Thursday, March 10, 2011

Lisa & Laura Guest Post for The Blog Tour of Awesome!


It is my privilege and honor to have the authors of The Liar Society guest posting on my blog today. Not only is their debut novel amazing [my review here], but they are just as equally amazing themselves. Today, they're going to give you guys a behind-the-scenes look into Pemberly Brown. Enjoy!


PEMBERLY BROWN, BEHIND THE SCENES

When we first sat down to write The Liar Society we knew that we wanted Kate's swanky private school jump off the page. In fact, we actually treated the school like a character in the book complete with quirks, secrets and backstory. Because we went to a boring public school complete with carpeted walls and tacky orange lockers, we had to rely on research and our imagination to bring Pemberly Brown to life.

Thankfully we have lots of posh private schools in Cleveland that we used as inspiration. Laura lives very close to Western Reserve Academy and she spent a lot of time roaming the campus and observing students there. It's not nearly as creepy as it sounds. Wait, actually, it kind of is. It also helped that Lisa went to Miami of Ohio for college. Administrators and students regularly refer to the school as "the Harvard of the Midwest" and they take themselves VERY seriously. Many fraternities and sororities were founded at MU and all of them started off as secret societies. The campus is steeped with legends and random traditions. You marry the boy you kiss under Upham Arches. You rub the turtles head on your way to class if you want to ace your test. You NEVER step on the seal outside of the student union otherwise you'll flunk out of school. We were able to take many of these little traditions and weave them into Pemberly Brown.

We wanted to have two private schools merge to create PB because it created a rich backstory for the school and the secret societies that were born there. As for the Latin nothing says snooty private school like plaques written in a dead language. One thing that helped us immensely with the creation of Pemberly Brown, was drawing a map of the school complete with all the numbered Stations, the Latin associated with each station and major landmarks. We still refer to it constantly as we're writing the next book in the series.

The amazing thing about Pemberly Brown is that the possibilities are literally endless. We've already cooked up a whole new set of legends and traditions that drive the plot in Liar Society #2. Get excited.

Psst...we have a secret. Click here, hit the Pemberly Brown Plaque. The password is SETHROCKS.

And if you want to enter The Liar Society Blog Tour of Awesome contest, and really, who wouldn't want to enter!?! There's a $100 Amazon gift card up for grabs! Just click here and enter the super secret password, SETHROCKS, for an entry. Remember you can enter one time for each stop on our blog tour, so be sure to click here and see where else we're visiting this month to maximize your chances of winning.


Audi, Vide, Tace,
L&L

1 comments:

Jemi Fraser said...

I live in a very relaxed area - private schools are way outside my area of expertise. Love seeing how Laura & Lisa researched them. The setting in the book is very well done!

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