Guest Post: The Teen Inside Me (Tawny Stokes)

I’m pretty sure I never really grew up.  Not really.  Sure I got married and had a kid, and got divorced and pay taxes and pay bills.  I do all the adult things I’m supposed to. But deep down inside I still feel 16.  Which is probably why writing YA feels so normal to me.

I’ve written a lot of books for adults but it wasn’t until I started writing YA that it felt truly right.  Static was the first YA I’d written.  And it was an easy book to write.  And a joy to write.  Some of it was like jotting down old memories. Vivid memories that I could still see, and hear and feel.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Salem’s experiences were mine. Although I had attended many gigs when I was a teen, and I did travel around following different bands, I have in no way had any contact with an incubus and have ever been turning into anything unnatural.  *looks in mirrors checks eyes*.  Nope, still good.

It was the same when I wrote Demon Whisperer.  It was easy.  Well, not easy easy, all writing is hard, but I didn’t have to think about what I was writing, it just flowed.  The difficult part was not interjecting my thought processes into the way Caden would think and behave.  He’s 17 and I’m well, not 17, and I have many life experiences, I’ve learned the hard way some tough lessons.  So, sometimes it proved difficult to allow Caden to make those mistakes when I knew better.  I didn’t want Caden to do dumb stuff, make poor decisions, but I knew to keep his voice authentic I had to let go.  And remember all those painful moments from my teen years.  In some ways, it was fun to relive them.  Like first love.  That’s always my favourite thing to re-experience, that rush.  And Caden’s got it bad for Aspen.  J

So now I’ve come up with the 5 ways you can tell you have a teenager living inside of you, for all those adults out there…

1. You call everyone dude
2. Your thumbs have callouses from texting
3. Your iPod, iPhone and other devices are part of your iDentity
4. You are either Team Gale or Team Peeta, or the fact that you think in teams when it comes to dudes
5. Other words in your vocabulary are: epic, uber, junk and awesomesauce
6. You watched the Hunger Games movie trailer ten times in a row.  (Okay, that might’ve just been me)