heart

My grandmother had a heart attack earlier this week- and it's made me realised that she is mortal and that I need to hear her story soon before she passes away. This is my way of getting to know my grandmother I don't speak Vietnamese and only know some of her stories through my father. I regret not having tried to talk to my deceased maternal grandmother more- my mother's story was fascinating and Ba's would have been even more interesting. But time ran out- and she was in the USA. Sometimes I think I have conjured up the whole Silence project to speak to Vietnamese older women, catalysed by this regret.

I've had a meeting with a publisher about my next novel and she wants to look at the full manuscript which is promising. We had a discussion about what makes the young adult voice more for the YA market and what other YA protaganists are for the adult market. We discussed MJ Hyland's work and thought it might be the sophistication of the writing, the subtext the fact that there are other points of view not just the YA voice. I like my YA voice because it sounds like a teen. But whether my novel benefits from having a YA voice as well as the voice of Ba (a grandmother) is another thing all together.