Commence radio silence in three …
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Meet Me (and Tess, and Maggie) in NYC!
Yes, today was originally supposed to be a high-school post day, but then things went and got hectic and disorganized and I had to drive to the airport, which is far away, and also I really really want to use this one specific picture, because I think the post will be stupid without it, but I can’t find the picture, but I think I know where it is, so just give me some time and I will track it down!
In lieu of that post, I have a fun thing: an announcement for all you bloggers headed to BEA in June!
(Also, my announcement presupposes that the bloggers I’m addressing are interested in what I write, or what Maggie Stiefvater writes or what Tessa Gratton writes, or a combination. But then, you’re here, so it’s probably safe to assume that you are, at the very least, aware that I write books.)
Now, the announcement—Carolrhoda Lab, who’s the publisher of our upcoming anthology The Curiosities, is going to be hosting a blogger breakfast, and right now, they’re holding a contest over on Facebook where you can enter to win an invitation!
If your name is picked, you’ll come eat breakfast with me and Tess and Maggie and a few other Carolrhoda authors, and ask us questions and participate in general merriment, and I will try so, so hard not to spill anything on myself.
(Which is something I do sometimes.)
(It’s problematic.)
Anyway, if you’re a blogger who’s going to BEA and hanging out with us sounds like a fun time, go and get entered, and hopefully I’ll see you at breakfast!
Better Late (Five Fictional Characters)
Okay, get ready to laugh at me.
Ready . . .
Ready . . .
Are you ready for it?
Here we go:
I’ve been working on this particular meme for roughly two years.
Yes. I know. In my defense, though, it was a really hard meme.
The instructions are simple. (Deceptively so.) List five fictional characters you closely identify with, and then explain why. Not five characters you admire, or find attractive, or think are funny, but five characters that you personally—like, as a person—identify with.
Now, let’s be very clear. It’s not that I consider myself to be such a mystery that I’m unquantifiable, and it’s not that no one ever appreciates or writes about people like me. It’s just that my type hardly ever shows up as more than a peripheral role—the literary equivalent to a walk-on. (In fact, some of my personal five are walk-ons.)
The following list can be roughly categorized by tropes (okay, sometimes the tropes are stupid-specific ones that I kind of made up, but still, I am organized. Look how organized I am!)
Also, some of the character descriptions may seem to sit in direct conflict with each other, but that’s not really true. Because inside, I think that a person can really be a lot of people, depending on the situation.
My list of Brennaesque characters reads as follows:
The Comic Relief
Luna Lovegood—Harry Potter. So, when I was in high school, I had this very bizarre sense of fashion. It was heavily influenced by my nonexistent budget, but also, it was kind of made worse by my affinity for … trinkets. I mean, I decorated everything. I sewed plastic Christmas ornaments on my sweaters and glued tiny dollhouse clocks to my shoes. I went out in public wearing rubber monster finger puppets. Plural. More than one.
I didn’t usually volunteer opinions, but if you asked, I’d certainly tell you what I thought. Regardless of how blunt or inconsiderate or strange it was. And sometimes I knew that I shouldn’t, but most of the time, diplomacy didn’t even occur to me. Because honesty is a virtue and precision matters. Because when you are Luna Lovegood, things mostly seem to sort themselves out. Sometimes you’re mildly perturbed when people call you crazy, but there’s really no point in being tragic about it.
Also, in order to make people start taking you seriously, you’d have to stop doing all the things you like. And well, that’s no fun. keep reading…
Like this:
Dweezil, Drawing, and Why the Hell Am I Not Capable of Eye Contact?
May is coming to a close and in the grand scheme of the high school narrative, things are actually going really well. Jane is out of the hospital, I have three English classes, and the soccer team keeps winning playoff games. The semester is almost over. Summer is almost here.
We’re two weeks from finals, and teenage Brenna is surprised to realize that despite her general lack of enthusiasm for public school (also, that right there is a gross understatement intended for comedic effect), she’s not really all that impatient for the semester to end.
This time last year, I was restless, annoyed, unsatisfied with pretty much everything. (I was probably a little insufferable.)
