Liv Spencer's Blog, page 2

Navigating the Shadow World Is Out!

You guys, it’s official: Navigating the Shadow World has been released and is out in the world! Ain’t she pretty?

I was at a fancy short-story award ceremony (I’m wearing Swifty-red lipstick for the occasion) when I laid eyed on Navigating the Shadow World for the first time. I think I can safely speak for all of Team Liv when I say this was the most ambitious of our books to date. So many references! So many rules! So many words to read and to write! Doing the worlds of Ms. Cassandra Clare justice was a task of angelic proportions, and we hope we were able to! Let us know what you think if give it a read! It’s available at all your favourite book dispensaries, like Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Barnes and Noble, Chapters-Indigo, or find a copy at your local indie bookstore via Indiebound.

Now when do we get our parabatai tattoos, Crissy?

xo Jen

TMI Source Reviews Navigating the Shadow World

Way more anxiety inducing than actually writing a book is waiting for the first reactions to it from the Super Experts — and Alyssa from TMI Source is someone Jen and I were excited/nervous to read Navigating the Shadow World. So I cannot overstate how amazing it feels to get a glowing review from her. Jen and I were dancing around like happy crazy people when we read this.

From the review:

I thoroughly enjoyed Navigating the Shadow World. It was more than just a book just summarizing the books we’ve already read, it went deeper into the Shadow World and analyzed characters, relationships and references in the series.

Navigating the Shadow World is a must-read for fans of Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunter Chronicles. It delves deep into the world that we know and love while providing commentary on the rich mythology that constitutes the books and the world, as well as taking fans step-by-step through the process of the film adaptation of City of Bones. Navigating the Shadow World is anything but mundane.

Read the whole post here, and enter the giveaway to win a copy!

A world of thanks, Alyssa, for being so supportive of the book and for such a kind review!

We’ll just be over here, squeeing with delight.

xo

P.S. I just had a look at Amazon & the book is shipping early! So those of you who pre-ordered, it should be arriving any day now! Hurrah!

Being Taylor

So after spending months researching and writing Taylor Swift: The Platinum Edition, Team Liv was feeling pretty expert on all-things-Taylor. But there were certain things we could never know, and sometimes imagined. Since we weren’t quite ready to stop writing about our girl, we decided to try something new: writing Swifty fanfiction, and sharing our flights of fancy with everyone. Because what could be more fun than imagining what it would be like to live the life of the Swift One?

Since our Swift Notes chapter meant we spent a lot of time thinking about the individual songs on Red, we decided to riff on that in our fiction and imagine the scenarios that inspired the songs or what it was like for Taylor to write them. Taylor Swift: Know You Better, the title for our collective Swifty speculation, will be made up of one story for every track on Red.

We publish a new story every Friday, and you can read our stories behind the first three tracks of Red over on Wattpad! Let us know how you like them! Want more romance, more behind-the-scenes on the tour, or more Meredith? We aim to please.

It’s a book: Taylor Swift – The Platinum Edition out early!

It’s out! And I gotta say: it’s pretty. We were lucky to have a wonderful designer work with us, and we’re soooooo happy with the book. And it’s BIG. It’s kinda sorta 40% longer than it was supposed to be — but same steal-of-a-deal price! There’s just So Much To Say when it comes to the Swift One.

If you happen to see a copy out in the world, snap a pic for us! It’s cool/weird/the best to see our little book out in the world. And if you buy it and read it? THANK YOU and let us know what you think!

love love love!

xo

p.s. we should probs mention where you can get a copy…

Buy it at Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Chapters-Indigo, or find it at your local bookstore via IndieBound.

Also available as an ebook!

You can also add it on Goodreads

Visiting London & thinking about the Infernal Devices

I’ve become somewhat of a TV/book tourist in the years since I started writing with Jen as Liv Spencer, and my own books as Calhoun. New York for Gossip Girl. Covington “Mystic Falls” Georgia for The Vampire Diaries. Iceland for Game of Thrones. (Just kidding on that last one — though admittedly the thought of casually running into Jon Snow did cross my mind….)

I was in London this past week for the London Book Fair — a big to-do where publishers from all around the world convene, show off their upcoming books, chat them up and try to sell them into other territories and languages. It’s very cool to see all the various things people are doing, in the book dept, around the world, and to meet with like-minded folks from halfway across the world. It’s also cool to be walking through the stands at Earls Court and see some Shadowhunters. The movie edition of City of Bones got some nice play at the S&S booth, but it was this poster that stunned me when I walked around the corner and suddenly had the Sight:

(Sorry — didn’t realize how soft the focus was on this until I pulled it off my iPhone. Seems like my Sight is not so crystal clear after all!)

