Teen Mom: A Journal
With total concentration, I can complete a book and have it for sale on Amazon.com in about three months. That includes page layout, cover design, multiple edits, and all the other elements (ISBN, PCN, copyright, etc) that are a part of book publishing, regardless of whether a major publishing house publishes the book or I self-publish it. This book took considerably longer.
Teen Mom: A Journal is a print version of the TV reality shows that are popular right now. Sixteen-year-old “Katie” was half way through her junior year of high school when she became pregnant. Throughout her pregnancy and for several months afterward she kept a journal. This is her story as told in that journal. This is not a work of fiction, the journal entries are real life, and they reflect what’s happening in countless families across the country every day.
Who is my target reader? I think that parents of teens could benefit from reading this book. And I think teen girls could benefit from reading about the day-to-day struggles of one of their peers. So could teen boys. All it takes is one careless moment to turn a casual relationship into something quite serious and long term.
Katie is not one teenager dealing with unplanned pregnancy, she is one of many. She may be the girl living next door or the girl in the next block. She may be your daughter. She may be you or your girlfriend.
Teens are more openly sexually active than in past generations and unplanned pregnancy is not the social stigma of years ago. The pregnancy of pop idol Britney Spears’ 16-year-old sister, actress Jamie Lynn Spears, was good fodder for the media, but it didn’t cause her to lose a starring role in Zoey 101, a television show drawing a large viewership aged 9-14. When vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant, it gave teen pregnancy even more of a stamp of “normalcy.”
Teen mom Katie is one of more than half a million teen girls facing unplanned pregnancies each year according to data from The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.