Brenna Yovanoff

Main stuff: my name is Brenna Yovanoff and I write speculative fiction. My work has appeared in Chizine and Strange Horizons, and my contemporary YA fantasy THE REPLACEMENT is coming out from Razorbill (Penguin Group) in 2010.

I don't update this blog nearly as often as I should, but you can find me at merry_fates on a regular basis, along with fellow authors Tessa Gratton and Maggie Stiefvater (everflame and m_stiefvater). There, we follow a strict schedule (I love schedules, but completely fail at making my own), and post short fiction every Monday. It's a closed community, but we love to hear from watchers, and everyone is welcome to contribute in the comments. So come check it out, because what could be better than dark, lyrical fiction?

That's right. Nothing.

Except puppies.

(I can't help it. I like puppies.)

(And parentheses.)

New York was absolutely excellent, and also full of shoes. It was the first time I'd ever gone by myself, so I felt particularly sophisticated and adventuresome.

I stayed at a Very Art Deco Hotel by Washington Square and successfully kept various appointments, saw two of my cousins, and got myself taxis.

On Tuesday, I went to Penguin, where I met my agent, the inimitable Sarah Davies, before going up to the Razorbill offices and encountering a whole contingent of marketing and publicity people. I simply can't do justice to their patience or their friendliness (I was pretty discombobulated by the whole situation). They were all warm and articulate, and I think I mostly sounded like, um . . .

Then we had a meeting, where lots of timelines and other practicalities were discussed, and I got approval for Book Two (yay!). However, my hands-down favorite part was when Ben Schrank, the Razorbill publisher, drew cover concepts for THE REPLACEMENT on the whiteboard. I can't talk about any of the drawings. I mean, there's not even an official motif to be top-secret about yet. But the experience was extremely exhilarating, and I'm so excited to see how it will turn out!

I had lunch with Sarah and my editor, Lexa, who is fantastic in too many ways to count, but particularly because when I was revising THE REPLACEMENT, she kept encouraging me to add more—more kissing, more angsting, more doom and disaster and redemption, and something on fire. And also because she has promised to send me an ARC of Angela Morrison's second novel Sing Me to Sleep! (I was quietly enthralled by Taken by Storm.)

The next morning, I breakfasted with Sarah, and met Allison the Foreign Rights Agent, who is both adorable and highly knowledgeable. She lives in New York and told me lots of nice places to shop, which helped later when I went wandering around SoHo. It was like a scavenger hunt—I meandered back and forth, referring to the list of addresses Allison had given me, feeling an excessive degree of triumph each time I located one, and occasionally stopping to wrap my blisters with strips of kleenex, which is an age-old soccer trick.

Then I bought some shoes, hailed a taxi by waving my arm and looking very assertive, caught my plane, and now . . . I'm home.

I'm going there tomorrow (!)

I'm going to meet my agent and my editor for the first time, and visit the Penguin offices, and also probably be forced to overcome my phobia of hailing cabs, unless I can coerce the desk attendant at my hotel to do it for me.

Maybe I can walk everywhere. I do have a map . . .

Disclaimer: this is still a hard subject for me to talk about, which makes me feel stupid. I hate admitting that I'm easily influenced by completely artificial constructs, most of which probably have something to do with the media. Also, I'm totally old enough to know better. And guys out there? I guarantee some of this won't even make sense.

At 15, I found social concerns far more captivating than, say, Algebra. There were the usual distractions—what to wear, who to sit with, how to start a conversation. However, all these things paled next to that ravening concern that blindsides so many teenage girls. Being Pretty.

I observed early on that being pretty was a tricky situation, a balancing act that called for absolute precision, and the footholds weren't always obvious. After a good deal of thought, I developed a theory. It was good to be pretty—but not too pretty. It was good to be not-ugly. It was bad if the boys liked you more than they liked other girls, because then the other girls might hate you.

