So apparently despite my best efforts not to, I am writing this story. I hit 5000 words last night and while I know several people who can knock out that many words in a day (assholes), that is a lot for me, especially considering that my goal is 25,000-30,000 words total.
The thing is that it’s hard to write a contemporary novel about someone much younger than me (my main character is 11 years old) because the times, they have changed. Some things, like kids having cell phones, I think will be easy to work with. If weird because IN MY DAY WE USED PAYPHONES. AND WE LIKED IT. But there are other things, little details that probably shouldn’t matter so much, that are totally tripping me up.
Such as: what is the Scholastic book fair like now? I remember reading something about how it is all video games and tie-in products and very few actual books. Of course, the Scholastic website makes it look like it is all books! Educational books! And what is the actual fair like? Never mind what it’s like now, I don’t even remember if 20 years ago we pre-ordered our books or if we just circled what we liked in the catalog and then bought them day-of. No clue!
And what about the Internet? I can deal with it for the most part the way I’m dealing with cell phones, but I am clueless what an 11-year-old would even do online. It’s a little old for Webkinz and Club Penguin, I think, but that depends on the kid, but anyway I am not going to advertise any of those sites in my story. Do kids that age use Facebook? Have blogs? I NEED TO KNOW.
And here’s one that should not be tripping me up so badly but totally is: television. Where I lived when I was 11, we could not get cable. Our house was on a mountain and there was no signal. (We also could not get the newspaper delivered, but that did not stop them from trying to get us to subscribe.) Now that everything has gone digital, can you get cable anywhere? Oh, and what about internet? Would my MC, who also lives on a mountain, be stuck with dial-up or is that going to seem unbelievable to contemporary readers?
Most things are, I think, pretty universal to the pre-teen experience, even if they are calling it tween now. These details don’t really matter. Except that they do because I need to understand her world, and these are the things that have come up.
I sent this to a friend who has a 10 year old….maybe she has some insights as I know her kids do a lot on the internet, mostly I know it’s youtube.
Well, my younger brother is 16, living in the mountains in upstate NY with my mom, and does NOT have cable. (still too far out for wired cable, in too much of a valley for satellite). We never did, and most likely never will, it’s just not possible to get it to us out there (or just to expensive I would imagine). He watches a lot of TV on DVD, and plays a lot of video games. He has a facebook (for a few years) and plays several online MMPORPG (or however you type that). He reads alot about music online, and pulls up sheet music etc. He does have a cellphone, which doesn’t get GREAT reception at the house, but better than it ever has before, they are putting up more towers I guess. Oh, and they have progressed beyond dial-up to DSL through the phone line, WOO!
So not the right age group, but accurate as of last I spoke to them about the cable/internet/etc.
I have no idea about the scholastic book fair now, but when I was a kid, we definitely pre-ordered. When the books came, they were all laid out on the cafeteria tables. My school was super-teeny (think 15-20 kids per grade) so I don’t know if things were different in bigger places. I can’t actually remember Saren having any book fair order forms for that partial year that she was in school and as for homeschooling, there was this one time that I went to a sale at a Scholastic warehouse (%50 off everything!) and there was a lot of tie-in stuff, but a lot of good stuff too.
Here’s what *my* 11 year old does on the internet. Whether it will help or not, I have no idea, but I’ll offer it up. She no longer plays Webkinz or Club Penguin, but she frequently complains about how Club Penguin got awful when Disney bought it out. She might still play Webkinz if she hadn’t lost her password and all of her special code tags from her stuffed animals, but then again, maybe not. I think it’s more something to complain about rather than something she wishes she could still do. She has no interest in Facebook or myspace. She plays role-playing games in which the players take turns writing out the story that their characters are living. They write it fiction-style. In these games she chats with her friends on the side. She also has a deviant art account and uploads pictures to that, sometimes things that she’s drawn and scanned, sometimes things she’s worked on solely on the computer. She has a blog but rarely updates. She watches youtube videos. The biggest part of her onlining is chatting with friends, both irl and ones she met on her roleplaying websites.
So that’s one perspective at least.
I think you can get cable anywhere but it has to be satellite? My dad has a somewhat remote secondary house in Utah and he does that. I don’t know about internet.
My oldest son is now 12 but has been online at our house since he was 10. His primary internet activities are YouTube and MSN. He also plays World of Warcraft which is online but not really ‘the internet’. He occasionally sends emails to friends and relatives (and they’re mostly incoherent crap, if I may say) and then he likes sites like Pop Cap Games and the like. Mostly, however, YouTube and MSN.
