Sensational 7 Q & A with R.J. Anderson!

Have you ever wanted to know what it would be like to hang out with your favorite author(s)? In an attempt to get a better understanding of authors, my Sensational Seven Q & A takes a closer or more personal look at these authors to give you a glimpse of the personalities behind the writing of your favorite books.

“Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.” By Ralph Waldo Emerson

R.J. (Rebecca) Anderson was born in Uganda, raised in Ontario, went to school in New Jersey, and has spent much of her life dreaming of other worlds entirely.

As a child she immersed herself in fairy tales, mythology, and the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and E. Nesbit; later she discovered more contemporary authors like Ursula LeGuin, Patricia A. McKillip and Robin McKinley, and learned to take as much pleasure from their language as the stories they told.

Now married and the mother of three young sons, Rebecca reads to her children the classic works of fantasy and science fiction that enlivened her own childhood, and tries to bring a similar sense of humor, adventure, and timeless wonder to the novels she writes for children and young adults.

WAYFARER is in stores now!

If you were given a chance to travel back in time, what year or place would you go / Why?
You know, you would think this is a nice light question... and I'm about to give it this big theological answer, but I'm a preacher's daughter so that's how I roll.
I'd like to go back to Israel in the year 33 or so, on the day Jesus rose from the dead. In Luke 24 there's a story about how later that day, Jesus joined two of his disciples walking down the road to Emmaus, and had a long conversation with them. I would love to listen in on that conversation!

Describe your novel in seven words or less?
Linden and Timothy get into big trouble!

(I cannot tell a lie: Saundra Mitchell, author of Shadowed Summer, came up with that one. I owe you, Saundra! I am terrible at seven-word answers.)

Please share with us about your favorite book and fictional crush to date?
C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair made a huge impact on me as a kid. It's so dark and gloomy and even scary in parts, but Jill is a wonderful tough, headstrong, yet vulnerable character (and I strongly identified with her misery over being picked on at school) and I adore Puddleglum.

As for a fictional crush, I have several (hello, Mr. Knightley), but most recently I fell in love with Jared Sapiens, the young tutor from Catherine Fisher's Incarceron and its sequel Sapphique. He's brilliant, scholarly, has a powerful sense of honor and duty, but he's willing to risk everything -- his position, his reputation, even his life -- to get to the truth and do what's right. He's got this quiet bravery and integrity, and this selfless love for Claudia, that just made me adore him from the start. It doesn't hurt that he's slim and dark and green-eyed and has beautiful hands, either. :)

If you could be any character in fiction, whom would you be / Why?
Eowyn in Tolkien's The Return of the King. She's beautiful, intelligent, determined, wields a mean sword, slays the Lord of the Nazgul (and deliver one of the best lines of the whole book in the process), and gets to marry Faramir, who is one of my other literary boyfriends. You can't get much cooler than that.

If Hollywood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you/ Why?
I couldn't think of an answer, so I ran my pic through Celebrity Face Recognition. The #1 answer? Danny Elfman. HARSH, software people, HARSH.

However, the next best female match was Debra Messing, about whom I know nothing except that she was in "Will and Grace," a show I've never watched. Um, okay then?

If someone wrote a biography about you, what do you think the title should be – please explain?
The Boundary Between, which is a snippet of a longer quote which appears in the Acknowledgments of my first novel -- "This world of ours, and worlds unseen / and thin the boundary between." I've spent much of my life with my feet in this world and my head in another, whether it's some fantastic world of my imagination, or the realm of the spiritual and theological.

How would you describe yourself/life in seven words?
A curious mixture of practicality and daydreaming.

Bonus:

**Is there any additional info you would like to share with your readers about what’s next for you and your books?**
There is! My next book will be ARROW, coming out in January 2011, which wraps up many of the loose ends introduced in the first two faery books. But that doesn't mean I'm done with faeries, because there's going to be a fourth book called SWIFT in 2012. And in between those two, I have a non-faery novel coming out -- a paranormal YA thriller called TOUCHING INDIGO, which is the story of a girl with synesthesia who ends up in psychiatric care after the death of a schoolmate, trying to figure out if she is responsible for the other girl's murder. So that should keep me busy for a while at least!

Thanks for stopping by R.J.!

For more information about R.J. Anderson and her books, please visit her website here.