differences. As a white woman of a certain age, I’m learning how many blind spots I have, and I hope reading about Stella and Farida’s friendship will encourage young people to think about what it means to be a good ally; to recognize that we can’t stand by in silence when we see injustice, just because it’s not happening to us personally.

Speaking of the news and how critical it is to learn media literacy skills, particularly in the Internet age, I’ve watched as the number of school librarians and media specialists has been cut by twenty percent since 2000, particularly in predominantly black and Latino districts, despite rising student populations. Technology can be a great tool, but Google will not teach our students media literacy.

I hope that this book will encourage discussion of these questions—and through those conversations enable us to find the humanity we have in common.


To read more about ANYTHING BUT OKAY, here's the link to the book on my website.

Gina Haspel nomination - revisiting The Politics of Mockingjay

Watching the politics around Gina Haspel's confirmation as CIA Director, and the reprehensible attacks from the White House directed at Senator John McCain, I've been reminded of a piece I wrote eight years ago for The Girl Who Was on Fire, an anthology of essays about Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series. I thought about it as I was listening to different news channels while stuck in traffic on I-95 this afternoon driving back from an author talk. Two themes of the essay - what it means to be patriotic and the use of torture, seem to be as much if not more of an issue today as they were back in 2010 when I wrote this:

"In the summer of 2008, two letters from readers arrived at my paper. One, addressed to me, asked, “Can you name me an instance where you are on the United State's side on an issue?” The other, addressed to my editor at the paper, complained: “ If you're going to continue to publish the far left ramblings of Sarah Darer Littman on your editorial page, you can at least try to balance things out by having somebody else on who actually wants to see our country win the war on terrorism.”

I found myself bemused by both, because as far as I’m concerned, I’m on the United States’ side on EVERY issue. It’s because I love my country so much, because I believe so passionately in the ideals upon which it was founded, that I’m so vocal when I feel that our government and our elected officials are taking us down paths that diverge from those principles.

So what does it mean to be patriotic? What does “being on America’s side” constitute? Does it mean “My country”—or in Katniss’ case, the rebellion—“right or wrong”? Personally, I don’t believe that is the case. One of the greatest minds of all time, Albert Einstein, said, “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

To me, it is about asking questions, fighting for what you believe in and holding our leaders accountable. It’s about making sure that making sure that they don’t take us down a path that is antithetical to what we stand for. It’s about saying “The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values” as President Bush declared in a speech on September 6th, 2006, but really meaning it, not coming up with rationalizations for how and why we are allowed do so.

It’s about facing the real challenges ahead of us without losing who we are as a nation, without compromising the core values and beliefs that made America the shining beacon of democracy in the world.

I have a letter to the editor from a World War II veteran, Richard P. Petrizzi, that I keep pinned above my desk. It reads ; “I have many friends who are veterans who have never worn a flag on their lapels or flown flags in front of their homes. Yet these same people went to war to fight the dictators who were trying to conquer the world. We fought at that time to preserve our freedoms, including freedom of speech. I urge Sarah Darer Littman to keep writing her column and standing up for what democracy is all about.”

Almost two thousand years ago, the poet Juvenal wrote the Satires, a series of poems highly critical of the mores and actions of his Roman contemporaries. In Satire X, he writes of the downfall of the head of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus, and the reaction of the citizens of Rome as he is dragged through the streets to his execution. One citizen asks ”But on what charge was he condemned? Who informed against him? What was the evidence, who the witnesses, who made good the case?"

Another replies: "Nothing of the sort; a great and wordy letter came from Capri, " in other words, Sejanus had been condemned to death on the basis of a letter from the Emperor Tiberius, because he’d fallen out of favor with his former friend. “Good; I ask no more," replies the first citizen – abandoning law and order to the winds.

Juvenal rails that “the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things----Bread and Games!”

Or, in the original Latin: Panem et Circenses. The phrase originated with Juvenal and two thousand years later, it describes how much of the American public preferred to lose themselves in “reality TV” than pay attention the erosion of civil liberties during the War on Terror; “asking no more” in the way of evidence from their government when confronted by policies that so clearly contradict our laws and our national values. From warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, to the politicized hiring and firing of Department of Justice officials, from the abrogation of international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, to leaking the name of a covert CIA agent for political purposes - the list of Bush Administration transgressions goes on. Although the Obama Administration has corrected some of the worst abuses such as the use of torture, it still hasn’t rejected the use of extraordinary rendition or closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay, despite the fact that the harsh treatment received there has motivated several released prisoners to become members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Yet much of the American public remains too busy watching Reality TV, preferring to discuss Dancing with the Stars and Jersey Shore, and continue to accept the harsh treatment of prisoners under the guise of “national security”, without understanding the global strategic implications, let alone the immorality.

