**This is cross posted on my blog, Yarning to Write.


So Chicken is nineteen, and I've been a little absent on the net, because, well, birthday.  I managed to get one picture of the elusive Chicken-- I talked her into coming with me as I went to purchase birthday pie, and she dressed as a slacking teenager.  That's my sweater, by the way-- and that's an entire other story!




So anyway-- Chicken is nineteen, but it wasn't so long ago that she was twelve, and that's when my story about my story begins.

See, I've been publishing my writing since February, 2005-- that's almost nine years.  And the first thing I put out was Vulnerable.  So  Chicken has been watching me write stories since she was very small-- and she and Big T were very aware that they were too young for mommy's books.  So, after three Little Goddess books, Chicken and Big T were 12 and 14, and I promised I'd write books they could read.

I both failed and succeeded.

See, when I started, I had the idea of the superhero in an epic fantasy setting, and I loved it.  But I wanted more than just the rich, handsome Duke of Earl or whatever-- I wanted to see what made this guy tick, so I started with the Seminal Event that began this schism in his personality-- the thing that made him two people.

I pretty much wrote the exact books I wanted to-- but as I wrote, concepts that seemed so very normal in my head began to seem really frightening for middle school students.  Now, I'm not even talking about the sex (although, of ALL things, during the re-edit of these stories, I was just asked to intensify one of the sex scenes in the next story, which sort of blows my mind.)  What I'm talking about is the idea of genocide.  Of mass murder. Of the government as bullies.

Remember, this was before the terrible events in Annoka-Hennepin, when those of us in the U.S. realized that our government was literally bullying kids to death, so in a way I was naive.

But I was also pretty dedicated to the story, so I kept writing.

And I was right to do so.  In the past couple of years, Elizabeth North, the CEO of Dreamspinner Press has made YA novels a concentration-- she's developed a Young Adult imprint of Dreamspinner, Harmony Ink Press.  When she put together this secondary company, she did her homework, and asked the Young Adult Librarians specifically, what made a YA book.

The answer?

Young. Adults.  (Shocking, I know.)

And when she told me this, I realized that I'd sort of known this.  I'd been getting book reports, for heaven's sake-- and what were my kids reading?  Ellen Hopkins, David Levithan, Sarah Dessen, Scott Westerfield, Holly Black, Robert Cormier, and Laurie Halse Anderson.  These guys deal with some pretty serious subjects.  Drug abuse, broken families, death, disaster, dystopia-- you name it, they've written about it.

They have even *gasp* written about sex.  The standard for Young Adult books and sex is simply that the sex has to drive character or story, and it can't dwell too much on the intimate details.

Well, oddly enough, that's what I wrote.  I wrote a book that an adult could enjoy (and several have) but that pared back (apparently a little too much even) on the sex.  The fact that there were boys having the sex (in some parts) was not a factor.

So, yes, Young Adult Books for Young Adults.  But not any Young Adults.

My Young Adults.

If you read the blurb, you will see that Torrant and Yarri are (by the time this book is done) our central players.  (All four books add up to nearly 500,000 words-- there's going to be more than two central players!)  You will also see some vague references to the "Moon Family in Clough."

Okay, let me be absolutely transparent (for those who weren't here when this was happening.)  The "Moon Family in Clough" is MY FAMILY in Clough.

These books were started shortly after Squish was born, and Chicken had just turned 12.  When we first see Bethen Moon, she is very pregnant, and her sturdy child Roes is at her side.    At the end of the bulk of the action, Squish's character is fourteen.  At the end of the epilog, she is a woman grown, with grandchildren.

So, while I was plotting something sort of delicate and all encompassing, I was also imagining my family growing up.  It was both an amazing and a terrifying experience, and in some ways, I was both very very wrong and very very right about who they would be.  (Zoomboy, for instance, is not a "pervert wastrel" as his counterpart, Cwyn "Terror" Moon, was in the story.  But he does give his teachers fits, he is terrifyingly bright, and the places his mind goes are not always predictable.)  While I was writing the second book, my students got into the act.  I was writing something aimed at high school aged kids-- I was very comfortable putting them in the book if they asked.  Now some of you know the story of Marv and Jino, and I won't go into it here, but this had some unexpectedly poignant results, and including my students is something I will never regret.

So these books-- well, close to my heart is an inadequate way of putting it.

When I discovered that Harmony Ink Press prints not just M/M romance, but all shades of the LGBTQ rainbow, and not just romance either, I thought, "Hey!  These books came out and only my loyal faithful fans and friends read them.  Maybe they can get another chance to be read." I suggested to Elizabeth and Nessa (who runs the Harmony Ink division) that these books might work for Harmony Ink when we were all in Chicago, and I thought that maybe, maybe, they'd be out in 2014.  I had no idea they'd be out so soon.

I'm thrilled.

The books were (as I've said) divided into four books reasonably large books instead of two GINORMOUS books, they were re-edited, and tomorrow, the first one begins it's re-release.

Next week, Ethan in Gold will be out, and I will throw a frickin' party, because Ethan was a tough write, and I loved it, and I think a lot of people are excited to hear that he's on his way.

But tomorrow, Triane's Son Rising is coming out, and even though this is the second time out of the box, I still think it should get some confetti.

Holy Goddess, Merciful God, let it not suck.