I myself was not a hater of pretty girls. They kind of scared me, but in a mesmerizing way, like poisonous flowers and solar eclipses are sometimes scary. More over, I felt sorry for the girls who drifted too far toward the stunning end of the spectrum and so, had to be punished for it. This is most apparent in the case of Rosie—to this day, one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen in real life, and in 10th grade, virtually friendless:

Angela says she’s jealous of Rosie, because all the boys like Rosie because Rosie is beautiful and friendly and knows how to make people pay attention to her. I’m not jealous of Rosie. I mean, I am. But I wouldn’t want to be like her.

And even Angela began to notice, after a few weeks, how Rosie eats lunch at a table by herself, walks through the halls alone, has no real friends. Sharky’s her friend when we’re all in PE, but outside of class he barely glances at her.

All those guys who flirt with her, they’ve got other friends, real friends, and once the bell rings, she doesn’t exist anymore.

Pretty much everything about this troubled me, but the most troubling part was my own failure to befriend Rosie. I wanted to ask her to eat lunch with us. I wanted—badly, even—to talk to Angela about the Whole Rosie Predicament, but I didn't know what to say.

The beauty conversation was one you were only allowed to have if you were tearing yourself down. I knew I didn't want to get into that, so it was easier to avoid it. Subsequently, I kept quiet about Rosie. I refused to admit that I ever even thought about clothing or makeup or boys. Those things were “shallow,” and also, if you admitted to anyone—even in private, even in a whisper—that you might possibly be pretty, you were clearly stuck-up and full of yourself.

Then, boys started liking me—not all the time, but enough to make things uncomfortable. I did the only sensible thing. I freaked out, went to Target, and bought a ( terrible hat,* ) which I used to hide my hair and a good portion of my face. Couple this with well-cultivated silence and a staunch refusal to make eye contact, and you have the formula for invisibility. It helped. Sort of.

This next excerpt is from the Hat Era and is as close as I came that year to discussing any of my attending beauty-panic. Also, it's pretty representative of my 15-year-old propensity to leap from topic to topic in the style of a flying squirrel.

My mom said that she’s going to buy me an alarm clock. She told me the other day that I was like the Snow Queen, cold and untouchable. That boys might be frightened of my tiny wrists, how smooth my skin is. Sometimes she says these things like they come out of nowhere.

But I can only see it the other way, like I am Jane (It doesn’t matter which one. They are always the girl-next-door). When I was little, I had a book about Plain Jane. Her bangs hanging down in her eyes, she said, “I wish he loved me.” And the fairy-godmother’s hobby was making wishes come true. I haven’t got a fairy-godmother and the boys around here smoke too much pot.

I want to point out that none of this is precisely true (except, my mom really said that, and I had the book with the fairy-godmother, and the part about the boys smoking pot—that was true). I wasn't plain, I wasn't Jane, and I wasn't the girl next-door. I was pretty, which is scary to say even now. Also, I lived halfway up the side of a rather treacherous mountain and was no one's next-door neighbor.

More importantly, the whole time I was writing it, I didn't really believe it. But even in the privacy of my own journal, I had to go for the tear-down. I couldn't talk about what it meant for boys to like me, because I might be punished. I couldn't talk about how it felt, because that would mean admitting that boys might possibly (sometimes? a little?) find me attractive.

It was two more years before I could think critically about the hazards of beauty without feeling like I was doing something wrong, because part of the beauty game is that you never acknowledge you're playing it. Even now, I want to reduce it, just throw up my hands and say “Yeah, fifteen was a really weird age.” But that's not adequate. The game was a kind of survival exercise, and I was always amazed that we played it right in front of boys, parents, teachers, without them even noticing.

I can look at it now and say (emphatically, if not objectively) that it was a bad game. Although the rules were nonsensical, the message was clear: Beautiful was what you were supposed to want, and it was also the worst thing you could be.

*Exhibit A: Hat I wore for roughly eight months, in order to diminish attractiveness and prevent scrutiny. Also, photographic evidence that I look exactly like my father.

This is kind of my favorite thing today:

. . . finally gets to tell her secret!

Okay, this has been driving me crazy, because it's the kind of thing you just desperately want to tell everyone already! (Which I realize does not remotely compare to what it's been like for Tess.) But now she can tell everyone, because the deal was officially posted this morning!

