FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Marissa Curnutte
347.574.3136
ROMANCE WRITER, LINGUIST KNOWS THE POWER OF WORDS
Summer promotion features Americana series by author Julie Tetel Andresen
Andresen has penned more than 20 books during her career, covering everything from historical romance and contemporary fiction to paranormal tales and linguistic theories. Putting her expansive knowledge of language to work, she writes with an impressive blend of wit, sincerity and intelligence. She uses the varied lessons learned from each genre to help strengthen the other.
Andresen’s time-slip trilogy – “The Blue Hour,” “The Crimson Hour” and “The Emerald Hour” – takes readers on a trip around the world. The series of time traveling excursions spans more than 100 years, exploring the economic consequences of globalization through cancer research, pharmaceuticals and the rubber trade.
In addition to being an accomplished author, Andresen is a professional linguist. Her newest academic release, “Linguistics and Evolution,” reworks theoretical linguistics around a developmental systems approach for these post-Chomskyan times.
Andresen’s official website is hosting a special summer promotion for her beloved Americana romance series, which includes “Dawn’s Early Light,” “Unexpected Company,” “Carolina Sonnet” and “Heart’s Wilderness,” each on sale for 99 cents through September. Her site also offers for free download two stories: The Wedding Night (when several things happen at once), an erotic/gothic short story, and Saigon Spring (coming in September), a BDSM-inspired novella set in Vietnam.
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You can pick up a copy of The Wedding Night free just by clicking this link. This is a short story. The
Synopsis:
"Was his new bride mad? That was the question on the mind of Roland Devereux, the new Earl of Rochester, as he turned the handle on the door to her ladyships' bedchamber.
The only question on his new countess's mind was whether she could save them both from the evil lurking in her house."
For more Julie Tetel Andresen goodness, check out her Timeslip Series at this link.
Book 1 - The Blue Hour
Cancer researcher Alexandra Kaminski is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough when she crosses paths with pharmaceutical representative, Val Dorsainville, and the two are plunged into the mystery, passion, and tragedy of their past lives in Paris of the 1800s. Can they solve the mystery and avert tragedy this time around?Book 2 - The Crimson Hour
Eloise Popescu has one last entry to make in her screw-up-alog, and it's a doozy: she has just walked into the cross-fire of warring Chinese mafia families and into the path of Hanes Reynolds whose career has just been ruined by those same families. As Eloise and Hanes reluctantly unite forces to escape the clans, they must learn to trust one another … or repeat the fatal mistakes they made the last time they were together in 19th-century Hong Kong.
Book 3 - The Emerald Hour
Londoner Theodor West can't quite believe how, much less explain why, the beautiful and free-spirited American botanist, Jordan Charles, is bedeviling him and his high-tech career. But it's clear that if he wants his career back and that if she wants to avert the destruction of the world's rubber forests, they must repair what happened the last time they were together – one hundred years ago in London and Rio.
And finally, some info on Julie Tetel Andresen herself, and a Q&A.
Biography of Julie Tetel Andresen
Julie
Tetel Andresen’s seemingly disparate writing activities – fiction, non-fiction
and essays in foreign languages – all arise from a unified sense of her writing
self.
As a professional linguist, she loves language, while as a
romance writer she loves the language of love; and when learning a foreign
language, she loves nothing more than exploring the limits of her ability to
express herself in that language on paper.
In her academic writing, she has long been devoted to
exploring the history of linguistics, and this disciplinary exploration
parallels her devotion to writing historical novels. In her most recent
academic work “Linguistics and Evolution”
(Cambridge 2014), she shows the ways that the history of linguistic theory and
practice informs the current state of the discipline, and this sense of the
past pressing on the present informs her time-slip series.
