Where did you get the idea to make the Yeerks alien slugs that crawl into peoples heads?
It’s pretty much a direct steal from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with some Star Trek thrown in on the side. Who is your favorite Yeerk? Oh, gotta be Visser 3. He’s the villain. He’s the boss of all bad guys. And yet he’s really not very good at his job. How did you come up with the body of a Taxxon? First of all, there is no truth to the notion that I came up with Taxxons bloodthirsty worms around tax time. Not true. Basically, I wanted a big old worm. So I came up with a big old worm. I was surprised to learn you were female. Do you get comments to that effect, that kids think you are a male author? It’s interesting, the idea that only a member of a gender can write characters of that gender. This would be news to Shakespeare, who wrote a lot of women characters. But in the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I have a “male” advisor who occasionally says, “oh, please, no guy would say that.” Is it different, writing from a male versus female perspective? Yes. I don’t w
