Contemporary Summer Interview: Ally Carter

I am SO excited for today's post...we have an inteview with one of mine and Liz's favourite contemporary authors...Ally Carter! Ally very kindly answered the questions we sent, so thank you so much =]

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Hi Ally! Thanks so much for taking the time to answer some interview questions for us, we’re both huge fans of your books and we really appreciate it.

First up…just how exactly do you go about researching how to rob an art gallery?

Well, I have a huge advantage in that I get to plan both the heist and the security system.  Robbing an art gallery is far easier when you get to play both sides.

On the topic of research, a lot of the information in both the Gallagher Girls and Heist Society series seems totally genuine (in terms of spy techniques etc) how much of this is real and how much did you invent for the purpose of the books? 

I tried to get all of the theories as close as possible, especially in the first couple of books when I was setting up the school and establishing the world.  I have never been trained as a spy (obviously) but there are a lot of declassified training manuals and other things, and I drew upon those heavily.  The very specific things (like names of devices or maneuvers) are generally made up, but the overall principles are as close as I could make them.

We’ve both read GG5 so we obviously have to ask….any hints/teasers for GG6??

I’m really excited to write GG6, I can tell you that.  When I was working on GG5 it felt very much like I was setting up a GG6 to do list.  When the book ends, Cammie knows a lot about the past, but she also has a very clear sense of what she’s going to have to do in the future.  Some people need saving; some people need taken down.  And she’s going to try to do all of it.

With GG6 being the last of the series, do you have any other projects you can tell us about?

Nothing that I can talk about just yet, but I do have a lot of ideas.  I’m just going to have to really think hard about which one is the right one to tackle as my first post-GG project.

If the characters of Gallagher Girls and Heist Society ever met, what do you think would happen?

I get this question a lot!  I honestly don’t know.  Perhaps I will have to explore it someday.  I am sure that it would depend entirely upon the circumstances.

 Can you please make Zach (for Liz) and Hale (for me) real?? (and also a little older….)

Oh, if I could do that then you girls would have to get in line!

 All the characters in both series have vey clear-cut and diverse personalities/characteristics, how hard is it to get so much depth into characters, especially the more minor ones?

Thank you.  I think I’m at a huge advantage because I have had (so far) several books to accomplish that.  Someone who has a very minor role in book one can have more significance in book two and so on.  Everyone (hopefully) gets their time to shine.

We’re currently hosting a Contemporary YA event on our blogs, what other contemporary books would you recommend for fans of the Gallagher Girls and Heist Society books (or just in general)?

If your readers haven’t yet discovered E. Lockhart then they are seriously missing out.  Her books The Boyfriend List (and later books in the series) and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau- Banks are some of my absolute favorites and great reads for fans of my series.  I’m also currently reading Code Name Verity which a World War II spy girl story.  Super great stuff.

And finally….what’s Hale’s name??

No comment.

Thanks so much Ally!

If you're in the UK, you can win a complete set of Ally Carter books (and trust me you want to!) here. If you're outside the UK, you can win a contemp book of your choice!

Today, Liz is posting an interview with Cora Harrison, author of The Debutantes!

Blog Tour Stop: Interview with Emma Mills

Emma is the author of newly-released UK-based paranormal YA  Witchblood and she's kindly stopped by for an interview to tell us all about Witchblood, her publishing journey and what's in store for her next.

In the spirit of Twitter, can you tell us about your book in 140 characters or less? 

Girl dies, gets saved by a vampire, turned into a vampire & fights to keep her soul, as she attempts to control her desire & newfound power

What tempted you to write YA, and why paranormal YA in particular?

It had to be YA, because that is what I love reading at the moment. I am in a book club and read other prize winning type adult books each month, but YA gives me the most enjoyment. I went for paranormal because I’ve always had an interest in Wicca, witches and had a secret love of vampires!

The setting of Witchblood is really unique, both in the sense it is set in Britain and that it is then set outside of London. What was your reasoning for this?

It was after loving the Twilight Saga, then the Evernight, Wings, Morganville, & House of Night series, amongst others that I came up with my own idea for a book series and I thought it would be great to add a British voice. There seem to be plenty of UK YA writers, but not many seem to do paranormal…or maybe I haven’t found them! It was an obvious choice to then set it in Manchester, rather than London, because I’ve grown up here and know it well, where as I’ve only been to London a couple of times. Plus in my opinion Manchester is a great city, which has everything, and is currently very ‘in’.

I've been following your blog posts about your journey through self-publishing, has it been easier or harder than you imagined?

