Writing for Young Adults

DFTBA

I'm going to try something a little different this week.  Sometimes I get an idea for a scene for a story, or create an exercise for myself trying to imagine a scene or situation and how characters might react. These little vignettes sometimes end up as a block in the patchwork of a story, or even the basis of a new story.

For this one:  I've been following John Green through the website Mental_Floss for a long while.  He's very entertaining, both as a writer and a vloger.  He produces a weekly List Show for Mental_Floss on YouTube, has a vlog with his brother Hank called The VlogBrothers, and even has his own fanbase who call themselves the Nerdfighters with their own website, Nerfighteria.  John has been a longtime best selling YA author with several books.  One of his most popular, The Fault In Our Stars was made into a movie due to be released June 6, 2014.  Needless to say, I admire the man for all his talents and contributions.

Having just finished The Fault In Our Stars and reading some interviews with John concerning writing for young adults, I began to wonder how hard it would be to gear your writing to a YA audience.  This lead to the following vignette...

---

The first thing I noticed, besides the crashing pain in my head, was the silence.

It was like when you’re under water: the total absence of sound wraps around your head like a thick towel and your ears are filled with cotton. 

Your primal frog-brain – the only part of my brain that seemed to be functioning at the moment – doesn't like this.  Absence of sound is not an absence of danger. It is an absence of the perception of danger.  Some saber-toothed tiger or a million other real or imagined threats may be about to leap on you.

So my frog-brain stretches to hear the tiniest hint of danger and I began to notice all the internal background sounds that my ear normally filters out because they are there all the time; the rasping of air through my nostrils, the squishy thumpa, thumpa, thumpa of my heart as the blood squirts past my ears on its way to my brain, or the liquid gurgling of my stomach as it digests my breakfast.

As more rational parts of my brain came online, I realized the absence of sounds I should be hearing and didn't, like the soft sighing of the air circulators with the subtle current of air flowing through the gangways of the ship, brushing past my cheek and subliminally reassuring me there was air to breathe. Also missing was the tick, tick, click of mechanical relays and the Gregorian hum of the photonic nervous system of our ship, barely above the threshold of perception like another presence in the room with you – a sense of another life besides your own.

As the fuzziness in my head seeped away, I realized that my eyes were open, but there was only blackness.  I felt the familiar cocooning pressure of my environmental suit and lack of upness – no gravity.  The logical parts of my brain finally kicked in and rationalized that I was in my E-suit, but it wasn't turned on.  Fortunately the air scrubbers were osmotic so I wasn't in any danger of running out of air for at least forty minutes, but the scrubbers would only extend the air trapped in my suit. I could already taste the tinny staleness that said some time had passed and if I wanted to keep breathing, the suit needed an injection of fresh oxygen.

My hands went automatically to the E-suit’s controls on my chest and clicked through the start-up sequence.  Ordinarily your suit-up partner did this for you and you for him, but in an emergency (and this would appear to be an emergency) you can do this yourself.  Universal Spirit bless the engineer who was thinking ahead.  I felt the suit’s systems kick on one by one and the HUD came to life with status reports and self-checks.  I noted that the suit’s two hour emergency reserve pack was fully charged, as it should have been, but that the standard sixteen hour pack only had a little over four hours left.

I always recharge my suit as soon as I take it off.  How could this be?  No one touches another man’s suit.  Everyone has their own E-suit, and everyone is responsible for their own maintenance.  Even the kids learn how to check your pack and how to replace it before you stow your suit; it’s part of the suit drill that starts when you’re old enough to walk.  Even when the Safety Officer scans the suits, she doesn't touch them when she finds a problem, she’ll roust you out of bed to take care of it, but it’s your responsibility.

Even while my addled brain is still mulling over this enigma, I head-bump the control to depolarize my viewplate.  It takes more than a few seconds for me to understand what I’m looking at.  When my much abused brain finally makes all the connections, I can feel my guts turn to water.

I am floating in space, a few hundred meters from the ship. Or what is left of the ship.  Her once streamlined beauty has been crumpled as if by a huge hand.  The forward parts are bent over her spine and almost touching the rear engine housing; her back has been broken, her head touching her feet, and her guts spilling out around her.  Debris floats around her like a cloud, expanding away from gaping wounds in her hull.

My first thought is, “Where is everyone?”  There are twenty three of us on that ship.  My whole family: my mother, my sisters, my brother and Uncle Bill.  Two other families.  Three couples.  Where are they?  My eye frantically scans the debris field, looking for human shapes, hopefully in E-suits. Nothing.

