Creative Leaps

Above All,  Happy Writing, JJ With Macmillan-Caribbean's Island Fiction tween novella series - 6 titles of varied speculative fiction - our authors managed to bridge the maturity gap between illustrated chapter books and novels. They did so with craft, while staying true to our regional dialects and cultures. It is a bigoted thought (born of stereotyping groups of readers, e.g "all young people" and therefore the characters that speak to them), that reluctant readers/ YA readers everywhere or anywhere, will only read if the words sound like the everyday speech of some of their peers. Even the most worldly characters with the author's dutiful effort and soul wrangling to produce original work can be believable and compelling without swear words. The most interesting characters are not all hoodlums, vampires or teens of any sort who punctuate their sentences with profanity. Also, couldn't any one of these be drawn with contrary expectations of a kind of ref...