Top Ten Tuesday - Ten Authors I REALLY Want To Meet

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted at The Broke and the Bookish.

This week's topic is Ten Authors I REALLY Want To Meet.  Being fairly shy around people I don't know, I'm not sure that I'd really want to meet any authors.  However, there are some that I find really interesting, and picking their brains about their plots and characters might be entertaining (assuming, of course, that they're open to having their brains picked).  A few of them are no longer with us, but that doesn't make them any less worthy of being on this list!

Ten Authors I REALLY Want To Meet:

Anonymous - author of the Voynich manuscript - Nobody knows who wrote and illustrated this thing.  It's an intriguing mystery.  Was it a cultist?  A hoaxer?  A time traveller?  Nobody's been able to figure it out yet... and nobody's been able to decipher the manuscript, either.  It doesn't really matter who wrote this thing; I think meeting the author would be an interesting experience, no matter who they might be!

Lauren Oliver - author of Before I Fall and Liesl & Po - This author has written some of my most highly rated reads.  I'd love to know what ideas are percolating in her brain.  I'd probably also be one of those annoying fans who asks questions like, "What's Po's story?"

Susan Ee - author of the Penryn and the End of Days series - This author is interesting to me not so much because of what she's written, but because of how the books made it to readers.  I would love to pick her brain about how she went about self-publishing her books.

Amanda Hocking - author of the My Blood Approves series - Here we've got another self-published author, but the situation is a bit different.  Hocking built a fan base with a large number of titles... and then got picked up by a traditional publisher.  She's written about it on her blog, but I'd still like to ask her some questions.  (I haven't read any of her books yet, but I do have one of them in my TBR pile.)

Laini Taylor - author of the Daughter of Smoke & Bone series - Judging by these three books, this author has an incredibly creative mind, and I'd love to know what ideas she's got brewing in there.

Diana Wynne Jones - author of Fire and Hemlock, Howl's Moving Castle, and Deep Secret - Jones was quite prolific over her long career, and she gave us so many wonderful stories for young readers.  A number of them drew on old mythology; finding out more about her inspiration and use of these old sources would be interesting.

William Shakespeare - author of lots of plays that most people read for school - I'd like to know if he really wrote all those plays himself, or if he was just the official face.  I'm not sure if I could tease it out of him, but it would be fun to try.

Laura Whitcomb - author of A Certain Slant of Light and The Fetch - This author really knows how to write; I mean, she even wrote a non-fiction book about how to do it.  I loved the writing in A Certain Slant of Light, and the whole premise of The Fetch was fascinating.  She doesn't have a lot of fiction works out there (only three that I'm aware of), so I'd like to ask her if she's working on anything new.

Mary E. Pearson - author of the Jenna Fox Chronicles and The Remnant Chronicles - I've read the first book of the former series and have heard such good things about the latter series that I'd really like to get to know this author's books better.  Some of the formatting in The Adoration of Jenna Fox, with the inclusion of free verse poems, was really interesting; I'd like to know why choices like that were made.

Lisa Schroeder - author of Chasing Brooklyn and The Day Before - I've read a number of this author's books, and I really should get around to reading more of them; they're some of my favourite verse novels.  It would be interesting to sit down with an author who tells stories in verse, and find out if the process of writing such a novel is any different than writing in prose.

Which authors would you like to meet?