Posts Tagged ‘Spouse Creature’

Some words from Tammy:

Whew!  I am back, bloody but unbowed, maybe a tad bit semiconscious, but what a wild ride!  This is absolutely the longest and wildest book tour I have ever had, including Firehouse Books at Fort Collins, Colorado; The Tattered Cover, Colfax Avenue (they have two stores now) in Denver; The King’s English in Salt Lake City; Barnes & Noble in Orem, Utah; Boskone (the science fiction convention) in Boston; Brookline Booksmith, near Harvard, Massachusetts; Escape Pod Comics, Huntington, NY, together with comics and book writer G. Willow Wilson; Barnes & Noble at Union Square, New York, NY; Books of Wonder, the new 84th Street store in New York, NY; Oblong Books, Rhinebeck, NY;  the University Bookstore hosting Rachel Hartman, Lish McBride, and me at the University Temple United Methodist Church in The Sanctuary in Seattle; three days of Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, then Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona!

By the way, as if my head weren’t spinning enough, Tempests entered The New York Times Young Adult Bestseller List at #1 right before I left!  Talk about a sign from the gods that things were going to go well . . .

I met many wonderful fans, familiar and new, got to talk with fellow authors and old friends, became acquainted with new landscapes, visited the Seattle Aquarium for the fourth (fifth?) time, saw the Grand Canyon from overhead,  and signed lots and lots and lots and lots of books.  So did my assistant Julie and my spouse-creature Tim, co-writers of Spy’s Guide to Tortall.  I drank way too much coffee, wore my funkiest-in-life-ever (funkier even than the miniskirts and hot pants I wore when I was much younger!) outfits, and came to hate tiny airline seats. And now I’m verblunget, as I say, with catch-up mail, unhappy kitties, new rescues to find homes for, and a book to write quickly!  But I’m home, and it snowed some more, and my office cat—the lovely Autumn—is curled up behind my butt, so all is good!

Back to the book, then!

—Tammy 

Big Changes in Summer 2006

We finally did it. After nearly 27 years for me and 25 years for Tim, we moved out of New York City. We’d been thinking about it for a while. I was more interested, at first. I spent 13 years of my life in western Pennsylvania as a kid, of course, and until moving to Manhattan, I’d spent a lot of years in small towns or suburbia. Manhattan was wonderful, heady, exciting, thrilling, everything you dream. Then I wanted to move away, but we couldn’t afford it. Then we settled in. In recent years, though, I really started to miss traveling less than a couple of hours to get to real woods. I wanted a house, with a yard. I wanted bird feeders and trees. I wanted to be able to put friends up for the night and maybe have a garden. Worse, I wanted all that for less than a fortune. When he began to look at prices for things like houses and auto insurance, Tim began to see what I meant. He took longer to come around, but every time we returned from trips away, he’d spend a week cursing our New York-sized kitchen, in which it’s impossible for two people to move around. He looked at our bills and our Manhattan stores, and compare them with the ones in upstate New York.

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Cool Things of 2005

  • Getting the New England Science Fiction Association’s Skylark Award for being an author who plays well with fans, and having Jane Yolen tell me why it’s important to put my award where the sun don’t shine.
  • Going to southeastern Alaska with Tim, which included:
    – Seeing my first glacier in person, the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau;
    – Seeing scores of bald eagles and humongous ravens;
    – Visiting the Alaskan Raptor Center in Sitka and being introduced to Volta, the bald eagle;
    – Seeing wild whales.
  • Having my face snuffled by a month-old baby rhino at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.
  • Visiting the Badlands, the Black Hills, Custer National Park, and the Needles in South Dakota with my sister Kim, which included:
    – Sitting (quietly) in the car while a herd of buffalo split and walked around us;
    – Feeding alpine chipmunks at a scenic lookout;
    – Getting wild burro slobber on Kim’s car as we fed them carrots;
    – Visiting Devil’s Tower in Wyoming with Kim and her husband Randy.
  • Going to my first family reunion in 30 years with Tim, Kim, and Randy.
  • Meeting Jane Lindskold, one of my favorite fantasy writers, after years of fandom.
  • Getting to visit again with Charles de Lint, Holly Black, Debra Doyle, James Macdonald, and the one and only Bruce Coville in my travels.
  • Attending the Witching Hour symposium in Salem, Massachusetts, and having a wonderful time with a lot of really smart Harry Potter fans who are into a million other things.
  • Shaking the hand of Studs Terkel, who re-made the face of social history and oral history with his book, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.
  • Discovering rough opals in their native stone: Mexican fire opals, Honduran (or Andesite) opals, black opals, Koroit opals, and Yowah opals, much to Tim’s dismay!  And as for what I’ve made of all these discoveries—you’ll just have to read the books, won’t you?!

Recording Circle of Magic Audiobooks with Bruce Coville’s Full Cast Audio

(See Photo Galleries for numerous production stills.)

In 2001 or 2002, I forget which, my friend and fellow writer Bruce Coville approached me about recording my Circle of Magic quartet with his new audio book company, Full Cast Audio. Because of my background in doing radio during the 1980s, I was thrilled to have the chance to get in front of a microphone again and to hear my characters given life by a group of good actors. There is no feeling quite like it. With movies and television, the studio’s choice of actors and visual details never quite matches the way anyone, particularly the author, imagined the story. With audio productions, though, the right actor can give the listener’s imagination an extra hook on which to hang her/his imagination, the extra boost that makes the book live in the listener’s mind.

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