I am working on a YA novel. At least I think it’s a YA novel. It may end up being an NA novel. They keep changing the rules.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a fair amount of YA and science fiction because that’s the genre I’m tackling this time. It’s not easy. You have to do this whole world creating thing. It’s not like describing something I’ve seen in real life. I have the utmost respect to authors who pull this off. My faves recently are the Wool series and The Martian. The latter is, of course, based on science but he still manages to imagine up a doomed, blank world.  Wool is wild and crazy and wow, not something I ever could have come up with.

So Mashable is having this brackets thing where you pick the best YA series. They left out Harry Potter because it would kick butt. I haven’t read a lot of the books on the list. (I can see the demo in the distance in my rearview mirror.) But to me, The Hunger Games is really head and shoulders above the rest.

Why? Well I felt it was always supposed to be a trilogy. (I’m not talked about the studio decision to split the last book into two parts which was strictly profit motivated.) Other series, like Divergent, felt like the first book did well so, we’ll keep going. You can tell. A good writer with a long term plan will put little easter eggy nuggets along the way that hatch later in the series. If you don’t know there will/might be a series, you can’t lay the proper foundation.

Anyway, here’s the link to the contest:. Vote early and often.