Meet Us At The Crossroads Tour Day 7: Rosemary Clement-Moore

1. What inspired you to write Sylvie 's character?

I’m sort of fascinated with ballerinas. They look so fragile and delicate, but they have amazing willpower to be able to put their body through so much. The dancers I know succeed because they live to dance. It’s all they’ve every wanted to do. (Ballet is too hard not to want it more than anything.) So I started with the idea of someone like that, who suddenly couldn’t do the ONE thing she’s lived for for almost 18 years.


2. What was the first book you read that made you fall in love with reading (past or present writer)?

I remember getting in trouble for staying up all night reading the Nancy Drew books. Then I read Little Women in the third grade, and loved those characters so much, I felt like they were my sisters. But the book that make me want to be a WRITER was Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. That book opened doors in my head to a whole new world of what books could be.


3. What paranormal author are you currently addicted to?

I’m late to the Hunger Games party, so I’m reading all three of those books right now.


4. What band or artist currently tops your play list?

I listen to everything, but lately I’ve been on a pub-rock sort of kick, so my current playlist is mostly Gaelic Storm, Great Big Sea and, um, Russell Crowe and the Ordinary Fear of God. (Yes, really.)

I can’t write to with music with lyrics, though. My writing play list is currently all classical music: Hayden, Handel and Chopin.


5. Do you have any projects you are currently working on that you are able to share? And can you give us a little teaser?
I’m working on something completely new (but still a YA paranormal) that is so new I’m not ready to talk about it yet. I do have a new book coming out next June, called Texas Gothic. It’s a twist on the gothic novel set in Texas (obviously) and it’s full of ghosts, magic, mystery and romance.

Here’s a teaser:

I nodded, somehow unwilling to speak and break the spell of discovery. As Dr. Douglas instructed, I left the dirt supporting the back of the skull—the occipital bone—and concentrated on the front. The nasal bone, the brow ridges, the cheekbones and maxilla. The things that had made it a face. Even if hadn’t remembered the names of the bones, their shapes were iconic, the stuff of nightmare and mortality, and in the heat of the day, I felt a graveyard chill.
Gently, I smoothed the dirt from the eye sockets with my thumbs and wondered what was the last thing they’d seen. The relentless drowning wave of a flood? The snake that had bit him? Did he stare his own mortality in the face before he died?

HOW THE TOUR WORKS:

Each day of The Crossroads Tour, a new research question will be revealed on The Crossroad Blog Tour main page, and each day the answer to that question will be found within one of the 16 different blog posts by Crossroads Tour authors. Your job is to get the question, read the blog posts, and collect all 16 answers by the end of the tour, on Halloween.