Both! On the one hand it is far more time consuming, and has had many more facets to it than I initially thought – for example Blog tours & Book trailers were something I didn’t know about, and it all seems rather daunting. Yet once you get into it and learn about each thing you realise that, yes it is extremely time consuming, but it is also very ‘do-able’, so things I initially thought would be impossible, become possible.

If you could choose to become a paranormal creature, which would you choose?

Hmm I’d probably choose to be a witch! I love the idea of spell casting and potion making, and if I could fly a broomstick and have a go at Quidditch I’d be in heaven! Although, after loving Aprilynne Pike’s, ‘Wings’ series I would also quite fancy being a faery!

Can you tell us a bit about what you're working on right now? 

Currently I am writing ‘Witchcraft’, which is the sequel to ‘Witchblood’.  I was doing really well and writing 1000-1500 words a day a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately it has been neglected the last couple of weeks, due to me arranging this tour, designing the poster and other promotional issues. My last word count was 13,661 and I’m at chapter 5. You can keep an eye on where I’m up to with Witchcraft and read sneak excerpts on my blog. 

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When Jess steals a glance at a gorgeous guy in a Manchester nightclub, little does she realise how he is going to change her life…or should that be death? Yet, the vampire clan could never have predicted what they were taking on. 


With Luke pronounced ‘off-limits’ and the blood of a vampire simmering in Jess’s body, can she forget the love of her life and move on? If not, she will risk exposing the entire Northern vampire clan to untold dangers, in order to live her life the way she wants. 


Can Jess be sure that Luke is all he appears to be? Will she succumb to the attraction she desperately tries not to feel for Daniel? And why does she still crave a packet of crisps more than a tasty teenage boy’s blood

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Emma is very generously offering up an eBook version of her fantastic new book to one lucky winner! 
Giveaway is completely international and will end 17/02/12

To enter, simply leave a comment  with your email address!

Author Interview and Giveaway: Ruth Warburton!

Ruth Warburton's debut young adult novel A Witch in Winterreleases today! Ruth very kindly took the time to stop by my blog and answer some questions about her book...and stay tuned for an awesome giveaway at the end!

Anna Winterson doesn't know she's a witch and would probably mock you for believing in magic, but after moving to the small town of Winter with her father, she learns more than she ever wanted to about power. When Anna meets Seth, she is smitten, but when she enchants him to love her, she unwittingly amplifies a deadly conflict between two witch clans and splits her own heart in two. She wants to love Seth, to let him love her - but if it is her magic that's controlling his passion, then she is as monstrous as the witch clan who are trying to use her amazing powers for their own gain.

When love is tangled up in magic, how can you be sure what's real?

Buy A Witch in Winter: Amazon UK/TBD

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1. I'm a huuuuge fan of twitter so, can you sum up A Witch in Winter in 140 characters for us? 

Ooh hard! Ok...

It's your average girl meets boy, girl enchants boy, girl tries to take enchantment off & they both get into a whole heap of trouble, story.

How's that? 140 EXACTLY.

[I checked, it is--C]

2. What inspired you to write YA and did you do a lot of research into the genre before writing your own?

I don't think I ever really sat down to write YA. It was a sort of mix of chance and circumstance.

The seed for the story came from an interview I listened to on radio four where the interviewer was talking about romance, and how the challenge in modern romance is keeping the main characters from jumping into bed with each other - because in this day and age, if you like each other, why wouldn't you? And I started thinking that for me, the main reason I wouldn't jump into bed with someone I was in love with, would be if I wasn't sure howthey felt about me. And somehow the idea of the spell just popped into my head - a girl gets the boy she loves, but can never be completely sure how he feels about her.

It just came out as YA in my head - I knew from the outset that the characters would be teens, and I'm not sure why, except that maybe I was spending a lot of time in the children's section of the library with my toddler, and I'd started browsing the YA section - basically out of boredom! I never really got to sit down and read a full book - but I'd look at the titles and the jackets and maybe read a page here and there - and it reminded me of a whole section of books that I hadn't thought about for a long time. I work in adult publishing so although I read a lot, it's almost always "work" books - which means adult literary fiction and non-fiction, pretty much.

Which kind of answers your other question - did I do a lot of research? No - not really, in the sense that I didn't read a great deal that was specifically YA. But I guess I had a pretty good idea of the tone and themes out there, just from browsing.

3. I know that you work in publishing, do you think this has helped (or hindered) your journey as an author?

Hmm... good question. I'd say a bit of both.

