With reading on my iPad, I am really digging it for non-fiction texts because often when I read NF, thoughts bubble up of people with whom I would like to share a thought, idea and so on.

The iPad makes it a one device “bounce over, shoot a quick email, copy and paste passages if I’d like, and then right back to my book” experience.

I love that.( Cause, like I said, when I read NF, I seem to think of other people to whom I’d like to share/connect these ideas to which I am being exposed.)

That’s an unexpected treat for me.

With fiction reading I rarely do that. I am far too immersed in the characters, story, narrative and so on.

NF though is about ideas – and since it taps a different part of my brain, I guess it also taps a different way that I process the information… and want – or do not want – to share it.

More and more ereading and print book reading are becoming apples and oranges.

eReading provides things like video embedded text, hyperlinking, ADD style reading (whereby, I read, check my email, read some more, check a sports score, read some more, buzz in on the news, read some more and so on.)

Print book reading is singular and if I want to multi-task, I need to put my book down.

Fiction doesn’t seem to trigger in me the desire to put my book down to do other things nearly as much as NF does.

Hmm… it’s interesting now that I think about it.

Either way, to remove judgement about either of these two means of reading seems like the best approach to me. One is not necessarily better than the other. (For a skilled reader, that is. For a kid with low literacy skills, learning to concentrate and focus and hold one’s attention for long stretches of time appears very critical to me… I am not willing to throw that skill under the bus for young adults at all! But does it have to be a printed book? Well, it certainly removes the temptation to use the “device” to bounce on over to something else if the device – by that I mean, the book – doesn’t offer any “bounce on over to” function. )

The world is changing right under our eyeballs. Of that there is no doubt.

As a writer, some days I am a machine. I mean words just pour right out of me. I’ve done stretches that begin early in the morning (cause I wake up EXCITED to write) and I’ve stayed up well into the evening with only the owls to keep me company as I hammer away at the keyboard.

Truly, I’ve had days (many, in fact) when I’ve been able to crank out well over 2,800 words. (BTW, that’s 11 or 12 pages of usable novel material… an output that, for me, is spectacular.)

However, on Saturday I just spent about 5 hours in a knife fight with my latest book with the grand word production total for the day being 340.

When I was a younger writer, days like this would really aggravate me. Truly, I’d get steamed at myself.

“You suck. You gotta do more. You are never going to hit your goals if this is all your able to produce.” Stuff like that. The critical voice which live(d) inside my head would just have a field day berating me.

But you’ll notice that I said live(d) instead of lives. The reason is that after years of doing this I’ve learned that some days are just gonna be that way. Some patches of my books are just going to pour right out of me and some are gonna be bare-knuckle, down-n-dirty back alley brawls.

It’s just the nature of the beast.

However, nowadays, instead of allowing my own inner critic to run roughshod all over my own inner world (btw, yes, I have voices in my head and they are in constant conversation — I have a feeling though that this is actually quite normal. And until they start telling to do things like “eat the neighbor’s door knocker then take off your pants”, I try to give them the latitude they need to express themselves.) I have learned to go with the flow.

The writing of each book is its own journey and to try and put preconceived notions about productivity and output on every day’s efforts, well… for me, it can prove detrimental.

In great part though, this is because I have already cultivated the muscle of self-discipline. See, some writers are, as they describe themselves, lazy. They’ll do anything they can to procrastinate. Me, I am the opposite. Give me a full day and I will seize it. This is why my own inner critic doesn’t crush me as much as it used to any more… because I know that even if today was tough sledding, I’ll be back at it tomorrow and the next day and the next and, like trekking in an adventure-filled country, I know that some days will be open road with sun and easy terrain and others will see me climbing uphill through mud in a downpour.

Obviously, the more days of sun the better — but without the tough days, I am not sure that my books will ever be any good. If they are too easy, it means I am taking on too much of the obvious — and I need to look deeper at character (i.e. making them richer), plot (i.e. crafting it in a more complex and emotionally fulfilling manner) and so on.

