About Cecily von Ziegesar: Cecily Brooke von Ziegesar is an American author best known for the young adult Gossip Girl series of novels.
I'm just a crazy person. I mean, I really didn't have any trouble coming up with weird ways for people to die. I think I'm just very twisted!
I tend to stare at people and memorize what they're saying and how they say it.
I avoid the young adult section altogether if possible, although it's sometimes fun to catch a girl lying on the floor, reading 'Gossip Girl.'
Face it, you have to be sort of an egomaniac to write something down and think that anyone is going to want to read it.
I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing 'Cum Laude.' So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby... but the students and...
I used to be an editor and I was editing young adult series. I didn't really like the books that I was reading, so I decided that I would write a book about something I'd want to read if I was 16. It turned into a Cinderella story... I developed a pr...
I feel like 'Gossip Girl' isn't really 'Gossip Girl' anymore when they're away at school because they don't go to NYU; they go to, like, Yale and Brown. New York City is just as much a character as anyone else in the books, and I was really sort of r...
But I've always been fascinated with that prettiest-girl-in-the-class person that I never was, getting inside her head and showing that she's just as tormented and messed up as everybody else.
'Gossip Girl' came out in rapid succession over two years, so the endings always had to be suspenseful so that you couldn't wait for the next one.
Recently my publicist asked me for a college photo, and I realize how chubby I looked. I know this sounds totally shallow, but my advice is don't fall prey to the freshmen fifteen!
I guess I was popular in high school.
I remember, in my senior year, one of my teachers taking me aside and saying: 'You look really tired.' This was when I was being a bad kid and she knew that something was wrong.
I have no sense of what I should or shouldn't talk about. I just blather. Which is why it's fun to write 'Gossip Girl.' I do tend to just talk about anything.
The girls show more skin these days, but I think, generally, they behave the same way as when I was growing up.
Back in my days as a children's book editor, my superiors caught on to the fact that teenagers were using the Internet to gossip about each other, and thought it might be nifty to develop a series of books about an anonymous high-school blogger who g...
...don't act like I didn't for you. I did. Hard. And for a long time. So please, forgive me if now that we're over, I'm exhausted.
My high school wasn't a big public school; it was tiny. There were 36 girls in my graduating class. We were a big group of girls that by the time senior year came along couldn't wait to get away from school fast enough but we loved each other. It's r...
I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I'd want to set it in a place that was familiar to me - Manhattan, where I'd grown up - and I'd model the characters on myself and my friends.
I'd never really babysat. I feel like I'm Blair, or 'Gossip Girl.' A teenager, basically - and now suddenly I'm a mom?
