Tap & Gown is out today! (or, a few days ago, if you’re one of those folks that stopped into a bookstore and found it on the shelves). Yay! I’ve been feeling so nostalgic about this series, getting all teary eyed when I flip through the pages of this last volume and stacking up all four books on a table to see how tall the entire story is.
I’m such a sap.
Let’s have a party! First off, I want to thank Lell for this awesome fanvid. Check it out! The music is utterly epic, but the coolest part to me is that it focuses on the actual text — on all those cool keywords that get repeated over and over in the story. I don’t think she missed a single one. (You got it: more tears!)
Isn’t that amazing?
Okay, the spoiler thread is up, so if you’ve read the book, come and comment! [PLEASE NOTE: DO NOT LEAVE SPOILERS IN THIS POST. USE THE SPOILER THREAD.]
And now, for the celebration, we’re going to play a party game. It’s called TAP & GOWN In The Wild. To play, all you have to do is send me a picture (or link to a picture in the comments thread) of TAP & GOWN — you guessed it — in the wild. If you do, I will send you a special Secret Society Girl prize pack, which is unfortunately unpictured at the moment, as I seem to have misplaced my camera’s computer cord, but trust me, it’s cool.
Now, pictures on bookstore shelves are perfectly acceptable wildlife photos, but I will put an extra something in your prize pack if your wildlife photo is of a more creative nature. Say, TAP & GOWN in the arms of an adorable kitten, or eating an ice cream sundae, or hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Behold! A thread to discuss the conclusion of the Secret Society Girl series, TAP & GOWN.
Comment here to your heart’s content about Amy’s iconoclastic choice to tap a goldfish to take her place in Rose & Grave*, Poe’s pursuit of a career as a professional clown,** George’s decision to take the cloth,*** and Jenny’s heretofore unknown luddite tendencies.****
Or, you know, whatever really happened.
_________________________
* The argument goes that it’s easier to keep a secret if you can’t remember it.
** It was the shoes that really appealed to him.
*** He heard the whole celibacy thing was on the way out.
**** After graduation, she’s moving into a yurt.
The electricity in my house was off starting Saturday night and going through half of Sunday. Therefore, I have fallen behind on my scheduled posts. I’m moving things around now so that Tuesday’s events will happen as scheduled, but other events will be moved further back.
College Affiliation: Strathmore College (graduated); currently a 1L at Eli Law School
Undergraduate Major: History, Political Science
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Gray
Height: 6′1″
Activities: Elizabethan Society, Rose & Grave (alleged)
Known Associates: Malcolm Cabot
Likes: secrets, power, order, reptiles
Dislikes: information he doesn’t have, stupid people, upstart Lit Majors who don’t know what’s good for them, beef
Favorite Color: black
Favorite Food: Doritos, eggplant Parmesan
Favorite Book:East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
Favorite Song: “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” by The Postal Service
Favorite Movie: Harvey
Specialties: Lurking, Sarcasm
Significant Other: none known
Status: It is thought that Orcutt spent his Spring Break on Cavador Key with the Knights of Rose & Grave, but with so few associates, it’s difficult to track his movements, and even more difficult to confirm the highly unlikely rumors of his Spring Break activities.
Status: Santos’s connections to the Order of Rose & Grave have been carefully documented, and indeed, it is through her that many of the connections to other members have been surmised. Santos has just returned from Spring Break at the Digger-owned island of Cavador Key, and is making final arrangements in the development of her start-up company, Caritas. Santos’s last company was purchased for several million dollars. This project, however, seems to be of a more personal nature, and rumor has it she’s filling the executive board with fellow Diggers.
Activities: Eli Spring Fashion Show (freshman year), Eli Art Gallery Silent Auction Organizer (sophomore and junior year), Rose & Grave (alleged)
Known Associates: Felicity Bower, Odile Dumas, Malcolm Cabot, Amy Haskel, George Prescott, Demetria Robinson, Jenny Santos
Likes: Couture, Cashmere, Impressionist Art
Dislikes: her father, dirt
Favorite Color: white
Favorite Food: champagne, sushi
Favorite Book:House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Favorite Song: “You’re So Vain,” by Carly Simon
Favorite Movie: Pretty Woman
Specialties: Withering Glare, Party Planning
Significant Other: none
Status: Cuthbert recently returned from a trip to Florida with her alleged fellow Diggers. She uncharacteristically participated in a Habitat for Humanity project (possibly under the influence of her alleged Digger compatriot, Demetria Robinson). Not much is known about Cuthbert’s post-grad plans, however, there are rumors that she will be joining the Santos-inspired start-up, Caritas.