Okay, Saturday was tough and hardly what I would call “voluminous” (by my own standards). But I made it to safe harbor, I definitely “worked hard at my book” and even if I have to go back and re-write or toss all the work I just did, it’s all just part of the journey towards completing a novel.

And, best of all, I greatly enjoy the work. Even when writing is really hard and really frustrating and really aggravating — heck, TORTUOUS… it’s better than not writing.

Not writing is death.

BTW, this post took me about 20 minutes to write. Word count: 636 Oh, the irony. The Gods of Writing must be laughing their butts off.

And me, too.

It’s National Library Week! (Hooray… I love libraries. And I find librarians HOT!! But I’ll save the “book people are sexy people” blog for another time.)

Yet hey, best of all, April 15 (tomorrow) is SUPPORT TEEN LITERATURE DAY. The purpose of this, according to the American Library Association, is to “…raise awareness among the general public that young adult literature is a vibrant, growing genre with much to offer today’s teens. Support Teen Literature Day also seeks to showcase some award-winning authors and books in the genre as well as highlight librarians’ expertise in connecting teens with books and other reading materials.”

So really, if you are reading this right now, I’d like to try and convince you to plan to do something. Run a teen book talk, hold an Academy Awards style young adult literature book vote, send a tweet about YA lit… just do something to show a little love for young adult literacy.

In a way it feels as if books are in the news a heckuva a lot these days. From the iPad to the Kindle to the buzz about a forthcoming Google Android Tablet, the e-book market is on everyone’s lips. Plus, Kitty Kelly has just taken Oprah out for a little walk on the scandal side, Stephanie Meyer has a new Twilight novella coming out and me, well, I’ve got a shelf of books by my bed that is tilting over waiting for me to get to them.

If you need some ideas from YALSA about how you can celebrate, click here.
If you don’t know who YALSA is click here.
If you want to see sexy librarians, click here.

(How come I have a feeling a lot of people clicked the last link? Do I know my blog readers or what?)

Let’s hear it for the libraries, huh?

BTW, if you want to see a slideshow of some amazing libraries, click here.

Libraries: an institution I genuinely love filled with people I genuinely like.

Here are the books I have coming out over the course of the next 12 – 18 months…

Daddies Do it Different

This is my first children’s picture book, inspired by recognizing that, as a father, “Mommies do it one way… but daddies do it different.” A funny, very warm book that just poured right out of me. Dedicated to my daughter and wife.

Nerd Girls

Inspired by the fact that I am so sick and tired of the way that so many teen books for girls are about a bunch of rich snobs who think they are all that, I wanted to write a book that was much more like my experience in working with middle and high school teens. And the fact is, most kids are nerds.

And most kids are funny.

And most kids are awkward, unsure, confused and just struggling to make their way through middle and high school.

And most girls love to laugh.

Nerd Girls is a comedy for the rest of us, the ones who were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth, who don’t always have the latest and greatest and most expensive clothing. The ones who actually are nice, real people – the kind that are real friends.

But wow was this a fun one for me to write. And it’s going to be a series. These girls are such dorks… they make me laugh just thinking about them Yet they have such heart.

The Math Class Problem No One Ever Talks About

Actually, this title may change… to Bonerville Middle School. Why? Because that’s what it’s about, a boy who gets an erection in math class… and gets busted.

But the thing is, it’s not a sex book. It’s a comedy about the fact that about a zillion 8th grade books every year get these uncontrollable woodies that Pop Up out of nowhere – and Boner Management becomes one of the most important areas of their life.

Prepare to laugh at Bobby Conner, a kid who is absolutely tortured by the perpetual popsicle in his pants.

Cinder-Smella

I re-imagined the Cinderella fairy tale as set in modern-day New York City with a protagonist that has very stinky feet! Yet another inspired by bedtime rituals with my daughter. Fun, fun, fun to write.

