Young Readers @Solsticepublish

Tonight at my youngest daughter’s middle school they were having a Science Fair/Author Expo.  Starting with the science side, I must say I was impressed.  There were no baking soda volcanos like when I was that age.  They had a vast array of experiments.  There were: “Does Color Seen Impact Memory”, “Does Barrel Length Effect Impacts of Guns”, “Do Pills or Capsules Deliver Medicine More Efficiently”, “Which Teeth Whitener Works Best”, “What Beverages Cause the Greatest Tooth Decay” and my favorite, “Which Energy Drink Makes Plants Grow Best”  (the winner far and away was Red Bull, in case you wondered.)  Presentations have come a long way since I colored on Bristol board with pencil crayons.  Photos and graphs abounded while some set up laptops running a film of their experiment in progress.  Science is well and good but I wanted to see the booths about the authors.  Part of the reason was that my daughter was there but I also wanted to see what tomorrow’s leaders were reading.  You can imagine my delight when I saw that close to ¾ of the writers chosen were in some form of Fantasy genre.  My own daughter chose J.K. Rowling.   Others chose writers like J.R.R. Tolkien, Suzanne Collins and Stephenie Meyer.  They were represented by multiple students as well.  As part of the display, the student would dress up as a character from the book.  My daughter was dressed as a Hogwarts student but I was pleased to see a number of characters with fake swords and some form of magic.  Fantasy is alive and well.  I have always contended that Fantasy will always have a place in literature.  People want to escape to another world where their troubles don’t exist.  Fantasy is a great place to just that.  It was nice to see the different subsections of the genre such as Urban, Paranormal and Epic all displayed with pride by their student representatives.  These are tomorrow’s Young Adult and the future Adult readers.  They are setting their foundation in the worlds of make believe.  I have said many times that Fantasy is for the dreamers out there. We can learn something from these students.  Imagination is the first step to invention or “Thinking outside the box” as it were.  By honing their minds now we will have the future inventors of the world.  All their imaginative creations can be traced back to their readings in these formative years.  It makes me proud to be a Fantasy writer.  Dream big, students.  Dream big.