I Guess It's Okay To Talk About This

No, I'm not talking about something dirty. I'm talking about the book offer I received in February. I just signed and mailed the contracts out today. The publisher still has to sign off, so it's not carved in stone yet. I won't give out the publisher's name.

I will say, however, that it's for two books. This is the first time I've been offered a two-book deal.

This is wonderful and everything, but now I have to write them.

Another One of Them Carnival Thingies

The Third Carnival of Children's Blogs is us up Semicolon. I guess it's just as well that we still haven't figured out how to do permalinks because the carnival had a theme this month. Poetry. The only poetry post I have is the one from last week that involves an Anne Sexton reading and skinnydipping. Totally inappropriate. Just totally, totally inappropriate.

A Hot Read

I've been hearing that the YA book Twilight by Stephanie Meyer is flying off library shelves. I can see why. The book is about hot, steamy, teen sex without the sex. I mean, just look at the opening screen at the official website. The book is called a "love story with bite." Very true. I don't like love stories, myself. I guess I liked the bite part of this one.

Isabella leaves her home with her mother to stay with her father in the state of Washington. Evidently it's overcast there a lot of the time, which is good for vampires. Not for the reason you're thinking, though. (Read the book.) At her new school she can't help but notice a group of incredibly good looking siblings seated together each day at the cafeteria during lunch. They never eat. One thing leads to another, and she and Edward the Beautiful enter into a classic "I can't stand you! I can't stand you! Wait! I just noticed! You're the hottest thing on two feet! I've gotta have you" relationship.

Yeah, I know. That's a cliche. But it's better in Twilight. You know. Hotter.

The vampire and victim thing has had a sexual feeling to it since Dracula, and maybe before for all I know. According to a recent article in Time, vampire romances are very popular right now. Vampires are the ultimate bad boy, it seems. Personally, I thought this vampire/teen romance works better than the (admittedly few) vampire/woman romances I've read. Personally, I always find the latter a little unbelievable because I expect an adult woman to have some kind of sense of self-preservation. But teenage girls have a reputation for being attracted
to bad boys, and I can believe that a young girl would think she'd rather be dead than not be with this guy she is so in love with right this minute.

We're discussing this book at adbooks. We're all coming up with all kinds of flaws in the story. Too much talking about the relationship, for one. (We adults grew tired of that long ago.) And why don't the young vampires go nuts and stake themselves after having lived as high school students in one place or another for the better part of seventy or eighty years?

But a lot of us agree, while we were reading the book, we really enjoyed it.

There are supposed to be two sequels to Twilight. New Moon will be out this fall. I don't hold out much hope for it, myself. Sexual tension was the big attraction with the first book, and I think it's going to be very hard to maintain. Plus, the relationship was left a little vague at the end of the first book. That's probably the best we can expect. In my reading experience, vampire/human relationships never come to a good end.

As it just so happens, I'm reading another good teen vampire book right now. And I've got an adult vampire book waiting for me. I'm guessing that will be it for me for vampire stories for a while.