Why I wrote Hip-Hop High School

In a way, Hip-Hop High School might be my most meaningful book, at least to me. Why? Cause it’s a book about heart. A book about tenacity. A book about life kicking you in the pit of the stomach and bringing you to your knees and forcing you to ask yourself, “What am I really made of?”

In my own life, I have gone to some dark places. And unnecessarily so. I took myself there as opposed to simply having these things thrust on me.

In a way, some of us become our own worst enemies – especially as teenagers – and the question becomes, am I going to live this way forever or am I going to dig myself out of this hole and do something to help myself.

It’s a stage in life when we realize that other people, our parents, our teachers, our friends, no one else can do the hard work of “living properly” for us. Each of us has a choice and there is no “not deciding” because, as the song goes, “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”

Push comes to shove for all of us during out teenage years in some way shape or form. This is what inspired Hip-Hop High School – and the sense of inspiration, hope, and so on that is woven into this novel makes it one of my own personal favorites.

You love each of your books as if they were your child. (In a way they are.) Hip-Hop High School was a triumph for me on so many levels. I proved to myself that I was not going to be a “one hit wonder” and instead was capable of writing a second novel. (And until you actually do it, you never are really sure.) I proved that I could tackle some of the most meaningful, hard-hitting issues in a way that felt good to me on the inside. I proved to myself that I belonged at the table of YA authors and that it wasn’t just a fluke that my dream of becoming a writer one day had actually come to fruition.

Hip-Hop High School has inspired lots and lots and lots of kids and it’s a book that I am glad has found an audience but this title, maybe more than any other, proved a whole heck of a lot to me about me as a writer in a way that not many people know – and would never be able to know by simply having read the book.

Why I wrote The Hoopster

Let’s be honest. To a certain extent, we are raising a generation of non-readers. I hate to sound like an old coot but these kids today with their computers, their iPods, their cell phones and their video games, they are just not reading as much as they used to anymore. It’s as if Guttenberg never lived.

And the consequences are dire.

(Okay, I’ll concede that kids today are Screen-Agers. Yes, they are reading their screens all the time in a literal way but it’s not the type of reading that promotes critical thinking. It’s like eating Doritos for dinner. Yes, it’s food but it most certainly lacks vital nutrition and if salty chips are all you eat your health is most assuredly going to suffer.)

Goodness, I don’t even know who I’d be if I hadn’t read some of the books that I have in my life. And many adults, I realize, feel exactly same way.

Quick activity: List your top two or three favorite books of all time… and then X them out, as if you had never read them. Ask yourself, who would you be if you had never read these works? For me I can say without reservation that I’d be much worse off as a human being without these books in my life. From Dr. Seuss to Victor Hugo to the Bible to Walter Dean Meyers, I mean it’s almost unimaginable who I’d be without these texts.

This realization is what led me to write The Hoopster. Knowing how immense the positive impact of one simple book could be to the lives of my students – and knowing how valuable it is in this day and age to be literate and be a reader – well, that’s what got my juices going. I wanted my students to read books.

And I wanted to be the one to write “that book”, the one that would turn them on to reading and make them realize, “This is cool!”.

Heck, it had always been a secret dream of mine to become an author, a dream that I had somehow put on hold as I got older, took a job, got married, blah, blah, blah.

It was at this juncture of my life that I realized I was being confronted by my own hypocrisy.

I mean I spend my whole life telling people to go after their dreams, to reach for the stars, to not let anything hold them back from striving for the brass ring and yet here I was with a dream of my own and I wasn’t going to go for it? The irony was just too thick and I knew I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t at least made an effort.

So I set to work.

I outlined. I plumbed the depths of character. But really, my whole aim was to simply gain the approval of teenage boys – particularly teenage boys of color, the hardest to reach demographic of all. (Hey, why no shoot for the moon, right?) I mean these were the kids sitting in the chairs of my classroom anyway. I wasn’t writing for the critics. I was writing for a much tougher crowd. To gain the approval of multicultural middle and high school boys.

