Allison Parr's Blog

Today I was feeling a bit like a disaster (I blame this on not taking a morning shower) and so when I came home, I wrote up a list called How to be a Proper Adult, which I expected to shame me into at least attempting to be responsible.

But you know what? There were only five (5!) items on the list. And, okay, #1 was make like five different kinds of doctor appointments, but still. I am not nearly as much as a hot mess as I thought I was!

The others were mostly about paying bills. Being a proper adult is boring.

But one thing on the list was update this website, because OH HEY, I have another book coming out! So I’m emerging out of the darkness of my writing cave, brushing off the debris, and saying: ta-da! A book!

 

 

This is Abraham’s book, which is the one you guys asked for – including my mom, who was like, “Why didn’t Rachael end up with Abe?” (This is probably because Abe is a nice Jewish boy. Ryan from Rush Me was not). Abe’s one of the best linebackers in the NFL, and a long time ago, Tamar was the girl next door. Now, she’s the newest reporter at one of New York’s premier sports blogs, and they’re about to see each other for the first time in four years…

Anyway, y’all can add it on Goodreads, which is pretty cool, or pre-order it on Amazon or Apple or Barnes and Noble or Carina Press, which is even cooler. And watch for more info here soon! Because I’m an adult, you guys. And that means blogs get updated.

 

Hey y’all! RUNNING BACK is now available on Netgalley, which is all kinds of awesomesauce*. Basically, it means if you have a blog of the book variety, you should hop on over and request it for your TBR pile (the TOP of your pile, of course!)

How to know if you should read RUNNING BACK: 

- You like smart girls and charming boys falling in love

- You like traveling vicariously to awesome places like Ireland and the City of Lights/Love (Seriously, can’t Paris just pick a name?)

- You think Indiana Jones is kinda amazing

- You’ve been so passionate about something its clouded your judgement (and landed you in a whole heap of trouble with the guy you’re crazy about)

- You suspect your family’s been keeping secrets

- And that you might know the location of an ancient lost city…

- Or, you know, if your just want to read about hot football players falling for awesome archaeology grad students

For lovers of football, Irish myths, old family secrets, redheads, blinding passions, mother-daughter relationships, and true love.

It’s for you.

I hope you like it!

 

 

(Oh, and if you want to join the RUNNING BACK blog tour, email me at allisonparrwrites@gmail.com!)

 

*True story about the word awesomesauce. When I was querying RUSH ME, I sent a test query over to one of my best friends who worked for a literary agent to see if she had any thoughts. Best Friend forwarded it along to HER boss, who thought it was a legit query, not me asking my BF for help. She responded that while she would be happy to read my manuscript, it was not entirely appropriate to begin my query “Dear Agent Awesomesauce.”

 

(Okay, so, the cover really went up on Amazon yesterday. I never claimed to be on top of blogging).

 

Guys, this cover is basically the definition of awesome. Seriously. Authors (at least at my imprint) fill out cover worksheets to make sure they accurately depict the story. For Running Back my cover worksheet basically said “I dunno, maybe there should be some green,  because Ireland?”

 

And somehow they took that and made the best cover EVER.

 

Yes, there is green. There are also the awesome stripes from the cover of Rush Me, and an intensely gorgeous Natalie Sullivan and Mike O’Connor. I’m pretty psyched. (True story: when I was sixteen I worked at a Barnes and Noble and called a cover psychedelic. For the next week, everyone in the store made fun of me).

 

When I got the cover file, I downloaded it and put it in the corner of my screen, where I stared at I for the rest of the week. I was at work, too. Turns out there is no better work break than staring at your cover. Cause it kind of makes the book feel like it’s official, you know?

 

So, are you ready? Luckily, all you have to do is scroll down two more centimeters. I think. Who knows, maybe you’re on a phone and it loads differently.

 

 

 

ISN’T IT FANTASTIC???  The cover designers at Carina are brilliant.