The Scholastic bookfair that my kids’ school hosts is primarily books and really, really crappy toys/trinkets (that are overpriced).
you can get high-speed internet via satellite these days. so if you can use a satellite dish up in the mountains, you can probably get fast internet too.
you can watch a lot of tv online, but again that depends on having the signal.
i have a nine year old and a 14 year old. i’ve been to the book fairs and both of my children have been on the internet since they were 3 years old. if you would like to send me a list of specific questions…i may be able to help you out.
All I know is that I am now 20, and when I was 11, I started lurking at the WD.
Somehow I don’t think this is entirely normal.
What kids have access to, media-wise, is really parent-driven in a lot of ways. So that might inform some of your choices.
Also, male or female? When you start to hit 8, media outlets start to talk about “boy audiences” and “girl audiences.” The other thing I learned about in working on tween stuff is that a lot of it is aspirational – they want to skew older. Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon have shows about 12-16 year olds, but the audience is more 7-13 year olds.
You can probably suss out some checking out beaconstreetgirls.com which is the social network around the BSG books. There’s also http://www.allgirlarcade.com/
I think too young for full blog blogs or facebook, (although I’m sure there are some that have them) but virtual-world type stuff is opening up.
Oops, sorry, MC is female! I know I *could* write about a boy, but it doesn’t seem very likely as long as I am writing books for my own 11-year-old self. The only books I remember loving that starred boys were fantasy, which is also very unlikely for me to be writing.
We had to pre-order at the book fair. Also, I’m suddenly intrigued about what it’s like now. I have no idea!
Perhaps you should join some pre-teen socializing … places. And be like, “Hey kids, where are all the cool parties? What’s the heppest dance craze?” I’m sort of kidding.
Also, my niece has a Facebook, but she only has one friend, and it’s my sister’s friend/neighbor. She spends a lot of time watching music videos on YouTube. And Dinner Dash, whatever that is. Actually, she enjoys any adware and toolbar-laden game that can be downloaded from Nickelodeon or similar.
If your character goes to school, it’s a safe bet that she has a baffling amount of homework, but knows a reasonably impressive amount of Spanish.
Hi! I have 4 kids, 1 of whom is almost 14 (girl) and 1 of whom is 11 1/2 (boy). Abby has been active online since she was 9 or so. She liked Neopets and Disney and Nickelodeon websites. Pete has never gotten online much, maybe to check out some football card prices on ebay or to some Star Wars website, but he’s rarely online anymore. Abby just got a Facebook acct and is on about an hour a day.
As far as bookfairs, Abby and Pete’s school has 2 every year. The committee chair lets the companies know what types, price ranges, and # of books we want, and they send them out in large trunks that open up to display cases. The school made 40% from the profits. Book prices were in the $1-20 range.
HTH
Forgot to reply to the last post…my kids don’t have that much homework. Depends on the kid some…mine have been able to do most of their work in class.
I have a nearly 10-year-old son, and we don’t have cable TV. He likes YouTube the best — and actually watching movie trailers on netflix as well. Slackmistress is right — it’s very aspirational. He wants to be like older kids and he’s very interested in girls in a very general way. He watches videos on YouTube of the way kids do things — like how they win at Wii games, or how they alter toys to make new things.
The Scholastic Book fair is really mostly books. There are a handful of video games and some cheap junk that actually makes the school a ton of money, but mostly books.
The other thing kids can do on the internet is interact with teachers and other students. There’s a cool thing called ThinkQuest and you have to get an account from your teacher, but then you can be on and do study group stuff with other kids from all over. My son doesn’t like it, but I know some of the girls do.
Best wishes!!
When I was 11, I was also lurking on the WD. Of course, when I joined, I lied and said I was fifteen. For what that’s worth.
Where we live (rurally but not too remote, foothills of mountains) there are no affordable high speed internet options. You can pay through the nose ($80/month) for sucky satellite, and certain houses can do a $60/month cell phone option (although I think that mostly worked for us because of a lot of extra computer equipment my husband acquired along the way), but most people have dial-up or nothing.
(We got rid of internet and then my husband discovered a loophole in our cell phone plan and between that and all that equipment I mentioned we now have relatively high speed access for free. Hence me commenting at 11pm. WHY AM I NOT IN BED???)
Anyway, my point is that is it totally conceivable for your character to NOT have internet if that is better for your story. (But if she does, she’s gonna be pretty web-savvy…FB, MySpace, special interest websites, definitely e-mail and IM, YouTube, etc. All my students of that age know way more than I do!)
my 13 year old niece has been on myspace since she was at least 11 (lying at the time to say she was 13; now she says she’s 16…); myspace seems to be dying out but she just joined facebook and twitter.