My upcoming novel ANYTHING BUT OKAY, (Scholastic, October 2018) is a further exploration of the questions I had in 2010 about what it means to be a patriot and who gets to define it. Rereading the essay from eight years ago reminds me that the seeds of our current political chaos weren't planted by Trump. Trump's election is the ugly weed that sprouted from the seeds planted years earlier. We have to recognize that in order to move forward with any vestige of a civilized society intact.

Branding or Gendering

#kidlitwomen, is a month of essays and posts about gender inequities and other disparities in children’s literature. Join the conversation at KidlitWomen on Facebook and by searching #KidlitWomen on Twitter.



When my editor sent me the cover concept for my upcoming novel, ANYTHING BUT OKAY, I liked it – a lot. Nonetheless, there was something that concerned me, and I wrote back posing the question of cover gendering.

My last three YA novels all have a technology element. As far as protagonists:

BACKLASH is told from four points of view, three female, one male.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT is from the point of view of a bright female who does probability trees to figure out if the guy she likes will invite her to the dance, and if she should accept if another guy asks her first.

ANYTHING BUT OKAY is told primarily from a female point of view, but with part of the story told in diary entries from the main character's older brother, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who is struggling with PTSD.

Here are the covers:

In comparison, I looked at the covers of some well-known male YA authors who also published books with a female protagonist, including several from my publisher.

Here are some examples:

When I look at these, I can't help but wonder if this is truly a branding and marketing issue or it’s gendering issue. Even the covers by male authors that do feature a girl on the cover are in more gender neutral color palettes. Not a hint of pink to be found. Why does this matter? Because despite the admonition that we "shouldn't judge a book by its cover", we all know that's what happens.

I’m by no means the first one who has raised this. Back in 2013, Maureen Johnson tweeted to her followers: I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says, “Please put a non-girly cover on your book so I can read it. - signed, A Guy”. She then had the genius idea for a Coverflip.

The results were illuminating, as you can see here.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes wrote a fascinating post the causality of a book's success and gender.

There are important reasons why we need to examine this more closely, particularly now that #Metoo has started past-due conversations about harassment. Covers create a perception of the book, and that translates to school visits - an important source of income for authors, and a source of book sales, which then translate to other forms of recognition - the cascading model, as Jennifer put it.

At a school visit not long after my novel IN CASE YOU MISSED IT came out, the media specialist told me that she almost had me only speak to the girls, because I write “girl books”.

I don’t think of myself as a writer of “girl books.” I do my best to create intelligent, thoughtful female characters with a full range of emotions – just as I do with my male characters. Then I put them in situations where they have to make choices, choices which are difficult because the answers aren't clearly spelled out in black and white. The grey areas of the human experience fascinate me, because it's those choices, as Albus Dumbledore observed: "that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

As far as I’m concerned, I write books for thinking human beings of any gender. Not only that, my school visit presentations cover completely non-gendered topics like research, the important of writing well no matter what you do in life, inspiration, creativity, and persistence. There are even butt jokes and corpses.

I asked the media specialist what message she was sending to both boys and girls if the girls were required to listen to male authors, but boys weren’t required to listen to female authors.

Her reply: “I never thought of that.”

It's just not good enough. We all need to think a harder about that, because the messages we’re sending boys are ones that will stick with them when they are men in college and the workplace. If we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem. Boys shouldn't grow up with the message that women's voices are unimportant and can be ignored. Shannon Hale has been powerfully outspoken on this.

When I asked other female kidlit authors for their thoughts, I heard a depressingly familiar story.

Here's Melanie Crowder:

I did a middle school assembly-style visit with a group of debut authors in 2013. We were brand new, bright eyed and enthusiastic, but the school nearly cancelled at the last minute. When I approached the principal before the visit he said something along the lines of: "Oh, we almost cancelled because you're all women and we didn't think the boys would get anything out of it."

A woman author who wished to remain anonymous told me: “I was meeting with a bookseller who is influential in selecting our city-wide read. She was flipping though my books, looking for one that had broad enough appeal for the program--and she made it very clear that by broad appeal, she meant one with a boy protagonist.”

