#Jerky boys piano tuner plus#
#Jerky boys piano tuner series#

When I give him one of these, he is happily through it in a day or two, loves the thing, has no where else to go, then goes back to not reading much.

#Jerky boys piano tuner plus#

As IвЂ™ve started writing YA, IвЂ™ve handed him titles IвЂ™ve come across I think he might like (I really can only dig up a handful of books - King Dork, Going Bovine, ItвЂ™s Kind of a Funny Story, anything by John Green, plus a few more - that suit him). Then he went through puberty and his concerns changed. Around the same time, he devoured any number of MG fantasy series. He devoured Harry Potter as a middle grade reader. The extensions of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid vibe into the YA marketВ (where more serious conflict can be shown) are few and far betweenвЂ¦ why? And, even as an adult, I totally get Diary of a Wimpy Kid, enjoy the humor, but that book is not for a sixteen-year-old. Why?ДЄgain, the conventional wisdom: boys stop reading at 12.Дiary of a Wimpy Kid directly addresses the dorkiness of growing up boy. Now, there is a giant YA market, but there are still relatively few books that intend to speak directly to boys. IвЂ™d have read a thousand of these kinds of titles if they were available. The few books that were aimed at me, I read, and I loved, and I read again ( Vision Quest, for instance). When I was growing up, there wasnвЂ™t really a YA market, yet.

#Jerky boys piano tuner series#

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series is wildly popular among 10-year-olds, but then boys stop reading. Boys read Harry Potter, but stop after that. It is commonly understood in the book business that boys stop reading around the age of twelve. These days, there are lots of titles geared for teen girls that speak to this outsiderness. When my students write about high school, most write about themselves as feeling like dorks, being dorks, standing on the outside looking in. It does not matter what demographic the kid comes from.

Having taught 18 and 19-year-olds for the last six years, IвЂ™ve come to the understanding that this generalized sense of somehow being unfit is the most generalizable aspect of teendom. These werenвЂ™t terrible times, at all, but I often felt terrible. I always felt on the outside of something. I showered twice a day, but always felt dirty. I had the sense that I didnвЂ™t understand the world. But, at the same time, I didnвЂ™t feel normal. In some ways, I was a pretty mainstream kid: I played sports.

Then I plunged into Vonnegut, which was good, butвЂ¦ I slowed down a bit, got less interested - there were almost no contemporary books, starring boys, that spoke to my central, very specific, teenaged concerns, which were largely existential: who am I? What is my place in the world? What am I supposed to do? What the hellвЂ™s wrong with me, because I know something is seriously wrong? IвЂ™d torn through I am the Cheese and Separate Peace and The Chocolate Wars and dipped into Salinger beyond Catcher in the Rye, although I couldnвЂ™t really get it. At 17, I looked like this and still wanted to read.Д«y fourteen, IвЂ™d read through all the fantasy I could handle. Sure, I played some video games and watched a lot of TV, too (we didnвЂ™t have cable, so I stacked a couple of VCRs together and copied several movies that I watched a thousand times) but, IвЂ™d get bored, eventually, and IвЂ™d read. Hello?Д«etween the ages of twelve and fourteen, I read a lot. Now, IвЂ™m not entirely sure what IвЂ™m writing about. Should I stop drinking coffee now so that I have a low enough caffeine tolerance next week so that my coffee might have some kind of longer-than-ten-minute affect? Literary Death Match on Sunday, big meeting I want to attend Tuesday, Book Launch at Red Balloon on Friday and, I have to re-write a few hundred manuscript pages. I think this whole problem is related to some recent trauma I suffered while at BEA last weekвЂ¦ДЎ) My phone was run over by a car a few weeks ago.Дў) It stopped working entirely while I was in New York last week.ДЈ) I bought a brand new, excellent looking iPhone.Д¤) I plugged the new iPhone into my computer and my hard drive freaked, screamed in pain and died.ДҐ) I have a book manuscript due in one month, which IвЂ™d been working on, which I hadnвЂ™t backed up on that dead hard drive.Д¦) My lungs stopped working and IвЂ™m drinking coffee all day long with seriously diminishing returns (and total wild monkey brain). After that, my monkey thoughts take off in two-hundred directions but I canвЂ™t get the body to move. When to say stop? IвЂ™m talking about coffee, which makes me feel great for about ten minutes. In this case, I have a hundred and thirty things to do and have fallen down due to some kind of crazy New York-based lung incapacitation that has limited my energy to one hour bursts.