Almost... R.L Stine

I have been stressing out over the formatting process of this novel all day. I've been going through it and it looks amazing. I mean, really looks great...but...

It shrunk. By almost 60 pages. The formatting has crunched my 200 paged novel into a mere 139 on my Nook. However, I downloaded it onto my Kindle on my phone and it's more like 2,296 tiny pages. I started to panic, of course, because all the novels I've ever read on my Nook have been looong. I've actually thought about NOT releasing it. Then I remembered who I'm writing for.

When I was a kid, you couldn't get me to read a damn thing. I hated it. It was a process I did not enjoy. I felt it was time consuming, boring, and I hated that the subject matter they were making me read because I thought it was boring.

And then there was R.L. Stine. The first book I ever bought, and only because one of my aunts took me and my cousin Claudia, who was an avid reader, to Waldens in the mall and said, "You may pick a book. Any one you'd like." I would have rather gone anywhere else than that bookstore. So, I reluctantly went to the young adult section at the back of the store and started looking at the back covers of these books and decided on one. It was called 99 Fear Street: The First Horror. And believe it or not, it changed the way I viewed reading. I was hooked, but I was totally screwed. It was a series. And so for the next few weeks, my mom spent calling bookstores in the area, which at the time, weren't very many, looking for the other two novels. She found them, I read them, and then I read more and more and more. I read ALL of the R.L. Stine books I could get my hands on. Then Christopher Pike and then, finally, I ventured out into the other novels on the Young Adult bookshelf.

I can truthfully say that if it hadn't been for R.L. Stine, I would have hated reading for a long time. They were short, to the point, stayed on plot, and didn't have a lot of fluff. These are all the things I love about a fast, easy to read novel. They averaged about 130-160 pages and were awesome food for my brain in Jr. High.

I'm writing for the kids that hate to read but WANT to love something. I'm writing for kids like me. And, really, that's the kind of writer I want to be. I want to be the kind of writer that writes books a Jr. High/ High School kid will like to read and can't wait to tell their friends about. Anyone can read it if they like, but I want to turn kids on to reading, too. I think that's what my little novel will do. At least I hope it will. :)