The resident merry_fates blood-bunny signed an awesome two-book deal with Random House Children's, the first book is slated for 2011, and will, of course, deliver blood.

. . . line edits are almost done, and I have a new title!

My book, coming next fall from Razorbill, is now quite aptly called THE REPLACEMENT, and here is the summary:

Mackie Doyle seems like everyone else in the perfect little town of Gentry, but he is living with a fatal secret - he is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now the creatures under the hill want him back, and Mackie must decide where he really belongs and what he really wants.

Also, it is a love story. Just so you know.

Okay, this is a set-up I generally try to stay away from. A lot of times it seems like an easy out, and when I write, I feel this mysterious obligation to portray all my characters as evenhandedly as possible. I tend not to like the set-up in published fiction for the same reasons, the big exception being Frank Portman's King Dork, because I swear Tom Henderson has the male version of my 10th grade English teacher—weird pronunciations, copious busy-work, and all. What I'm saying is, my real life experience was distinctly lacking in evenhandedness.

I don't know if this is completely normal, but in tenth grade, I had a spate of really questionable teachers. Later, I went on to have wonderful teachers, but they were younger, took themselves less seriously, and mostly taught the college-prep courses. The unpleasant ones taught general requirements, which could definitely account for their somewhat tyrannical attitudes.

Looking back, I'm much more able to understand what drove them to be angry and jaded, but I still don't condone it, mostly because they were supposed to be the responsible ones. Their jobs were to mentor, to educate us, and I think it doesn't matter how rude a fifteen-year-old is, you should never try willfully to hurt them.

In this excerpt, I am almost 16. I've only been in school for about a month and already the English teacher, M, is shaping up to be my secret nemesis. Lucas sits directly in front of me. He's popular and kind of a party boy, but generally articulate, generally kind. When the mood strikes him, he has the decency to notice I exist, and the decency to let me be invisible the rest of the time. ( . . . )

Well, I've been MIA for a while due to my second round of revisions, but I'm back! At some point, I may even get around to talking about revision and structure and what it means to sit down and really take stock of your story, but right now, I'm in the mood to talk about high school. Specifically, I'm in the mood to talk about that ever-popular literary cliché, The First Day.

Unfortunately, I have no cohesive written account of this event. It's kind of too bad, because I'd really love to know what my fifteen-year-old self would have said about it.

Suffice it to say, there was an incident, and that incident clearly made an impression, because I continued to mention it in my journal for the rest of the year. But at the exact moment that it happened, I was far too mortified to write it down.

On the first day of school, I had to stand in line in the counseling office to pick up my class schedule.

I was on a natural-selection kick (yes, you can have those) and had assembled what can only be termed a scientifically-informed outfit.

It went like:

Plain navy blue T-shirt, not quite fitted, but not too big. Cut-off denim shorts. Turf shoes, which were the only sneakers I owned that didn't have cleats attached to the bottom. To prevent my hair from attracting attention, I braided it into a ballet bun—dainty, demure, conservative. Totally inoffensive. This is the apparel-based definition of protective coloration.

None of my efforts mattered, as you will see in a moment.

For the sake of this narrative—my stats:

Height: short
Width: twig
Depth: impenetrable
Volume: mute

So, the story. There's this girl (me) standing in the scheduling line, not bothering anyone. She has on this completely terrible Wal-Mart wristwatch. It's ugly the way a codfish or a potato is ugly, by which I mean, it is so ugly that it's not even ironic-ugly. It is black polyvinyl, she hates it, it is water resistant to 20 feet.

There's this boy (douchebag)* standing in line just behind her. I say boy, because looking back, I realize that no matter how I viewed him at the time, he was young—eighteen, nineteen. But from the perspective of the girl, who is fifteen and completely unused to institutionalized learning, he is the very picture of authority. He's terrifyingly adult-looking, with capped teeth and weight-room muscles. He has a stupid little festival of facial hair. He has a neck tattoo, okay? He is not a boy.

