Providence

Is it okay for me to be annoyed with other writers?
Okay, I know it is. I feel like an ass thinking this way, but when I read a book, and I like it, I hate it when it slowly gets worse and worse until you know that they seriously pieced the thing together just to make it end the way they wanted.  I know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I'll try to explain it a bit better.
I just finished reading Providence by Jamie McGuire.  I knew what to expect, and I saw the whole story line pretty much ten pages in, but I read because I like to be entertained, and because I live vicariously through other people's romance.  Disappointed isn't the right word, because it was what I expected it would be after I had started reading it.  I think I was hoping it would be better than it was.  The writing feels really juvenile, which works just fine when you're writing for juveniles.  The thing is...okay, children's authors often have to write in a very specific way to reach their audience.  They adapt and manipulate their language and story to appeal to a younger audience.  What I've discovered about a lot of YA authors is that they write YA books because they still think and feel the way they did when they were fourteen.  Writing their stories doesn't require adaptation, because this is how they write.  The immaturity of the writing just seeps through the surface of the story and all through the consciousness of the characters.  Annoyance is probably a better word for how I feel than disappointment.  Annoyance because I can tell that these writers could write better if they just spent more time on developing the story and less time on pounding out emotions and feelings.  What's more is that their male characters are almost always horribly unrealistically emotional and needy.  Men are not emotionally collapsing or emotionally distant.  There are all these other places they exist in between.  YA authors are almost always women, and they almost always depict men the way they wish they were.  No one's doing any teenage girl a favor if they do that.
Now, don't get me wrong, if one of these authors came upon this blog post and felt indignant, saying to themselves, "Let's see her do better", I'm not sure that I could.  I just know that I'm trying to do better than that.  If I wrote that way, I wouldn't let myself settle for that kind of book.  I would rip it to shreds, change it and hone my skills until it was the best that it could be.  Maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist.  When it's your career, wouldn't you want it to be the best that it could be?  Trying to make it less seems lazy to me.  Sorry, Jamie, your writing makes me feel like you're being really lazy.  That expression really hits the nail on the head.
(about 20 minutes later)
My sister just got back to me about my first 4 chapters of my new book, and I find that asking for her criticism was actually really, really helpful.  I used to hate asking her for her opinion, because I couldn't explain why I was writing things the way I was, but email works well.  Plus, I guess I had to learn that if I ever want my writing to be worth anything, I'm going to need her help.  She did it for my dad, and he got published...
The world feels strange tonight.  I felt it when I woke up from my nap earlier, and I think some of that is because I was reading that stupid book, but I feel like it's early morning, not the middle of the night.  I'm also having a hard time grasping reality.  I'm sure that expression is way overused, because this inability to distinguish reality from dreams feels so completely different than that weird niggling sensation of deja vu because I dreamt something and then it happened.  This is just straight up "I don't know where I am or what time it is" for a long, long time.  Or forgetting that I'm me and not someone else.  I know, I sound like I'm on drugs.  But that's probably the biggest problem.  Whenever I've felt this way before, I would just drink until I didn't feel so off anymore.  I can't do that now, so the world won't right itself.  Weird, right?