Awesome Authors: Niki Burnham

Niki Burnham certainly is an Awesome Author. She is the RITA-Award winning author of twelve books, including Sticky Fingers, Goddess Games, and the Royally Jacked series. She is also a frequent blogger. You can read excerpts of her books, visit her bulletin board, and check out her blog at www.nikiburnham.com.

Blogs are a central part of the Bradford Novels universe. If you have a blog, why did you start blogging, and how did you come up with the name for your blog? I blog in two different places. Once a month, I post to the Simon Pulse Romantic Comedies blog. There, I mostly write about the process of writing (or, last month, about the tech guy at Apple who casually informed me that my hard drive was fried. Ouch!)
Then, I post roughly weekly to my own blog, The Go-Ahead, which is on my website and copied to MySpace and LiveJournal. The Go-Ahead is more for fun. I blog about television, Academy Awards fashion, writing, and a myriad of other topics, including baseball. (Picture me in a crowded room: "My name is Niki, and I am addicted to baseball. I understand that it's a sickness. . . . ")
I chose the title of the blog, The Go-Ahead, because I like the positive, optimistic connotations of the phrase. In baseball, a go-ahead run is one that—if the game is tied or your team is losing—puts your team in the lead. In writing, getting a "go-ahead" from your editor means that the publishing house loves the story you've submitted and wants to go to contract.

What's your favorite thing about blogging? It gives me a chance to have some back-and-forth with readers. I don't get a lot of comments on my blog, but I get a TON of e-mail about it from teens. It's usually along the lines of, "I totally agree with you about Kylie Minogue's outfit! I didn't want to put the comment on the blog, though, because I also have a question about something in one of your books. . . ." So that's cool. (Particularly when they agree with me about Kylie's outfits.)

What's the difference between a blog and a diary? I think of a diary as more of a log . . . a notation of things that happened to you over the course of a day, and how you felt about them. It's something you write for yourself. A blog, on the other hand, is more conversational. You know someone's reading it!

Spencer Grace Kelly, the main character in GoldenGirl, is named after her distant relative, the Princess of Monaco. What’s your favorite Grace Kelly movie, and why? Do the newsreels of her wedding count? I loved how both she and Prince Rainier looked nervous and happy at the same time.
As to films, while I loved both Rear Window and To Catch A Thief, my fave would have to be Dial M for Murder. None of the characters were completely good or completely bad. I like that ambiguity.

GoldenGirl is full of scandals and exposed secrets. What was the biggest scandal at your high school? There really weren't any huge scandals. Or maybe I just didn't know about them!

Did your classmates discover any of your deep, dark secrets? This is one of the upsides of being an Army brat. The longest I attended any school was three years, and all my friends moved from place to place, too. So if anyone had deep, dark secrets, it was tough to discover them. There wasn't enough time!
Not that I had any deep, dark secrets, of course.

What are your most recent books? Goddess Games is currently out in paperback. It's the story of three very different girls who are forced to room together while working at a mountain resort over the summer. Of course, each of them harbors secrets (and they want to keep it that way!)

What new projects are you working on now? I have several projects in the works, but I'm one of those superstitious writers who doesn't want to talk about a project until it's in the can. Is that so wrong? (I know, I know. More secrets!)