Did you go to the Austin Teen Book Festival last year? There were panels about beasts and romance, there were light saber fights and smoke machines, there were YA fanatics and nachos- needless to say it was awesome! And judging by the authors announced thus far for the 2013 Austin Teen Book Festival, this year is going to rock. Check out the latest panelist we have confirmed:
For each author our Teen Press Corps came up with some interview questions, here are some highlights.
PJ HOOVER – SOLSTICE
“How many Star Trek t-shirts do you own? Be honest!
LOL. I went to my closet to count. I’m an equal-opportunity t-shirt aficionado, so here are the counts:
Star Trek: 4
Star Wars: 5
Lord of the Rings: 4
Smurfs: 4
Game of Thrones: 3
Remember Pluto: 3
Mario Kart: 2
And then of course I have a nice smattering of others including He-Man, Transformers, Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon mashup, Blade Runner, and Hunger Games.”
ROBIN LAFEVERS – DARK TRIUMPH
“Where did the character and town names come from?
Well, I’ll start with the town names, because that’s easy: they were taken from actual towns in Brittany. The even cooler thing is many of those towns are still there today and still have much of their medieval flavor and architecture, whether it’s the gate towers or the city wall or the 15th century cobbled streets and wood framed houses.
Ismae’s name was a bit harder to come by. Names are one of the most important parts of a character for me and I often can’t really settle into writing about a character until I get their name just right. I knew it had to have a bit of a French flavor to it, and it had to be medieval in origin, or at least feel that way. Luckily, I write in the Age of Google and so was able to access some amazing historical documents that let me see which names were in use back then. But none of them were quite right and many of them, frankly, felt decidedly wrong. For one, it seems like about 80% of people back then all shared one of five or six common names. The less common ones sound just strange to the modern ear and didn’t work for a heroine. I liked Isabeau quite a bit, but that created a problem because one of the historical characters in the book had that name and that would get way too confusing. Then I stumbled across the name Esme in reference to that time period, and Ismae just kind of evolved from there. Her last name, Rienne, was a slight modification of the French word for nothing, which is what she’d spent so much of her life feeling like.”
MARI MANCUSI – SCORCHED
“If you had to pick one, would your spirit animal be an armadillo, a bat, or a 
longhorn?
I’m a goth girl at heart so I’m going with the bat for sure. I love going down to the bridge over Austin’s Town Lake in the evenings and watching the bats emerge. There’s just something magical about them. Creepy–yet majestic.”
CLICK HERE to read the complete Q&A’s, and be sure to mark your calenders for Saturday September 28 because this year’s Austin Teen Book Festival is going to be a blast! Follow @AustinTBF
on twitter and be sure to use the hashtag #ATBF2013.
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