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 Question: “Is it true that, like, 99% of our presidents were in secret societies?”
Answer: I haven’t the foggiest. I believe some of the founding fathers were Freemasons — though according to Wikipedia, John Q. Adams, at least, was a vocal opponent. People love to point out the signs and symbols of Freemasonry in some of the emblems of our country, design of our money, etc. But saying you were in a fraternal order in the 18th century is pretty much like saying you were a member of a certain societal class. And then I bet a huge number of our presidents were in fraternities in college. Or do secret societies with Greek letters not count? Other than that, I know that at least Presidents Taft and both Bushes were in Skull & Bones.
Question: “Why is the Ivy League called the Ivy League, and what is it, exactly?”
Answer: The phrase originally referred to only an athletic league, like the “Big Ten” or “Division I” or etc. In fact, it is still used that way: Yale sports teams compete within the Ivy League Conference. The teams included are: Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth. I have heard two stories: that the term came from the ivy on the college building walls, and that the term is a misprint of the fact that originally there were only four (IV) teams in the league: Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers. There were other schools that came in and out over the centuries, like (I think) Bowden. Or maybe Bowden was offered a position in the conference and turned it down? There are a lot of rumors and legends.  At any rate, only later did the term come to mean anything other than an athletic competition.
 Question: “Is the conspiracy theory website working again?”
Answer: Nope, but it will be when the new site launches! (Note to the uninitiated: I made a web site to match the one that plays a major role in Under the Rose. It’s currently unavailable. I guess the powers that be have more influence than we’d thought!)
Question: Why are your books set at “Eli University” instead of Yale?
Answer: Because it’s fiction, and it’s fun to make up names for things. No, seriously. Why does Superman work at The Daily Planet in Metropolis, rather than The Chicago Sun? I think it’s much more rare, in fiction, for writers to talk about real companies. In The Devil Wears Prada, Prada might be real, but Runway magazine is not. I’m not trying to pull anything over on the reader; anyone with eyes can see that Eli is extensively based on Yale. Even the name “Eli” is a shout-out. You’ll note in the books that I never talk about Yale. Yale does not exist in the world of the books. I talk about Princeton, or Harvard, or Stanford, or NYU… but in this world, there is no Yale, no other Ivy League college in New Haven. In its place, there is Eli.
 The extra layer of fiction gives me leeway, as an author, to not constantly be worried about literal accuracy. I can change geography or traditions or facts to suit the story, because I’m not talking about a real place. Rose & Grave is not Skull & Bones, but its own secret society, composed of a variety of society traditions drawn from collegiate, professional, fraternal, and religious secret societies. Eli is not Yale, nor is it connected to the Yale Corporation. When I’m talking about deans or professors or leaders of campus organizations or rivalries, it’s not real people or real organizations I’m talking about. I make it all up for the sake of the story.
Question: How many books are there in the secret society girl series? Answer: Four. The first three are, in order: Secret Society Girl, Under the Rose, and Rites of Spring (Break). I’m working on the fourth one now, and it will be released in summer of 2009.
Winner of the “Read it before the Release” Rites of Spring (Break) giveaway is….
LIZA!
Liza, email me with your address and I’ll get you a copy of ROSB and some other goodies.
So, as part of the redesign of my website, I’m putting up a new FAQ. I already have some of my biggest hits down (**cough**cough**wereyouinasecretsociety**cough**cough**) but I’m sure there’s stuff I’m missing.
One of my recent faves: Why would otherwise intelligent, Ivy-League educated students let themselves become slaves to the weird rituals in a secret society?
Diana: Why would otherwise intelligent people paint their faces and do the wave at football games? Why would they kiss under mistletoe? Why would they blow out candles on a birthday cake? If you stop and think about some of the rituals you participate in, don’t they seem silly? “Ooh, I’m going to cover this lovely cake with burning sticks of wax and then I’m going to breathe and spit all over it before giving it to my friends to eat.” Now that’s weird. But we do these things all the time because it’s part of societal norms. It doesn’t seem odd, and everyone else who is part of our society does the same thing. If you think about it in those terms, it doesn’t seem so silly, and the people who particpate in it as part of a special group, it’s nothing more than a game — like dressing up on Halloween, holding your glass up to toast people’s health and good fortune, cheering for your school/team/country at a sports event. They aren’t slaves, they’re participants, doing things of their own free will that doesn’t hurt them or anyone else.
Of course, I could just find FAQ questions based on what has brought people to my site recently. Stuff like:
- the analysis of under the rose by diana peterfreund (looks like someone is doing a book report)
- free reads (Well, aside from the Great Blog Voice Experiment, not so much)
- kill your darlings (a perennial fave!)