Natalie Sullivan is on the verge of a breakthrough most archaeology grad students only dream of: discovering a lost city. Her research points to a farm in Ireland, but to excavate she needs permission from the new owner: the Michael O’Connor, popular NFL running back.

On TV Mike seems so charming and good-natured that Natalie figures getting his cooperation will be a breeze. So she’s not prepared to deal with the arrogant—and adamantly opposed—man she meets in person. Or the way one look from him sends shivers down her spine…

Determined to kick-start her career, Natalie travels across the Atlantic and finds herself sharing an inn with Mike, who has come to Ireland in search of his roots. She tells herself her interest is strictly professional, but the more she gets to know him, the harder it is to deny her personal attraction to the sexy sports star. And when Mike confides why he refuses to allow the dig, Natalie must decide if she can follow her heart without losing sight of her dreams.

 

You can pre-order your copy right now and have it download October 21!

Amazon / Barnes and Noble

And add it on:

Goodreads

 

Yay! Do you like it? I’ll be sure to keep you posted when it shows up on more vendors, and stay tuned for a sneek peek later this month

 

 

Welcome questers, to the beginning of Quest 2 of the NAmazing Adventure! Did y’all just finish your first quiz, and are ready to start the next?

Or, are you sitting there, staring at the screen and thinking:

 

Personally, I always like to know about the hullabaloo, so, head on over to NA Alley to learn more about this awesome blog hop , which features over 60 New Adult authors, and prize packs that include ARCs, signed books, gift cards, swag, and more.

On this stop, you’ll learn about my debut novel Rush Me, in which Rachael, a snarky unpaid intern (raise your hands, unpaid interns) falls hard for Ryan, a gorgeous, golden football player.

 

 

So please, take a glance around, read about the book, and check out a couple recipes (I bake chocolate goods. So much chocolate). You’ll need to keep notes in your quest scroll for the quiz at the end of this quest. And remember, you must complete ALL SIX quizzes to be eligible for a prize pack.

 

RUSH ME BY ALLISON PARR

 

Amazon / Barnes and Noble / Carina Press / Goodreads

 

When post-grad Rachael Hamilton accidentally gatecrashes a pro-athlete party, she ends up face-to-face with Ryan Carter, the NFL’s most beloved quarterback.

While most girls would be thrilled to meet the attractive young millionaire, Rachael would rather spend time with books than at sporting events, and she has more important things to worry about than romance. Like her parents pressuring her to leave her unpaid publishing internship for law school. Or her brother, who’s obliviously dating Rachael’s high school bully. Or that same high school’s upcoming reunion.

Still, when Ryan’s rookie teammate attaches himself to Rachael, she ends up cohosting Friday night dinners for half a dozen football players.

Over pancake brunches, charity galas, and Alexander the Great Rachael realizes all the judgments she’d made about Ryan are wrong. But how can a Midwestern Irish-Catholic jock with commitment problems and an artsy, gun-shy Jewish New Englander ever forge a partnership? Rachael must let down her barriers if she wants real love–even if that opens her up to pain that could send her back into her emotional shell forever

 

You can come back later this week to learn more about my newest novel, Running Back, which features one of my favorite secondary characters from Rush Me – Boston-Irish Mike O’Connor, who is perfectly content with his life until he meets archaeologist Natalie Sullivan. Their romance will take them from New York to Ireland to Paris, and it won’t end until old family wounds have been reopened and ancient cities revealed . . .

I’m pretty exited about it.

 

Thank you so much for coming by! Say hello in the comments, and then it’s time to go onward to the next stop on your adventure! (And I think it’s only fair to tell you guys – the author you’re about to visit is the wonderful woman who organized this adventure, so take your hats off as you click on over!)

 

 Things That I Am Doing Today

1) Watching the rain.

Seriously, this is an exciting thing to do. Rain is kind of mesmerizing. Also I like the tippity-tappity on the rooftop. And drinking tea. Mm, tea.

2) Answering emails

I am bad at this. Fact.

