Bookish Lifestyle: "Making a genre switch - from YA to adult" - Guest Post + Giveaway with V.E. Schwab, author of Vicious

Today is one of the most exciting days in my entire blogging *carier*, as I have the fabulous and enormously talented Victoria Schwab stop by to share a wonderful guest post about *making a genre switch - from YA to adult novels*. I'm so honored to be one of the stops on VICIOUS blog tour! I absolutely loved this book - it was my pick for Favorite Bookish Read of September!

I also have the pleasure of hosting an awesome giveaway sponsored by TOR Books, so be sure to scroll all the way down and enter! :) Trust me, you really NEED to read this book!

"Making a genre switch - from YA to adult."

It wasn't really a conscious decision. I just kind of sit down and write and then figure out later what shelf a book might go on. But I will say that as I was writing VICIOUS I thought, huh, this is adult. It didn't stop me, that thought, or cause me to change direction, though I did after first wonder to myself if I should make it YA. But it resisted. It was always meant to be adult. That's just the shape it needs to be.

I want to say, though, that VICIOUS has teenage characters. And characters in their early 20's--and later early 30's--so it's not solely the age of the protagonists that puts it in the adult column.

The inevitable assumption, then, especially from people who don't already know my YA work, is that my adult books must be "too dark" to be YA. Those that *do* know my YA work are probably chuckling, because in truth my YA work is very dark. As dark as my adult work. In some ways darker.

But if it's not the age, or the darkness that makes VICIOUS--in my eyes--adult. It's the kind of humor. VICIOUS is funny in that sick, dark way, a black humor I think we develop more as we exit our teen years than enter them. So that's why VICIOUS was/is adult. I couldn't just change the age of my protagonists. The whole tone of the story was adult.

But it's not as though I've changed course, made a permanent switch away from YA to adult. Looking at my plate, which is quite full right now, I have everything from tween guardian angels to more Archived to very dark adult historical fantasy. I write books. They are starting to take a variety of forms, but they're all me :)

Goodreads |Amazon | Barnes & Noble

VICIOUS by V.E.Schwab

Hardcover, 368 pages
Published September 24th 2013 by Tor

A masterful, twisted tale of ambition, jealousy, betrayal, and superpowers, set in a near-future world.

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?

In Vicious, V. E. Schwab brings to life a gritty comic-book-style world in vivid prose: a world where gaining superpowers doesn’t automatically lead to heroism, and a time when allegiances are called into question.