But now, I feel strangely light. I want to dance around and put lilacs in my hair, and toy animals and feathers and tiny paper cocktail umbrellas. I want to roll in the grass like a puppy. I’m just not the same girl I was at 16.
The change is mostly apparent in little ways, like how the underclassmen on the soccer team will sometimes look to me when it’s time to organize ourselves for relay drills, and the way my teachers have started treating me like they expect me to take charge of projects or volunteer answers, and the fact that my hair has grown more than five inches and comes down almost to my hips when I wear it loose.
Also, now I sometimes wear my hair loose.
I have a whole closet of eclectic DIY clothes, some of which are disastrous, but some of which are excellent. I have a sister who looks like a best friend. I have pastel-pink fingernails and cinnamon lipgloss and I get picked for things, group presentations and committees and teams in PE. People say hi to me in the halls—sometimes people I’ve never even talked to. They nod and smile when they see me, and even though I’m still marginally terrified of strangers, I keep my chin up and work hard to smile back.
I am (sort of/kind of) someone-in-the-real-world, and I don’t even know exactly how it happened. keep reading…
Today’s Favorite Thing: The Cabin in the Woods
While this probably constitutes retreading old ground, I feel that I should take this opportunity be very clear.
I like horror movies. A lot. Like … I really, really like horror movies.
It’s a condition that’s plagued me since childhood, and yes, I could probably even make some weird attempt to justify my obsessions or invent a cool little postulate as to why my little-girl thoughts were dominated by movie monsters, and not flowers or ponies or rainbow-dolphin-unicorns. (I was an English major with a psych minor—I’m uncommonly equipped to mangle theories into vague reflections of reality.)
But I just have this feeling that anything I could come up with wouldn’t mean that much. The true, honest thing is actually very simple. I saw my first horror movie when I was six (It was House. It was terrible.), and since then, I’ve just kind of been fixated.
As a result, I spent most of my childhood searching out terrible, hilarious monster flicks (Puppet Master, Leprechaun, Troll), and then talking my sister and my friends into to watching them with me. I saw the good, important movies, and the classics—The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Nosferatu. I saw All The Zombie Movies. I read special effects books about designing prosthetic wounds and watched documentaries about the rise and fall of the slasher film. If I happened to be wandering around looking oblivious and humming disjointedly to myself, there was a good chance I was bopping along to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” or “Pet Sematary.”
So it is with very little irony that I say, The Cabin in the Woods exists for me! Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard made it for ME. (Oh be quiet—I will tell myself this fantasy if I want to.)
I went and saw it on Saturday. And not just because I have a troubling, knee-jerk impulse to see every horror movie that comes out, regardless of whether it looks like it will be any good, and not just because I am in love with Topher Brink.
I saw it because it promised me something unusual and unexpected and fantastic.
These promises were not empty.
The Cabin in the Woods is my new best friend. It knows all the horror movie conventions, and it understands them, and loves them and cuddles them just like I do, and it still has the absolute temerity to flip them over and start poking around in the wiring.
Even now, three days later, I catch myself thinking about the narrative and the structure—taking apart ideas and stacking them in a neat little row like a set of morbid Russian nesting dolls. And no, I don’t think this movie will be for everyone, But I know enough to tell you that if you like the same things I do—if you get irrationally excited about zombie apocalypses, and the piano theme to John Carpenter’s Halloween makes you feel nostalgic, instead of just edgy or kind of annoyed (and yes, if you love Topher Brink)—then you need to go see it.
Because if you’re anything like me, then Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard are thinking of you.
They made this movie is for you, too.
Jane Comes Back
Okay, wow. It has been FOREVER since I put up an actual high school post!
To reorient: A long time ago, before hyper-productive writing trips and knee surgery and that time I revised a book, we left teenage-Brenna post-break-up, marginally assertive, and newly intent on locating the missing Jane. (And also a little bit of a nihilist—not even a regular, run-of-the-mill nihilist either, but like a fancy one. That’s old news though. She’s already growing out of it.)
