Viking Girl Scribbles

1. They deal with young people. Are you / have you been young? Then YA is relevant to you. 2. They are about growing up. Are you growing up / have you grown up? Then YA is relevant to you. 3. They often start straight away and keep good pace. You don’t have to yawn your way through 50 pages of boring introduction. 4. The dialogue in today's YA often kick butt with the dialogue in today's adult novels. 5. You would miss an enormous amount of awesome novels if you didn’t read them.

It was Virginia Woolf who said that women need a room of their own, a room where we will be able to write (fiction more specifically). I was lucky in that respect when I began to read and then later on when I started to write poetry and prose as a teenager. I was always encouraged to both read and write, and my father would take me to the library and introduce me to the wonderful world that is Science Fiction. Growing up I was sort of an only child, I never had to share my space with anyone. Okay, the “sort of an only child”-thing might need some explaining. My older sister, by 6 years, was severely handicapped ( Retts Syndrome ), so we could never have any kind of sisterly bond or do anything together. When she was 17 she died from heart failure, leaving my parents and I to continue life without her. Yes, it was an easier life because she needed so much help and we could never take any long trips; or if we did my parents had their hands full with her and sometimes I was l...

I have for a long time had unfinished novels lying about (I think the oldest one is close to 10 years) and I wonder if I’ll ever finish them. But recently, or perhaps all the way through spring, I have taken some time to think about how I should proceed. There are so many loose ends and some days are so overwhelming that I tear at my hair and curse those voices inside my head that demand to be heard and to get their stories written down. In moments like these I comfort myself by checking out my favorite authors' websites. I have read over and over again on different websites (Neal Asher’s and Ursula K LeGuin’s among others), that writing is like everything else: If you want to be good at it you have to do it often, write every day and accept that much of what you write is (more or less) rubbish. I listen to that and write and write and write and reject much of what I scribble down. But sometimes, sometimes , it’s good and I feel I can believe in myself and my projects aga...