New Attack from The Committee to Protect YA
I was visiting with Scott Westerfeld on Friday morning, and he showed me this video. It appears the Committee to Protect YA’s have produced an outrageous attack against Westerfeld’s tell-all novel, Afterworlds, about a young novelist living in New York City.
The “committee–who’s members include John Green, Holly Black, Gayle Foreman, James Dashner, Maureen Johnson, E. Lockhart, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Matt de la Pena and Shannon Hale–claim that Westerfeld’s novel is full of lies… except for the parts that are true.
On his blog, Westerfeld includes an excerpt from a work in progress called How to Write YA, which is a companion to Afterworlds. Under a “What are novels?” heading, Westerfeld writes:
I’m not going to talk much about the history of the novel. Your local high school, university, bookstore, and library all have departments devoted to that subject. If you want to be a novelist, you should be reading lots of novels, new and old.
Go do that. Keep doing it your whole life.
Those words are music to a bookseller’s ears.
Westerfeld spoke at a SIBA luncheon and affectionally claimed to belong to the southern book crowd, just a little more south and slightly east, in Australia.
Here’s the trailer for Afterworlds, which comes out tomorrow.
