It doesn't feel like it, and I hate it, but it's been almost two years since the last blog post. Obviously I was a big fat liar in the last entry. The snail never made it to the finish line. The snail turned out to be in the wrong race. After further revisions (and major additions), cherubs & lavender shifted from novella into full length novel. It's a far cry from the story I originally intended it to be, but I'm much more proud of where it's at now. The thing is terribly creepy. Certain scenes still give me shivers, and the characters are much more developed than in the earlier drafts.
Since it's now commercial length, I hope to go the traditional literary representation → publication route. This means lots of query letters and constantly crossed fingers. Thus far all but one of the replies have been generic responses of thanks, but no thanks. The outlier was still a no, but I appreciated the specific reasoning: Though well written, I’m afraid we felt this was too dark for middle grade, and I’m simply not enthusiastic enough about my ability to sell this work to offer representation.
The twist here is that I never intended the story for a middle school audience. It features twelve and thirteen-year-olds as protagonists, yes, but this doesn't mean I expect the readers to be pre or early-teens. It's geared toward adults (and those teens who don't mind an R-rated movie). Just because characters are X age does not thereby deem readers must be X age. I've read the creators of the recent show Stranger Things ran into a similar attitude with studios outside Netflix: you can't expect adults to watch a show whose main characters are children. I suppose there's a fear that age gaps create inherently unrelatable characters for the reader/audience.
I disagree. Paint the world and what's at stake and we should be good to go. Even if this wasn't true, I'd argue children are easy to relate to because we've all been there. Childhood stands out so vividly from our adult timeline that we're not likely to altogether forget what it was to be ten.
Stranger Things became an unexpected success. The ramifications go beyond the television industry. Literary agents now cite interest in representing the next Stranger Things. Even if this is a little silly since Stranger Things is a loving throwback to numerous other stories—agents may as well claim they want the next Goonies/Carrie hybrid—I've been hoping to capitalize on this because cherubs & lavender features several similarities to the show. We've got children trying to defeat monsters in an otherworldly place where the adults are powerless to help. There's even a mysterious new girl in town.
The catch is, if I'm ripping off widely successful properties in a [desperate] effort to promote my work, cherubs is as much Stranger Things as it is IT or Hellraiser or A Nightmare on Elm Street. The terrors the poor Robin's Lane's kids experience are much more gruesome than what the Stranger gang confronts.
So I understand that agents may worry straight-faced horror isn't as palatable as fantasy/science fiction tinged with occasional darkness. I just happen to disagree. I believe our collective appetite for the sinister is much larger than agents gauge. Which circles back to a different, more controversial point. Yes, I didn't write this book with a middle grade audience in mind, but is it too dark for middle schoolers? Maybe for some. [Full disclosure: we have fifth-grade sisters stabbing themselves to death in a cafeteria. A creature that sexually taunts a boy from inside his mirror. Flayed infants and people being eaten alive.] For readers like the kid I once was, a boy who begged his parents to rent him R-rated horror flicks, who owned the entire collection of Aliens toys, who dressed as Freddy Krueger for Halloween, who went on to realize he would face no censorship in the books he bought (because in the eyes of his loving parents, books could commit no evil), this novel would have been the jackpot.
I suppose you could argue I was the abnormality—that most kids want a horror story's punches pulled—but this is subjective stuff. I believe we underestimate what children are capable of "handling" in their fiction. Others will call bullshit. More will say the obvious: it depends on the kid. And this is all a wild tangent, because cherubs & lavender remains targeted toward adults and the upper teens.
We'll query on.
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