Posts Tagged ‘Tammy Speaks’

Help the Syrian Team for Animal Rescue!

If you have a little bit to spare, STAR (The Syrian Team for Animal Rescue) needs help!

Based in Damascus, STAR rescues, rehabilitates, and provides ongoing care and shelter to stray and injured animals in Syria. This shelter depends on individual donations for its survival, and as of this post, STAR is still a ways from their $20,000 goal.

Help STAR look after injured animals in Syria

This is a cause Tammy strongly believes in. To make donations go that extra mile, she will be matching fans’ donations, up to a total of $1,000, from now until March 28th. Just send an email to tpiercemail@gmail.com with the subject line “STAR Fundraiser” and some confirmation of the donation and amount.

I believe in these people and their mission with all my heart.  They’ve been struggling for years to save as many pets (of those who couldn’t take their animals as they fled) and abandoned animals as possible.  They are heroes to me, and since I can’t support them all on my own, I’m hoping my friends and fans will feel the same way. Here’s to the animals cast aside and the hardworking people who rescue them!

—Tammy 

Please, donate if you can, and share. Together, we can raise $2,000 for STAR!

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 

In Memory

My beloved agent’s oldest daughter Jesse, a fan and an animal lover and rescuer, died very suddenly. If you feel so inclined, would you make a donation to one of these causes that she supported? Even if it’s just a couple of dollars, it would help, as you know. Think of it as good wishes that will help to carry her to the Summerlands:

Many thanks,
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?!

My Mundane Jobs

Behold the latest of my ever-changing addition to a basic biography that doesn’t change much. Call them snippets from my own mental scrapbook:

Babysitter (duh), 1966 – 1972: The first time I babysat an infant boy, I begged my mother to change his diaper. Instead she laughed herself silly and told me to do it. (To her credit, she did talk me through the changing process, which I’d never done before, but she still laughed till she turned purple over me changing a little boy. I’d never seen one before!)

Census Information Taker, 1970: For one week. This is the kind of job that introverts dream they have to do in Hell. My mother had the job, so she handed some off to 16-year-old me.
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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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