It doesn't matter if it's aliens or emotional weapons or whatever - it's still a real story about big feelings that have to come out.

Everything I write is about big feelings. What I care about is trying to be brave enough to feel how you feel and to be emotionally true.

I always say, 'I'm cracked. My characters are cracked. And you, reader, you're cracked, too.'

I'm always excited to see my good buddy Richelle Mead. She cracks me up. I never get to see Veronica Roth enough, either.

People ask why do I write strong women characters, and basically, all the girls I know are strong; the girls I've had are strong. The women in my life are strong.

Harper Lee was my David Bowie, and I feel her loss in my bones.

Everyone reads Harper Lee personally. For me, 'Mockingbird' was about admitting my own hyphenated identity - about loving and hating my world, about both belonging and not belonging to the community I came from.

I was raised in a community of Christian orthodoxy that had traveled with my parents to Los Angeles when they moved there for my father's job.

I first read Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' as a teen in school, like you did. I read the book alone, eating lunch at my locker, neatly scored oranges my mother divided into five lines with a circle at the top, so my fingers could dig more easily into the orange skin. To this day, the smell of oranges reminds me of 'Mockingbird.'

Sam and Dean Winchester sitting on the top of the Impala sharing their feelings over a beer is a reward worth driving any 'Supernatural' demon away - but in real life, they'd have crippling co-dependency issues.