“Hello? Hello?” I called out to the suit’s communicator.  “Can anyone hear me?”  Silence.  “Comm switch local,” I commanded the comm to switch to another frequency.  “Hello?  Can anyone hear me?”  Still no response.  I look at the HUD to see if there are any warning lights and notice an amber on the comm unit.  I order a self-check.  The suit reports an unknown problem, but the short story is that I don’t know if anyone can hear me or not.

Familiar, everyday pieces of life flow around me, out of context and slowing turning.  A tablet, its screen still glowing with information is just out of reach.  I can see Robbie’s yellow stylus, the one he guards with threat of extinction if anyone touches it. A doll, usually being dragged around by one of the kids.  A flurry of printouts.  Bits and parts and pieces that we use every day.  We are all on the same trajectory, from a starting point in our proper places somewhere in the ship, then away in all directions. 

My aching head tries to make sense of what I’m seeing.  My memory is still fuzzy.  I only have a vague shadow of a feeling of urgency, memories of rushing into my E-suit overlay along with the dozens of other times I've suited up. 

A slight tug at my E-suit turns me away from the ship toward the direction I am moving.  A long tool cable drifts into view,  one end snap-clipped to my suit. At the other end is another E-suit.  At first the other suit seems impossibly far away,  and then I realize that the suit is smaller. A child’s E-suit.  The child inside the suit has their hand around the cable, tugging awkwardly to pull us together.  I reach out,  grasp the cable and give it a practiced jerk, just enough to start our two masses moving slowly toward each other.  In a few seconds, our suits bump together and I clamp down on the suit’s carry handle and pull the viewplate into mine.

My brother Justin is there, his green eyes round with fear, but looking at me through the viewplate of his E-suit, his face lit by the glow of the suit’s HUD. The trust on his 8 year old face is that his big brother – any other time his sworn enemy and bane of his existence – will take care of him and keep him safe.  I feel a huge surge of relief and prickling behind my eyes.  I press the viewplates together, hoping that it is enough to allow my voice to carry into his suit.

“Are you OK?” I shout. 

At first he only looks at me, then nods. “Andy!  What happened?  Where’s Mom?”

“I don’t know yet.”  I’m not sure if he’s noticed the ship.  He seems to be stunned and scared.  “Just hang on, buddy.  We’re going to be all right.”  I immediately knew it was a lie.  But you can’t tell an 8 year old, “We’re fucked, buddy.  Suck it up and die like a man.”  I wasn't sure I could.  I’m only seventeen.  I feel more like an 8 year old about to piss himself than a man.

But looking at Justin watching me, waiting for me to pull some miracle out of my ass and save us both, I knew I had to hold myself together.  Like Justin, I wanted my Mommy, but for more practical purposes.  Mom’s a crack engineer and the brains in the family.  If anyone could get us out of this predicament, she could.  But Mommy wasn't here, and her little boys would just have to fend for themselves.

So, what would Mom do?  First step, don’t panic.  Check – but just barely.  Next step, secure yourself before you try to help anyone else.  This may sound cowardly and selfish, but if you don’t take steps to secure your own life, you won’t be much use to anyone else if you’re dead.  It just makes sense.  I had air, for the moment, and wasn't in any immediate danger, although that could change if I didn’t find shelter soon.  Last I heard, space didn't have many calories and was a little thin on oxygen.  That’s why they called it “space”.

If we were going to survive, we had to get back to the ship.  Or what was left of the ship. Any air, water, food or shelter were on that ship.  We might be find a communicator to send out a Mayday, then seal off a compartment, salvage air and water, then hunker down and wait for some Good Samaritan to come by and pick us up.

So now I had a plan.  That made me feel a little better, but we still had to get back to the ship.  And currently we were moving away from it.  There was no place to drag our feet and slow us down, much less turn us around in the opposite vector.  E-suits were excellent for working in almost any environment hostile to human life, but you were usually delivered there by some other means; a ship, a work platform, or a good old drift out the door on a cable.  They didn't come with their own built-in propulsion.

Or did they?  All I needed was some kind of reaction.  Our momentum wasn't that fast; probably less than a meter every few seconds.  Otherwise, I could have seen the ship shrinking in the distance, but it really didn't look any farther than when I first noticed.  This is good.  We would have had to counter that momentum before we started back the other way.

I started to mentally inventory everything on my E-suit, weighing its value as a potential form of propulsion.  In the end, I could only come up with two things:  a retrieval gun and oxygen tanks.

