Themes in YA #amwriting

By: Meradeth Houston on 4:00 AM

How is everyone doing? I hope everyone State-side had a nice long weekend. I do try to spend some of my day off thinking of the reason for the day, though no matter what it's nice to have a day off from the grind :) How did you spend the day?

The long weekend was MisCon here in Missoula, which is our comic/writing festival. It was a great

event, as always, and I had a lot of fun. This year I sat on several panels, did some critique work for aspiring authors, and had a very good time watching all of the people in their fabulous costumes. How people manage to put some of those together is beyond me--they were amazing! Only a few were of characters I recognized, unfortunately, but in general it was fun to appreciate the work that went into them.

One of the panels I was able to attend and enjoy listening to (a great break from attempting to come up with interesting things to say at the ones I was participating in), was on themes in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror (this was a genre festival, to be sure). I am always curious to see what sorts of things are popular right now in the writing world, and what people think will be the "next big thing." One of the panelists mentioned a few:

• In sci-fi, the singularity, as well as first encounters with life forms on other planets.
• In fantasy, more paranormal/urban-fantasy without the romantic spin it's taken on so much of lately. 
• Less dystopian and more hopeful fiction, or at least fiction that doesn't see the world ending quite so disastrously.

These areas are a ton of fun and I'm very curious to see what will come of them! Particularly the fantasy bent, as that's what my agent is shopping at the moment :)

In addition to this, there was the perennial warning to not write to trends. The logic is clear: usually once a trend stars, it will be over by the time you have a solid draft ready to shop around. Unless you hit the sweet spot where you have a novel ready to go and can ride the wave of a trend (think Divergent coming after Hunger Games). Or, of course, the really lucky few who start the trend--wouldn't that be nice...

So, what do you think? What are the upcoming trends in genre fiction, or just in books in general?