- out of fashion sparkly jeans (since I was in college, yes)
- passive voice is 12% good or bad (Huh? I wonder if they mean “using it 12% of the time” Either way, passive voice is perfectly fine. Use it as needed and directed.)
- mystery novel three acts inciting incident (I use four-act, myself.)
- characters in under the rose by diana peterfreund (Book-report person, back again)
- diane peterfreund (close enough!)
- passive voice it takes a long time to think of these example sentences. (I’m guessing this is our 12% friend, again. I don’t think it would, if you were trying to find sample sentences. But maybe they were searching for a particular article and that’s the only sentence they could remember?)
What questions would you like to see answered on my FAQ? Ask away here, in the comments section. Anonymous is fine.
All commenters entered to win a prize. Gee, wonder what it could be?
Unicorn found in Italy
In Italy, no less!
And a big thank you to all the people who’ve sent me this news story. I am agog, truly. I have decided to take the entire episode as a good omen about Rampant. there are already uicorns in Italy. Woo hoo!
It’s especially fortuitous because the unicorns in Rampant are not the horse-like unicorns most people think of. There are unicorns in several ecological niches, with body types and behavior to match. That can be, at times, a bit difficult to explain to people whose mental image of a unicorn was formed by 1980s Trapper Keepers and My Little Pony.  “It’s a bit more like a goat, or a llama” doesn’t fly so well, and you should see the expression on their face when I say, “Imagine a wooly mammoth if it were a unicorn.”
Well, except for people who play WOW:
For some reason, they picture things like that, no problem.
But now, I have a world-famous image to share with folks who want to know how in the world a unicorn could look like a deer. Thank you, little fawn!
And, seriously, good people of Florence: Watch out for that one. They’re cute all right, but you have no idea what they’re capable of!
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Confidential to the Lady of the Green Pencil: Knock ‘em dead!
J.K. Rowling’s been busy as a beaver lately. First, there was her commencement speech at Harvard. Then there were all those late night visits to Maureen. And now, she’s posted an 800-word excerpt of the “prequel I’m not working on” at Waterstone’s.*
To read the handwritten note:
1) Go to http://www.waterstoneswys.com/
2) Wait for the Flash-based portion of the site to load
2) Click the “Read our authors’ stories” link
3) Click JKR’s name from the list that appears
Be sure to read both sides!
In related news, my favorite comment from Sailor Boy, who has been reading Rites of Spring (Break)**:
“I knew Poe had a pet snake named Lord Voldemort. What I didn’t realize was that he actually is a Slytherin.”
To which I laughed out loud, then heartily agreed. Poe is a Slytherin, most definitely. Then we had a conversation about the Sorting Hat-potential of all the other characters in my series. He thinks that Amy is a Hufflepuff, which makes some sense to me, though there’s an argument that all of them, just by dint of being at Eli, are Ravenclaws. Alternately, that all of them, just by dint of being in Rose & Grave, are Slytherin.
So what do you think?
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* Thanks to Geoff for giving me the head’s up!
** Out in two short weeks!
Of interest to readers, writers, and those who are both:
My friend Carla Capshaw, an extraordinary writer and a connoisseur of hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants, tells about her road to publication on The Manuscript Mavens blog. I read Carla’s wonderful “The Fox” many, many years ago, and was brokenhearted that it couldn’t find a home. I specifically remember one dinner with C.L. Wilson, Carla, and me, where we all sat around, drowning our rejection blues and talking about how much we loved one another’s books and how we couldn’t wait until the rest of the world got on the stick and figured it out, too.
Sigh. Now I’m all nostalgic for Florida, and my writer’s community there. To make a long story short, Carla’s journey is an incredible testament to her hard work and faith, and I can’t wait to read her gladiator story, THE HEART BECKONS. I’m so bummed I have to wait more than another year to read more than this excerpt. (How ’bout some sugar, CC?) As I may have mentioned, I’m a little bit in love with ancient Rome…
 For quite some time, I’ve been hearing tidbits about Jessica Andersen’s Mayan prophecy series (we share agents and critique partners), and now, Night Keepers is finally on the shelves! Not only is Jess’s website divine (and that author photo!), but I was so struck by her recent essay on the Plotmonkeys blog regarding how she went about constructing her fictional world. Much of what she said really resonated with me, since I, too, was creating a world from scratch in terms of killer unicorns.
