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I love reading YA books; they’re my favorite–and I love writing them, too. (Smiling) So much emotion and tension, strong-girl characters (and strong boys, too) who I root for, no boring bits or long passages of description that stop the story, so often characters overcoming great odds or fighting for what is right or learning something important about themselves and other people, and novels tackling issues that others aren’t talking about. YA books feed my soul–and they helped me survive when I was a teen being abused. So I’m happy ‪#‎IReadYa‬ week is here! (See @thisisteen on Instagram for more info.)

I’ve been on a YA fantasy binge for a while. Some of my most recent favorites are:

Unremembered by Jessica Brody,






The Body Electric by Beth Revis,

Elusion by Claudia Gable & Cheryl Klam,

Everything That Makes You by Moriah McStay,

and The Taking by Kimberly Derting–all of which I highly recommend.

I’m looking forward to reading lesbian YA novels:

The Summer I Wasn’t Me by Jessica Verdi

and If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan. And I love Julie Anne Peters’ novels, and so many other ‪#‎LGBTQ‬ novels.

And I always recommend realistic YA fiction by Ellen Hopkins, Jennifer Brown, April Henry, Laura Wiess, Jo Knowles, Gail Giles, and many more. Discover the fantastic books out there waiting for you!

with the first chapters of SCARS, STAINED, and HUNTED up for you to read. Also some poems.

http://www.wattpad.com/user/CherylRainfield

Silvia Sala / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

When I don’t write
words get stuck in my throat,
tightening my muscles.
They curl up in my lungs
Making it hard to breathe
a slow, painful strangulation
sucking the life out of me.
Silence does that.

I had so many years of terrified silence
So many years of threats
to my life
Saw so many people in pain
and fear
the way I was
with no way to know
that they weren’t alone.

So now when my words
uncoil on the page,
become books that reach others
and I hear back how grateful they are
My throat loosens
My breath eases
My heart feels full,
And healing happens.

© Cheryl Rainfield, April 2014

I’m so thrilled to hear that Writer’s Digest Magazine (in the May/June issue) gave me A+ for social media for teens!(beaming and beaming) What an honor, and such a good feeling!

And Debbie Ohi’s (a fellow Toronto writer, illustrator, and friend) website is in the top 101 websites again (and so well deserved).

Thank you so much to Maureen L McGowan for letting me know!

I get a digital subscription to Writer’s Digest magazine, but I don’t have the May/June issue yet. And I so prefer paper magazines any way; they’re so much easier to read, what with the sidebars and such. I have to go buy myself a print copy! (grinning)

Today Maria E. Andreu, author of YA novel The Secret Side of Empty, talks with us about secrets, shame, and writing our truths. I hope you’ll enjoy this powerful, inspiring post. I did.

Leave a comment on this post to enter to win a copy of The Secret Side of Empty; it sounds like a fascinating book. (US residents only.)

Where the Light Enters

by Maria E. Andreu, author of The Secret Side of Empty

The wound is the place where the light enters you – Rumi

I’ve had many wounds. That’s why I was so excited when I found out Cheryl would allow me to do a guest post here on her blog. I figured anyone who’s written a book called SCARS understands about wounds, light and what comes after. There are many of us, and we form a sisterhood of sorts, crisscrossing ourselves and the world in search of light we can learn to stand.

I grew up illegal. Illegal isn’t the “correct” word for it anymore, but it’s the word that describes how I felt. I snuck across the Mexican border with my mother at the age of eight. That’s the word my parents would use when I’d hear them whispering about it in the other room. “Somos ilegales,” they would say, as a preface to some other things that bound us. “We’re illegal so we can’t buy a house.” “We’re illegal so she can’t go to public school.” It was a stain, an identity. It was what I was. And I was ashamed.

I didn’t do anything to earn this brand, but I didn’t know that at eight years old. I didn’t know it at fifteen either. I didn’t know it until well past thirty, after I’d spent a third of my life hiding, measuring myself against others and coming up short. The thing that branded me was something that had been decided for me way before I had reached the age of consent or even understanding. But still it made me so desperately wrong. It was my darkest secret, one that not even my best friend knew. Then I got my papers through an amnesty when I was eighteen years old. I did everything I could do bury that part of my past.

But the light is wily. It found me one day as I drove my late-model German sedan on my way from one part of my shiny, put-on life to another. It came in the form of a hate-spewing talk radio guy saying that if we let “these immigrants” stay, they will destroy our country. He made me so furious, talking about “the fact” that immigrants bring diseases and live off the government. In that moment I realized that by keeping quiet I was aiding and abetting him in making his case.

So I began to speak. And write. I had spent a lifetime wishing to be a writer but hadn’t been able to connect somehow. Stories had gotten rejected. Agents had passed on my work. It was because I hadn’t been writing as my whole self, I realized. When I wrote my novel, THE SECRET SIDE OF EMPTY, about an undocumented immigrant high school senior, I got the first agent I queried, who sold my book in the first round of submissions with multiple offers. The irony was sweet. My broken places had let the light I had most wanted into my life.

So we are scarred, all of us. And we are still wounded, sometimes, still afraid. But when we speak with voices clear and true, we heal a little, and turn our faces to the light. And we shine.