Why Write YA Lit with a Male Lead?

By Tamara Rose Blodgett

Writing Death Whispers from a teenage boy’s perspective wasn’t difficult (my four sons and all their friends were fodder for the novel!). I fell in love with the idea of a fresh premise told from the male POV as soon as I had the story in my head in early 2010. They say to write what you know and I did. I think a female POV set in the teen years would have been more challenging and I’m glad my first series was written from the male perspective.

Caleb Hart has the same problems all teens have except the pesky zombie raising that rears its ugly head at the worst possible times. Just like everything in teendom it’s about finesse, and that is a learning experience that he suffers through, along with all the other fun puberty stuff. This is a novel about real teens in extraordinary circumstances. Many of the events that take place in this book challenge Caleb…  morally. I like putting my protagonist(s) under pressure from the beginning and seeing it through to the end. Action and crisis are part of the reading pleasure for me. Other authors describe that they write books they’d want to read and when others love them too- well bonus. That’s what I did here: writing a book with real dialogue that teens actually use, lots of action and romance that unfolds naturally.

This isn’t a homogenized story that has been run through the wash a couple of times. Where, everybody comes from perfect families that robotically interact in an expected way, Hence, my main character falls for a girl he’s hopelessly attracted to that hails from a nightmare family. This strife is part of what makes the story’s heartbeat tick-tock along. Caleb matures during the story, his experiences begin to shape him, he begins the journey of self-discovery, making decisions that will shape him into the man he will become.

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I love genetics and although far from expert. I did enough research for the premise to be plausible. All three series’ I’m working on and will work on have their basis in the “what-if” factor. Human potential is intriguing to me.

In Death Whispers we have a group of teens that are given a “booster” inoculation before high school that sends them down a slippery slope of power and choice. The Pearl Savage, (paranormal romance) addresses what happens when genes are tampered with and a group of humans become other: bred to protect. Blood Singers deals with a sub-species of human beings that balance the “food load” for the vamps and give the Were’s a chance to become moonless changers. This rare group, the Blood Singers, are but a fraction of the human population and have a skill set that makes them as dangerous as the vamps and shifters. Finally, a group of humans that can fight against them on equal-footing because of evolutionary circumstance.

My hope for the reader of the Death Series is (besides being wildly entertaining!) some of the stereotypes will be debunked about boys. There are some things that will be stereotypical because they’re simply true. Conversely, there will also be the moments when the reader’s mental light bulb goes off with an “Ah-huh!” The girls are clever as well and not diminished one bit in their respective roles in the books. All the characters have flaws which makes the reading of it more real; that was the goal for me, a unique read that was entertaining, imaginative and resonated with all who read it. (And encouraging teenage boys to read feels pretty snazzy!)

As I approach the release of Death Weeps, book four on May 18, I will have taken the teens into their junior year of high school and seen them escape the boundaries of the earth they know!

Thanks so much for reading my stories.