Now that would be the motherload!

Action. Suspense. Humor. Heart. I flexed every literary muscle I could. And then I handed my novel to Dontae.

“Yo Dontae, Man,” I said in a sort of California-causal way. “I wrote this book for folks like you and your boys. Would you mind checkin’ it out?”

I handed him the manuscript.

“Yeah, sure I’ll check it out, Mr. Alan,” he replied.

A day passed. Nothing.

Two days passed. Nothing.

A week went by.

You know how when you are waiting to hear feedback from someone about something and you start to get all itchy? Let’s just say it felt like I was wearing a wool sweater knit by a fat aunt with bad teeth and lots of caked-on make-up. At day 10, I cornered Dontae in the hall. (Obviously, maturity and patience are not my greatest strengths.)

“Yo Dude,” I said trying not to sound like an addict fiending for a fix. “Remember that book I gave you? Did you even read the first page?”

Dontae looked up at me with innocent teenage eyes, the kind of eyes that always remind teachers why working with kids is the most fulfilling type of job on the planet there is.

“Aw yeah, Mr. Alan,” Dontae said in a relaxed tone of voice. “I read it in two days. And then I gave it to Richard and he read it and gave it to Joel. I hope that’s cool.”

I paused, stunned.

Oh my goodness. They’re bootlegging my book around the school.

“Uh, yeah, Dontae, that’s cool,” I said, unsure of how to respond.

“Yo, when you gonna write another, Mr. Alan. Beats that boring shi… I mean stuff in the library.”

“Uh, I’ll get back to you, Dontae.”

And that’s how The Hoopster was born.

Why I wrote The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez

After Homeboyz came out my career ascended to a whole new height. The popularity of the title mixed with the accolades mixed with the attention and awards moved me up “to the next level”. And then one day a group of girls, Latina students of mine, came up to me and asked…

“How come you don’t write a book about us?”

The Hoopster, Hip-Hop High School and Homeboyz all had African-American characters as their protagonist. Why? Because I aspired to get my students to read through writing books for them, books where they saw their own lives directly reflected on the page. But at Lynwood High, a growing portion of the student body was Hispanic – and my girls felt a little cheated.

When these Latina students hit me with this question, I immediately felt bad. As a teacher, you never want to play favorites between your kids and this was a group of really awesome girls, students I tremendously enjoyed having in class. Additionally, racial tension between brown and black kids on campus has been an issue for years and years (The race riot scenes in my book Hip-Hop High School and The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez are fictionalized accounts of race riots we have had on campus) so being fair and balanced in aspiring to write a book for all of my students, so that the Hispanics had the same feeling of “my English teacher wrote a book for us, too” instantly became a high priority for me.

And then I asked the question, the one which turned out to be the fuse that lit the dynamite.

“Well,” I said to this group of Hispanic teenager girls. “What should I write about?”

If you know anything about teens, you know that asking a teenage Latina to talk can be a dangerous thing because, once asked, they are going to talk and talk and talk and talk.

Lunchtime in my room. After school. They talked and talked and talked and I just listened and listened and listened. That’s when I saw a few incredibly common threads between so many of my Latina girls. (Note: These are simply my observations from our conversations – please don’t get all politically correct on me for being honest or go cuckoo with emails to me about matters of race, gender equality and so on. These are broad strokes here – case by case, of course it can be different)

