Hannah Moskowitz is an accomplished author. At only 22, she’s published six YA and middle-grade books, all truly unique in their subject matter that helps set Moskowitz apart from the rest of the authors on the bookshelves.

Follow her on Twitter, and you’ll quickly learn she has a strong affection for television and her cats, you’ll also be taken along for the ride as she seems to crank out books one after the other, often with strange hashtags.

She participated in National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo – last year and is back again this year to hopefully ‘win’ the writing marathon for the second time by hitting the 50,000+ word milestone in 30 days. It’s a goal that thousands around the world try to complete but requires time (and who has a whole month to dedicate to writing?) and perseverance through bumps in the writing road.

In anticipation of NaNoWriMo beginning Friday, November 1, we asked Moskowitz about her writing playlists, how she stays focused on the writing and what to do when you have maybe too many plot bunnies hopping around in your head.

Interview with Hannah Moskowitz

How long did take for you to sell your first book, Break?

Hannah Moskowitz: I wrote the first draft of Break in October of 2007. Bunch of revisions, bunch of queries. I signed with my first agent sometime in the beginning of 2008, and we sold it to Simon Pulse early that summer.

When you get an idea, do you instantly start writing and let it grow as you write or do you outline and plan first?

I definitely give it time. I don’t usually come up with a strict written outline, but I won’t start until I know the ending and the order of some big things that happen along the way. So I’d say I don’t have a road map, but I do have checkpoints. I just let myself do whatever I want between them. I tend to panic and give up if I don’t have a way to keep track of how far along I am.

Where and when do you work best?

Typically late at night. I’m useless when the sun’s out because I’m a creepy vampire robot. I’m also very lazy and my apartment is very small, so writing happens in bed.

Why did you participate in NaNo last year?

I really love the camaraderie of it. More than one year I’d made the decision not to do it and then changed my mind after everyone on my twitter feed started getting all fired up and I got jealous.

What are some writing strategies you use to keep yourself going, particularly during an event like NaNoWriMo?

I make these ridiculous rules for myself. Like, you can’t get up and go to the bathroom until you’ve written a thousand words. You’d be amazed how quickly you can write when peeing yourself is on the line.

What do you find the most challenging part of writing a book? The most exciting part?

The most challenging part for me is not giving up when you decide you want to change something. So many times I’ve realized halfway through that I want to change the age of a character or how he was involved in such and such incident, and it’s always a struggle to make myself keep going after that. What I need to do is just make the change now, pretend that what I’ve written so far works with that change, and keep going. Making the first half agree with the second is a second-draft problem. But that can be hard to keep in perspective in the moment.

The most exciting part is being done, obviously. The only thing better than writing is not writing.

What would you say to people who have a lot of plot bunnies jumping around and can’t decide which one to focus on?

Smush them together. Do ’em all in one book. Do it. I mean, what do you get when you cross sniper shootings, a gay love story, cancer, and a bunch of animals running away? You get a book that got me a speech and a fancy certificate at an awards ceremony! Bam.

I know you had a playlist for Invincible Summer, would you say the music helps you write the story, or the story helps you pick the music?

It works both ways. Making the playlist shows me places where I can tell the energy’s lacking, or where I can see I’m repeating myself (do you really need four mopey love songs in a row? FOUR? No one wants to read the equivalent of four mopey love songs) and that makes me go back to whatever outline I have in my head and fix those spots.

You juggled high school, then college and writing for a long time, how did you find the time to publish six books and write even more?

Hell if I know. That’s a horrible answer, but yeah, I get this question all the time and I have no idea. Really you just have to believe it. If you need it to get done, it’ll get done. I mean, it’s just writing. This isn’t brain surgery. This is fingers on keys typing words. There’s no reason you can’t do this.

Are you working on anything right now? When will we see your next book on the shelves?

Well I’ve got my NaNo idea all geared up and ready to go – I’m doing a take on Dirty Dancing with an asexual main character – and I’m finishing up edits right now for a book I have coming out in 2015.

My next book coming out is also 2015, but a little earlier, and it’s actually my NaNo from last year! It’s called Etta Not Otherwise Specified and it’s about a black, bisexual, eating-disordered ballerina in rural Nebraska. Sometime in Spring ’15.