First Pages Back For The Forthcoming YA Novel ...

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Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

'White Oleander' by Janet Fitch 

I am a collection of oddities, a circus of neurons and electrons: my heart is the ringmaster, my soul is the trapeze artist, and the world is my audience. It sounds strange because it is, and it is, because I am strange.

Mosquitoland by David Arnold 

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of ever being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

'Tell the Wolves I'm Home' by Carol Rifka Brunt

Boy you really missed the boat. I'll make it simple, so's even fuckin you can understand. Papa God growed us up till we could wear long pants; then he licensed his name to dollar bills, left some car keys on the table, and got the fuck outta town". Water rushes to his eye-holes. "Don’t be lookin up at no sky for help. Look down here, at us twisted dreamers". He takes hold of my shoulders, spins me around, and punches me towards the mirror on the wall. "You're the God. Take responsibility. Exercise your power

'Vernon God Little' by DBC Pierre

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.

'Autobiography of a face' by Lucy Grealy