After the fair, I tooled around with my darling friend who’s lived in LDN for the past 10 years, and she took me to the oldest bookshop in London. The bookshop where a certain young Shadowhunter once upon a time bought a copy of A Tale of Two Cities for one Tessa Gray.

Hatchards Piccadilly is a big big store with beautiful staircases up and down, now operated by Waterstones and all fancy like with its By Appointment to Various Royal Persons, operating since 1797. I went up to the Dickens section and picked up a copy of Two Cities, but already owning two copies of it myself I didn’t entirely recreate the Will Herondale moment. Instead I opted for a stunning copy of Dante’s Inferno. So as to be well-read and ready to talk circles of hell and their various temperatures during a daring rescue by a Shadowhunter.

And the full haul of books from my trip. Not too many this time!

So many moments from the Infernal Devices to be reminded of while walking around Central London — prime among them having a good look at Blackfriars Bridge and imagining Jem and Tessa on it.

It was perfect timing too: Jen and I are just finishing up the proofread on Navigating the Shadow World, it hits stores and e-shelves on July 1st, and we’re working away on a special free e-book companion reader to the book — more on that soon! — and Clockwork Princess was still fresh in mind. Very cool to walk the streets the Enclave crew would’ve over a century ago. Literary tourism is the best!

xoxo

Crissy

In Defense of Taylor Swift

I spend a lot of time defending Taylor Swift, not that I think she needs it. In fact, it seems absurd to me, but perhaps once more, for the record, let me address a few issues that seem to plague our girl.

First, she is not anti-feminist. While she may have been hesitant to embrace the term in interviews (and she is not alone in that), and her songs may deal with fairly conventional roles and relationships, she remains an excellent female role model. I don’t mean because she’s “a good girl” resisting a Lohan trajectory, I mean because she has had a truly tremendous career of which she’s always remained totally in control. She started chasing a record deal at age 11, knocking on doors of Nashville’s Music Row. When she was 13, she walked out of a development deal with RCA when they wanted to shelve her for a while. She had other plans. When she was 14, Sony picked her up, their youngest songwriting hire. She took a chance on then-fledgling label Big Machine at 15 because they would give her the control she wanted most of all: she was going to write and perform her own material — period. And she’s done that ever since. And it’s not only her songwriting she controls, the woman is the head of an empire: she is involved in everything from tour design, to packaging, to product endorsements and partnerships. She is the sparkly embodiment of creative control.  Everything must be true to her vision and her image. What makes this more remarkable is that she did this in an industry that would normally take a 14-year-old girl and package and exploit her. If Taylor Swift is going to be “packaged” it will be by Taylor Swift herself. Now that she’s famous and powerful, she still finds ways to manipulate greater, seemingly uncontrollable forces like celebrity gossip, as Elizabeth Perie points out in the Huffington Post.

Though even the Swift One can only control so much, and it’s distressing to watch the media make her out to be a desperate, love-crazed man chaser. But that’s not her — that’s what we project onto her. That’s the character we want her to be for our own amusement. Is a successful, powerful young woman dating different men so distressing somehow that we have to belittle her in this way? In the April Vanity Fair cover story (which, annoyingly, has a headline that puts “her men” and “her moods” above “her music”), Taylor wisely noted, “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.”

And how about those confessional lyrics? For some would say that even if she isn’t anti-feminist, her lyrics are. And to answer that I send you to Erin Riley, who argues that Taylor’s lyrics are being oversimplified. The only song she doesn’t account for, unfortunately, is “Better Than Revenge,” which even I would admit slips into slut-shaming. That said, she was 18 or 19 when she wrote that album. And what teenager — and what human, really — doesn’t make mistakes? And it’s with slips like this that we know we’re getting the true Taylor, even if sometimes it’s not as tidy as we’d like.

Sometimes it’s the content of the songs I have to defend. People often say she only writes love songs. This is, it must first be clarified, an exaggeration. She does write mostly about love, but she does sometimes write about other things: growing up and family (“Never Grow Up,” “The Best Day,” “Fifteen”), the risks of stardom (“Innocent,” “The Lucky One”), self-image (“Tied Together with a Smile,” “Mean”), not fitting in (“A Place in This World,” “The Outside”), losing a child (“Ronan”)  and good ol’ celebratory anthems (“Change,” “Long Live”). She has won Grammy Awards for two songs decidedly not about love: “Mean” and “Safe and Sound.” But sure, she does write mostly about love. You may have noticed that so do a lot of artists. Love is an endless font of inspiration, something that changes as we grow older, as we discover new variegation in a colour we thought we knew well (the many shades of red, you might say). Because not all the songs are about being in love: they’re about crushes, fleeting love, enduring love, heartbreak, betrayal, moving on …

