Dead To You Blog Tour: Q&A With Lisa McMann

Hi everyone!

I'm really excited to have been asked Simon and Schuster Canada to be a part of the Dead To You blog tour! I really enjoyed reading this book (I'll have my review up tomorrow), so I was happy to be able to ask Lisa McMann a few questions as part of the tour!

1. When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?
When I was in grade four. I wrote a story for an assignment at school and it won me the opportunity to go spend the day with professional writers. As a mediocre student, knowing I wrote the best story in the whole class made me feel amazing. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

2. Dead to You is about a teenaged boy who was kidnapped as a child and has finally returned home, what was the inspiration behind this story?
The inspiration came from a story in The New Yorker, though I took the idea in a different direction. I think the story title was The Chameleon – don’t Google it if you haven’t read DEAD TO YOU yet, because it will spoil the ending.

3. This novel is told from Ethan's perspective, do you prefer to write from a male or female point of view?
I really love writing from a boy’s perspective, but I also love writing from a girl’s perspective – I think the character’s personality and inner thoughts is what makes them interesting, regardless of gender.

4. What type of atmosphere do you like to write in? Do you have a favourite spot you like to be in or music that you like to listen to?
I usually write in my library at home (which is basically what most people would call a formal living room, but we converted it into a library so we’d actually use the space). I also have an office with a door I can close, but I feel so cut off from the family when I do that. I think that’s because I wrote my first four books (WAKE/FADE/GONE/CRYER’S CROSS) in a tiny house, in a green chair in the living room, in the middle of all the family noise, because there was nowhere else. I don’t listen to music while I write because it’s too distracting for me, but I do listen to and find inspiration from music outside of my writing time. I’m particularly fond of The Killers these days.

5. Do you have any new projects or books that you're working on at the moment?
Always! J I’ve got a new YA series in the works, the first of which will be out next March – it’s called CRASH and it’s about a girl, a vision, a meatball truck, forbidden love, and nine body bags in the snow. I’m working on book 3 of THE UNWANTEDS series (book 2 comes out Sept ’12), and I just finished a first draft of my book in the Infinity Ring series, which is a time travel series written by several different authors. My book in that series will be out in Feb 2013. Tons of fun!

Thank you so much for answering my questions, Lisa!

-------------------------------------------------------------------