Difficult to Categorize | 1 | Is it YA?

I've been polishing these second editions and preparing files for print and re-formatting them for Kindle and formatting them some more for Smashwords through which I'll distribute to iStore and Nook. In the midst of doing this I find I'm still locked into Amazon’s exclusive-to-Kindle program for Famepunk Part 2: Middlemarch, dating back to when I'd published it for Kindle on the day before the hurricane, back in October; I really rushed out that first edition in case something happened. As usual not reading the fine print but especially not with a hurricane coming I missed the part about automatic renewal—I just went naturally for the 70% royalty and figured I could wait three months before putting it on Smashwords. Three months I do standing on my head, easy. But five months later I've made a lot of changes, I'm happy with the results, and I want to get both these books “out there” so I can move on to the next one. Period. Instead, because I missed the renewal, I’m back in month two again—five months, by the way, with nothing to show, 70% of nothing, zero. Annoyed with myself and none too pleased with Amazon or its customer base, I've unchecked the proper on-screen box and will be free at the end of April to complete its publication process when I post Famepunk Part 2: Middlemarch on Smashwords. Where, I've noticed, I'll have to check a different box to say whether it contains content unsuitable to be seen by readers under 18 years of age, or not.

What strikes me first about that is 18 being a high cutoff. As a young lesbian, say even at 14 or 15 I'd have seized on and embraced a book like this with all my attention, I’d have read it straight through on a school night, seriously. Granted I was intellectually precocious but lesbians are often intellectually precocious, this is not a necessary sign of lesbianism but it's an indicator. I think it might have done me some good, too, to read this book at that age. By 18, I'd already slept with the wrong woman—and I was not precocious sexually. Kids these days, not uncommonly, I've heard things, today’s 17 year-olds would be the equivalent to what childless divorcees represented experientially in my own youth.

Bieliebers: They just love that lesbian boy.

So, no. Even though the book is one big vast and tumbling cornucopia of lesbian erotic thoughts and deeds including public sex, rough sex, and masturbation, I wouldn't call it unsuitable for readers between 13 and 17 years of age. It’s a book about teens and that’s the kind of sex teens have—in real life. They know this. So is Famepunk Part 2: Middlemarch written for teens? No. Is it YA? Of course not. It isn't. Should teens read it? I say yes, if only because it will take them all a great many hours they would otherwise spend texting each other about blow jobs and cyber-bullying schemes, if media is to be believed. (It isn’t.)