Due to some recent flowing of creative juices and no satisfying outlet...coupled with my impending employment drought.....I have picked up a book on writing mystery fiction. I've always loved reading mysteries...and I'm not talking true crime (I do enjoy that too) but more like witty sleuths and parlor murders. When I was young I read Nancy Drew books all the time.
So, in my imagined literary success I see myself writing teen mysteries...with a sort of hipper Nancy-ish sleuth character. However, today at dinner (I'm at work) I went to the nearest Wendy's and because it was 4pm and because school is now back in and apparently no one eats at home from September to June, there were about 800 teens in Wendy's.
At first I thought....aw crap this is going to be annoying. Instead it was mostly interesting and frightening. Maybe it was frightening because I just saw Idiocracy yesterday and I'm sure most of these teens are going to end up like the people in 2505. But anyway, I couldn't understand most of what these kids were saying - it was English but it was like they spoke another language that's all hyphenated and melded together. All the females were bossing around and slapping around the males who were trying to pretend it wasn't happening. They were in huge groups and were checking their cell phones every two seconds. Then I started to worry that maybe I can't succeed at writing something for this group of people. I mean, what the hell would they want to read about? Can they read words longer than 5 letters? Can they sit still long enough to read a book longer than 5 sentences? What sort of mystery do they find interesting? Would my book be like this?....."OMG! Someone has totally like hijacked ur wireless service and all ur TM's are going nowhere....I must find out who this is!"
Maybe that's the biggest crisis they can handle. Who knows but I'm not giving up hope that some literate teens exist out there who don't just care about TM's and IM's and the next designer handbag.
