Yesterday, I got a new friend request on Facebook with a note: Haha… I remember you from when I was like 10 years old! He’s the nephew of a friend of mine that I spent a lot of time with in high school and early college.
Said 10-year-old is now 25.
But that’s not the worst of it.
As you know, I’ve been working on my second book this week. The main character is a 16-year-old girl named Delilah. In one scene, she finds letters that her grandfather wrote to her grandmother while he was overseas in the war. Now, I can’t speak for all of you readers out there, but when I think of “grandfather” + “war,” I think of WWII, or maybe the Korean War, like my grandfathers served in.
But then… I did the math. Math in the morning is never a good idea, but since I hadn’t yet had my coffee, the common sense gene lie dormant at the time.
- This book will be published in 2010.
- Subtract the age of 15 to get the average reader’s year of birth: 1995
- Let’s say her parents are kind of young – 25 when my reader was born.
- That means her parents were born in 1970.
- Assume her grandparents were also mid-20s when they had her mother.
- That means her grandparents were born in the 1940s.
- So, unless grandpa was born on the beach at Normandy, there’s no way he was in WWII.
- He was in… Vietnam.
My target audience has grandparents that served in Vietnam.
I need a Manhattan and some Ben-Gay. Writing is stressful.
Sarah Ockler 
Ain’t time a bitch?! It just keeps on going and going…
We started doing some of that funky math at my workplace the other day. I work in a marketing firm with LOTS of 20-somethings. The other day we figured out that the year I graduated from high school some of them were babies or had just been born. They, on the other hand, graduated from high school in the 21st century.
Whaaa?? When did I get this old?!
Easy there. I was born in ’71 and I’m too young to have a teen child!! I didn’t know you were writing Gen X horror novels!