Melissa Marr will present on the panel Tayshas: Hot High School Authors on Wednesday, 10:15-11:50 a.m. She joins authors Lisa Klein, John Green, and Sara Zarr.

Have you attended TLA before? If so, what advice do you have for new authors?

I am one of the authors needing the advice. In the past 2 years, I’ve attended ALA Summer and NCTE/ALAN, but this will be my first TLA.

What is your preferred method of writing and why -- laptop, longhand, typewriter?

I almost always write on the PC. When I travel, I have a journal or notepad to write longhand and, if necessary, my laptop. I prefer being at my desk though. When I write, I tend to get lost in the story, so I try to avoid writing around people because if they speak to me, I have a blink-and-stare response that embarrasses me a bit.

Favorite books of the past year

I read a couple books a week minimum, so I have a lot of titles that I enjoy every year. If I only picked one book (out of adult, YA, & MG), it would by The Graveyard Book (Gaiman). If I can pick a few others, the YA ones I’d add include Graceling (Cashore), Impossible (Werlin), What I Saw and How I Lied (Blundell), The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Pearson), Night Road (Jenkins). There were also three I read advanced copies of that I loved: Wintergirls (Anderson), The Forest of Hands and Teeth (Ryan), and Immortal (Shields).

Favorite books from your YA years

I was reading classic lit and philo (Faulkner, Kerouac, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, et al), fantasy (Weiss and Hickman’s Dragonlance series, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffrey), my mother and grandmother’s romance and ghost stories. I’ve never stuck to any one genre.

Finish this sentence. The perfect vacation is...

with my kids and spouse somewhere we can explore a mix of ruins, landscapes, and museums.

MySpace or Facebook?

For access by the world at large, I am on both MySpace and Livejournal.

BBQ or Tex-Mex?

I’m afraid neither are strong cravings.. I’m pretty bland in my appetites: I like fresh fruit, raw veg, breads, potatoes of any and every sort, and the occasional steak.

Finish this sentence. Libraries are…

essential. The first thing we do at every new address is get our libraries cards. We generally have books checked out before the movers arrive with our belongings. Without libraries, I couldn’t have afforded satisfying my children’s reading appetites (or my own).

Do you have a blog, website, or other online presence that you would like to share with us?

I’m online at www.melissa-marr.com. Blog, MySpace, & Flickr are linked to that site.