Christina Soontornvat spoke of a problem that is all too familiar:

"I have gotten so many comments of "Do you think my son would read this?" or "Oh, we have some girls in our class who would love that". Too many comments to keep track of! But when kids are allowed to choose, I find that boys tend to like them in the same proportion as girls do. "

At least she gets asked if the adult's son would read it. I get people just telling me: "Oh, it looks great, but I only have sons/grandsons/nephews." They take one look at my covers and ASSUME that the book wouldn't be of interest - and I can't help but wonder if it would be the same story if my covers were more like the male author ones above.

What's particularly depressing is how young kids are when they get this message from parents and gatekeepers. Here's picture book author and journalist Dashka Slater: "I have watched parents literally take copies of my book Dangerously Ever After out of their sons' hands because it's about a princess."

We all know how subversive it would be for a young boy to read about a princess. Heck, he might grow up to respect and understand women better!

Here's an unutterably depressing story from Newbery award-winning author Linda Sue Park.

One of my books, KEEPING SCORE, is a baseball book with a girl protagonist. Uphill work getting boys to read it, sigh. When the paperback jacket was dummied, the publisher showed it to me. It had even MORE 'girl' markers (more pink, very domestic scene). I told them about the difficulty of getting boys to even open it. They switched to a cover with a DOG. Boom! Boys read it now. It's such a quandary: Is it better to have the dog on the cover so boys will at least open it, and read about a girl character? Or leave the girl on the cover while we work on dismantling the patriarchy--which means countless boys WON'T read it, at least for now.... OY."

What does that say about the messages we adults send young men and boys, that they will pick up a book with a dog on the cover over one with a girl - even if it's about baseball?

I know that boys DO read my books, and again, I can't help wondering how many more might if my covers were more gender neutral.

Here's Jen Brooks, a media specialist in Findlay, OH:

Sayantani Das Gupta wrote:

On the flip side my new female protagonist mg book with a brown girl on the cover front and center is actually getting really good reception so far from boys and girls and teachers seem to be pushing it toward both - is it because it’s a funny fantasy and not realistic fic? I don’t know .

It's an interesting question. I wonder if it's because it's humorous fantasy or that one can get away with more when it's a drawing of a girl than photograph? Or if it's because middle grade rather than YA?

Holly Westlund was working as a bookseller when Marie Rutkowski's WINNER'S CURSE trilogy first came out.

I think THE WINNER'S CURSE trilogy is an excellent example of series that should realistically appeal equally to both genders and was marketed to girls only (see covers), despite the dual protagonists.

Maureen Johnson made the papers when she highlighted the gendered covers issue in 2013. Sadly, five years later, it doesn't seem like much has changed.

About Valentine's Day...

Haven't had much time to blog lately due to...well, lots of reasons, but the best one is the impending deadline for my 2019 Scholastic book. But given the fact that the #MeToo has finally hit the kidlit world and tomorrow is Valentine's Day, Auntie Sarah wants to share a few words about love.

I hate Valentine's Day - I think it's a ridiculous holiday. I told my then boyfriend, now husband, that I never want or expect anything from him on V-Day. Here's why - because love isn't about a day where you get expensive presents, chocolate (okay, you can give me dark chocolate if you REALLY want to), and flowers which have been hiked in price because supply and demand.

Love, as far as Auntie Sarah is concerned, is shown by being there on a day-to-day basis, not by overpriced flowers and dinners on a prescribed day. By being supportive of your partner's career, and strong enough in your own self to rejoice in her successes, instead of feeling threatened by them. By believing your partner when she tells you about the experiences she had with harassment and abuse in life, and in the workplace. By taking action and having conversations with other men about how you can make the world a better place for her, instead of shrugging and saying: "boys will be boys."

Love is surprising your partner with flowers or chocolate or something you know she likes and will make her laugh - but when she least expects it, not just because you're supposed to because it's Valentine's Day and everyone else is doing it.

Love is laughing together. And crying together when hard times hit, and helping each other to find hope again.

Love is experiencing true intimacy when you talk about the things closest to your heart.

"But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

The love and respect your partner shows you on a day-to-day basis is so much more important and revealing than the most extravagant prescribed expressions on Valentine's Day.

Go forth and love. But don't make it about the Hallmark Holiday.

/endrant