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June 27, 2005
Tiaras for Everyone!
From Beverly, June's Guest Literary Chick!
Like Alesia, I also have a July release. It's titled The Tiara Club and I knew, even as I was writing it, that it was going to be a different book for me. For one, the writing just felt different. It was . . . slower, but not in that the pace was slower than any of my previous books. Maybe richer would be a better word. It was like I was there in that make-believe town in Mississippi and could feel the warm fall air on my skin and could smell pecan pies baking. Plus, I was channeling my heroine. By the end of the book, I was drawling (not drooling, mind you) at my computer screen, actually saying the words outloud as my heroine fed them to me. I gotta tell you, this does not happen very often, and when it does, you just thank God or the Muses or whoever it is you pray to that it's happening.
Another thing that was different about Tiara Club was the cast of characters. I knew that the story was going to have to include more than just my usual five or six characters because of the nature of the book. It's a friendship book, but also a book about keeping secrets in a small town. So you get to know everyone: the UPS guy, my heroine's cousins, her best friend from kindergarten, her ex-husband, her mama, and the people who run the local grocery store. Plus the members of the Tiara Club itself!
It was a fun book to write--well, wait. Let me rephrase that. It was a fun book to have written, they are all hard to write. I think it turned out to be a fun read, and the reviewers at Kirkus, Booklist, and RT BOOKclub have agreed!
The following four lucky entrants won copies of The Tiara Club during this month's promotional giveaway at www.literarychicks.com:
Sanjay Srinivas, Flower Mound, TX
Lynn Wood, Auburn, GA
Melissa Lawson, New London, CT
Kim Westgaard, Crystal Lake, IL
Congratulations to the winners! And my thanks to Alesia, Lani, and Michelle for having me as their guest Chick this month.
Beverly
P.S.--If you want to know more about The Tiara Club, here's a little blurb:
The Tiara Club, formed by best friends Georgia and Callie after a night of too many martinis, consists of five veteran beauty queens who have survived the pageant circuit. The women grew up together and have been there for each other through weddings, divorces, funerals, and a good portion of The Bartender's Black Book.
Now they've decided to broaden their scope, and allow a Yankee to become part of the Tiara Club. In fact, the ladies are prepping this virgin to the beauty pageant scene to become the new Shrimp Queen. With Callie's impending marriage on the horizon, the Tiara Club has to rely on their friendship to get them through planning the wedding, turning a Yankee into a Southern Beauty queen, and keeping Georgia's big secret from her controlling, gossip-queen mother.
For an excerpt of The Tiara Club, visit my website at www.beverlybrandt.com.
Posted by at 1:52 PM | Comments (2)
Comments
I won! I won! Thanks so much, Beverly! I can't wait to get this book in my hot little hands.
Thanks for posting about your experience writing this book. It's always fun to get a peek behind the scenes.
Posted by: Lynn Daniels ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.literarychicks.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 27, 2005 3:38 PM
Congratulations, Lynn! I just got books today from my publisher, so I'll get you a copy ASAP.
Your comment made me think about a question I often get asked--how long does it take to write a book? The answer can be really convoluted! The heroine of Tiara Club was actually a secondary character in the fourth book I wrote, which, oddly enough, is the only book I've written that has never sold. (That's not to say I haven't written *proposals* that have been rejected, but this is the only book I completed that's still gathering dust.)
So I guess you could say that I started writing Tiara Club back in 2001. I wrote a proposal for the book in early 2003, but it was nothing like what the completed book turned out to be. At that point, I didn't even have it set in the South, which is such a huge part of the story, I can't even imagine setting it anywhere else.
Oh, and want to know what the original title of the book was? Fast Food. Can you believe it?! It was only as I started writing the book, and came up with my heroine's beauty queen friends, that The Tiara Club was born.
Beverly
Posted by: Beverly at June 28, 2005 3:58 PM
