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"If you&amp;#039;re a huge fan of fantasy books, you&amp;#039;ve probably heard of the Shiver trilogy by Maggie Stiefvater. Now, Maggie is set to release her highly-anticipated new book The Scorpio Races on October 18. This exciting new book is about an annual horse race where not every rider makes it to the finish line. As if she didn&amp;#039;t have enough of a busy schedule already, Maggie is also one of the judges of Seventeen&amp;#039;s 2012 Fiction Contest (It&amp;#039;s open now, so don&amp;#039;t forget to enter here). Maggie sat down with Seventeen recently to dish exclusively on her new book, writing, and what she was like in high school. 17: You gave a talk called &amp;quot;How Bad Teens Become Famous People.&amp;quot; Did you see yourself as a &amp;quot;bad kid&amp;quot; in high school? Did that inspire your writing at all? MS: I saw myself as an outsider as a teen. I was home-schooled and got my GED when I was 16; I wasn&amp;#039;t interested in high school at all and figured that college might be more entertaining. I remember thinking there were a lot of check boxes out there to sort teens into appropriate molds, and they didn&amp;#039;t seem to make check boxes for whatever it was that I had grown up into. I definitely explore that a lot in my novels. 17: What do you think girls will love most about The Scorpio Races? MS: There are three big things going for The Scorpio Races: 1) it is set on a beautiful but wild island in the middle of the cold Atlantic Ocean. That would&amp;#039;ve seduced me as a teen reader. 2) It is full of beautiful but killer horses being trained for a dangerous race. Actually, that would&amp;#039;ve seduced me as a teen reader as well. 3) It involves a very repressed love story with a very Mr. Darcy-like love interest. That would seduc...I feel I&amp;#039;ve said some of these words before. 17: What was the most memorable adventure you went on while researching The Scorpio Races? MS: My most memorable adventure was investigating the chalk cliffs in Yorkshire. While clambering over kelp-covered boulders half-covered by the sea, I fell and smashed my tail bone on one of them. It was a very long flight back home on a very bruised bottom. It took months to heal and was very difficult to explain to people. 17: We know the movie rights for Shiver have been optioned. Do you have any more movie info you can give us? Who would your dream cast be? MS: People ask me this a lot, but I try to avoid answering it ever since I told someone &amp;quot;I always thought Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys for Sam, because he&amp;#039;s so funny-looking, he&amp;#039;s almost cute&amp;quot; and discovered I was sitting one table over from his girlfriend. I just feel it&amp;#039;s best to avoid it altogether, if not for your sake, then mine. 17: Authors are often perceived as loners, but you interact with your readers so much through your blog and other social media. Why is that connection so important to you? MS: For the same reason &amp;quot;This is Teen&amp;quot; is important to me. A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn&amp;#039;t there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot. The last novel I was working on kept me up late night after night \u2014 I was on deadline and, moreover, I couldn&amp;#039;t seem to focus on it until the sun went down. I found myself typing chapters at 1 and 2 a.m. in the morning while readers on Twitter made me laugh and entertained me in the background. That&amp;#039;s a pretty fun experience. Seventeen: Tell us about your involvement with Scholastic&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;This is Teen&amp;quot; community. Why is it so important to you? Maggie Stiefvater: &amp;quot;This is Teen&amp;quot; is important to me for the exact same reasons that having a blog, Facebook, and Twitter are important to me: I like to hear from my readers, and I like to feel like I&amp;#039;m part of a bigger community of readers and writers. Both the online involvement and &amp;quot;This is Teen&amp;quot; events are ways to extend the conversation started by the novels. Did you read the Shiver trilogy? What&amp;#039;s your favorite book by Maggie? Comment below!  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/interviews/a16292/maggie-stiefvater-interview/>