Twenty Days and Counting

Twenty Days until the release of the fourth and final volume of the Secret Society Girl series, TAP & GOWN, and I’m feeling super nostalgic.

It’s been four years almost to the day since I sold my first book, and three years to the day since I quit my job to write full time. Right now, I have all four books of the Secret Society Girl series stacked up across from me, their candy-colored covers a bright and cheery reminder on this gray day that I wrote four books and got them published! They are on bookstore shelves where total strangers can buy and read them! They were thoughts in my head and now they are packets of paper you can get all over the world!

Sorry, had to geek out there for a minute.

And then there’s a fifth book coming this fall!!!!

Okay, now I’m done for real.

Though it seriously never gets old. I get to make stuff up for a living. I get to make up stuff out of completely thin air and other people are entertained by it! It’s the most amazing feeling. I remember the first time I saw my work in print in something other than a school newspaper. I remember the first time I ever got a check for something I’d written. Had I been a restaurant, I’d had framed that money to hang over the bar, but since i don’t have a bar, it wasn’t a dollar, and I needed to pay my rent, I cashed it in instead. Every time I get one of my books, I do a little happy dance. Every time I get a check for something I have written, I do a slightly bigger happy dance (so do my mortgage lenders). This is the best job I’ve ever had. I hope I get to keep it.

So I wanted to take this opportunity to say THANK YOU to everyone who has bought one of my books these past few years. Thank you so much for reading the things I’ve written. You have no idea what it means to me.

Around the web, some folks are reading Tap & Gown. Here’s what they are saying:

Alexandra of Not Enough Bookshelves:

The search for taps means that quite a few new characters are introduced and some of my favourites got less page time than I’d have liked. Having said that, Diana does do a great job of tying up everyone’s loose ends and making the new characters interesting and well rounded. If she gets tired of killer Unicorns there’s definitely a place for the adventures of the new R&G knights. Amy is still a utterly engaging and likable narrator. I love her asides and her lists and her general attitude. The book is as fast paced as the previous three and the dialogue, especially between Amy and Jamie, sparkles.

Tap & Gown is a great conclusion to the series. It’s a little darker than the pervious three books. t made me laugh and cry (twice) and took me back to my own final days at University. The sadness, the excitement and the sheer overwhelmingness of deciding what to do next are really captured here.

Tiff, a blog reader and ARC winner, shared her thoughts on the PeterfreundFans LJ community:

…the real meat of the story lies in the new characters, most of them Amy’s junior potential taps. What we learn with her is such an important message of female empowerment, of tenacity, and of being true to oneself. We learn about sacrifice and compromise. And most of all, we learn about change, both for better and for worse. It’s a little cliché to talk of change being the central theme of a book about graduation, but Peterfreund spins it in a way that doesn’t feel quite so obvious. Amy’s approach to change evolves so subtly, but so genuinely as to make us feel that no other approach could have worked.

For me, the key to a good story is unpredictable characters in unpredictable circumstances. That is, the characters surprise us with their actions, yet those actions feel in character. At the same time, the plot must maintain some kind of unpredictability, throwing those characters into situations that are unexpected, but completely plausible. Peterfreund successfully achieves this balance with Tap & Gown—I was gripped by both the story and the characters’ development in a way that made this book the most masterful of the series, and affording closure while still allowing me to imagine Amy’s future.

Which, thanks, guys. I got all teary eyed and felt tempted to play Green Day’s “Good Riddance” (in passing, how annoying is it when bands call their songs by names that are so obviously unsuited to the song that they have to include the title everyone else knows it as — in this case, “Time of Your Life”– in parentheses afterward?) and flip through some old college photo albums and stuff.

And then I realized that I have to write, and if I don’t, I won’t get to keep this job that I love so much.

Also, a new excerptlet is way more fun than that, don’t you think? So here goes:

George stopped at his usual entryway. “See you guys later,” he said, and as the door closed, I noticed he went not up the stairs to his room,  but rather cut to the right and headed into the basement.

Huh? These are the things in the basement:

1)     The laundry room. Chance that George was washing his whites at 3 a.m.: 0%
2)     The Buttery. Hamburgers, pizza bagels, and grape sodas galore, but at this time of night, it was locked up tight.
3)     The underground passageway to all the other entryways in the building.

I quickened my pace, took the stairs up to my entryway two at a time, yanked open the door, and sprinted down the basement passageway just in time to see George’s fabulous butt disappearing into the corridor toward the sophomore wing.

Huh.

I met a quizzical Josh in front of our suite door on the first floor. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing.” I pushed past him and into the common room. Where was George going? At night? In secret? “I thought I’d forgotten to take my clothes out of the dryer earlier.”

“But then you remembered?” Josh asked.

Not that I cared what George did. I’d totally moved on. He could have as many three a.m. rendezvous as he wanted with as many sophomores as he cared to. No skin off my back. I had a boyfriend and I was over him.

“Yep.” I tripped over the laundry bag of obviously dirty Spring Break clothes I’d dragged into the common room that afternoon and then promptly ignored.

“Uh-huh.” Josh shook his head. “Night, Bugaboo.”