Lauren is a feminist, and strongly pro-choice. She supports equality for women and LGBTQI people, and is especially interested in promoting the acceptance of gender queer teens. As a straight ally, Lauren is personally committed to making the world safe and lovely for people of all orientations, and her work reflects this. Her first novel, Cycler, is about a girl who turns into a boy for four days each month. Lauren uses this premise to explore what gender means, raising at least as many questions as she answers.

Lauren started out in the film industry, working her way up from production assistant to line producer and screenwriter, and eventually to helping Mike Paseornek open a New York production and development office for Cinepix Films (which later became Lions Gate Entertainment). She began writing prose full time in 2000. Cycler came out in 2008, followed by a sequel, (Re)Cycler in August of 2009. A third (unrelated) novel is on the horizon, but doesn’t have a formal release date yet. Though Lauren is not working full time in the film industry anymore, she has written a screenplay for Cycler, which will be produced by Don Murphy.

Cycler has a facebook page, and a YouTube trailer. (Re)Cycler has been nominated as a Rainbow Book for 2009 through the Rainbow Project. Lauren blogs on her personal site, and posts to Twitter under the name LaurenMcWoof.

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Cycler and (Re)Cycler explore gender identity and sexuality in a lot of different (and often surprising) ways. Did you know where the story would lead from the start, or did you manage to surprise even yourself?

I actually knew what the ending of Cycler would be in terms of the prom. I saw it very clearly as soon as I outlined the story. But there were tons of surprises along the way. I personally have a very open and flexible view of gender and I’ve never found stereotypically gendered people all that interesting. But to deal with the subject of gender as a social phenomenon, I had to have characters who embodied and endorsed gender stereotypes. Even though those ideas chafe against my own, I did what all writers do: I fell in love with the characters anyway. So, for example, even though Jack and Jill’s mother, Helen, espouses the anti-feminist gender stereotypical man-hater philosophy I oppose, I found myself sympathizing with her. Bad guys are much more interesting if they have a defensible point of view. And, in the case of Helen, she’s the only member of that family responsible enough to help Jill.

For (Re)Cycler, the whole thing surprised me from start to finish because I started writing it without knowing for sure where it would end. It was a very different writing process, much more painful, but, in the end, more interesting too.

One of the characters in Cycler is a bisexual boy (which is awesome in my book). What drew you to write a bisexual character?

It was a combination of factors, actually. One thing I feel that I have to do as a writer is figure out what’s the most challenging and morally compromising thing that could happen to my protagonist. Then, whatever it is, I have to inflict that on him or her. In Jill’s case, she’s struggling, against impossible odds, to be a “normal” heterosexual teenage girl. So of course I had to make her love interest bi. That forces her to confront all sorts of messy feelings and it lent a moral dimension to the story, because her emotional reaction to the news ultimately violates her own moral sense. But the bisexual character was not merely a plot device. He actually arose from a personal experience I once had, where a boy I had been dating for a long time sprung his bisexuality on me one day. I went through a lot of the same feelings Jill went through only to discover that, in the end, it made no difference to me. I think a lot of our so-called “feelings” on the subject of homosexuality and bisexuality are not actual feelings at all, but rather culturally constructed rules and rituals that enforce a heteronormative and patriarchal worldview.

You wrote screenplays before you turned to fiction, and now you’ve adapted Cycler for the big screen. How much of the story changed in the process? Did you tone down the queerness and genderbending at all? Any idea when the Cycler movie will come out?

The first thing you have to do when adapting a novel into a screenplay is figure out what to cut. Not just scenes and characters, but ideas as well. In one version, I did actually cut out the bisexuality of one of the characters because it was an extra idea that I didn’t have time to flesh out in one-hundred minutes. But I think I’ve figured out a way to include it now, so hopefully it will be back in. There is absolutely no soft pedaling in the screen adaptation on the gender-bendy-ness of it at all, however, because that’s the essence of the story. And, thankfully, my producer, Don Murphy, really likes it as is. I do think it would be possible to take the basic idea of Cycler and turn it into a mindless romp about how funny it is that boys and girls are completely different. But, as long as I’m writing the screenplay, that will never happen. I don’t yet know when the movie will come out because it’s not in production yet. It’s in development and that can take a long time. The fact that we already have a screenplay, however, gets us one step closer.

Your next novel is about teens and surveillance. Can you tell us anything more about it? When will that be available?

My next novel, Steal the Future, is is about what happens when ubiquitous surveillance is linked up to a powerful software program that analyzes human behavior. By crunching data from surveillance cameras, Web usage, cell phone conversations, etc., this software program, called Athena, comes up with a monthly score indicating a kid’s overall social fitness. That score has proved to be so good at predicting academic performance and future earnings that it has become a kind of universal SAT. As a result, kids’ whole lives are focused on the score  and in school they arrange themselves in score gangs so as to avoid contamination from lower scorers (or “lowbies”). The novel centers on a high school senior whose score of 62 puts her 8 point below the college line. She could probably get over that line if only she abandoned her best friend,  a 22.

Finally, we love recommendations here, especially if they subvert gender stereotypes. Have you got any good ones for us?

I love books that subvert gender stereotypes too. Unfortunately, too often books that purport to do just this end up boring me by adhering to another gender stereotype–the plucky teen girl who can do anything boys can do. I sort of feel like we should be beyond that by now. I don’t think we should waste time “proving” girls can do anything boys can do. It’s been proven. I say we declare victory and move on. The best book I’ve read in a while that plays interestingly with gender is Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. Meg Rosoff’s What I Was is also fantastic.

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Thanks, Lauren! Join us next week for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, why not check out Cycler?