3) Picking recipes for dessert

Chocolate cookies? Brownies? Chocolate cake? The choices are LIMITLESS. I mean, as long at there’s chocolate. Which isn’t a limit, it’s a lifestyle.

 

Things That I Was Supposed to Do Last Week and Didn’t

 

 

1) Write a post about my book’s release

Oh, HEY. I wrote a book! And it got published! And I meant to blog about the release date! And I didn’t!

Why not?

Well, I have this really weird affliction called shyness. I KNOW. It means I kind of want to hide under the covers whenever anyone talks about something I did. (Okay, fine, I’m actually an extrovert and I like talking about other people’s stuff. I am a pro at that. I considered being a therapist for approximately eighteen seconds, and then I realized I would inevitably end up stealing from clients lives and inserting them into stories, and then I would be sued, and really, who has that kind of time/money?)

But I’m not very good at talking about myself in public forums. Still, I did write a little about Rush Me elsewhere on these here interwebs:

Like in an interview with the very nice people at USA Today.

And in a blog post about being a fish-out-of-water over at my lovely publisher, Carina Press.

And another on the Harlequin blog: On Rush Me, “Girls” and being an unpaid intern in NYC.

 

And, you know, if you’re feeling super interested, you should go buy Rush Me, which happens to be cheaper than coffee at the moment. Amazon and Barnes and Noble have it on sale for $2.51. And it’s only 17c more at Carina Press (which, let’s be honest, is where y’all should really buy it from because then I get higher royalties. Is it awkward to admit that? Think of it as donating to a starving artist!) It’s also available at Kobo and Itunes.

 

To everyone who has been so supportive and positive about my release, thank you so much! You’re awesome!

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations! It’s spring time. I hear that somewhere in the world, that means sunshine and flowers, but where I live it means the crocuses are buried under an additional foot of snow, school is cancelled, and the roads are dangerous.

But at least our snacks can be spring like, right?

 

 

 

I rarely make non-chocolate treats, but these were just so pretty and looked like a perfect tea time treat. They were very tasty – though I might cut down on the amount of sugar in the future . I really liked the cake crumb, and they were an excellent way to use up the clementines in my fridge before they got too tired! Also, I find zesting fruit very relaxing.

 

Clementine Upside Down Cakes from Drizzle and Dip

This recipe makes 15 small cakes

1 cup butter – room temp
1 cup sugar
1 3/4 – 2 cups flour (Original recipe calls for 225g – approximate as you will)
2 teaspoons baking powder
4 large eggs – room temp
finely grated zest of 2 small clementines
about 1/2 – 1 t of brown sugar for each cake
15 slices of peeled clementines (1 slice per cake)

Hot Syrup:

1/2 cup of clementine juice
1/2 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 350 FF. Beat the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, allowing to fully combine between each addition Add the clemantine zest and mix. By hand sift the flour and the baking powder over the mix and fold it in to combine

Sprinkle around 1/2 – 1 teaspoon of brown sugar in the the bottom of each cavity of a greased muffin pan. Add a slice of clementine (cut about 1cm thick) on top of the sugar. Using an ice-cream scoop, evenly measure out the cake batter and dollop onto each clementine (about 3/4 of the way up the pan).  Bake for 25 – 30 mins, until golden brown.

Make the syrup by bringing the juice and sugar to the boil until the sugar has dissolved and it just starts to thicken.

Using a spatula gently loosen the baked cakes from the mould and tip out onto a cooling rack. Pour the warm syrup over the cakes to allow them to absorb.

So Purim was this weekend. Purim’s one of those holidays that always sneaks up on me (though honestly, most lunar holidays sneak up on me) and then I have to run around frantically to make sure I get enough hamentashen, because my life revolves around food.

Unlike my mother, I always liked Purim. A Jewish orphan girl goes to princess school for a year, makes a king fall in love with her, and then saves her people from destruction? AWESOME. I am on-board.

