Canto 74 – Jungle Jingles (The Green Thread)
The planet Stanley was beautiful in a primitive sort of way, but covered with an endless, nearly unbroken jungle on its entire land surface. Strange reptilian birds fluttered through stifling, pollen-saturated air. Primitive Lemurians called out from height to height in the tops of the jungle canopy. Their simian cries spoke of fear and death and loneliness, the need of the semi-intelligent to cling to each other in the face of the predatory jungle darkness.
The pinnace rode upward on a pillar of repulsor force, using magnetic pulses to push away from the planet’s wild green surface. King Killer, Dr. Hooey, and Willie Culver watched it go with grim faces. Marooned on a jungle planet full of unknown creatures that hunt all that lives and breathes.
“What will we do now?” asked Willie.
“We’ll be fine,” assured Hooey. “What Admiral Tang doesn’t know is that I’ve already read how this turns out. There is an Ancient archaeological site in the southern hemisphere that contains an Ancient artifact known to the Time Knights as a “transmat”. It turns anything that steps onto it into a tachyon stream that can physically transport anyone or any physical thing to any other time and place in the galaxy that has another transmat.”
“What are you saying?” said King. “You are planning to scramble our molecules and send them on a particle beam across space? You really know how to do this? You’ve done it before?”
“Well… no. I’ve never done it before. But the book says I will figure it out in time to save us from certain death. You and I will be fine, King.”
“What about me?” asked Willie. “Do I make it out too?”
“Well,” said Hooey, “you’re kinda the one-episode character. The kind the writer sends along on the mission to allow for a terrible death without killing off a main character.”
“What! I’m gonna die? AAARGH!”
“Don’t panic yet,” said King. “We are quite capable of surviving this. All of us.”
“Yes, quite,” said Hooey, “now we need to head for the archeological site.”
“Is it close by?” asked Willie.
“About eight hundred kilometers to the south.”
“Good Lord!” growled King. “You aren’t making this any easier, are you?”
“What do you mean?” said Hooey. “I just have to follow the right timeline. I didn’t choose any of this.”
At about that moment something large gave them a glimpse of itself in the undergrowth. It was the creature soon to be known as the Stanley Damnthing. It was a large porcine predator with ears like an elephant, a mouth like a toothy wolverine, and the overall body shape of a ten-ton hog.
“Oh, gawd!” sighed Willie. “That thing is hunting us, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” King looked grimmer than his usual grim.
“It won’t be able to catch all of us, though,” reassured Hooey with an eerie smile.
Willie Culver wet himself.
Catch a Falling Star 
Directions to Be Worried About
The question came up on Twitter. “What things aren’t safe to write about in a Young Adult novel?”
I have personally never questioned myself about that before. The writer asking for input was writing something science-fiction-y about a telepath using telepathy to torture someone. He was apparently worried that a younger audience would be traumatized by that.
Really? Anyone who can ask that has never spent much time talking to young readers.
I base my answer on over thirty years of trying to get kids to read things of literary quality. My very first year of teaching a male student stood up when the literature books were passed out and announced, “I don’t do literature!”
“Really, Ernie? You are going to lay that challenge before me?”
We slogged through The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that year, using and reusing 20 paperback copies of the novel purchased with my own money. Ernie maybe didn’t like it. But he did literature.
And I went on a thirty-four year quest to find out what literature kids really would do and what literature kids really needed to do.
Here’s a tiny bit of wisdom from Mickey’s small brain and comparatively large experience; Kids are not traumatized by literature in any form. Kids are traumatized by life. They need literature to cope with trauma.
Kids want to read about things that they fear. A book like Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card has some graphic violence in it and a war against faceless aliens, but it does an excellent job of teaching how to empathize as well as fight against bullies, and it helps them grapple with the notion that the enemy is never clearly the thing that you thought it was to begin with.
Kids want to read the truth about subjects like love and sex. They are not looking for pornography in YA novels. They get that elsewhere and know a lot more about it than I do. They want to think about what is right and how you deal with things like teen pregnancy, abortion, matters of consent vs. rape and molestation. Judy Blume started being objectively honest with kids about topics like puberty and sex back in the 60’s with books like Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. and Iggie’s House.
If you are writing for young adults, middle grade and high school kids, even kids 5th Grade and below who are high-level readers, it is more important to worry about writing well and writing honestly than it is to worry about whether they can handle the topics and trauma that you wish to present. Write from the heart and write well.
I can honestly say I know these things I have said are true about young readers from having read to them, read with them, and even taught them to read. As an author, my opinion is worth diddly-squoot since I have hardly sold any books, and no kids I know have read them (except for two of my nieces, both of whom are pretty weird and nerdy just like me.)
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