1. Boys were treated better than girls in their home/culture. (i.e. Machismo is still alive and kicking.)
2. Girls were outperforming boys in school, really stepping into their own and coming on stronger than they ever had while the boys were lame.
3. Girls were caught in the crosshairs between serving the family and getting an education as if the two were mutually exclusive… and mothers from the prior generation who had made the choice to value familia first and foremost were often applying the most pressure to follow in their footsteps and be homemakers as opposed to independent, well-educated women with professional careers.
4. First generation immigrants (illegals and legal – I teach both at my school) often were the bridge to the English speaking world for their non-English speaking parents, of which there are millions in America. The daughters, even ones as young as 8 or 9 years old, were the official translators for parents who had never learned English – even if they had been in America for more than 10 years. They may have immigrated, but they did not assimilate.
5. Sexual molestation was a HUGE problem… and it was incredibly under-reported to authorities, other family members and so on. Teen Latina girls were being sexually abused at a far greater rate than I had ever imagined. It was, tragic to say, “common”.
6. Today’s young girls are smart as a whip, ferociously determined and a whole lotta fun to be around. They really do LOVE to laugh.

These notes – and others – are what inspired The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez, a book that has been exceptionally well-embraced by Hispanic readers, boys and girls alike. My own opinion as to why boys like this book so much is because of the cultural validation. In this novel I worked exceptionally hard to move beyond stereotypes and illuminate the beauty of the Hispanic culture. Latinas are a remarkable people, unique and distinguished, and the pride so many teens feel in seeing their culture portrayed in a positive light – despite it being “and warts and all” book – has really won over scores of young adults.

Last thing about The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez that I should mention is that I never in a million years would have been able to write this book without genuinely listening to my students. When you read the book, I take the reader deep into Mexico, a Mexico that a white guy like me could never really know firsthand. It truly took a latino to shine a light on this private, inside the culture world and I can’t tell you how many comments I have had from Hispanic readers who say, “how did you know this.”

It’s because real people illuminated it for me. From the code-switching language (my students proofed the Spanish that is peppered throughout the text) to the quirky little aspects of life as an American Latina who is caught between the two worlds, two cultures and two completely different sets of expectations (based on gender), without the real voice of my students, The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez would not have any real voice at all.

Why I wrote Homeboyz…

As many know, I am an inner-city high school teacher in Los Angeles at Lynwood High. It goes without saying that I love my kids and love being an English teacher but Los Angeles is a city plagued by teen violence and many, many, many of my students live in a community that is poisoned by gangs, guns and drugs.

Students at our school have been shot. Murdered. Killed. And tragically, violent teenage death has become so common in urban America (especially when it comes to minorities killing other minorities; there are virtually no white students at my school) that when this sort of monstrosity happens, it doesn’t even make the newspapers.

Owch!

Worse, it feels as if there is an entire segment of the media that profits off of selling young kids the idea that gangs are cool, sexy, fun and adventurous. They’re not. Gangs are violent, anti-social and deeply hurtful to many, many people – and no one gets hurt more so than the young kids who get caught up in these street gangs. Therefore, when I see major record companies and multi-media conglomerates “selling the gangsta lifestyle” to our nation’s kids in order to make a buck, I get angry and frustrated.

The fact is, becoming embroiled in gangs – real gangs, not wanna-be stuff but real gangs – ends up one of pretty much two ways for young people. Kids go to jail or kids go to the cemetery. Of course, in music videos and the such, it all looks like a pumpin’ party. But go visit Juvenile Hall or prison – I have, many times – and you will see that the reality is an entirely different story.

It was this idea that was the spark which inspired me to write Homeboyz. I wanted to do a book that stripped away the false romance, that peeled away the pretend glamour, that didn’t buy into the bullshit that gangs were a just a life of non-stop partying.

Homeboyz is raw. Homeboyz is gritty. Homeboyz is a tragedy.

And Homeboyz has also been my most popular book. It’s won awards, it’s turned on thousands of readers, it’s got people talking about turning it into a feature length movie.

But probably, the thing that is most rewarding to me is that Homeboyz has been “that” book, the one that teachers everywhere have given to kids who swear they don’t like to read.

I’ve got boatloads of emails from people all across the country telling me the same story over and over.

I’ve got this boy (it’s inevitably a boy) and he wouldn’t read a thing. But he read Homeboyz and loved it! It’s the first book he has ever read cover to cover.

