A Quick Interview with Author Piper Maitland

Urban fantasy author Piper Maitland is back at the Nook today. Last year, she stopped by with a guest post about her writing rituals as part of her tour for her first book, "Acquainted with the Night". Now the sequel, "Hunting Daylight" is out and Piper took the time to answer a few questions for me.

Piper Maitland lives on a Tennessee farm with her family. She is the author of the paramormal romance, Acquainted With the Night (Berkley/November 2011). The sequel,  Hunting Daylight, was  published on 2/5/13 by Berkley/Penguin USA. Piper has also written novels under the name Michael Lee West.

Find Piper online:

Website
Twitter

Facebook 

Blog

*Spoilers for the first book in the questions*  

Bea, I’m excited to visit you today. Your questions are always fun and make me think. Without further ado, I’ll start with the first one.

 

Thanks Piper. It's great to have you back again. 

Bea: If you could be a character in a book, which one would it be, and what part would you play? (Romantic lead, sidekick, etc) 

Piper: I’d want to be Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Why? Darcy. And I adore Lizzie’s wit and spunk.

Bea: Do you have a guilty pleasure? If so, what is it?

Piper: I’m a dead-serious cook, but I also like to buy store-bought desserts and gild them with flowers or drizzled chocolate.

Bea: Do you think social media is important these days for an author?

Piper: It seems to be a part of everyday life. I love my blog, though I write about food, not books. I treasure the friendships I’ve made, so it’s truly a social thing for me. I enjoy Pinterest, too.

Bea: Why jump so far forward in time instead of picking up the story closer to the end of the first book?

Piper: A great editor once explained how to handle trilogies and series fiction: to forget that I’d written the first book and pretend it was backstory. She also told me to be fearless with the timeline. Jude and Caro’s daughter, Vivi, is at the center of an 8^th century prophecy, one that signals a showdown between humans and immortals. The first novel had ended with Caro’s pregnancy. If the action in Hunting Daylight had begun with Vivi in utero, or even as a baby, she wouldn’t have become a fully-realized character. Worse, she could end up as a plot device, Vivi MacGuffin.

Bea: If you could have dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? 

Piper: James Bond. He’s handsome, sophisticated, and has a license to kill. We’d begin our dinner at the Athenaeum Hotel in London. Between the martinis and dessert (a delicious trifle), I’d listen to his juicy stories.

Thank you Piper for taking the time to answer my questions. Best of luck with your tour!

Piper will be continuing her blog tour on Feb. 10^th at www.ismellsheep.com!

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Book Blurb (from goodreads) ~ *Spoilers for the first book* 

Piper Maitland's Top 10 Writing Rituals: A Guest Post

Photo from author website

 Please welcome Piper Maitland to the blog today. She is on a blog tour to celebrate the release of her urban fantasy book, "Acquainted with the Night", which was released by Berkley on November 29th. (See my review here.)

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

BOOK BLURB (from goodreads):

 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… 

ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT

By Piper Maitland 

ISBN: 9780425243633

Published by: BERKLEY

Genre: FICTION,URBAN FANTASY, THRILLER

Format: MMP, ebook

Length: 539 pages

Release Date: NOVEMBER 29, 2011

Author Website:  http://www.pipermaitland.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/pipermaitland

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/PiperMaitland

Blog:  http://acquaintedwiththenightbypipermaitland.blogspot.com/

Piper is here to talk to us about the rituals that she uses when writing. It's a fun and interesting glimpse into an author's mind and writing process. Thank you Piper for joining us today.


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Piper Maitland’s Top 10 Writing Rituals

1. Black Flair Pen - I'd love to break my superstition about these pens. Kroger stopped selling them, and I've been forced to buy the pens in bulk. They're all over the house. Words seem to flow faster and surer when I write first drafts with a Flair pen (must be black, medium point, at this stage).  

2. Yellow Legal Pads – Here’s another cursed superstition. When I was a young girl, I wrote on Big Chief tablets. Many hundreds of years later, this item might be extinct. For the past three decades, I’ve written all first drafts on yellow legal pads. When I complete a wobbly draft, I type up the whole mess.

3.    Photo collage – During the pre-writing stage, which can last a while, I focus on the characters by building collages. I don’t care about hair color or facial features at this stage. I’m more interested in the characters’ inner lives. I gather pictures of their favorite foods, paint colors, seasons, etc. Then I go deeper. What scares them? What do they desire? What are their quirks? All of these images are taped on one side of a double door. I will also make a photo collage and use it as the image on my laptop. 