He's visibly bored, clearly at the top of the social food chain. He takes pleasure in the fact that there are very few obstacles to prevent him from doing whatever he wants. She notes this, because she is nothing if not observant. Her observation is reinforced a minute later when he reaches out and takes hold of the her wrist.

Remember folks, she hates this watch. But that is not the reason she doesn't stop him. The reason is mysterious. The reason is that the situation is just too bizarre, and no stranger has ever taken the liberty of touching her without permission.

The buckle is a cheap one. It sticks and he has to work at it. She doesn't look at him. She stands placidly, patiently, while he undoes the buckle and removes the watch from her wrist.

Anyone shaking their heads in disbelief yet? Because I am. I was there, and I'm still marginally scandalized by my behavior.

I did look back at him. Once. It didn't prove to be a very effective defense tactic. I don't know what he saw, because he smiled—this wide, carnivorous smile—and then I just looked at the floor. I was mortified. I was mystified and petrified, and still, I couldn't stop thinking that this was by far one of the most interesting things that had ever happened to me in my entire life.

I went to my first class, which was Geometry. My errant watch-thief was there. His seat was directly across the aisle from mine. Until he got dropped from the class a month later, he would periodically lean over and hold up his wrist so I could read the time.

We never spoke. Occasionally, I wrote flippant, angry things about him in reference to other events (and once, in reference to William Golding's The Lord of the Flies), but only because I didn't want to admit that I was actually angry with myself.

I recognized that I had set a precedent of inactivity. But at fifteen, I was content to accept that, if it meant avoiding conflict. My greatest horror was Making a Scene. Occasionally I wondered what would have happened if I'd objected—just snatched my wrist back and told him to go to hell—but not with any real curiosity.

I didn't think much about things like personal integrity or establishing reasonable boundaries. Hey, at that point, I hadn't even figured out that the person I was actually mad at was myself.

After giving the matter a great deal of insufficient thought, I concluded the only thing that would be different if I'd protested was that I would still have my watch.**

*Can I say douchebag? I think I can—they say it on network TV. Okay, I'm leaving it in.
**Several weeks later, my mom asked me what had happened to the watch. Always the literalist, I told her that I'd lost it.

Chances are, you've seen this. Tess, Maggie, and I have a lot of overlap in our f-listers and I am chronically late to everything lj-related. So, I'm not going to re-post the whole thing, since you've probably already seen it, but I will provide a general rundown, plus important links.

Maggie's new novel Ballad is coming out. If you spot it in the wild and take pictures, you'll have the chance to win fabulous prizes. Maggie does a better job of explaining, using visual aids. Plus, she tells you how to actually, you know, enter.

Prizes (this is where it gets fabulous): The grand prize is a one-chapter/15-page critique by all three merry_fates. Second prize is books, and everyone likes books, right? Right? Also, a slick merry_fates messenger bag. Third prize is a signed audiobook of SHIVER.

If someone goes well above and beyond the contest requirements, we may just have to work out a fourth prize. So, get those cameras out and start stalking!

Hey all,

While I'm not an official entrant, Jackie, AKA fabulousfrock has a really
cool contest going on, so if you'd like to win an ARC of her upcoming debut Magic Under Glass, personalized with adorable illustrations, you should head over and check it out!

I've been thinking about this journal. I know, I know—you can't tell by looking at it. I am a very bad journal-keeper.

But here's the thing: I wasn't always.

There was a time in my life when I recorded my thoughts and observations with an enthusiasm bordering on obsessive. It sustained me. It kept me from melting into a puddle of boredom during high school.

I can't be sure that other people like journal entries and scrapbooks the same way I do, because I also like liverwurst and that Swedish salt licorice that's shaped to look like little fish, so this is going to be kind of an experiment. megancrewe has been talking about adolescence, posting journal excerpts that chronicle various revealing moments. In a certain sense, you could say that I'm copying Megan Crewe. And you would be right.