What bothered my mother – what bothers a lot of people – is the sheer amount of vengeance and violence that takes place in this story. At the end, “the Jews struck down all their enemies with the sword, slaughtering, and destroying them, and did as they pleased to those who hated them*.” And while some people love revenge fantasies – many adored Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist history of WWII – for others they are intensely uncomfortable. I watched the movie and just wanted them to start rebuilding their lives and join some nice support groups.

But I was never bothered by the Book of Esther, because I barely even noticed the violence at the end – to me, that was just a touch of well-deserved revenge, kind of like Cinderella’s stepsisters eyes being pecked out, or Snow White’s stepmother dancing to death. I was a fan of comeuppance; Edmund Dantes and I would get on well. But as a child my focus remained solely on Esther. And the very early part of Esther’s tale plays into a specific version of the Cinderella trope – the bride show:

Let beautiful young virgins be sought out for the king. And let the king appoint commissioners in all the provinces of his kingdom to gather all the beautiful young virgins to the harem in the citadel of Susa under custody of Hegai, the king’s eunuch, who is in charge of the women; let their cosmetic treatments be given them. And let the girl who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti.

Queen Vashti deposed – 1890
Queen V does not look all that broken up, if you ask me

The turn came for each girl to go in to King Ahasuerus, after being twelve months under the regulations for the women, since this was the regular period of their cosmetic treatment, six months with oil of myrrh and six months with perfumes and cosmetics for women.

So, the first part of Esther is every make-over show ever, combined with The Bachelor.

Esther does not look nearly as happy about the make-over as I was

When the girl went in to the king she was given whatever she asked for to take with her from the harem to the king’s palace. In the evening, she went in; then in the morning she came back to the second harem in custody of Shaashgaz, the king’s eunuch, who was in charge of the concubines; she did not go in to the king again, unless the king delighted in her and she was summoned by name.

Basically, unless she got a rose.

Anyway, then she was Queen and we leave the bride-show territory, and the story gets a lot more exciting, but completely stops paralleling The Bachelor, so. Let’s go to Constantinople. You may sing if so inclined.

A thousand years later, something very similar went on not too far away from Susa. In the Life of Philaretos (821-822) the monk Niketos describes imperial agents canvasing the empire to find beautiful young women to come for a bride-show in Constantinople. Similar bride-shows are also mentioned in Theophanes’ Chronographia and in the Funeral Oration for Basil I and the Life of Theodora.

“Between 788 and 882 bride-shows were held five times to select a bride for the heir to the empire, and even if the decision were generally made by the emperor’s mother or stepmother with a political agenda in view, there still was clearly a consideration that beauty was an essential prerequisite for an empress” (Garland).

Yet despite its multiple mentions, modern scholars aren’t all convinced they actually occurred. Much as Esther has been described as a historical novella, the Byzantine bride-shows have been referred to as a literary conceit and “a textual event rather than an actual one”. They were part of the traditional literature because they served a purpose; they were used to exploit slight connections with the royal family, to politically discredit opponents, to justify assassinations (Vinson, 118).

 

Skip ahead to the present. Why did a producer whip up a modern day bride-show?

I started watching The Bachelor in Paris. My friend and I would buy a pizza from the Domino’s right next to Napoleon’s tomb, and then retreat to my apartment and lie comatose on my pullout couch. We’d stream images from America of a blond dude saying rote phrases, over and over, about a house full of women and discussing whether his wife was in the room. It was fascinating. Addicting. I wondered if a notecard was propped up for the Bachelor in case he stumbled, prompting him to discuss “this journey” or “the right reasons.”

Much like Ahasuerus’ commissioners and the imperial agents, the casting directors search through the nation for beautiful young women (though not, presumably, virgins this time around) to appear on their show. They spend some time being beautified – well, at least putting on pretty clothes and make-up and doing their hair – and then they stand around competing for a man’s attention. (To be fair, there is also The Bachelorette, and I’ve never read of any historical groom shows).