Her writing activities have always been entwined
temporally. She wrote her first historical “My Lord Roland”
while writing her PhD dissertation “Linguistic
Crossroads of the Eighteenth Century,” and all her early academic
articles were written mostly in French. Twenty novels and dozens of journal
articles later, she wrote her Regency novella “French Lessons”
while waiting for the 2012 autumn meeting of the Cambridge Press Syndicate to
decide to issue her a contract for “Linguistics and Evolution.” At the same
time, she happened to be in Ho Chi Minh City learning Vietnamese and happily
writing her Vietnamese essays.
She
firmly believes that one type of writing strengthens the others. Her historical
novels have honed her craft of plotting and sub-plotting, while her time-slip
series has given her the Kraft (in the German sense of the word 'power')
to handle the long historical arc and multiple characters involved in
“Linguistics and Evolution.” Her professional study of language, in turn, makes
her sensitive to the vocabulary and rhythms of speech in other places and time
periods; while writing in a foreign language – be it French, German, Romanian,
or Vietnamese – is to her like the pianist warming up with scales and arpeggios
or the yogini trying out a new asana.
Can she get her leg behind her head in Romanian? No? Well, then how about
triangle pose? Can she get into full lotus in Vietnamese? Again, no? Let’s see
about half-lotus.
Andresen
grew up in Glenview, Ill. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from Duke
University and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
She has taught at Duke University
for the past 20 years where she specializes in linguistics.
Q&A with Author, Linguist Julie Tetel Andresen
When did you develop a passion for linguistics?
Ever since I was
about five years old. I remember lying in bed at night in the room I shared
with my older sister, making up new words that I would teach her. When I
discovered there were other languages in the world, with the words already made
up, I couldn’t get enough. I didn’t know, however, that there was such a thing
as a discipline of linguistics until I was working on my Masters in French.
After that I was hooked.
How do you bridge your career as a romance writer with your life as a
professional linguist and academic?
The two activities wrap around
another almost every day in my life, and this has been the case for the last
twenty years or more. Today I’m at a resort on the Black Sea in Bulgaria. My
friends are on the beach. I can’t tan, since I have redhead skin and was told
by a dermatologist years ago to stay out of the sun. I’m happy enough, however,
because I’m on the balcony of my room overlooking the sea, and working on the
some of the early chapters of the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell book, Languages
of the World, skyping with my co-author, Phillip Carter. When I take a break
from this, I’ll probably download a werewolf story or a panther shape-shifting
story. I got into these subgenres in the past few months. At the moment, I
can’t get enough of them.
How do your two writing careers strengthen each other?
All good writing is story
telling, and this applies to academic writing, as well. I love reading about
language, and the question is always, “What story is this linguist telling me?”
I am currently reading The Last Speakers by David K. Harrison, and it’s a
wonderful world tour of the stories of speakers of endangered languages. My
favorite linguist may well be Stephen Levinson. Although it might not seem like
his Space in Language and Cognition would make for a gripping story, I read the
book (several times, actually), enthralled by the world Levinson was opening to
me. Following a good (academic) argument is like reading a well-plotted novel.
I think it was Fred Astaire who
said: “If I don’t dance for one day, I feel it. If I don’t dance two days in a
row, the audience will feel it. If I don’t dance three days in a row, I should
find another job.” Having two writing careers keeps me in writing shape. It’s
cross training. Yoga and Pilates.
You have lived and traveled all over the world – to France, Germany,
Vietnam, Romania, Greece, and Brazil just to name a few places. How did this
influence your writing?
I’ve always loved
historical romances, but I began my time-slip series when I realized I wanted
to write about the places I’m visiting in the here and now. I love it when a
place is a kind of character in a novel, ever-present and shaping events. I
also happen to love botanical gardens and the tropics, so I find myself
gravitating toward southern latitudes and the equator, where everything is
lush. When I write a story and find I need to check out the details of a place
I’m using as a setting, I can easily persuade myself I need to revisit the
location in order to make sure I have the details right. While writing The
Emerald Hour, I made sure to revisit the spectacular Jardim Botânico in Rio. In
fact, it would have been irresponsible of me not to revisit the location.
How do you see language changing?