“Seems simple, right? Wrong! It took me nearly eighteen months of research, writing and rewriting before I could hammer out a workable proposal, partly because it was a big-a$$ed idea, and partly because it wasn’t a mythology that’s really been done in-depth before within the genre (to my knowledge, anyway), so there weren’t any shortcuts. I mean, you say ‘vampire’ or ‘werewolf’ and you’ve got a common starting point for reader expectation, right? Not so much in this case. I built this sucker from scratch.”
I kept going “yes!” “me too!” “exactly!” while reading. Check it out! (And, in passing, I dare you to read this excerpt and not start hankering for the whole book.)
Also, Leigh Court, who wrote the excellent novella, “The Disciplinarian” in Secrets, vol. 15 (yes, that’s me on the cover), is giving a workshop on novella writing at Romance Divas this week. Since I loved her novella, I’m so there!
And finally, long time readers of this blog may remember that there’s a certain trope in historical romance that drives me absolutely batty (even if I otherwise love the book!). Well, I’m reading one now (though it’s not actually classified as historical romance) where the heroine acts like she’s got a brain in her head, and I’m so happy about it I could cry. I’ll let you know all about it when I finish the book, and if it turns out well.
 First up is Jess Riley’s debut, DRIVING SIDEWAYS, which I first encountered, many, many moons ago as a contest entry called “Riding with Larry Resnick” that was much lauded and talked about by anyone lucky enough to get her hands on it. Funny and touching, it’s the story of a road trip one woman takes with a teenage runaway and a borrowed kidney (yes, it belonged to the aforementioned Larry). I’m glad it’s finally in stores, after a publishing trip almost as long and strange as the characters’ own.
While you’re at it, check out Jess’ hilarious blog.
Teri Brown’s YA, READ MY LIPS, is another debut to check out. It’s about a hearing-impaired girl whose special lip-reading ability becomes an asset to getting “in” with the popular crowd. She’s holding all kinds of events on her blog to celebrate it’s release (click on image):
The other day, I came across a blog post by my pal Colleen Gleason that had me scratching my head. In it, she posits that I run a writing blog:
Some writers blog with an audience of other writers (published or not) in mind. They blog on topics of interest to people who are trying to get published or to find an agent, and about their own writing and publishing experiences. (Diana Peterfreund comes to mind, and so does this very blog.)
“Do I do that?” I wondered. So I looked over my last few weeks worth of posts.
5 Posts about Writing (and not so much straight advice as “This is what I’ve noticed about writing my books, killer uniforms, etc.)
6 Promo Posts (Hey, I had a book out garnering reviews and another starting to!)
3 Life Posts
12 Posts about Books (by other people, ones I’ve liked, etc.)
By that count, I’m clearly a reader blog.
Just kidding. The point is, I don’t really see this as a blog about writing, not like some people. Sometimes I talk about writing. But I always talk about whatever is on my mind. Usually, because I’m at this job all day long, every day, writing and publishing are what is on my mind. If writers read the blog, great! If fans read the blog, great, too! I know there are both. Though this doesn’t jibe well with Colleen’s thesis, I don’t spend a lot of time wondering which audience a particular post will appeal to. Kind of like my books, I write about what I want to read about, whether it’s killer uniforms or visiting the Library of Congress.
The “Life” posts have been a bit thin on the ground of late, it’s true. I think that’s mostly because I’m probably in my busiest professional time ever. I’m in a totally new situation, having one book out, one book in the production stage, and one book in the writing stage. I’m really enjoying it, but it definitely makes me a bit of a boring dinner date. If it’s not making sure I’ve got all my killer unicorns in a row, it’s thinking about the release of Rites of Spring (Break) and how to carry the atmosphere from the end of that book into the new one.
I’m living in Bookworld, full time. My parents call and ask what’s up, and all I can talk about is my three books. I got out with my friends, and in the back of my head, I’m thinking about scenes or plot.
There’s a reason Sailor Boy stole me away to the Caribbean last weekend.
I live a pretty quiet life. No kids, no dating disasters, and I don’t even have TV. The monkeys are inside this summer, so I don’t even have that escape. We play some Rockband, and it’s fun, and I finally hit 70 on my World of Warcraft character. (I’m not quite sure what to do with her now.) Our friends are amazing, extraordinary people, who want to be profiled on the internet about as much as Sailor Boy does. I don’t want to blog about politics or house hunting. I’m doing some massive explorations in the culinary field, but there are much better blogs to read if you’re interested in food, or you know, butchering chickens. I read a lot, and I love to talk about books. So I blog about that, and I blog about my job, which happens to dovetail nicely with the whole book discussion.
Hopefully, that adds up to a blog that you, dear reader, enjoy.
