Tag: fairytale

OPERATION CINDERELLA Amazon Gift Card Giveaway

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My Suddenly Cinderella Series launch, OPERATION CINDERELLA, is coming up on it’s one month release milestone — woot!

To celebrate, and to thank all of you who are sharing the love for this book, I will give away three $25/each Amazon gift cards to three lucky winners!

There are several ways to enter:

  • Be my Fan on Facebook (extra easy entry)
  • Follow me on Twitter @HopeTarr
  • Tweet about the giveaway
  • Like the OPERATION CINDERELLA Book Page on Amazon
  • Share a review about OPERATION CINDERELLA on Amazon or Barnes & Noble!

To enter, just use the Rafflecopter Form below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Hope

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suddenly Cinderella Series: It’s Official!

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Who doesn’t love a good Cinderella story? (Note: not really a question).

I love the Cinderella story so much that writing one such themed book wasn’t going to be enough for me, not nearly. So, instead, I’ve signed on to write three of them!

My “Suddenly Cinderella” Series (Operation Cinderella, Project Cinderella & The Cinderella Caper) will be published with Entangled Publishing starting this fall 2012. As per the deal report on Publishers Marketplace:

“Three unlikely Cinderellas are helped along by uber-cool fairy god friends and princess-worthy red stilettos as they meet their matches in these contemporary re-tellings of the classic fairytale beginning with OPERATION CINDERELLA, wherein a goth-girl editor is paired with a sexy conservative radio talk-show host, to Stacy Cantor Abrams at Entangled, in a nice deal, in a three-book deal, for publication starting in fall 2012, by Louise Fury at the L. Perkins Agency.”

Bonus: the books’ digital releases will be followed by audiobooks with Dark Desires Audio, my wonderful audio publisher for Tempting! I’ll be sharing sneak peak snippets from the series in the coming months, so please check back. For now…

Huzzah to Happily Ever After!

Hope

Halloween Wrap Up

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This year was my very first Halloween in the Big Apple, and I’m happy to report, it did not disappoint. I kicked off the day with a trip to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx with my good writer buddy and Halloween enthusiast, Leanna Hieber. It was a gorgeous fall day, crisp but not cold. The colors were phenomenal, positively jewel-toned. Many of the monuments, notably the celebrated Woolworth tomb, include stained glass windows a la Tiffany, which were breathtaking to behold. Creepy though it may sound to some yes, we had a picnic. And yes, it was fun. I could say more but to save my typing fingers, check out Leanna’s Blog for the truly awesome photos.

Liz Maverick and Hope (as Goth Snow White).
Liz Maverick as Geisha Goldilocks and Hope as Goth Snow White.
Marianne, Hope, Leanna, and Stacey as fairytale femmes a la Goth.
From left to right, Marianne, Hope, Leanna, Stacey and Liz as fairytale femmes a la Goth.

Then it was back to Manhattan for a quick transformation (note: not transfusion). First stop: the Halloween Parade with my fellow Goth fairytale femmes: Leanna, Stacey Agdern, and the Rebels of Romance, Liz Maverick and Marianne Mancusi. Re Leanna as Dead Little Miss Muffett, check out those choppers!

The parade, though slow moving, was well worth the wait. The piece de resistance for me: the skeleton puppets, hulking dudes operated by multiple human hands (at least I think they were human). We rounded out the evening with a post-parade party in Murray Hill hosted by our good friends at Pacific TV. Morgan and her hubby put us through our paces playing trivia games long past the Witching Hour. Note to Self: less book reading, more TV watching and PEOPLE Magazine perusing.

Hope and Liz strut their stuff.
Hope and Liz strut their stuff.

On Saturday night, I joined friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where rock legend Patti Smith celebrated All Saints Day with an evening of poetry reading and of course, music.  Afterward, it was dinner at Les Halles on Park Avenue South. For me, the steak au poivre with frittes and yes, Bearnaise sauce, thank you very much! Finally, home for a soothing cup of peppermint tea, a quick glance at the second half of SNL and then, yes, bed.

Even a party ghoul needs her beauty sleep.

"Those trivia questions were pretty...hair raising."
"Hey, those trivia questions were pretty...hair raising."

To paraphrase the remarkable Patti Smith: to all our saints, to the unsaintly saints, both living and dead.

Hope

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?

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“I want to meet Mr. Big, get married, and live in New York.”

I am freezing my butt at the outside bar of the Bryant Park Grill, sipping shiraz, eating french fries, and fielding questions from two twenty-something German chicks who’ve come to New York for the first time, ostensibly on vacation. For tonight at least, they are on a fact-finding mission more so than a holiday. They want to know where to find Mr. Big and a good deal on American jeans–in that order.

