Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Ahhhh… excellent question, these!  I tend to play the slightly modified “shag means make out” version, which leads me to…

Marry McSteamy (or, if I can’t, I want him to get back with Lexie so she can!)

Make out with Avery (oh, those eyes.  THOSE EYES).

Throw McDreamy off a cliff.  (Seriously, he is not all that dreamy.  And also, he is frequently a sanctimonious jerk to Meredith et al).

I think there is probably a complex formula that predicts big-ness of hair.  Some of the contributing variables are G (genetic predisposition for big hair), h (humidity), L (length of hair), S (co-efficient describing attempts to straighten hair), and P (amount of de-biggifying product used in hair).  So then we’re left with something like:

Hair Bigness = 2H(G^2)/(L) - (S*P)/2

In other words, my hair is big because I have a very large G and am usually too lazy to invest much time/effort in S or P.  However, my hair is quite long, which means that my hair is ultimately less big than it would be if it were shorter.

PS: I am a nerd.

The answer to this question changes pretty much every time I write a new book, so to give a *real* answer, I need a little more time and distance from the books.  At this point, I can say that of the seven books I wrote/pubbed between 2005 and 2010, my two favorites were THE SQUAD and RAISED BY WOLVES.  I’m still too close to the 2011-2012 books to figure out how they’re going to stack up in my favorites count in the long run—but I do think I’m probably more excited about people getting to read TAKEN BY STORM than I’ve been about any previous book, because SO MUCH HAPPENS to Bryn and her pack in this book, and I can’t wait to see how the events of the book resonate with readers.

Thank you!  I have a rule about essay anthologies: I only sign up to write an essay if I feel SO INCREDIBLY STRONGLY about a topic that I could (and have) ranted about it for thirty minutes at a time.  And the idea that Katniss is a complex character who is far more notable for what she does than for who she ultimately chooses romantically was something very close to my heart.  

Sometimes, in life and in books, it’s not about the romance.  Sometimes, it’s about the girl. -Team Katniss, The Girl Who Was on Fire

In general, I am more of a television person than a movie person (and my taste in TV shows is very close to my taste in books), but there are movies that I love as well!  Many of my all-time favorites are teen movies (Clueless, Mean Girls, Easy A), but I am also quite fond of movies that blend action (explosions!  chase scenes!) with humor and family/friendship/relationships.  And if you can throw in superpowers, all the better.

Of all the movies I’ve seen in the past year, my favorite was THE DESCENDANTS.  I also really enjoyed HANNA and X-MEN: FIRST CLASS. Of movies coming out in the next year, I’m already looking forward to ONE FOR THE MONEY, the dueling Snow White movies, Joss Whedon’s AVENGERS, and (more than ANYTHING!) THE HUNGER GAMES.

I have not one, but TWO books coming out this year!  

TAKEN BY STORM (Raised By Wolves #3) comes out in May.  I think it is my favorite of the books in that series.  In general, the thing I like best about writing the Raised By Wolves books is that Bryn changes so much over the course of each book that every time I sit down to write the next book, she’s a really different person than she was at the beginning of the previous book.  The events at the end of TRIAL BY FIRE had a huge effect on her, and book three is very much about Bryn coming to terms with the kinds of sacrifices and choices she will have to make as an alpha.  There are old friends and old enemies and so much other stuff that I cannot mention, for fear of spoiling people.

And then in December (I *think*… this isn’t final, so it is still subject to change), I have a new standalone called NOBODY coming out.  Of all of my books, it’s probably the most like Every Other Day, but it’s also really different from both EOD and everything else I’ve written.  It’s a dark romance about a supernaturally unnoticeable assassin and the teenage girl he’s sent to kill.  Genre-wise, it’s definitely a romance (which is new for me, as none of my other books really focus on romantic relationships).  It’s also a thriller.

I’m working on getting Golden and Platinum up as e-books, but no ETA on that yet!  So glad you enjoyed EVERY OTHER DAY!

Raised By Wolves was my seventh published novel, and there were probably a dozen unpublished ones in there as well.  But pretty much the entire time I was writing, I knew that I would, at some point, write a werewolf book.  They’re my favorite supernatural creature, and some of my all-time favorite books are werewolf books.  

So the real question isn’t why I wrote about werewolves, but why I waited so long to do so, and the answer to THAT question is that “I want to write a book about werewolves” isn’t a plot, and it isn’t a premise.  In other words, it’s not a book, and I had to wait until the right story idea—and most importantly, the right character showed up to actually start writing the book.

Everything finally fell into place when I got the idea of writing from the point of view of a human who had been raised in a werewolf pack.  I’m a psychology graduate student, so the idea of playing with the supernatural equivalent of “nature versus nurture” was hugely compelling to me.  I worked on the book for several weeks before it occurred to me that I could call it “Raised By Wolves” (though that seems obvious now!), and once the title clicked into place, I was committed.

As for why I chose to write the werewolves the way I did, some of that fell directly out of the premise.  This werewolf pack had taken Bryn in and raised her; they were her family, so I had a hard time seeing them as typical movie monsters.  But at the same time, I wanted the difference between them to be striking: as a human, Bryn is always at a disadvantage with werewolves, and Callum has taught her not to forget that.

A lot of the little details about the way that the werewolves and packs interact with each other was inspired by my work with pack animals.  I used to do animal cognition research and spent my summers on an island full of monkeys, who lived in groups that were defined by strict hierarchies.  I’ve spent enough time around wild animals that I couldn’t write my werewolves as completely human in their behavior, even when they were in human form.  The animal kingdom can be brutal—and so can Bryn’s family, as much as she loves them.