Books with Teeth in the Middle
🙂 My daughter came up behind my computer screen while I was toying around with an opening scene on a book I’m not really writing yet. (A character you all ask about sometimes but I’m deep in others.)
She read the first two lines:
“Burned out and burned up, and there was a man in her orchard.
_____ wondered if she should shoot him.”
And her eyes got so big! She was worried about that guy in the orchard even after she went to bed. She said: “Is this going to be a dangerous book? One that has teeth in the middle and eats people?”
[Bonus points if you get her cultural reference there. 🙂 ]
Geneva Christie
Kids can have an odd sort of double standard when it comes to their parents, but would never ever admit to that being true.
Something which makes them giggle or belly-laugh when in a movie, a TV performance, or in fiction is one thing but if Mom or Dad or anyone they actually know did anything nearly that outrageous, the kid would consider it too awful to contemplate. It’s a tricky line all parents have to navigate, the job of staying out of, “Don’t embarrass me, my friends might see,” territory. No matter how proud they actually are of you, they still don’t want you to be noticed by their friends for anything different.
I love that your daughter thought of the Perry book from reading your scene opener! And no doubt it widened, in a slightly unsettling way, her concept of what her mom might think and write. So, good job, Mom!
…and yes, I hope that this will grow into the long-anticipated L-book.
Warriors who have tried hard to protect others deserve their own chance to come home and to find a peace of their own.
Laura Florand
Especially once they hit middle school years! My daughter hasn’t started getting embarrassed by her parents in public yet, but we know it’s just around the corner. Any day now really.