I dismissed the oxygen.  I might be able to rig some type of “jet” that would push us back in the other direction, but I had no idea how long it would take to get us back to the ship, and I was already handicapped in that department.  Even if I was dead certain it would work, I didn't know if we would be able to find a fresh supply right away before either of us ran out.  That was one resource that I had to conserve at all costs, and it was too precious to just release into space.

So that left the retrieval gun.  The purpose of the retrieval gun was to retrieve tools that had drifted away.  It was basically a hollow handle with a shaft inside.  At the end of the shaft was a very powerful electromagnet.  The shaft and the handle were connected by several hundred meters of monofilament cable.  Any tools that were used outside the ship contained a bit of ferrous metal embedded in it somewhere so that if it drifted away, you could point the gun toward it, adjust the distance and shoot the shaft by magnetic induction toward the tool.  You didn't want it to shoot too hard, otherwise it would just hit the tool and go bouncing off into space.  But as the shaft got close to the tool, you could trigger the electromagnet and the powerful magnetic field would attract the tool.  Once the magnet attached to the tool, you would just reel it in. Some people were pretty good shots and could grab a tool several meters away with one shot.  Most of us were average, and it might take two or three tries to get the magnet close enough to connect.

How was this going to help me?  Between me and the ship were several larger pieces of debris.  If I could manage to connect to one of these, I could use the gun to reel myself toward the ship.  Once I got enough momentum going in the right direction, all I had to do is wait for us to get near enough, then latch on to the ship and pull ourselves in.

I turned back to Justin and pushed our helmets together.  “I have an idea, but I need you to hang on to me and don’t let go.  Do you understand?”  He nodded.  “Pull yourself around me and grab on to my backpack.”  I wasn't too worried about him maneuvering around me, since we were tethered together.  Moving around me set up a bit of spin, but once he settled in place, I just waited for the ship to come back around in my view.

Directly between us and the ship was a fairly large section of hull, maybe two meters across.  A nice, big target, and not too far away.  I aimed carefully, then pressed the trigger.  The magnet shot from my hand with little recoil, moving toward the debris and uncoiling the barely visible filament behind it.  Luck was with me; the magnet was headed dead center of the hull, and the hull’s rotation would have it almost flat toward us about the time the magnet reached it.  I triggered the magnet and saw it leap forward and attach itself to the hull.

My mind tried to juggle all the forces involved:  Our mass, the mass of the hull piece, the attractive force of the magnet, the acceleration as the gun slowly took up the slack on the monofilament and started reeling our two masses together. I was counting on the mass of the hull to be considerably more than mine and Justin’s; this would cause us to move toward the hull, rather than just pull our two masses together.  And I had to take care that the acceleration of the filament reeling in didn't break the hold of the magnet on the hull.  It wouldn't be a disaster – I would just have to shoot it again – but I kept hoping that my so-far phenomenal luck would hold.

I could feel the vibration of the gun through my glove gradually gearing up as we moved toward the hull.  It suddenly dawned on me that we were going to connect with the hull, dead center, and lose all the momentum we had built up, or worse, rebound off in another direction.  I released the magnet from the hull and the now loadless magnet hurried back to us.  We were still drifting toward the ship, still some minutes away from intercepting the hull directly in our path.

There was no way to dart around it.  I couldn't even risk a glancing blow that might change our vector in some unknown direction.  My aching head tried to picture all the angles and movements involved.  In desperation, I saw only one slim chance.

As the hull approached, I swung my feet up, intending to hit not the dead center, but the upper edge of the hull.  As my feet connected, I switched on the magnets in the soles of my suit, intended for keeping you anchored to the hull when working outside the ship.  I felt the soles connect and I braced my legs, not allowing them to bend and kill the momentum we had built up, but transfer it to the section of hull.  In response, the hull slowly started a new rotation.  With painful slowness, the flat side of the hull turned until it was facing the ship, and rotated past.

I had thought about leaping toward the ship at that point, but wanted to wait and make sure where I was going.  Since we were now attached to the hull section, we were still moving away from the ship, but at least we weren't headed off into some unknown direction.  After a couple of rotations, I carefully moved to what I thought would be the center of the hull section’s mass, crouched as low as I could in the E-suit.  I allowed a couple of more rotations to make sure of my vectors, then at the exact moment when everything seemed to line up, I jumped, releasing my soles from the hull as I pushed off as hard as I could.

My center of gravity was not perfect.  As far as I could tell, we were moving in the right direction, but Justin’s weight on my back had thrown my center of balance off, so we were more tumbling toward the ship than gracefully gliding.  That would be fine.  Judging by the debris we passed, we were on course.  It might take an hour or more to get there, but unless something blocked our way, we only had to wait.