So, here goes. The Alice in this early observation is excruciatingly shy, which may explain why she is so fascinating to Sophomore Brenna. She wears glasses and is a year or two older than me, putting her at about 17. She wears combat boots and plays the cello. Although she mostly seems to go unremarked, Sophomore Brenna finds her utterly remarkable and admires her in the way that younger girls admire older ones. Although you can't tell it from her somewhat impressionistic description, Sophomore Brenna spends most bus-rides wishing that she looked just like Alice.

No girls ride the bus except me, and sometimes Alice. But Alice keeps to herself and doesn’t say much. She is kind of pretty, with short auburn hair and gray eyes. She reminds me a little of a rabbit. The kind of rabbit that doesn’t say much. When someone asks her a question, she sighs, like the answer weighs a lot. Like so much that she almost can't breathe.

She sits with her cheek against the window and her knees pulled up to her chest, tugging on the laces of her boots. Her slip is always uneven, hanging down past her skirt, and her stockings always have runs. I make up stories about her. About how she dreams of symphonies, of pirate ships or stars, like she's always someplace else.

Alice escapes by staring out the window, but I don’t have to. It’s strange to know you mostly don’t exist. I’m not even a real wallflower, but more like the shadow of one. Sometimes people in my classes make comments about how I’m a space cadet, or “not all there,” and maybe that’s the same thing I’m doing when I pretend that Alice has gotten away. Maybe it’s the equivalent of calling her a space cadet, when really she’s just like me.

I could say a lot about this—things about empathy and self-perception and projection, but I'm mostly just astonished to realize that I probably could have been friends with her if I'd been more outgoing or hadn't been in such peculiar awe of her.

At the time though, I felt her solitude was necessary to her character. Even though I prided myself on my objectivity, I still had a tendency to view everyone through my own lens. I saw people in terms of narrative rather than real life. It occurred to me that Alice was lonely, but not that I had any possible influence over her loneliness. I was fundamentally separate. Even sitting across the aisle from her, I had no involvement in the situation. The idea that I might one day start a conversation with her was flatly implausible.

This makes me regretful now, mostly because I think I would have liked her. In some ways though, it was simply a necessary part of my socialization, one more thing to grow out of. Because as weird as it may sound, at 15, if I didn't know someone, they were mostly just a story I happened to be telling.

Just a note to say we're doing the Oklahoma/Kansas thing again, so I'll have absolutely no internet and very little phone reception until Wednesday night.

Tessa's being good enough to post my merry_fates fic for me, but I won't be able to respond to comments until I get back.

I'm hoping to get some good photos out of this--possibly even some author-type photos, since Little Sister Yovanoff is bringing her camera with all the fancy parts, so I'll be posting pics when I get back.

See you all next week!

First foreign rights!

My book (which is currently between titles) is coming out from Razorbill next fall, and now it's also going to be published simultaneously by Simon & Schuster UK!

This means I will be on two continents. Which is indescribably novel to me!

My book is going to be British.

This book--m_stiefvater's beautiful, luscious book--has debuted at #9 on the NYT Bestseller list! Go forth and tell Maggie that she rocks!

This is a tricky question. It's not exactly rhetorical, but it's also not one of those ones that requires a definitive answer. It's not like “Can I put away this cordless drill?” or, “Do you need anything from the store?”

People are allowed to write what interests them. That's the cool thing about writing—you get to tell the stories that matter to you. People ask why I write about high school and I'm inclined to say that it's because I am allowed to. Which is a complete cop-out.

So, honesty time: I write YA because high school was one of the most interesting things that has ever happened to me in my whole entire life. Ever.

This is mostly because it was the first time I had attended—you know—school, and when you spend the majority of your time alone in your room with your extensive collection of spiral-bound notebooks, or else playing Blackjack with your sister, you never have to practice skills like plotting the quickest route to your locker or peacefully coexisting with 2,500 total strangers.

On the first day, a boy asked me which junior high I'd gone to and I told him, very indistinctly (I'd previously had near-perfect diction, but the social rigors of school immediately transformed me into a mumbler) that I had been homeschooled by hippies.

He looked at me for a long, long time. Then he squinted and said, “Wait—did you just say you were raised by gypsies?”

