Author Archives: Brenna Yovanoff

Today’s Favorite Thing: The Cabin in the Woods

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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.

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Jane Comes Back

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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.)

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In Which I Answer All Your Questions

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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 →

Fly on the Wall: A Bookish Report

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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.

fly on the wall

Reasons this is the best* book in the world:

  1. Random, unexplained magic that is really a metaphor.
  2. 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.
  3. Frank, realistic discussion of physical attraction. Not sex. Not love. Not even necessarily kissing. (Although yes, sometimes.)

What this book is about:

  1. 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.
  2. A girl named Gretchen Yee, who is secretly kind of a badass and doesn’t even know it.
  3. 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.

Introducing THE CURIOSITIES!

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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:

the curiosities

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

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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.

before I fall

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.

The Big Crunch: A Book Report. Sort of.

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To reiterate very briefly, I am currently revising Paper Valentine. It’s new and exciting and lots of fun, BUT. It definitely cuts into the amount of time I can devote to other things. For instance, blogging.*

I don’t want to neglect the blog entirely though, because I like it, and I like you guys. So, here is what I’m going to do. I’ve been thinking for awhile that I’d really like to put together a short series on Books High-School Brenna Would Have Loved (except they didn’t exist yet), and this seems like a good an opportunity.

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Sh*t Writers Say (also, I am a bad blogger)

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First things first, I am a bad blogger.

Things that have contributed to blog-silence, in order of occurrence, 75% work-related:

  1. Final stages of Merry Fates anthology madness
  2. Knee surgery
  3. Edit letter
  4. Writing retreat

With that in mind, I’d like to take this moment to assure anyone who might be wondering that—you know the drill—I’m not dead, and things will be returning to normal very shortly. At least, shortly when considered in the grand scheme of things (continents drifting, stars colliding).

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Brenna Revises

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Okay, so. This is the last post before Enforced Blog Silence, and I wanted to make it count. What I’m giving you now is what’s known as actual writing-related content. (I know, I know—we don’t necessarily see a lot of that around here.)

What happened is, Maggie Stiefvater recently wrote a wonderful and highly detailed post dissecting the intricacies of revision, and the response was tremendous. The resulting discussion involved a lot of people saying they wished more authors would share their process with this same level of detail, and since Maggie is by nature a helpful and motivated person (also, she is organized), she asked a bunch of us if we’d be willing to participate in what has essentially become a series!

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We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

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Today is high-school post day. I know that.

But.

The thing is, it’s about to get very disorganized around here and I wanted to announce ahead of time that the next couple weeks are due to be pretty quiet.

The reason for this is twofold—first, I’m going out of town to work on the Merry Fates not-an-anthology with Tess and Maggie in an undisclosed location.* Secondly, the trip will immediately be followed by knee surgery.

Which, it’s cool. I’ve had knee surgery before and while I wouldn’t class it as fun, exactly, it’s eminently doable. However, based on my previous experience with the recovery process (specifically Vicodin), even typing out a series of four or five coherent sentences can take about twenty minutes. So, not only will blogging most likely not happen, it absolutely should not happen! I have one more fun thing that I’ll be posting on Monday, and then blog silence for the next two weeks.**

Okay, now I feel like I’ve just spent this whole post talking AT you, declaring things loudly and telling you how it’s going to be.

So hey. Hey, you. What’s up with you guys?

*Otherwise known as Tess’s living room, but it sounds way more glamorous if you imagine us working diligently in a dilapidated fortress. Or a rustic cabin above a fjord. Or anyplace else suitably isolated and weird.

**This might not work. I might disregard my own advice. I might subject you to incoherent post-surgery ramblings. Please, I hope not.