Sabrina Banes, a writer and former journalist in Brooklyn, has a website, YA New York ( www.yanewyork.com ), dedicated to young adult literature. She has an unusual interview technique in which the interviewee also gets to ask questions of the interviewer. Here are a couple of the questions.

Alma Alexander's Worldweavers trilogy was completed earlier this year with the release of Cybermage…In Cybermage, Thea and her friends meet the famous scientist Nikola Tesla at various times in his life, whilst attempting to keep an important magical object out of the hands of a race called the Alphiri.

The book, Alma's tenth, is awesome, and I heartily recommend the entire series to you. It's funny, interesting, dramatic and also exceptionally creative.

Without further delay, I bring you Twenty-one Questions with Alma Alexander:

Question One

Sabrina: You write under the name Alma Alexander, but you seem to be pretty free about your given name [Alma Hromic Deckert]. Why do you use a pseudonym?

Alma: Because when The Secrets of Jin-Shei was being published, my agent phoned me up and said they wanted a pseudonym. They wanted a name that was easier to pronounce. It was presented to me as a dealbreaker. My middle name is Alexandra so I went with that, so it felt more like me. [Alma's maiden name, Hromic, is pronounced H-rome-ich.]

Question Two

Alma: What made you create YA New York?

Sabrina: I used to have a column about trashy novels, called Dustbin Diaries, and even after I left the newspaper that published that column, I was gluttonous in my consumption of teen literature. Eventually I realized that I needed to write about it somewhere other than on my LiveJournal.