I shrugged. I lifted my hands and let them flop back down. “Sure. Yeah, that.”

Because at a certain point, there is not really a quantifiable difference.

I realized at once that being homeschooled by hippies (alternately, gypsies) was not very normal. In an attempt to isolate the elements of Normal—not an attempt to necessarily be normal, but just to have a clear understanding of what it entailed—I started writing things down.

I wrote down what people did and said and wore, and how they acted when they knew people were watching them, as compared to how they acted when they thought they were alone. I developed theories on various mating rituals, and divided displays of aggression into classes and subclasses. I studied my peers with the intensity of an anthropologist. A tiny, unlicensed anthropologist who was supposed to be doing her English homework.

But that was at the beginning. After a few weeks, I stopped trying to wedge everything into a scientific schema. I was interested in people because they were interesting. They were surprising and kind of wonderful, and I wrote down anything remarkable (and many things that—looking back—were not particularly remarkable) every single day. I have never in my life paid as much attention to what was going on around me as I did between the ages of 15 and 18.

So, I guess the answer is, I write YA because I still have hundreds and hundreds of close-written pages, no respect for the margins, all of them containing something raw and startling and true to remind me what it was like. Because it's very interesting to watch who people are while they're in the process of becoming themselves. It's very real.

What about you—readers, writers, either, both—why YA?

The revision cave is a nice place to live. It's quiet and dark. There are no bright lights and no loud noises. Or maybe there are, but you certainly can't be counted on to notice them.

There is no such thing as laundry in the revision cave. There are no dishes to wash, no plans. The gym is a thing of the past, and so is vacuuming. News, politics, and series television grind to a halt. The world stalls.

Occasionally, there are anxiety dreams involving carnivorous rabbits that dig all the way down to the water main and flood your basement. You try to shoo them away, but they are, unfortunately, carnivorous. So you get a stick and poke at them half-heartedly. This is a metaphor for revision, even if you have no idea what it means.

In the cave, in the dark, everything is a metaphor for everything else. Sometimes, not a very good one. You consider all the ways that language feels inadequate, and then use it anyway.

Sometimes, you look around and discover with delight that there is coffee.

I'm writing a funeral . . .

However, due to certain biological constraints that prevent him from actually setting foot on hallowed ground, my main character/first-person narrator is unable to attend.

I'm writing an implied funeral . . .

Revision is awesome.

. . . is so much fun. So much fun! There will be a more cohesive account later, for sure. But right now, just so much fun.

And thank you *everyone* for all the responses to my big news! I've been running around like crazy the last couple days, and when I finally got a chance to get some internet and log on, it made me appallingly maudlin and sappy when I saw all the comments!

Two things, actually. Two.

The first thing is that by this time tomorrow, I'll be in Savannah and it will be awesome. Not only will I have the pleasure of meeting fellow authors dawn_metcalf, everflame, carrie_ryan, m_stiefvater, fabulousfrock, ljsingleton, watchmebe, and seaheidi, but I hear there will be food there. And Spanish moss, and possibly ghosts. Also, I understand there's a beach. (For those who may not be truly familiar with the great paradox that is me, I hate water, but I love the ocean.)

The second thing is . . . I have a book deal!!!!!!

(!!!!!!!!!!!)

It's with Razorbill, an imprint I have coveted for a long time to an obscenely covetous degree, and while I'm completely unable to express myself clearly, I can still communicate by pasting the PW announcement here:

Lexa Hillyer at Razorbill acquired the debut novel FE by Brenna Yovanoff at auction during BEA. The book tells the story of Malcolm Doyle, who seems like everyone else in his perfect little town, but he has a secret: he is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby 16 years ago. Now the dark side wants him back and he must decide where he really belongs. Pub date is fall 2010. Sarah Davies of the Greenhouse Literary Agency was the agent.

That's about me!

Also, my fabulous and . . . what's another word for fabulous? My super-fabulous agent, Sarah Davies, gives an account on her blog.

So, uh. You should check it out. Yeah.

Yeah.