Day three of the Qs and the As

Wow! You guys are GOOD!

Here are the latest questions:

Did you enjoy writing this book?

I don’t know. What day, specifically, are you curious about?

I jest. Seriously, this book was a blast to write most of the time. But I did do a fair amount of FREAKING OUT because I wanted it to be so good.

Disney had already optioned the film rights, and my very cool editor, Donna, had really gone out on a limb for me with the publisher—and the book wasn’t even finished yet! So there I was, trying to act all cool, but on the inside I was totally stressing. Still, I knew these people wouldn’t have said I could do it if I couldn’t do it.

So I did it.

When you were young did you ever aspire to be a spy, or did you ever aspire to be a writer?

Who says I’m not a spy? This could just be the best deep cover legend ever, you know!

I have never had a creative writing class (even though my mom taught one at my high school.) And I had the most uncreative major possible in college. But yes, probably somewhere in the back of my mind I always knew this is what I wanted to do. But I also wanted to eat and have health insurance, so I got a career that I would enjoy and would provide for me.

You don’t have to go to college to be a writer. You can—and a lot of great writers have. But publishers buy books, not degrees, so that’s the approach I decided to take.

PLEASE tell me that you are going to write more than two or three books in this series!

I would love to! But you know what? If the first two books don’t make money then they won’t buy any more. That’s the sad truth of the business.

Soooooo, if you guys want to see what I have up my sleeve in the future then I’m going to need you to tell your friends and beg them to buy a copy and talk to your librarian about getting a copy and all that stuff. It’s not something I like to talk about, but the book needs to sell a lot of copies for it to be “a success.” I hope that happens for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that I think there’s a ton of story left to tell.

I had a contest with my friend, where we tried to guess what 14 languages Cammie was fluent in. What are they?

YEA! I was hoping someone would ask this!

I actually have a list somewhere, but since I’m knee-deep in notecards for my book 2 storyboard, I’m going to try to swing it from memory. Here goes:

1—English

2—Spanish

3—French

4—Portuguese

5—Russian

6—Chinese

7—Japanese

8—Arabic

9—Farsi

10—Swahili

11—German

12—Latin (I know it’s a “dead” language but I figured they’d know it because of old texts and stuff.)

13—Korean

14 I think I left blank because I wanted some wiggle room in case something comes up in the future—like Cammie goes on assignment somewhere that doesn’t speak one of the other thirteen. (A good spy always leaves herself an exit, you know.)

Plus, a lot of languages are derived from each other. For example, a good use of Russian would probably help them pick up Romanian very quickly.

And in their graduate work and later school years other languages may get added. These are just the ones she knows as of the fall semester of her sophomore year.

Incidently, I really want to include a good cross section of those languages in the book, but it's not as easy as it may seem. For example, I have a wonderful friend who is Japanese who would gladly do Japanese translations for me, but it's harder for languages that have a different alphabet and characters. So that's why the girls are always jabbering in French and Portuguese and stuff. If I could do something in Arabic--oh boy would I.

Do you know if and when there are going to be some type of auditions for your movie?

I get this question a lot, and sadly, I don’t know. All I really know is that they’ve hired two incredibly cool writers to adapt it from a book to a screenplay (something I wouldn’t be good at.)

After that they’ll start getting people like directors and actors in place. Chances are I won’t know about any of that until after it’s done—which is okay because it doesn’t have anything to do with me at that point. I need to focus on writing the new books and so that’s what I’m doing. The movie stuff is in good hands, though. I swear!

And again, guys, not to sound needy or anything, but for the movie to actually get made and released in a studio and everything the book probably needs to sell really well. So every time you tell your friends, you're helping out more than you know!

Questions??? Any more questions???

XOXOX,
Ally