And just like Esther and the Byzantine shows, this is fictional, created not to help people fall in love, but for a purpose. (Ratings? This doesn’t seem nearly as noble a purpose as to encourage an oppressed group to fight back or as interesting as Machiavellian politics, but. It’s probably the most popular). Why are we still using this trope and presenting it as reality? What is it that draws people in?

There’s the beauty aspect; right off the bat, appearance is a huge part of all these narratives. There’s the Cinderella story, where a young girl of no special background is elevated by marriage to a high social status. There’s the competition, and the tension between women wanting to win and wanting to be friends with the others. In the monk Niketos’ description, the empress “urged the ten other contestants to make a sisterly agreement among themselves so that whoever became empress would help the others. To this proposal, one of the girls haughtily replied that she was sure to be chosen because she was richer, nobler and prettier” (Vinson, 114).

As literary concepts, all these themes are fraught with tension. Friendship, class, love, power dynamics. If done right, they weave a fascinating story – one that can make it’s way into the most influential book in Western civilization (despite not once mentioning God) 0r that can garner millions of viewers, year after year. So it’s not much of a surprise that several bride-show novels have cropped up recently.

 

 

The Princess Academy by Shannon Hale. Hale has a beautiful, lyrical voice in all of her writing, and this novel won a 2006 Newbery Honor.

The Charmed Sphere by Catherine Asaro. A little more Esther than Bachelor, this is about the relationship between the woman and prince rather than about the competition.

The Selection by Kiera Cass. A dystopian take on the trope. Apparently the CW’s making a pilot episode.

 

I was going to end this with a bit about how bride-shows would never work in real life – just look at the results of The Bachelor or how the Byzantine marriages usually ended in disaster. And Esther’s triumph came not from winning the king’s love but rather from saving her people. But look! A new book on bride shows! A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia by Russell Martin. In any case, they seem to be popular.

Personally, I would like to see a miniseries about the Byzantine Empire bride-shows with a heavy dose of modern day snark. I strongly believe in anachronistic history. Someone please pitch that?

 

*Heavily quoting from the New Oxford Annotated Bible over here

A couple of great reads about Byzantine women:

Vinson, Martha. “Romance and reality in the Byzantine bride shows” in Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900 by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith(Cambridge, 2004).

Garland, Lynda. Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 526-1204 (Routledge, 2002).

Herrin, Judith. Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (Princeton, 2001).

 

 

 

Argh! I was hoping for Sybil!

But let’s be honest. I really am Anna.

I did thoroughly enjoy that one of the questions asked:

But what about those of us who do write romance novels, Downton Abbey quiz creators? What then?

Also, would Anna really be writing romance novels? Who is this answer weighed towards?

If you also desperately need to know your DA Dumbledore’s Army counterpart, take the Masterpiece quiz!

 

I spent a lot of time driving this week, so this Gif Wednesday is devoted to CARS. I know, mad exciting, right?

 

You know what it feels like to drive in Boston? Like this. Just like this.

 

But that’s okay! Because our cow-paths are awesome. Who wants straight roads? Psh. Whatever.

 

Not that we would ever be rude to out-of-towners. Especially those stalled in the middle of our cow-paths.

 

Anyway, unless I’m totally stuck in traffic I’m pretty happy. Especially if I end up in a line of Priuses! I always feel like we’re a happy little pack. Until one of them invariably cuts me off.

 

 

So then I have to figure out what to listen to. Usually NPR’s all budget and fishermen, and I’m just:

 

But sometimes it’s This American Life.

But whatever it is, I always feel 5% smarter than when I left. Thanks NPR! Now I know about drones and guns and murders!

 

But if things start to get too serious, I just press buttons until I end up with Taylor Swift.

 

One of these days I’m going to learn how to hook podcasts up. Seriously. It’s happening.

When I find out my editor’s over at the Harlequin Blog talking about my book:

 

And then I feel like I should chip in and I’m all Promotion! I will slay you!

 

But then I’m like, maybe I should actually be in my writing cave managing my puppets:

 

Except everything goes out the window when I realize the next episode of my bad tv show is on Hulu: