Hey everybody!

It's always interesting on tour to see the questions that I hear multiple times--and there are always the same questions.  I find it sort of amazing that people in a blizzard in Chicago want to know the same things as the people who strolled in off the beach in Miami, but that always happens, and I always find it really interesting to see what questions are common all over the country.

So for the next couple of days I'm going to tackle exactly that: frequently asked questions--the tour edition.

Here goes--the most commonly asked questions on the Heist Society tour (part 1):

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WHERE DO YOU GET THE NAMES FOR YOUR CHARACTERS?

This is a question that I think I got at every tour stop.  Every single one!  So I'll try to go through the answer here.

Cammie: I knew I wanted a "C" name that could also be a last name, and Cameron is the first one that came to me and it just stuck.

Macey: Was always just Macey--don't know why.

Bex: I'd heard Bex as a nickname for Rebecca once and I really liked it.  This seemed like a good time to use it.

Liz: A family friend was named Liz and it seemed like a good name to round out the group.

Rachel: has always been my favorite name.

Abby: I have a cousin Abby. (Hi, Abby!)

Morgan: Morgan was the last name of some people who were very, very dear to me.  I gave Cammie their last name to honor them.

Joe:  This was my father's nickname when he was in the army.

Solomon: King Solomon asked God for wisdom and is synonymous with that ability, so it seemed a really fitting name for Cammie's wisest teacher.

Kat: the whole book started with "Kat the Burglar"

Bishop:  Kat's last name is an homage to probably my favorite heist movie ever, Sneakers.

Hale: I wanted a last name that could easily be used as a first name, and when I saw that on a plaque on a wall it just clicked.

Zach: No idea. Zach was just Zach.

Josh:  Josh was just Josh.

Bobby Bishop: I like alliteration (obviously).  Plus, I wanted a first name that is a common nickname so that Uncle Eddie could call him "Robert" when he's in trouble.

Uncle Eddie: Edward is a name that exists in some form in a lot of languages, and Uncle Eddie is a resident of the world.  Plus, it just always felt right.

Angus and Hamish: I wanted two names that sounded very British.  And I got them.

Simon: Was always just Simon.

Gabrielle:  Perhaps my favorite character on TV is Fiona from Burn Notice. When I was planning Heist Society I knew Kat would be surrounded almost entirely by boys, so it was important to make the other girl in the story the ultimate girl.  So I thought about Fiona--how she's as tough as the guys but she's also incredibly graceful and beautiful and feminine.  So I named Kat's cousin Gabrielle after the actress who plays Fiona, Gabrielle Anwar.

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR TITLES?

So far in my career, I've been the person who has come up with all the titles of my books.  This is actually sort of unusual since titles are so incredibly important, and the ability to write a good book and to title a book are sort of different skill sets.  I fully anticipate there will eventually be a book that someone (a friend, my agent, my editor--someone) will have to title for me, but so far that hasn't been the case.

As to where my titles come from, that's a different beast altogether.  I like to say the Title Fairy drops them off and that's really not far from the truth.

I'd Tell You I Love You but Then I'd Have to Kill You was the title for that book almost from the second the idea for the book dropped into my head.  Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy was a little bit harder.  Eventually, I started making a list of common sayings and phrases and playing around with them.  When I hit upon "cross my heart and hope to die" it was pretty obvious where we needed to go next.

Don't Judge a Girl By Her Cover was the title for GG3 just as soon as I wrote about Macey with her parents and I realized that she was living a cover that was very different from who she really is.

Only The Good Spy Young was much harder--probably the hardest GG book to date.  Again, I spent a lot of time looking up/thinking about common phrases and sayings and once you've read the final book I think you'll agree this one fits GG4 quite nicely.

Heist Society was probably my hardest book to title so far.  Well, actually, the "coming up" wasn't the problem.  The title Heist Society occurred to me very early in the writing process, but my editor and agent and I kept telling ourselves that we could do better.  But no matter how many ideas we came up with (and, believe me, we came up with A LOT) none of them sounded right.  Turns out that was because we'd had the right title all along.

DID YOU ALWAYS KNOW YOU WANTED TO BE A WRITER?

The first time I ever thought seriously about being a writer was when I read the book The Outsiders.  As soon my father told me that SE Hinton was a sixteen year old girl who was living near where I lived when she wrote that book, that was the first time it ever occurred to me that real people write books.  Not only that, I realized that real people who were like me wrote books.

And that was good enough for me.

Tune back in tomorrow when we'll do part 2!

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