It’s a brand new school year…and a brand new year for Teen ‘Zine!

We look forward to another year filled with poetry; drawings; photos; reviews of books, tv, and movies; and whatever else your creative brains can create.

How can you get your work on Teen ‘Zine? There are three easy ways.

(1) You can respond to our Creativity Challenges. Each Challenge contains instructions for what to do and how to get it to us.

(2) You can also send your original creative work (writing, images, music, videos, etc.) to teenzine@hclibrary.org.

(3) If you crave creative company, attend a creative Library class like Duct Tape Design or Punk Rocks. Your instructor may snap some pics of your finished products.

We’ll choose the best of the best and share them right here.

Now get out there and create!

posted by Administrator

We know that everyone has a different life story. Some might be full of adventure, others filled with happiness; still others might be a story of sadness and tears. Whatever you story might be, we want to hear it…but not in the traditional sense. No, you don’t have to write a paper or do any genealogy research. We want to hear it, literally! All you have to do is create a Grooveshark playlist that you feel sums you up in music and lyrics, submit the link for your playlist to teenzine@hclibrary.org during the month of February, and we will post your playlist on the Howard County Library Teen ‘Zine page. Happy music hunting!

Guacamole
Individual recipe

1 ripe avocado
1/8 teaspoon chili powder
3 shakes hot sauce
2 pinches of cumin
2 pinches of salt
1/4 of a small red onion chopped
1/4 of tomato diced (no seeds)
Juice of one lime

Cut avocado in half and scoop out center.

Mash avocado with the back of a fork.

Place onion in a food processor, chop, add to avocado.

Cut tomato in half and scoop out seeds. Chop. Add to avocado.

Cut lime in half and squeeze juice into avocado.

Add cumin, salt, chili powder, and hot sauce.

Taste it and adjust seasoning, if necessary.

Eat with tortilla chips.

–by Falon D.

Sky High Sky Blue

Come outside and smell the fresh air
The sky up high when it cries out tears
We sometimes wonder why it ‘s so blue
When we know the answer inside me and you
It’s Mother Nature caring for it and giving it food
Sky high sky blue we will remember to appreciate
So we give you a scale from 1-10 and you’ll reach the highest rate
Sky high sky blue wen we see rain we will always think of you

–by Andrea O.

It’s September and everyone wants to know…what did you do over the summer? Well, don’t just tell us, show us!

What to do:

Create a 30-second Animoto video featuring highlights from your summer.

How to do it:

How to get it to us:

We’ll choose our favorites and post them to Teen ‘Zine.

Want to see a sample project? Here’s what we did, this summer. We spent it with you!

We can’t wait to see what you did, this summer!

posted by Administrator

For those of you who have been impatiently awaiting the next instalment of Ask Jack, here it is! In this episode Jack answers the burning question, “How often do Jupiter and Mars align?” (Due to some technical difficulties, the audio and video are out of sync…but stick with it, Jack always has the answers!)

posted by Administrator

Believe it or not, Stephenie Meyer was not the first author to write a young adult vampire novel. Shocked? Whether you’re waiting for “Midnight Sun” or just wishing the whole craze would be over already, here are some books for you.

For Twilight Lovers: The Interspecies Romances

Just itching for another fix of forbidden love? Whether the romance is a vampire, a werewolf, or just a plain ol’ human, these books will surely appeal to you.

“The Silver Kiss” by Annette Curtis Klause
I cannot count how many times I’ve heard that this book ‘rips off’ “Twilight,” and that’s why it merited number one on this list. Like “Twilight,” “The Silver Kiss” deals with a human-vampire romance, but one with a bit more substance– she’s a lost, lonely human girl, grieving over her dying mother, while he’s a mysterious, alluring vampire, able to understand what she’s going to due to his desire to avenge his own mother’s death. While “The Silver Kiss” is by no means Klause’s best book, if you’re looking for another tale of forbidden love and moody undead boyfriends, this is the novel for you.

“A Great and Terrible Beauty” by Libba Bray

The Unconventional Vampire Novels

If this list is making you feel like vampires are the most overused staple in all of literature, here are some authors who agree with you. Enjoy their more original takes on the vampire myths!

“Blue Bloods” by Melissa de la Cruz

“Thicker Than Water” by Carla Jablonski

“Peeps” by Scott Westerfeld

“Sweetblood” by Pete Hautman

Hate “Twilight” because you can’t take sparkling hundred year old men seriously? Well, these books all hope that you don’t take them seriously.

“The Reformed Vampire Support Group” by Catherine Jenks

“Suck it Up” by Brian Meehl

“Bloodsucking Fiends: a Love Story” by Christopher Moore

“Interview with a Vampire” by Anne Rice

“Blood and Chocolate” by Annette Curtis Clause

“Thirsty” by MT Anderson

Posted by Bethany Davis

Bee never thought that she was normal, but this becomes even more clear when a mysterious girl who looks exactly like her appears, demanding her body back. Bee soon finds out that she’s a changeling, and changelings are never treated kindly, to say the least. Can her friends– a half-alien and a reincarnated slave girl– save her before it’s too late?

Francesca Lia Block’s novels are always a breath of fresh air, mixing mythology and modernity and poetry and prose so seamlessly and beautifully that one can’t help but savor them. The Waters and the Wild is no different from the others– achingly gorgeous and always just mysterious enough to keep readers guessing where imagination stops and reality begins. There really isn’t much that one can say about such a short novel, but this, one of Block’s newer novels, is more “PG” than, say, Echo or the Weetzie Bat books, and thus an excellent introduction to the wonder that is one of Young Adult literature’s most revolutionary authors.

Posted by Bethany Davis

Nina may look like any other fifteen year old novelist– okay, maybe a little skinnier and just a tad paler– but she has a secret, one that would be devastating if it got out. That secret? She’s not really fifteen. Well, technically she is, but she’s been that way since 1973.

That’s right, Nina’s a vampire, just like Zadia Bloodstone, the fictional heroine about whom Nina’s novels are written. Actually, not just like– because vampires, despite their reputation, have no super powers, are not gorgeous, and, well…they feed on guinea pigs if they want to survive long, because they can be killed with stakes, and no one wants that, do they

On second thought, maybe someone does. When Nina and her friends find one of their companions staked in his coffin one evening, they realize that there’s a vampire hunter on the loose, one who clearly does not know the true nature of vampires. If they want to survive, the vampires will have to leave their cozy basement lives and begin a hunt of their own.

It’s always refreshing to read a book with characters that are original for the sake of being original. Sure, the idea of vampire life being less than pleasant has been done a thousand times before– really, vampires in general have been done to death, if you’ll pardon the pun– but Catherine Jenks acknowledges this and skips over it entirely in her funny, fresh take on the cliches. The Reformed Vampire Support Group is a satire of sorts, but also an adventure novel that will keep you hooked in your seat from beginning to end, if you don’t fall out of your chair laughing halfway through.

posted by Bethany Davis

posted by Black-eyed Susan