Once upon a time there was a geeky, nerdy hobbledehoy who liked girls pretty much, but was totally oblivious to the fact that some of them really liked him.
This problem began in junior high when the hobbledehoy was thirteen. A girl named Nikki decided to sit by him in art class even though they were assigned seats in alphabetical order, and the hobbledehoy’s last name began with a B, while Nikki’s last name began with V.
She constantly remarked about how wonderfully he drew each and every assignment, even the ones that looked like a black bird bathing in a mud puddle even though they were assigned to draw the teacher using swirl doodles, which nobody knew how to do and everybody got wrong.
By the end of the first semester, Nikki had made it known to the hobbledehoy that her greatest wish was for him to come to her house after school and draw her in the nude. “I cannot,” said the hobbledehoy. “I have to catch a bus after school. And this is Iowa. It is too cold to take my clothes off to draw somebody. I would shiver too much to draw well.”
In college, the hobbledehoy was still a little clueless and clumsy. He still didn’t see it whenever someone of the female persuasion looked at him and hoped that he would be their little huggie-bear.
A beautiful blonde girl started sitting with the guys from Ayers House whenever they went to lunch in the dorms. She always chose to sit next to the hobbledehoy. She asked him about his class times and class locations. When the guys went in Doobie’s car to MacDonald’s. She sat in the front seat and turned around to talk to the hobbledehoy in the back seat, the whole way, both going and coming.
Then one day, she sat by him at the food service table even though no other guy from Ayers House was there at the time. “Sometime you will have to show me these drawings you can do, the ones that Doobie is always talking about. You can bring them to my room when my roommate is out. Doobie can tell you where to find me over in the Maples Building.”
The hobbledehoy seriously thought he might show her some of his drawings. But he couldn’t ask Doobie where to find her, because he didn’t know what her name was.
Finally, when the hobbledehoy got through college, and he also got through remedial college to get a Master’s Degree and a Teaching Certificate, he got a job teaching middle school English in South Texas. And he had a pretty Hispanic teacher’s aide who asked him to take her places in his car. And the pretty blond Reading teacher from the classroom across the hall also liked to invite him to go places either in her car or in his. And he had a great time with each of them. But the three of them never seemed to be able to do things together without somebody getting angry. And the hobbledehoy didn’t understand it. He was never the one who got angry.
The Hispanic one had a sister who lived in an apartment complex in Austin. And the hobbledehoy’s parents lived in the suburbs of Austin at the time. So, they would travel together to Austin for weekends. The only complicated thing was… the apartment complex where the hobbledehoy dropped her off and picked her up was a clothing-optional nudist apartment complex. The hobbledehoy learned about human anatomy and nudist etiquette very quickly.
And the Reading teacher was rather aggressive. She dropped a lot of hints. And one night she arranged a card party at the hobbledehoy’s apartment. It was a small party. Just the Reading teacher and the hobbledehoy and the female Science teacher. And it turned out that the Reading teacher had bought two packs of pornographic playing cards. And she wanted to play strip poker.
So, the moral of the story is… even hobbledehoys grow up sometime. And by the time the hobbledehoy had gotten fat around the middle so that he could no longer be a hobbledehoy, he got married and had three kids.
And if you were to say to me, “Mickey, is the hobbledehoy really you?” I would say to that, “I don’t think I can answer that.”
This is not actually a picture of Boogendorf, this is Toonerville where the clocks are wrong and a giant Mickey Mouse lurks in the foothills beyond. 
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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