tfw: unproblematic faves

For awhile, I felt embarrassed about wanting to read young adult fiction.

The moment I turned eighteen, I started going to the Fiction section exclusively in Barnes and Noble. I was an adult. No need to read Sarah Dessen or Tamora Pierce anymore. I was ready for bigger, better, older things.

And then… I stopped reading.

Because: college, my a cappella group, student teaching, those 3 months when I had a boyfriend my senior year… These are all the things I told myself. I was just too busy to read now. I had things going on. I couldn’t just sit in my dorm for hours, immersed in a book.

But really, I couldn’t find anything interesting. Don’t get me wrong — there are good authors out there. I love Jodi Picoult and Sara Douglass and Diana Gabaldon, but a few years ago, I realized that young adult fiction made me fall in love with reading. I remember ordering Twilight from the Scholastic catalogue, I remember when my mom finally let me read Harry Potter in the third grade. I remember finding Alanna the Lioness in my middle school library, I remember when I discovered Sarah Dessen in high school.

I had fallen out of love with reading. I struggled to finish books, struggled to stick with them. Which never happened before; I earned every single Accelerated Reader Pizza Party, okurrt!

Here’s the thing about young adult fiction: it’s interesting. There’s drama. There’s romance. There’s angst. And as a “good” kid, I enjoyed that. Reading for me was escapism at its finest.

Today, reading young adult fiction is still escapism, but it’s also representation. As a teenager in the late 2000s, there weren’t a lot of books about young black girls. There weren’t a lot of books about young, black, queer girls. And now there are so many! It’s so powerful and encouraging, and I wish there had been more when I was younger.

I don’t feel embarrassed about going right to the young adult section anymore. I’ve read so many great, powerful young adult books in the past year, that it’s inspired me to dust off my keyboard and start writing again.

That’s where That Feeling When… comes in.

As I dip my toes back into the writing waters, this will be a place where I post my short stories/novellas/flash fiction, whatever you want to call them. I really enjoy writing prompts, and I’ll be pulling some from Tumblr/Twitter/Pinterest/wherever the hell I can find them.

I hope you read these pieces and escape. I hope you read these pieces and examine yourself. I hope you read these pieces and enjoy them.