First off, thanks so much for joining us for an up-close and personal interview for TeensReadToo.com! My name is Jen, and I’ll be your server toda…oh, wait, wrong job! Anyway, thanks so much for taking time out of your writing schedule—which I’m sure is busy!—and answering a few questions for your readers and fans.
My pleasure. (Seriously: It’s embarrassing how much I enjoy talking about myself…)
Let’s get some of the typical interview questions out of the way first. When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?
Apparently I’m very impressionable, because I think I decided I wanted to be a writer after a variety of elementary school teachers all told me that I should want to be a writer. I don’t remember a decisive moment, but I know that in third grade, the idea of being a writer hadn’t really occurred to me—and by the end of fourth grade, I was obsessed.
Can you tell us a little bit about your road to publishing?
I published (well, okay, “published”) my first book in fifth grade – it was named Kenny, was a total ET rip-off, and was a winner of the “Write and Illustrate Your Own Book” contest, which meant it got bound and put into circulation at the local library. Then there was a looooong gap, while I grew up and went to college. After graduating, I went to work in children’s publishing, where I learned a massive amount . . . and basically spent every minute of every day bitter that I was editing other people’s books rather than writing one of my own. So eventually I decided to trade in the former for the latter (with a brief, bizarre detour to grad school), and was lucky enough that it worked out.
Tell us a little bit about either your latest or upcoming release. If you could only tell your readers one thing about the story that had to convince us to buy the book, what would it be?
Skinned comes out in September, and I’m freakishly, wildly, sugar-crazedly excited about it. It’s the first in a trilogy about a girl whose brain and personality are downloaded into a mechanical body. Think Uglies meets The Terminator.
It should be a miracle: She’ll never age, she’ll never get sick, she’ll never die. But all she wants is her old life back, and that’s the one thing she can’t have. No one can accept the fact that she’s the same person she used to be – or even a person at all. Eventually she begins to wonder if they’re right. It’s a story about what makes us who we are, and what makes us human.
As for persuading you to buy it, hopefully I already had you at “Uglies meets The Terminator,” but if not . . . I’m guessing Skinned is the only book this year to feature religious zealots, cliff-diving, cybernetic acid trips, Cartesian philosophy, secret societies, and a love triangle where only one of the players has a beating heart.
What, or who, has been the greatest inspiration for your stories?
The books I loved when I was growing up – A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game, It, Ender’s Game, House of Stairs, etc etc etc. These books shaped the person I became, they changed the way I understood the world and myself, they helped me survive – I dream of writing a book with the power to do that for someone else.
Let’s hear about your family, who I’m sure are thrilled to have a published author among them!
Books are a big deal in my family, even though we tend not to actually own very many. (My father is a big believer in the library system – as in, “Only a sucker would buy something that the library will give you for free!” Thanks to him, now that I’m an adult and can decide for myself what I want to buy, I still find myself reluctant to buy anything but the books that I know I’m going to keep and love forever.) And I’ll always be grateful to my aunt and uncle for introducing me to science fiction (and sharing their ample collection of Heinlein paperbacks). Skinned would never have happened without them.
Now for some fun facts. What’s your greatest comfort food?
Macaroni and cheese. Or maybe nachos. Basically, anything drenched in a lot of cheese.
Mmmm, cheese.
What are the first three things you do when you wake up in the morning?
1. Check my email. (I’m addicted.)
2. Go to the gym. (Which means I’ve officially turned into the person I always used to hate.)
3. After checking my email again . . . eat a bowl of Cheerios. (I’m addicted to those, too.)
Sorry, could that list be any more boring? But who has the energy to be interesting first thing in the morning?
If I came to your house and looked in your closet/attic/basement, what’s the one thing that would surprise me the most?
My shiny new electric guitar. (Though I suppose that would only surprise you if you knew me, because then you’d know I’m the world’s least likeliest electric guitar owner.) I won it in a raffle. I’ll learn how to play it . . . someday.
Everyone asks the question about “if you could be a tree, which tree would you be?” so I want to know: If you could be a color, which color would it be, and why?
I’m tempted to say lime green, because somehow almost everything I buy ends up being this color. But that’s probably a little – okay, a lot -- too perky and cheerful to represent my personality. I suppose I’d be the color of the ocean after a storm. Bottomless, churning slate grey, until the sun comes out and makes it sparkle.
Who is your favorite cartoon character?
Daria (from the old MTV show)
Which cartoon character is most like you?
Lisa Simpson (with a dash of Daffy Duck)
If you could beam yourself to anywhere in the world (“Beam me up, Scotty!”), during any time in history, where and when would it be—and why?
Personally, I’d prefer to go to the future. But if I’m stuck with the past, I’d pick late nineteenth century Vienna, which was a seething mass of artists, scientists, writers, philosophers, musicians – all consumed by a passion for their work and pushing the boundaries of their discipline past anything seen before. Along with the
So what’s your favorite type of music to listen to? Favorite musical artists? Do you listen to music while you’re writing?
I tend to be pretty clueless about music, although I am a crazed Broadway fan. (Favorites: Rent, Godspell, anything by Sondheim.) For every other kind of music, I have to depend on friends with superior taste who are willing to make me the occasional mix CD. Thanks to them, I’m now a huge fan of the Decemberists, Mike Doughty, and the New Pornographers. But unfortunately, I can’t deal with listening to anything when I write.
Do you have any favorite T.V. shows? Movies you watch over and over again? What was the last movie you saw at the theater?
The last movie I saw (and loved, thanks to the excellent performance by my imaginary husband, Robert Downey, Jr) was
On the guilty-pleasure side of the spectrum, I’m also a bit obsessed with Gossip Girl (thanks to the magic of Chuck Bass) and The Paper, MTV’s ridiculously entertaining reality TV show about the staff of a high school newspaper.
You have the chance to give one piece of advice to your teen readers. What would it be?
However much high school may suck, never forget that it’s only temporary.
One last question. What stories can we look forward to from you in the future?
Right now I’m working on the sequel to Skinned, tentatively titled Crashed. I’ve really enjoyed getting to play around with a futuristic, dystopic universe, so I suspect I’ll be writing a lot more of this kind of thing. And I’m still working, slowly but surely (but verrrrrrrrry sloooooooowly) on my Top Secret Dream Project. Which, as you perhaps guessed from the title, is still top secret.
Again, thanks so much for joining us at TeensReadToo.com!
Thanks for having me!
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