A novel’s setting springs from the characters, and when the time is right I will add photos of places the characters live, have lived, and will travel. At some point I’ll know my characters’ physical traits, but I keep them in my mind’s eye. 

On the other side of the closet door, I will gradually add Post-it Notes—plot points and snippets of dialogue. Usually these snippets come just as I’m falling asleep. When I reach this stage, the characters are talking, and I’m no longer writing—I am inhabiting the book.

4.  Inspiration tray – Also during the pre-writing stage, I’ll grab a metal tray, a large one, and walk around the house, gathering objects that call out to me. For AWTN, I included a Greek orthodox icon, garlic pods, a box of Jammie Dodgers (British biscuits), a pomegranate, a crucifix, an unused petri dish, and a vanilla scented candle.

Pomegranates

Greek icon

5.  Music playlist – For each novel, I build a music playlist. As the book changes and grows, so does the music. I don’t have an office; I write on a laptop in the family room. It can get noisy! I put on earphones and listen to my playlist. The music acts as a door, blotting out the world, but the songs are also intensely personal for the characters and the story.

 

6.  Cocooning – When I’m working hard, a ringing phone can cut through the music and knock me out of a book. Sometimes I can’t find my way back, and if I do, it can take days and a virtual machete. I’ve also been known to remove batteries from the doorbell. I tend to distance myself from the world. For me, this is necessary. I just want to be with the characters and follow them around. I have to give them 100% of my focus. Sometimes this can be a problem for the people around me. I have an understanding, loving husband who understand the process. My younger son is a biochemist and an author, and he keeps watch during this relentless period when I just fade from the world. I thank God for them. When I emerge from the cocoon, a few family members are always waiting with fangs and claws <grin>.

 

7.  Digging in the garden – If weather permits, I like to dig in the garden. I sift through the dirt, looking for pretty stones. In my yard, I’ve uncovered brown glass medicine bottles and two funeral wreaths (yellow plastic). It’s no accident that Nigel Clifford turned out to be an archeologist in AWTN.

 

8.  Cooking  -- I’m a self-taught cook, and I love to bake whatever my characters are eating.  If I can’t bake it, I’ll try to find the item at the grocery. While I worked on this book, I threw out my carb counter and ate baklava, moussaka, potato soup, and homemade crackers. 

 

9. Revisioning – When I finish the first draft, I print the manuscript and attack it with a blue Flair pen. Then I try to decipher my handwritten notes: corrections, additions, and deletions. This is a miserable stage and requires lots and lots of chocolate. I try to think of this process as revisioning, a reimagining the scenes and characters, as opposed to revision.

 

10. Celebration – When the book is finished, I celebrate with a   slice of mile-high, chocolate dipped cheesecake.

Doesn't that look delicious? 

Thanks, Bea, for having me on your blog today. I enjoyed it!

Review of Acquainted with the Night by Piper Maitland

Publisher: Berkley
Release Date: November 29th, 2011
Series: #1 in the Night series
Buying Links: Amazon     The Book Depository

Book Blurb (from goodreads):

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…

Teaser:

She stepped over to the mirror and lowered the scarf. She'd expected to see two jagged holes, but the wounds were much larger. Serrated tooth marks curved into two half moons, one set above the other, with a circle of unblemished flesh between them. He'd bitten into her the way a normal person would bite into an apple. The bleeding had slowed, and a thin scarlet line zigzagged down her neck.

My Thoughts:

"Acquainted with the Night" is a blend of mystery, thriller, urban fantasy and romance. Add in some religion and European history, and you get a story full of action, twists and turns, and yet another update on vampire mythology. Although, the religious aspects and some of the vampire traits reminded me a little bit of "The Cowboy and The Vampire" by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall.

I was hooked from the first page. "Acquainted with the Night" is a mystery, a search for religious icons with international bad guys after our heroes, melded with a story about vampires in the twenty-first century and the result is a thrilling, fascinating story about a woman's search, not only for the religious icons, but for her family and herself and her struggle to adapt to the truth about herself and also find love. Now, that's a lot for one book and sounds like it could be a soap opera but Maitland manages to avoid soap opera territory. It's a long book, 539 pages in paperback, in order to accommodate everything and the resolution is open minded but book two is coming in 2012. If you like an intelligent story and a mix of genres, and don't mind a little sex, you need to pick up this book.

I received a paperback from the publisher for review.