The genre is obvious

I teach music at a middle school in Austin and spending your days with twelve-year-olds gives you a very specific window into what twelve-year-olds actually are, which is not what YA fiction usually thinks they are. They are not innocent. They are not naive about injustice, about social hierarchy, about what adults are doing wrong. They notice everything and they are angry about a lot of it and they are also still learning to read, still discovering that characters can feel like real people, still in the period when a book can change how you see something permanently. I write for that window. My current YA novel is about a thirteen-year-old in Austin who discovers that her school's music programme is being cut to fund something she considers worse, and her response involves things that I, as a music teacher, technically cannot endorse but do privately admire. It's my third attempt at a novel. The first two taught me where my structure goes wrong: the midpoint, always the midpoint. This time I outlined. Outlines are not my native form but they are apparently necessary.