The Dynamic Duo from Deutschland
The Dynamic Duo from Deutschland

The more animated of the two, or at least the one with the better English, is leading the charge. Even though she has barely touched her sweet-looking drink, she is more than slightly drunk. She waves her stick thin arms in the air a lot and slides her Size 0 butt around the stool a lot, and steals my fries when she thinks I’m not looking. So far, though, she’s more amusing than obnoxious, certifiably happy to meet me and anyone else who lives in New York. Even if it’s partly vodka-induced, that kind of unbridled, unjaded, over-the-top enthusiasm is well, kind of refreshing.

She smiles frequently and broadly, and I can’t help noticing her teeth could really do with a bonding. Still, she is lovely in that haphazard, waifish, just-breezed-out-of-my-bunk-at-the-youth-hostel sort of way, a look you pretty much stop being able to pull off the day you turn thirty-five. With her straight brown hair, full mouth, and pencil thin body, she also bears a striking resemblance to the 80’s supermodel, Paulina Porizkova. I’d tell her so only she probably wouldn’t know who Paulina is. You see, she was born in 1981.

“No, really, I want to know,” she persists, plumping her full lips into a pout which if I were a guy I’d probably find really hot. “Where do the Mr. Big’s go?” She tosses her bangs out of her eyes for the umpteenth time and slants her big round eyes at her friend, whom until now she seems to have forgotten. “We want to go there.”

Yes, well, good luck with that. Not that I say anything so remotely bitchy, of course. Instead I smile back and shake my head and admit it’s a worthy goal–and one hell of a good question.

Just what my friends and I need, another nubile twenty-something model look alike swimming in our dating pond which even though it’s Manhattan sometimes feels more like a puddle. Supposing I do know where Mr. Big hangs out? Does she really expect me to give it up out of what, the goodness of my heart?

The German educational system is reputed to be among the world’s best, but I’m thinking the curriculum must not include any Darwin.

To segue from science to literature–that’s litter-ah-chur–I’m reading or rather re-reading Candace Bushnell’s SEX AND THE CITY. It’s interesting how living in Manhattan has altered my perspective on the book as well as the HBO series. Before moving here, references to The Bowery Bar (B Bar and Grill now), Bicycle Boys, and yes, Modelizers seemed about as relevant to me as Ancient Egypt. I mean good to know, fascinating even, but really what does any of it have to do with my day-to-day? Now nine months into my Single Girl in Manhattan Life, I find myself sighing and shaking my head. And groaning occasionally. Okay, a lot.

The Paulina girl interrupts my momentary musing, her eyelids listing toward closed though her drink is more than three-quarters full. “You are Carrie Bradshaw, yes, but you have brown hair.”

I don’t smoke, either, but well, when you’re being compared, even remotely, to Sarah Jessica Parker, is it really any time to quibble?

Candace Bushnell, whom I met last month when she stopped by the Barnes and Noble in Union Square, is frequently likened to literary icon, Edith Wharton. The only Wharton books I’ve read are ETHAN FROME and THE BUCCANEERS and well, it’s been a while. (As for THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, so far I’ve made due with the Daniel Day Lewis film). For sure both authors offer an insider’s sometimes scathing perspective on Manhattan culture, though Bushnell’s take is a lot closer to the Age of Un-Innocence. And even though SEX AND THE CITY was first published in 1996, dating some of the references, it’s amazing how much of what she wrote in the 90’s still holds true. If you have any doubts, see my 9-22 blog on “Keeping It Real.” Believe me, modelizing is alive and well.

Fortunately, so are dreams. Yes, “girls” of all ages still want to have fun. But along with the fun, we want the fairytale. Sure, Prince Charming is now Mr. Big, the castle is now an Upper West Side high rise, and the glass slippers are Manolo slingbacks with some sort of really amazing detailing on the vamp, but otherwise the story, the fairytale, plays out pretty much the same.

And I for one am holding onto it with both white-knuckled hands. Even Bushnell’s Mr. Big got it right in the end, at least in the television and film adaptations of the book.

“Sometimes you just want to be with the one who makes you laugh.”

Happily Ever After–and Happy Halloween,

Hope

PS In celebration of the day-long Witching Hour, I’ll be pulling out my Inner Princess along with my ghoul-friends Liz Maverick, Elizabeth Kerri Mahon, Leanna Hieber et al as the Goth versions of popular fairytale princesses. I’m going as Goth Snow White and in addition to that Poison Apple, my costume’s corset is well, murder.