Triane's Son Rising at Dreamspinner Press
Triane's Son Rising at All Romance e-books
Triane's Son Rising at Amazon.com

Okay—I was not on the excellent panel on World Building at RWA, but someone asked a question at the panel that didn’t really get answered.  At the end of the session, I moseyed on up to her, and gave her the answer I arrived at, mostly just by writing AU stuff myself.  When Mary Calmes asked me what the answer was, I told her, and she got pretty excited. 




“You must tell people this!” 




“Why?  So they can fall asleep?”




“Don’t be stupid.  This is important stuff.”




“This is basic stuff that I’m sure everyone has thought of.”




“I will beat you.  I will.  Just write it up in a column or something, okay?”




“Yeah yeah yeah.  Is there anywhere in Atlanta where you can get a Diet Coke?”




“Squirrel!”  she said, rolling her eyes.  Because she gets me, and that was the end of the conversation.  Until now.  When I’m going to share my advice with the two people who read this column. 




Enjoy!




The secret to building a world is the secret to stubbing your toe in the middle of the night. 




I shit you not.




So, imagine this.  It’s the middle of the night, and you roll out of bed (what kind of bed?  Is it made of rushes?  Stuffed with ticking?  Electromagnetically elevated pockets of air?  The equivalents of dead marsupials?  What?) and you walk down a darkened hallway.  (What would normally light the hallway?  Photosynthetic lichens?  Radioactive feral wombats with glowing eyes?  Inefficient electric lamps?  Three moons through a stone window?  You decide.)  You are on your way to the bathroom (and the possibilities here are endless—there have been bathrooms around since 7000 B.C. Egypt, so don’t let the historically ignorant talk you out of an indoor place to pee for an AU setting) and you stub your toe. 




What do you say?




This is really important.  Pay attention.  What do you say?




“Goddammit!”




Okay—this implies that you believe in a higher deity, but not a nice fuzzy one, one that can damn something, and probably some sort of punishment or a universe of punishment, so there’s a hell involved. If you’re society is futuristic science fiction, has this concept carried over from the colony of origin? Either way, you just established a humongous assumption in your universe, and if you don’t want it to be a god, you want it to be a goddess or science or something, you’ve got to choose another swear word. 




“Oh hell!”




So your universe believes in hell.  Awesome.  What’s that like?  Loneliness?  Ice?  Fire?  Corruption?  Being stuck watching Cartoon Network with no alcohol, knitting, or LSD?  What is the belief system of hell where you are at—it’s embedded in your flesh enough to be spit out in the dark hours of the night when you’re in pain, it must exist. 




“Fuck!”




Okay, so fornication is an issue in your universe—it’s an animalistic act that has been made into an oath or a swear word.  Are there positive contexts in which sex is mentioned?  What are the words used there?  If you make up another word, where has it evolved from? 




“Shit!”




So your community shames basic body functions, does it?  Or is actual excrement just that unpleasant?  Has this word, too, evolved from a singular meaning to an all encompassing one?  If this is in the future, do people deal with actual excrement, or do they get the pleasant enema bath in the morning?  If this is in the past, is this a word children can say?  Does it have a different form?  (“Shite” for example, was a perfectly acceptable word in the lower classes for quite a while.  All barnyard animals did it, nobody got excited about it, and how did you warn someone not to step in it if you couldn’t say it?)




“Mother-fucking-cunt-smashing-cock-sucking-butt-reaming-son-of-a-come-guzzling-whore’s-nasty-assed-dog!”




Well, uhm, yeah.  You get the picture.




See, the thing to remember is this. 




We did not just wake up one day and have swearwords.  Many of our most reviled words came from a complex collision of historical circumstances.  In 1066, William the Conqueror came knocking on London’s big wooden gates and said, “Let me in, heathens, I’m here to rule you!”  King Harald the Luckless (my own personal epithet) looked up into the sky and said, “Oh help me, God, what shall I do!” and caught an arrow in the throat, and William said, “Thanks, God, I knew you were on our side!”




Well, what followed was about 500 years of Anglo-Saxon oppression.  The Anglo-Saxons spoke a language very much like German, and the Normans spoke a language very much like French.  The Anglo-Saxons were on the bottom of the social ladder, the Normans were at the top.




The Anglo-Saxons said fuck, shit, piss, cock, cunt and ass, and the Normans said fornication, defecation, urination, penis, vagina, and derriere.




After five-hundred years and a giant vowel shift, the two languages expanded like an accordion to become the one English we currently speak—but the words of the lower classes?  Those were the words you didn’t speak in polite company.




After another 500 years, they were the words you didn’t say in polite company.




In fact, you only really said them in the bedroom, in the barnyard, or when you were stubbing your toe in the dark.




This example can be extended, of course.  You finish going to the bathroom, what do you use to clean yourself with?  You walk down the hall into the kitchen, where do you keep your food?  What do you eat? Where did it come from?  What trade routes and levels of agri-technology does that imply?  What’s good for a midnight snack in the world you’ve created?  Where do you sit down to eat your furtive course of Gonadal Plums (or whatever you’re eating on this world at dark-thirty a.m.) and how do you see to wash up? What dietary needs to Gonadal Plums satisfy, and are they different than the regular human ones that plain old regular plums meet?  Eventually, when your characters have completed the course of their day, you will see the basic human necessities of their world—but the human necessities do not always reveal the hidden assumptions and belief systems that our world sits on, and that we don’t even notice beneath our feet.




No—those are the ideas that come out in the middle of the night, when the oldest words come out to play.




It’s important to listen when they do.