author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

1. No sex, at least none onstage.

I'm remembering two YA novels that had sex scenes in 'em, one by Margaret Mahy and one by Madeleine L'engle. Both of them occurred off-stage, "between the dots" sort of thing. You didn't actually get to see the main character enjoying it, and in both the narrative picked up with a lot of "what have we just done?" worry/angst/contemplation. Well, contemplation at least.

For some reason rape is an exception to the unwritten "no sex in YA novels" rule - I guess that's because rape is actually an act of violence, not of sex. Violence always seems to be more accepted for younger readers then sex is. (I say "accepted for," not "acceptable to," because younger readers will read anything you throw at them that doesn't make them feel too uncomfortable. It's when adults choose reading material for younger readers that these filters come into play.) I think it really comes down to our weirdly neurotic American puritanical heritage: you're never too young to suffer, say the Godly ones, but you must not under any circumstances be allowed to enjoy yourself until you're of statutory age of consent, married, and planning to stuff yourself with babies.

2. Adults mustn't see the supernatural thingie.

Adults to date that have seen the unicorn: Random couple in a Fort Collins King Soopers parking lot; drunken frat boy wandering about downtown Boulder; homeless woman who in fact turns out to have a bit of history with the beastie; a secondary character's parent (in today's writing of the second denouement scene); three policemen; and Diane's now very much ex-boyfriend Mitch. And his gang buddies.

Oops.

3. The magic stuff has to go away by the end of the novel.

Well, and it does. Sort of. Unless you want a series of superhero or Harry Potteresque novels, you can't have your main character holding on to her magic talent past the point at which it fulfills its purpose as a coming-of-age gimmick. But here's the trick: The unicorn's still out there. And in Diane's case, coming of age doesn't mean leaving childish things behind, but instead rediscovering them.

I always hated how the wing-juice ran out and the ponies all left forever and the Egypt game lost its appeal (Zylpha Keatley Snyder) and the girls stopped believing that they were witches (E. L. Konigsberg, Edmund Wallace Hildick). But I think in this story I've come up with a compromise between magic lasting forever without giving the girl superpowers forever, in a way that at least meets my standards for story necessity.

So are there any rules I missed?