Following my awkward showdown with Dill, I have Jane’s number. Like, physically have it. On a scrap of paper. In my possession. This is alarming, because it means that now I actually have to do something. Also, Catherine will not stop teasing me over my phobia of the telephone.
I call Jane’s house after dinner, hating the sound of the signal ringing on the line. My aversion to the phone is hard to explain. I don’t freeze or stutter, I don’t panic. It’s more like as soon as I’m in the true, tangible act of calling—as soon as I’m actually holding the receiver to my ear, I just … really, really want to hang up.
The impulse is bizarre and kind of embarrassing. Sometimes I consider the possibility that it might be neurological, but I don’t really think that’s the case. I think part of it might be that I sometimes have a really hard time understanding what someone’s saying when I can’t see them. Also, I’m beginning to suspect that I don’t have the greatest hearing and that’s probably why I sometimes have trouble understanding people even when I’m looking right at them.*
I’m about to just call it a wash and put the receiver down, when a girl answers. I ask for Jane and she says, “Are you her friend from school?”
It’s a weird question because it’s incredibly direct. Because it implies that Jane has only the one friend.
“Yeah, just—I hadn’t seen her in a while.”
“She’s not here.”
I have the unsettling feeling that this will be it. That I’ll thank the girl for her time and hang up the phone and that will be the end of the whole production and also of my friendship with Jane.
But the girl takes pity and says—pleasantly enough, “She’s in the hospital.” keep reading…
In Which I Answer All Your Questions
Actually, these are mostly not your questions, since for the vast majority of people reading this right now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you probably came here on purpose. (And also, if you wanted to know something I hadn’t said already, you’d probably just ask me.)
So, a cool thing about WordPress is that the site-stats feature lets you see a list of all the search terms and combinations that brought visitors to your site. (Don’t worry, I have absolutely no idea who visited the blog or searched for which various weird things, or even what geographical region the queries came from, so this is purely an exploration of the vagaries of the internet.)
Anyway, because I think the feature is just pretty awesome and because some of the searches are frankly hilarious, I’m going to do my best to address the concerns of the people.
In an attempt to prove that I am sometimes mildly responsible, the first questions I’m going to answer are the actual Brenna-themed ones that aren’t addressed in my FAQ.
Starting with a very popular one:
how old is brenna yovanoff
brenna yovanoff born
how old is brenna yovanoff ?
brenna yovanoff birthdate
when was brenna yovanoff born
brenna yovanoff date of birth
Okay, so yes. I know why this is even an issue. It’s because I’m very short, and when I talk, I sound basically like I am five. But I’m not five.
I am actually thirty-two, and I’m telling you this now for the sake of posterity, because I don’t think it does anyone any good to go around assuming that I’m some stray child who has catapulted into the professional sphere, when really, I’m just marginally childlike.
And in related searches:
where is brenna yovanoff from
where was brenna yovanoff born
is brenna yovanoff russian
So the most basic answer to this is that I’m from the United States of America. I was born in California and then my family moved to Arkansas, and after that, Colorado. However, if you’re wondering about my last name or my cultural heritage, my dad is half-Macedonian, which is why I have a pretty prominent bump on my nose. (Well, also because I’ve been hit in the face a lot by various pieces of sporting equipment. But it was always there—it’s just gotten more noticeable. By which I mean broken.)
is brenna yovanoff writing anymore books
is brenna yovanoff working on book 3?
brenna yovanoff new book
new book for brenna yovanoff
A good rule of thumb for this one is to just assume that the answer is always YES. However, the more specific answer to this question is, I’m currently working on Paper Valentine, which is scheduled to come out next February and you can read more about it here.
who is brenna yovanoff married to
Aw, you guys are a bunch of romantics! I’m married to this guy. Also, I’m not telling you his name.
brenna yovannof secret crush
While I suspect that most people were just trying to go to this post, there’s a small possibility that some of you are in fact trying to determine if real, live, grown-up me has a secret crush. In which case, I can’t tell you, because then it wouldn’t be a secret. However, I can tell you that in a dignified, mature, and purely rational capacity … I am an avid fan of both Ryan Gosling and Joseph Gordon Levitt. And that is all I’m saying on the subject.
brenna yovanoff bug phobia
Ooh, ooh—you’re talking about the centipede story! And yes, I totally have a bug phobia. But only centipedes. Because they are the devil. Continue reading
Like this:
Fly on the Wall: A Bookish Report
I would just like to take a moment to announce that yesterday, I turned in my first revision of Paper Valentine!