Further, Taylor writes a love song well. She’s one of our premier pop philosophers, and her particular articulations of heartbreak have won her a trophy room full of awards and have her matching sales records set by the Beatles (they sang about love a lot too, you may recall — using the word love 613 times, according to this highly reputable Buzzfeed article). Anyway, my point is if you want a really good loaf of bread, you go to the bakery, not to the supermarket. Go to the specialist. And while she may not be great at love (or at least not lucky in it), she is great at writing about it. Not just because her songs are catchy, fun to belt out in your car, but because her lyrics are deceptively simple. I’m always thrilled to hear Taylor sing about new things, but if she writes love-heavy albums for the rest of her career, so be it. Our canon of modern love songs will be better for it.

Yes, her sweetness is a sugar rush, but I think for the most part it’s genuine. Straight from the hands-making-a-heart, you might say. She is powerful, she is savvy, she is authentic. If I had a daughter, I’d encourage her to listen to Taylor. And Lady Gaga. And Beyonce. And Ani Difranco. And Joni Mitchell. The point is, Taylor is a valuable and necessary part of an ongoing dialogue by women in music and about women in music. She is the sparkly dresses (or retro fifties chic) to Lady Gaga’s meat dress. And we need that. She doesn’t have to be the full picture, and she can’t be and shouldn’t be. But she’s an important part of that picture, and I hope she continues to be a part of it for a long time.

YouTube review of Rosewood Confidential

“This was phenomenal, it was so interesting! . . . Definitely check this out if you’re a big Pretty Little Liars fan like me.”

Thanks for this iPhone review, beautyequalshate; seeing your review pop up in our google alert was a great start to the day!

Review of ROSEWOOD CONFIDENTIAL in Scene Magazine!

“an ideal companion for your next journey to Rosewood”!

Pretty Little Liars Season 3B So Far…

Crissy here! It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged on Pretty Little Liars, but that does not mean I have not been loving season 3B so far. Some highlights and questions…(with spoilers up to and including “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Inferno”!)

The whole Byron mystery freaked me right out of town. The relationship between Aria and her pops has been such a huge part of the show since the beginning, and the revelation that he saw Ali the night she died was sooooo creepy and felt like such a betrayal. Especially after they finally reconnected! Even though it was great and creepy, the Meredith Is the Crazy One wrap-up was a little unsatisfying, and frankly I still do not entirely trust Byron.
Because on PLL, can you really ever trust anyone? Not Toby… I’m glad it didn’t take too too long for Spencer to find out about him, and it is gutting (and totally realistic) to see how destroyed she is by his betrayal. Even if in the end there’s some altruistic reason that he’s on the A Team (and trying to run over Lucas and terrorizing Emily and Paige and Hanna…), I don’t think I could forgive a guy who put me through that.
Oh Spencer. She thinks school is pointless! Spencer Hastings! When she tore up that picture of herself — so symbolic! ::tears:: I’m glad she hired the private eye to find A’s lair, rather than going to see Toby (ya, I thought she was texting him…). But not telling the girls that Toby is on the A-Team? Not cool. That just puts your best friends in serious serious danger.
Where is Melissa? Meredith’s AWOL in Mystic Falls, and Melissa’s AWOL in Rosewood. I need some Torrey DeVitto onscreen in one of my favorite crazy fictional small towns!
Who is Ali’s baby daddy? Is it Wilden? Was she really pregnant? Was she so desperate for money from Byron because she needed money for an abortion?
When will we meet the Mysterious Lady in Red who’s pulling the strings of the A-Team? Soon please! And more CeCe. I love her. (Is CeCe the Lady in Red? I’m hoping for a bookish twist instead…)

Is it Tuesday yet??

xoxo

Exciting News! Taylor Swift: The Platinum Edition

Over two years ago, we wrote Taylor Swift: Every Day Is a Fairytale, a biography of the sparkly superstar who was just gearing up to release Speak Now at the time. She was a big deal then, and she’s an even bigger deal now. The fearless songwriter just won’t quit. She just released her fourth studio album, Red, and in case you didn’t know, she’s sold approximately a bajillion copies. She’s showing more range and more courage than ever, not to mention she’s sporting some fierce red lipstick.

T-Swizzle is on fire, and we figured we needed to update our book to reflect all of Taylor’s most recent developments, in and out of the studio. So we’re happy to announce that in June, we’ll be releasing Taylor Swift: The Platinum Edition. We’re working away at decoding lyrics, analyzing videos, and writing about Swifty’s last two years in the fast lane.

Basically we’re listening to Taylor Swift all. the. time. And it’s pretty magical.

If you are so inclined, the Platinum Edition is already available for pre-order at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, & Barnes and Noble.

love, love, love