 There’s always so much to do when you get home from a vacation. Like, unpack, and then look around in dismay at all the stuff (mail, email, bills, work, laundry — and seriously, there was more laundry, which makes me wonder what species of brownie or sprite was wearing my clothes when I was in the Caribbean) that somehow piled up while you were gone.
So Sailor Boy* and I spent a little while doing housekeeping and bookkeeping yesterday. And we came to the rather unfortunate conclusion that we have no more space on our bookshelves. The shelves are packed, two and three deep, stacked tight with all of our books — old school textbooks, from both undergrad and grad school, his novels, and my gazillion, fabajillion books.
My solution: buy another bookshelf. SB’s solution: Get rid of some of my books.
 You’d think he’d know me better, after all these years.
His argument is that a good proportion of these shelves (or rows on shelves) are dedicated to TBR (i.e., “to be read”) and that a lot of them haven’t moved from that position in the last three and a half years. If I didn’t read these books in three-and-a-half years, I’m not going to read them now, he argues.
 I say that’s untrue. After all, it was almost two years after Gina Black encouraged me to read Flowers from the Storm that it finally floated to the top of the pile and caught my interest. (It was great! Thanks, Gina!)
But I can admit that there are a lot of these books on the shelves that I am never going to read. I get a ton of books every year at conferences or trade shows (I have ARCs from 2006 BEA, books that might not even be in print anymore, that I have not read), and they are not all to my taste or interest.
 But SB is afraid, with good reason, that if I start going through them and putting them into piles of “may read someday” and “will admittedly probably never read” — well, one of those piles just isn’t going to go very far. Because I like to believe I’ll read them all, someday. It’s someone’s book, that they labored long and hard over.
What to do, what to do…
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* For those of you following, Sailor Boy read both Under the Rose and Rampant this weekend, then lamented that he hadn’t brought Rites of Spring (Break) with us. Have you put in your order?
I know I’ve talked before about my rather amusing typos and errors and the valiant attempts made by my editors to justify them. You know, rather than just admit that I have a problem with typing to sound, or just forgetting my character’s name mid-paragraph, or am actually writing a book about killer uniforms.
Sigh.
Amusing mistake of the day:
I have a character in my latest book who is Austrian. In my head, she is Austrian, has always been Austrian, has never been anything but Vienna born-and-bred.
So when I got a note from my editor wondering why she was speaking German rather than Czech, I was a bit taken aback. Do they speak Czech in Austria? I was pretty darn sure it was German. (Runs off to double check.)
Oh, no, it’s German, all right. My editor’s problem was that I’d listed said character’s hometown as Prague. Why? I have no earthly idea. I don’t even remember doing it. It is possible, in some early draft of the book, I’d made up a character from Prague, and somehow, in subsequent cut-and-pastes, she got attached to my Austrian. Or I may have had Prague on the brain (lately, it’s Copenhagen — more on that later).
Anyway, mea culpa. Off to listen to some Mozart. (Not so much penance, but.)
Wait til you hear the one about the lorry!
Still in the Caribbean. But while we wait for our plane, and for the “go live” date of my brand-new website, I thought we might talk about some of my upcoming appearances for the release of Rites of Spring (Break).
 *Launch Party*
MONDAY, JUNE 30, 7 PM
Borders Books
11301 Rockville Pike 11301 Rockville Pike
Kensington, MD 20895
301-816-1067
*Bookstore Anniversary with Nora Roberts*
SATURDAY, JULY 12, 1-3 PM
With Nora Roberts (and other authors)
Turn the Page Bookstore (13th Anniversary Celebration)
18 N. Main St.
Boonsboro MD 21713
ttpbooks.com
*Virginia Signing*
WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 7 PM
Barnes & Noble
1851 Fountain Drive 1851 Fountain Drive
Reston, VA 20190
703-437-9490
And, because I know you guys love teasers, a thrilling excerpt from Amy’s newest adventures.
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Question: “Is it true that, like, 99% of our presidents were in secret societies?”
Question: “Is the conspiracy theory website working again?”
The extra layer of fiction gives me leeway, as an author, to not constantly be worried about literal accuracy. I can change geography or traditions or facts to suit the story, because I’m not talking about a real place. Rose & Grave is not Skull & Bones, but its own secret society, composed of a variety of society traditions drawn from collegiate, professional, fraternal, and religious secret societies. Eli is not Yale, nor is it connected to the Yale Corporation. When I’m talking about deans or professors or leaders of campus organizations or rivalries, it’s not real people or real organizations I’m talking about. I make it all up for the sake of the story.