Soon (possibly very soon), I’ll get a second revision letter, after which I will probably disappear in a puff of smoke and go into hiding and eat only beef jerky and popcorn, and bake pies in the middle of the night.
But for now, we should have a week or two-ish of relative normalcy. I plan to get back on schedule (mostly meaning the official return of the high school posts) and in short, Be A Better Blogger.
But that’s next week.
Right now, I’m here to tell you about the third and final book in my Books-Brenna-Would-Have-Loved-in-High-School-Had-They-Existed series.
Pretty much anyone who hangs out with me, either on the internet or in real-life, has probably heard me talk about how much I love E. Lockhart. When YA readers ask me what smart, romantic contemporaries I’d recommend, I invariably point them toward the Ruby Oliver books . When professor-friends ask me for YA books to put on reading lists involving sociology or feminism or Marxist strong-containment models (or-or-or), I rave about The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks.
However—while each of these books is smart, hilarious, and wonderful, and while they are all inarguably excellent books for many, many people to read—there’s still this one book that I tend to keep to myself. Because it is weird and hard to explain. Because it is bizarre and uncomfortable and kind of abrasive. Because it is my favorite.
That book is Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything.
Reasons this is the best* book in the world:
- Random, unexplained magic that is really a metaphor.
- Boys. Real boys, without censors or filters (sometimes without clothes), afflicted with faults and insecurities and terrible, stupid defense mechanisms and crushing vulnerabilities and social hierarchies and everything that makes boys real, live people.
- Frank, realistic discussion of physical attraction. Not sex. Not love. Not even necessarily kissing. (Although yes, sometimes.)
What this book is about:
- A girl named Gretchen Yee, who is half-Jewish, half-Chinese, and the lone comic book enthusiast in an arts-intensive NYC high school where all her teachers want her to draw “real” things.
- A girl named Gretchen Yee, who is secretly kind of a badass and doesn’t even know it.
- A girl named Gretchen Yee, who, through a very Kafkaesque turn of events, is transformed into a house fly and spends the rest of the week trapped in the boys’ locker room.
See? This is why Fly on the Wall is a very hard story to talk about.
This is also exactly why it would have been seventeen-year-old Brenna’s Most Important Book.
In high school, I was just as passive, just as intellectually prickly, and just as desperate to understand people as Gretchen is. And I wanted so, so much for a book to magically come along and tell me about boys—not a book to tell me what it thought I wanted to hear, but to tell me the truth, in precise, unerring detail.
Fly on the Wall has that. Fly on the Wall is that!
Lockhart does an amazing job of exploring all these tricky, interconnected ideas, like how to be a good friend (by listening, communicating, being honest), how to talk to boys (like they are people), how sometimes an unspoken infatuation can kind of start to edge into awkward voyeurism, and maybe most importantly, how the way you feel inside is not what other people see—because most of the time, people only see what you show them.
Which was something that at seventeen, I had absolutely no concrete understanding of, and would have pretty much willingly died a thousand deaths for any book that could actually kickstart that conversation.
(Also, sometimes I still don’t.)
(Have an understanding.)
(But I try.)
*In my head, I have like 20 Best Books at any given time. This is always one of them.
Like this:
Introducing THE CURIOSITIES!
This is not a book report. But. It is about a book.
So. Wow. Okay.
I feel like I’ve already been talking about this for a long time. No, seriously. For like a really long time .
But now, we’ve officially moved beyond the Realm of Vague Talk. We’ve entered the Land of Imminent Book, and I can finally (finally) give you a look at what’s been going on behind the scenes for months (years!).