For one thing, it’s always
changing! I wrote a short essay that’s on my website for the Duke Magazine
about where English will be in 25 years, where I offer a few ideas. Linguistics
isn’t a precisely predictive science where I can say that X grammatical change
is certain to happen. However, since William Labov’s groundbreaking work in
sociolinguistics, linguists are able to track language change in progress. Just
sticking to phonetic matters, Labov is currently tracking the Northern Cities
Shift and the Southern Cities Shift in North American English. As for lexical
and grammatical matters, there is no doubt that platforms such as Facebook and
Twitter compel their users to create new and abbreviated forms that will no doubt
get woven into the
spoken language. People are already speaking abbreves, and LOL has morphed into
the word lawl. One of the more interesting phenomena
created by social media is that previously unwritten forms of a language
(Arabic dialects, for instance) are now becoming written forms of
communication. Before these new media, in the case of Arabic, only Modern
Standard Arabic functioned (and still functions) as the written standard, while
the local dialects were written in very limited circumstances, if at all. Now
there is an explosion of writing in the local dialects, as people communicate
directly among themselves.
How many languages do you speak? Which one do you prefer and why?
I’m not a polygot. I’ve studied an array of languages – French, German,
Arabic, Japanese, Vietnamese, Romanian – sometimes just to get a sense of how
the particular language is put together, but I know true polygots, and I’m not
one of them. I make zero claim, for instance, to knowing anything but the most
superficial facts about Arabic or Japanese. At the moment I am immersed in
Romanian. If I’m not in the language at the moment, I can’t say anything about
it. The language I prefer is the one I am in in the moment. I do know that I
love Vietnamese enough to want to spend an entire year there, in a language school.
The six months I spent there last year was not enough.
Do you find it easier to write or speak in a foreign language?
For me, writing is always the easiest thing to do! When I was in
Vietnam, I kept coming to class with essays. The teachers wondered at first why
I was doing this, because they hadn’t assigned them. One of the first questions
one of my teachers asked was, “How long did it take you to write this?” I would
usually work on one for a couple of hours a day for maybe a day or two, so I
could sleep on things, and then go back and see what I wanted to say. I would
tell my teacher I spent maybe five, six, or seven hours an essay. She would
shake her head and say it would take her over a week to write something like
this in English. And her English was way better than my Vietnamese. I think
most people think speaking is easier than writing. For me, it’s the opposite.
It didn’t really even occur to me that I have routinely written in a
language I am studying until a little over six months ago. It simply seemed
like a natural thing to do as a writer, like a pianist warming up by playing
arpeggios. As I was putting my website together, I thought, Well, if I’m
putting together all my writing, I may as well include all my writing.
I’ve always written my foreign language essays for restricted audiences, either
a small group of academics interested in a particular question or for an
audience of one, namely my language teacher. They’re intimate pieces. I finally
put them on my website, because I thought maybe other people would enjoy them
as well.
This is a
choosing-among-children question, only slightly less difficult to answer than, “What’s
the favorite book you’ve written?” All historical periods are fascinating.
Especially the present one, since I’m living in it.
How was your approach to writing your time-slip series different than
your historical and Regency pieces?
Not much different. I felt my
time-slip series explores and expands my sense of the boundaries of the
romance. I got my start with Regencies, which to me are like classic Hollywood
romanticomedies, and who doesn’t like a Frank Capra screwball comedy? Everything
I’ve written from that point on has been an extension of the form of the
romanticomedy, even if the tone is dark.
We can only assume you never stop writing. What can readers expect from
you next?
I yielded to trend and just
wrote a BDSM-inspired novella. Yikes! But I loved it. Not for everyone, of
course, but nothing is. After the linguistics book, it’s back to another
time-slip. (I think.)
I plan a trip to Mongolia in
2014 and want to find a good 6-week program for learning the language – the
basics, obviously, nothing for fluency. What will come out of that is anyone’s
guess. I, for one, don’t have the faintest idea.
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