That to me, is just flat out awesome! Homeboyz has achieved cult-like status in certain circles, a fact which makes me really proud.

People often ask me, “Do you have a “reason” for writing each of your books?”

Now that I think about it, I guess I do write all of my books for a reason. For each of them, I am, dare I say, “inspired”. After all, it takes quite some time to write a novel and the truth is, it’s long hard work that is very much like running a literary marathon. And just because as an author you have done it before, well… this doesn’t mean that you are not going to sweat, ache, groan and feel like throwing in the towel over the course of any new project just because you have been down the road before. You simply know the terrain better – but you still have to run 26.2 miles.

All authors do.

Writing a book, in this way, is like tackling the task of “eating an elephant”. And, as the old saying goes, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

This is why for me, the first bite always has to be fierce inspiration. Why? Because the burning inspiration to write a story is going to die out. It’s gonna fade away. I’ve discovered that at some point, it’s like being on a sugar high; it’s sustenance that is going to get reduced to virtually nothing over the course of writing an entire novel other nutrition is going to be required to complete the book before the journey is through. Tenacity, fortitude, the determination to work a project to it’s rightful end – the hunger to climb Mount Everest if you will – these are the elements that get me through to the completion of books.

But the start of a new book or project? It always has to begin with an idealistic sense of, “Damn, this is gonna be freakin’ GREAT!”

Having said that, each of my writing projects thus has its origin located in a very specific, tangible place for me. There is a seed which has preceded every birth. (And I have now given birth more than 10 times.)

Over the course of the next week, I think I am gonna explore the reasons that inspired me to pen a few of my young adult novels.

I am asked all the time about how to become a published author… so here’s some advice for aspiring writers.

Lots of people, it appears, have the desire to write a book one day. My thoughts: just do it.

Spring Break is here and summer is coming up. At some point in all our lives we must step up to do those things we one day had always hoped to accomplish so if there is a book living inside of you waiting to be born, you gotta ask yourself, “If not now, when?”

I say, do it!

And then do it and do it and do it some more. Will it be hard and aggravating and gut-wrenching and rough? Of course. But will it also be fulfilling, exciting, adventurous and rewarding? Most probably so. (I can’t promise, but it is for me.)

In my experience, the people who are most frustrated as writers are either 1) people who swear they are going to write a book but never actually do write a book or 2) people who do ultimately write a book and then come to believe that the world has failed to recognize their literary brilliance when they don’t sell as many copies as John Grisham while at the same time garnering the same critical reviews as Oscar Wilde.

Hogwash.

Real writers write because they can’t not write. If that is you, write, continue to write, continue to read and and continue to keep learning and learning about the craft of writing. Your publishing break will eventually come (mine took more than a decade) and when it does, it’s only going to mean that more writing will be expected of you one day.

This is a profession for lifers. The first ten years are school, the next ten years are learning the business behind the business. Write an average of 10 pages a week for 50 weeks a year (that’s 500 pages) for 20 years (that’s 10,000 pages) and then talk to me then about how no one wants to publish you. Cause you know what? You do that and I can almost guarantee, you will be published.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers talks about the 10,000 hour rule. (i.e. it’s takes a ton of time to get really good at something.) Me, I kinda think there is some wisdom in this.

Now sure, you hear stories all the time about first time-authors who just got paid $750,000 for their debut novel… and maybe that will be you. (You’ll never know unless you actually write your book.) However, if you are looking for a quick score, a lottery ticket, I am not sure book writing is the best path.

But if you are looking to write a book for another reason, such as possibly believing that you actually MUST write this book (even if only your mom will ever buy a copy; but don’t worry, my mom bought 16 of my first book thinking she was going to propel it to the bestseller lists all by herself. BTW, nowadays, she waits for me to send her a free one. Sheesh, times have changed.) then do it.

More about the writing process is gonna come next week. But in the meantime, think about tapping at the keyboard. The page is blank for all of us when the sun comes up in the morning. The only question is, are you going to fill it?