As you may or may not be aware, Tess, Maggie , and I have been critique partners for a very long time. So long that when I post about something we’re doing, I often forget to give you any sort of context. So long that it’s hard to conceive of a time when we were not critique partners. My writing career has literally not existed in any significant form separate from the three of us knowing each other.*
Okay, let’s back up. Right away, from the beginning, before everything—before books on shelves—we started doing this thing.
At first, it was just a little thing.
It was a fiction blog shared between the three of us, and we’d write short stories really fast and post them the same day and egg each other on and get tons of practice at narrative structure and economic character development and not procrastinating.
And then, so slowly it was kind of hard to pinpoint, it stopped being a little thing and started being a big, awesome thing, and that wasn’t us—that was you guys, and the way you showed up every week and got involved and talked to us and talked to each other and made it less like three writers shouting stories into the internet, and more like a community.
And now, after four pretty incredible years, the Merry Sisters of Fate has grown into this:
For real.
The simple version is, here is a book that’s an anthology of our stories. And the complicated version is that it’s also way more than an anthology. It’s a retrospective and a conversation and a scrapbook and a diary, and it’s coming this fall from Carolrhoda Lab and we are so, so happy with how it turned out! And to celebrate our happiness, we’re giving away three shiny brand-new ARCs and the contest is very, very easy, so go enter!
Now, because it’s kind of hard to describe exactly how The Curiosities happened, here’s a video about our motivations, where we look neat and brushed and are wearing makeup.
Also, because it’s kind of hard to describe exactly how The Curiosities happened, here is a video about the behind-the-scenes. In this one, we’re wearing pajamas and making a huge mess and very little sense.
It probably goes without saying, but the finished product is kind of a synthesis for these two videos.
(But the manically-productive pajama part more.)
*Except for a few times when I sold some short fiction to horror markets, but I was totally flailing back then and really, really didn’t know if I was even pointed in the right direction.
Before I Fall: A Book Reportish
For the next Book I Wish Had Existed When I Was in High School, I absolutely have to tap Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver.
Full disclosure: I put off reading this one for a really long time because I didn’t think I was going to like it. The premise—which could sort of be described as Groundhog Day meets Mean Girls (popular girl dies, only to relive the same day over and over again while learning to be a better person)—struck me as being at high risk for rampant sentimentality, complete with Lessons Learned, and even as a little kid, I was pretty resistant to cautionary tales and anything that smacked of after-school-special.
And then when I finally picked it up, I was duly chastened, because instead of being not my thing at all, it turned out to be exactly my thing.
For those who haven’t read it, Before I Fall is kind of a strange beast. Oliver combines a bunch of elements I really like, but don’t often see happily coexisting together. Even though the central device is thoroughly fantastical, this is a book that reads 100% like contemporary realism, (which is one of my favorite genres). The depictions of daily life are fully articulated and lovingly mundane, and the complex social interactions of the characters are the most important part of the story. The fact that our narrator is reliving the same day over and over again is not The Point, but rather, a way to get a really good look at the precarious dynamics of high school social schemas.
Before I Fall is widely acknowledged to be a book about mean girls. However, I’d make the case that Sam, the main character, is not a prototypical mean girl. At the outset of the story, she’s definitely a weak girl, but there’s nothing sadistic about her, which I think is in keeping with the realities of bullying—meaning that most people who act in antisocial ways are not sadistic. Rather, they’re bad at propelling themselves through society in a way that doesn’t damage or exploit others, and also prone to hitching themselves to those vicious few who have no reservations about using power like a weapon.
When I talked about The Big Crunch last week , I was mostly interested in what that book could have told teenage-me about myself. With Before I Fall, the more pertinent thing is what it might have been able to tell me about my world, because it completely debunks the politics of bullying as depicted by movies like Heathers* without taking the position of apologist. I’m not going to go so far as to say it necessarily functions as a guide book to the underlying messiness and paranoia of teenage popularity, but it has to at least qualify as a brochure.
(The kind with a map on the back.)
*Heathers was my favorite movie as a tween—taught me everything I thought I knew about adolescence. Then I got to school and had to unlearn half of it.