It helped for sure in that I knew how high the bar was, and how good a manuscript has to be to get published, so I made damn sure my book was as perfect as I could make it. I also had a pretty good idea of how to craft a pitch (it's kind of what I do in my day-job, only for other people's books, which, let me tell you, is a whole lot easier than pitching your own!) 

I also knew the basics - like the kind of thing that makes a submission an automatic "no", and how to research agents and go about subbing to them. But I didn't have any contacts in the children's side of the business so for me the actual process of subbing was the same as for any other aspiring author - I looked up sites on the internet like www.authoradvance.com and checked who was interested in YA, and who was accepting subs, and then I drew up a hit list and subbed via the agents' slush piles like anyone else.

But it also hindered for the same reasons. I'd been writing for years but always adult novels and all my manuscripts had always gone under the bed. I just wrote for my own fun, really. As I said above, it's incredibly hard to get published - fantastic manuscripts get rejected every day. I knew the odds and it really put me off even trying - which is kind of pathetic, but I'm not the kind of person who's spurred on by setbacks. I have a very low failure threshold and tend to just give up! Also I really, really didn't want to sub to agents and editors I worked with. I thought it would be horrendously awkward all round.

But then this book just somehow came out as YA. I wrote it without even really thinking about publication - just for pleasure like all the others - and then when I'd finished it I suddenly realised it was a totally different set of agents and editors - ones I'd never met and would likely never run across in the course of work. So I decided to go for it. And 2 years on - here we are!

4. I love the setting of Winter, the small English coastal town that the book takes place in, why did you decide on this?

I don't exactly know where the setting came from - the first scene that came into my head was a girl in the car with her dad, driving along the M25 towards a new life. He was whistling Jumping Jack Flash through his teeth and looking forward to a fresh start after he'd been sacked - she was depressed and trying not to show it. That was the first scene I wrote - though in the event it got cut quite early on! I didn't immediately know where they were headed and then Winter gradually took shape in my imagination. It's quite similar to the town where I grew up, Lewes. Lewes isn't by the sea (it's about five or six miles inland) but it has a lot of the same features as Winter, including a ruined castle which glowers above the town, a bit like Winter Castle. It was also heavily flooded in the year 2000 (including my dad's house) which was the inspiration behind some of the later events in the book. 

The seaside setting came from the Sussex coast and also from holidays in Cornwall, Brittany and Devon - I wrote some of the book in Brittany and in Padstow, in a house overlooking the sea.

5. Magic features pretty heavily in AWiW, if you could cast one spell successfully, what would it be?

Crikey, that's a hard one! I think I would be incredibly wary of messing around with spells after what Anna goes through! A bit like genies with wishes in the Arabian Nights, the spells in my books always seem to cause more trouble than they solve.

But I am quite envious of Anna's ability to fly (wait for book two!) which I think would be very fun, and a huge saving in commuting costs!

6. What books are you most looking forward to reading in 2012? 

I am really, really excited for the release of my friend CJ Daugherty's first book, Night School which (bizarrely) comes out the exact same day as mine. I also intend to try Cassandra Clare's Clockwork series after you recommended it so strongly! [yes! you will LOVE it--C]

7. A Witch in Love, the second book in your trilogy gets released later this year, can you give us any hints about what's to come?

Hmm... what can I say? Well it starts six months in from where A Witch in Winter ends, just before Christmas. Anna's made her peace with what she did to Seth in book one, but after what happened she's vowed to suppress her powers and become an ordinary girl. Unfortunately it's not as easy as all that. Some things are beyond her control - including her heart. She's also about to find out that there are more terrifying entities out there than the Ealdwitan - not all of them witches. Emmaline, Bran and Seth will all be returning and we're also going to see a lot more of Abe...
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Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions Ruth!
You can learn more about Ruth and A Witch in Winter on her website
Or her Facebook
And you should definitely follow her on Twitter 
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And now for the totally awesome giveaway! Ruth has very kindly offered to send a SIGNED AND DEDICATED copy of A Witch in Winter to one lucky winner!

To enter you must:

Live in the UK

Leave a comment with your email address and an answer to:
If you could cast one spell successfully,what would it be?

I'm also going to give away a copy of AWiW to one INTERNATIONAL winner

To enter you must:
Live outside the UK
Leave a comment with your email address, state you're entering the INTERNATIONAL giveaway and give an answer to:

If you could cast one spell successfully, what would it be?

NO extra entries, but I would appreciate you spreading the word any way you can!

Contest opens today (5th) and will end on the 10th January at 12am GMT