To celebrate the release of Tap & Gown, I’ll be doing an interview next week. If you have any burning questions for me about the secret society girl series, here’s the place to ask, and now’s the time to do it.
Sorry I’ve been such a bad blogger the last few days. I’m working on a theory that Twitter actually hurts my blogging. Now when I see an interesting post, etc., I don’t save it up to blog about it, I just log onto Twitter and 140 characters later, there you have it.
I need to get better at that.
For instance, here is this very cool blog post on Publisher’s Weekly about the strange ways people go about looking for books in bookstores. While the post itself is great, it’s really the comments section that follows that is truly priceless. Check it out for gems like these:
“One of my favorites was a phone call from a college student who said she needed ‘a copy of ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Jane Eyre. Would you like me to spell that for you?’ I had to put her on hold for a minute. I guess universities aren’t what they used to be.”
“One of my co-workers was helping a woman who wanted a book for her grandson. ‘He wants a book about a boy and his dog. I think it’s called Boy and his dog or boy and his wolf, maybe boy wolf.’ Until my co-worker said, ‘Beowulf?’ ‘Yes!’ said the woman. ‘That’s it, Beowulf.’”
“We had “Onion in the Closet” in lieu of “Indian in the Cupboard.” Also, a request for “a children’s book about European trains” turned out to be Thomas the Tank Engine.”
Makes one wonder how people have requested one of my books over the years.
Also, those of you who have read/are about to read TAP & GOWN will note a similar joke within its pages.
Yes, I’m a tease.
Speaking of Tap & Gown, there’s some upcoming release fun to be had, including, but not limited to:
Giveaways! Giveaways! Giveaways! (the book lover’s equivalent of Girls! Girls! Girls!)
An Interview with yours truly.
More dossiers.
The posting of the last of the Secret Stories
Possibly another Tap & Gown Show. It depends upon my schedule.
You are most like Alianne. You are rebellious and cunning. Like her mother, Alanna, you risk your own life to protect those around you, but you would rather they did not know it. Your passion for justice is just as strong as your compassion for others and they often conflict with one another.
We — and by “we” I mean “I” — are slightly stymied in our dossier progress by the picture component. I never really had firm, unyielding portraits in my head of most of the characters, but I did for Brandon and Poe, and so as I’m putting together pictures of possibilities, I keep thinking to myself that they are not *quite* right, and then I get frustrated and ignore the dossiers for a little while. Which is cool because it’s not like I don’t have a real book to write and a real proposal to finish and to, you know, do my job and stuff.
Last night I was at yoga class, and we had a substitute teacher who was talking to us about the Bhagavad Gita 2.47, which (as she put) basically says that you have the right to your actions, but not the outcome of your actions. (I came home and googled it, and it’s a lot more than that, but this is beyond the scope of the story, which is what I was thinking about in yoga class today.) You know how sometimes, when you least expect it, some stranger comes along and tells you precisely what you need to hear? I was just hanging out on my mat, zoning as she discussed the weekend yoga retreat and how there was a sale going on in the center’s shop on yoga props and then she drops this bombshell on me and I focused.
My writer friends and I talk a lot about “protecting the work” — about how it’s so easy to get caught up in marketing or submissions or reviews or what some other writer is doing to promote their books that you forget that the only thing — the most important thing, is the work.
And this is sort of the same thing backwards, at least to my mind. I am entitled to my actions, to the words I put down on the page. I am not entitled to anyone liking — or, and here’s the kicker — disliking those words. It doesn’t belong to me. Which is a good way sometimes of turning off that internal editor, which is a rather misleading term for the chorus of “this won’t sell” “your fans won’t like this” “your editor won’t like this” “the reviewers are going to get all over this” that goes on in my head. It’s not actually an internal editor at all. It’s the internal manifestation of all those things that are very external indeed, that are the outcomes of my actions. Somebody liking or not liking the choices I’ve made with my work is not my responsibility. Making the right choices is.
Even when I am writing to spec, writing with specific guidelines or saleability in mind, I am writing about these issues and themes because they concern me as a human being. So much of writing is, for me, a way to think about these issues, to hold a conversation with myself.
But there is a deeper truth in here.
The ending of Working For The Devil was so hard to write. I knew what the ending had to be, of course–I was pretty sure I was working on a series and had the framework in my head. The only way the framework would hold up is if a Certain Character died.
I did not want that Certain Character to die. My editor did not want that Certain Character to die. My agent, my readers, nobody wanted that Certain Character to kick the bucket.
But he had to. Because it was the essential truth of the story, and I had made a bargain with the Muse and the story. The bargain was I would not truckle. The bargain was that I would tell the truth as best as I knew how, and the truth was that character had to die. There was no way around it. That was the way the story went.
Name: James Timshel Orcutt