From what I can discern of her online activity, it’s a lot of youtube, chatting, leaving direct messages via twitter; hidden comments on friend’s pages, etc. In other words, she’s joining the social networking sites but she is savvy enough to keep a lot of stuff private. Her other online stuff include searches for things about Robert Pattinson and Twilight; two years ago, she was still into Miley and Hannah Montana but that switched about 6 months ago.
That said, it’s going to depend on your character. I know when I was a tween I likely would have seen through the marketing BS that Disney peddles so it’s highly possible your character wouldn’t be caught up in that.
OH and she loves to play DS games and Wii but isn’t into playstation or Xbox really.
Well, I keep a pretty tight rein on my 10-year-old’s online activities. She only occassionally plays Webkinz still and is more into Pixie Hollow and Club Penguin. Although she enjoys them for what they are, the most fun she has is chatting with friends online at the same time. All her friends though are people we know IRL, I don’t allow her to make friends online. Needless to say, she does not facebook or twitter. She enjoys YouTube a lot, but she doesn’t tend to ask to search things out on her own, she just likes the videos I show her.
Ooh, I am so excited about this for you!
But yeah. I had a character in Some Girls Are who uses a payphone and then I had to explain why she didn’t have a cell phone. I cried a little on the inside. I can’t imagine having a cell phone at 11. At the same time, I live in a rural area, so it just seemed like less of a necessity, idk. When I hit high school I started to see a few more people with them but even then I viewed them as a luxury. If I was in HS now I probably wouldn’t even blink. And I likely still wouldn’t own one.
The subject of the Scholastic Book Fair has come up on VK’s a few times, if I’m remembering correctly.
Oh, I just thought of another attribute of my niece that I think is pretty common: she doesn’t have a computer at home (that’s not the common part). What I mean by that is that she connects to all these sites at her friends’ houses. So apparently when the kids are just hanging out/having sleepovers, they are checking out their facebooks, tweeting, etc. Not just sitting around together and talking about the boys and such.
Crap! I keep forgetting. she does EVERY SINGLE ONE of those infernal quizzes/forwards/you are going to die if you don’t send this to 24 friends things
Yes, she did them at 11 on myspace; now she does them with her cell phone (she got it when she was 12), via texting
I just have to say that I had to use a pay phone at the airport yesterday and IT DIDN’T HAVE A COIN SLOT.
A lot of families here in SC don’t have home computers. The tweens who come into the library to use the computers seem to mostly play games, chat and listen to music (which they also download to their MP3 players, though that might be older kids…). Some of them have a Myspace site (which they use to chat and listen to music, I presume), but I rarely see anybody on Facebook. This could be a regional thing. Dial up or DSL makes sense (we used dial up but I bet there is DSL available there now). Funnily, I can’t really remember how the bookfairs worked. I remember choosing books ahead of time, so we probably pre-ordered. Wait, I do remember you just coming home with books, so I must have sent the $$ in first.
Oh, and TV, we had neighbors with satalite, though it would go out in high winds and thunderstorms.
I don’t have any 11 year old girls, obv, but I do work amongst quite a few of them. :) I appreciate that the Atlantic ocean difference might make some of this less relevant, but….
The majority of the 11 year olds we have are still nice, sweet kids though they are starting to be interested in fashion and dressing up and handbags and whatnot. A lot of them wear body glitter and nail varnish and lipgloss and carry/wear little handbags. Some seem to go on Facebook a bit but it’s mostly Bebo and Myspace and MSN messenger, and all of them (especially the boys) are into Youtube. They all like to play online games. Also, NEOPETS NEOPETS NEOPETS! (I am also an 11 year old girl.)
They still read and most seem to like Harry Potter. The girls really like Jacqueline Wilson books, especially Tracey Beaker who has been made into a TV show. (I don’t know if JW has made it to the US but she is HUGELY popular here – one of the most-borrowed authors overall in UK libraries, plus, like I said, TV show.)
As you’d expect there is a good deal of Hannah Montana and High School Musical obsession. There seems to be a lot of girls who are very into swimming and dancing, or play instruments. I’d say there aren’t many into horses, and that makes my pants sad. (When I was 11 I did not have the Internet or a mobile phone. I did not give two hoots about boys or fashion, though I was somewhat into pop music. The only thing I really wanted to do was be at the stables or, if that wasn’t possible, play with my Julips i.e. realistic model horses. With real miniature tack and everything! I also read a lot, mostly pony books, but I could be persuaded onto other stuff as well.)
p.s. apologies for the essay! I’m really excited that you’re writing this.