A Note:

6/2/13

I once told myself: IF I am accepted into grad school, this blog would no longer be updated. As it turns out, in April, I received news of my acceptance for the Fall 2013 semester, where I will attain a Master's degree of Science in Nutrition.

Running a blog, as many of you may already know, is a demanding side job once the excitement wears off. And once I fell out of the blogging community's loop (have you SEEN how many blogs there are now? Wow!), it was like the kiss of death. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get into a blogging routine once this happened due to the disconnect I felt from the community.

So I took a break. I struggled with the loss and with missing my blog. And then I realized I didn't have to run Book Faery to still be a book reviewer; I could read my books and post reviews online. I'm still a book review blogger, just not in the traditional sense.

I'll still be online. You can chat with me on Twitter, where I'll be posting links to my reviews and talking books. I'll also be posting links to nutrition articles. And if you'd like to connect with me where I guarantee I will post reviews, just add me as a friend on Goodreads.

So that's all, folks! It's been a fun and amazing journey, and I thank you all for listening to my thoughts about books. I hope we all can keep in touch elsewhere :)

Tori

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Guest Post & Giveaway with Piper Maitland

Piper Maitland lives on a Tennessee farm with her family. She is the author of the vampire thriller, Acquainted With the Night (Berkley/November 2011). She is currently working on the sequel, A Requiem for Daylight. Piper has also written novels under the name Michael Lee West.




“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive.”

When people ask how I became a writer, I blame it on my sickly childhood, a book-lined room, and Daphne Du Maurier’s fondness for old mansions. It began when I was a young girl, my mother sent me to Girl Scout camp. After a day of caving, I spiked a high fever and couldn’t breathe. The doctors were puzzled. They took my mother aside and asked if I had been exposed to tuberculosis. X-rays and skin tests finally determined that I’d contracted histoplasmosis, a rather common malady in middle Tennessee. 

Fearing that my brother would catch the disease, my mother sent me to my grandmother’s house in the piney woods of Mississippi. My Mimi’s home didn’t have servants or sweeping views of the ocean, but its cozy warmth and smells of fresh baked bread were healing forces. I spent a rainy morning in Mimi’s book-lined study—a rare treat because my mother did not purchase books and borrowed them from her friends or the local library.  

On Mimi’s shelf, I found a tattered copy of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I curled up in the window seat, and for the next few days, I entered the world of Manderley. I could see Jasper, the spotted Spaniel dog, as he followed the unnamed narrator around the stone mansion, the sinister housekeeper, Danvers, lurking in the shadows. I could feel the warm, sandy grass as I walked down the path to the sea. When the narrator walked down Manderley’s secluded driveway, I was right behind her. When she sat down at the dinner table, I lifted the linen napkin and ran my finger over the ornate, monogrammed R. 

In real life, apparently Daphne Du Maurier was a bit of a house stalker, one of my favorite vices. Her young mind was shaped by two English estates. The first, Milton Park, was located in Northamptonshire, and Daphne spent the summer in the lavish gardens. Later, Hitchcock would use Milton as the inspiration for Manderley’s interiors. 

The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done….
 

But it was the second house, Menabilly, that shaped Manderley, along with other fictional mansions (My Cousin Rachel and The King’s General). Daphne would walk around the ruined house, and while she mentally refurbished the manse, her writer’s imagination was firmly engaged. Using words, she constructed a hybrid of Milton Park and Menabilly, and a house with another M-name was born: Manderley. Daphne constructed the grey stones, soaring ceilings, and windows with glimpses of the water. 

I recovered from my illness and returned to Tennessee, but part of me stayed in Manderley. I became a seasoned house stalker. I’d walk around the neighborhood, ringing doorbells, boldly asking owners if I could tour their homes. Oddly enough, these kind souls never refused. 

My mother forbade me to become a writer, and I ended up with a B.S. in nursing. I wrote in a stuffy closet under the staircase and papered the walls with rejection slips. During those long, unpublished years, Manderley was never far from my mind. When I began writing full time, I wasn’t sure how to build a fictional world, so I turned to Rebecca. Fictional houses became just as important as my characters—in fact, the houses became characters.

In Acquainted With the Night, I “designed” a farmhouse in rural Tennessee, a cliff-top monastery, a stone house in Oxford, an English country estate, and a London pharmaceutical building. My favorite house was an Italian vampire’s villa. I placed it on an island near Venice: 

The villa reminded Caro of a floating hotel. The four-story Italianate was the color of oyster shells. Stone gargoyles peered down from an upper balcony. The island wasn’t landscaped so much as sculpted. Stone nymphs danced around a fountain. Further out, boxwood hedges formed crosses. Next to the front steps, topiaries were carved into mythological beasts.
 

The mansion’s name is Villa Primaverina. Inside, it had been modernized: a mirrored weight room, lap pool, media center, game room, elevators, blood bank, and a virtual golf course. Naturally the manse has a windowless, book-jammed library or two. 

In real life, I will soon move to a farmhouse, mainly because I fell in love with the winding driveway. It’s far from the sea, but the setting has already sparked my imagination, because just last night, I dreamed of Manderley.







Giveaway


Acquainted with evil…
The pages of history are written in the blood of the undead…
A woman’s quest for the truth…
A medieval icon that holds the clues…
An ancient book with the power to shake Christianity—and humanity itself…

Caroline Clifford’s bland life as a London tour guide flips upside down when her beloved uncle is brutally murdered at a Bulgarian archeological site. While traveling to recover his remains, she meets a man who corresponded with her uncle. Jude Barrett is a biochemist on a mission—to eradicate the world of vampires… 

At first, Caro is dismissive of Jude’s beliefs, but she can’t ignore the signs around her—the human bites on her uncle, the strange men following her, the anguished cries after sundown. Strange anagrams on her uncle’s passport lead her and Jude to a cliff-top monastery in Greece, where a shattering revelation connects a relic Caro inherited from her parents to an age-old text on immortality—and an enigmatic prophecy that pits the forces of darkness and light in a showdown that could destroy them all…



7 comments:

  1. When I was a kid we weren't supposed to ride our bikes on the highway. So of course we'd go a couple of blocks from my house and ride onto the shoulder and into a parking lot (about 10 feet).

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  2. When I was younger a teenage. My mom did not want my mom to cut my long hair but I did. Please enter me in contest. Tore923@aol.com

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  3. Yes, I was forbidden in getting a tattoo, so I got my eyebrow pierced, instead! LOL

    And eventually, I got my tattoo. Eventually, the parental units ended up like both.

    Thanks,
    Tracey D
    booklover0226 at gmail dot com

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  4. My mom and I watched a news program once that tackled the issue of rock albums and the controversy behind questionable lyrics and satanism. She looked at her teenage son (me), with his long hair and rock music, and told me that I was never to bring any of those albums into her house. The fact was that I had nearly all of the ones mentioned in the show already... *grins*

    Thanks for introducing me to this writer. *waves to Tori and Piper*

    -Jimmy

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  5. My parents definitely forbade from doing a great many things, which I eventually found a way to do anyway:) We still talk about!

    yadkny@hotmail.com

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  6. we were not suppose to tell any one about the ghost in the Franklyn manor in Cleveland ohio and two the day it still haunted
    desithe blonde2msn.com

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  7. I don't think my parents forbade me to do most things except being out late at night or sneaking out. Honestly, I never did while I lived with them. I didn't see the point of it. My brother, on the other hand, is a different story. Thanks for the giveaway.

    wingedpersephone at gmail dot com

    ReplyDelete