By Brittany Geragotelis

Charity Tahmaseb

Names: Charity Tahmaseb & Darcy Vance

Nicknames: In e-mails, we refer to each other as “C” and “D.” You could also call us “Seven of Nine” (after the character in “Star Trek: Voyager”), since we often have “Borg” moments.

Best Known For: The Geek Girl’s Guide to Cheerleading

Home Towns: Charity: Minnetonka, MN; Darcy: Kendallville, IN

Website: thegeekgirlsguide.com

AC: You two are the brains behind the super-fun book, The Geek Girl’s Guide to Cheerleading. Why a cheerleading book?

Charity: I wish I could remember exactly what sparked the idea. I must have been reminiscing about high school, and all of a sudden remembered my time on the cheer squad. I do remember thinking: Maybe that could be a story.

And immediately after that, I e-mailed Darcy with my idea. Her response was: “I will either steal your story idea or kick your scrawny cheerleader butt if you don’t write this.” True, Geek Girl did start off as my solo project, but as you can see, Darcy was there all along.

AC: You have a really unique story behind how this book came to fruition. Do you mind sharing it with us?

Darcy Vance

Darcy: Sure! Like Charity said, Geek Girl’s Guide was originally her idea, but I loved it from the start. You could say I was the book’s cheerleader. Whenever Charity would get tired of working on it, I’d push her to keep going. There was a point where Charity had given up, and nothing I did or said could get her started on it again. Then my 21-year-old son, Matt, got sick—he was diagnosed with tongue cancer.

After that first horrible week, Charity said she wished she could do more to help, “…but we live so far apart. It’s not like I can pop down the street and deliver a hot dish to you.” The next day she asked me to join her in a private online group called “Hotdish.” When I signed in, there was a message saying “Remember that story,

Darcy and her son Matt

the one with the cheerleaders? What if we worked on it together?”

Charity knew needed something else to think about besides my son being sick and that I needed the money (paying for cancer

treatment is expensive). She said that if we could turn Geek Girl’s Guide into a story that a publisher might want to buy, I could use my part of the money to help pay my son’s doctor bills.

In between taking my son to doctors and hospitals, Charity and I worked on the book together. By the time my family found adoctor to help us, Charity and I had rewritten most of the book. Charity spent the week my son was in the hospital to remove his cancer, writing to agents. My son’s surgery was a success—and so were Charity’s letters. Several agents got in touch with us about our book right away.

The same month that my son’s doctor told us everything was OK, our agent sold The Geek Girl’s Guide to Cheerleading! The book was published 11 months later, two years and one week after my son’s diagnosis. He was with me the first day I saw our book in a store and he’s still cancer-free!

AC: That’s an incredible story in itself! Are you two planning on teaming up on another book in the future?
Darcy: We’re working on a couple of books at the moment, not true sequels, but other “geek girl” types of books. Charity is working on something called Dating on the Dork Side, which as a novel—and social experiment—is still a work in progress.

AC: Where did you get your cheerleader intel from?
Charity: Darcy’s cousin is a cheerleading coach, and we owe many of the little details we included in the story to her. We also did what the main character Bethany and her best friend Moni did: research! We hit the internet and did a lot of digging and reading.

AC: Were either of you “geek girls?” What do you hope other “geek girls” learn from reading your book?

Charity: Considering Darcy and I were chatting the other day about how many times we saw the original Star Wars movie in the theater, I think you could call us geeks—then and now.
Darcy: I hope readers will pick up on one of the main themes in our book: No risk, no reward. Maybe the odds are against you but your chances of gaining something you really want are absolutely zero if you never even try. Besides, the odds might not really be that bad. Just ask Charity—she was a geek girl and a cheerleader. And, almost everywhere I go, I meet girls who say this is their story, too.

AC: Cheerleading’s portrayed pretty positively in this book. Was this important to you?
Charity: It was. We both know how hard—and dangerous—it can be. While I spent only one season on my squad, I spent four on my school’s synchronized swimming team. Any sport with a performance aspect to it is at least 10 times harder. If you’re hurting, you can’t grimace, swear or spit; you have to smile, even if your ankle is throbbing or if you’ve accidentally inhaled half the pool into your lungs.

Darcy: Absolutely! There’s a reason it’s called cheer-LEAD-ing. Most of the cheerleaders I’ve met are not only expected to lead their schools from the sidelines of football fields and basketball courts, they set an example for all the kids in their school in every aspect of their lives. They deserve our admiration.

AC: Who are your own personal cheerleaders?

Charity: Definitely our families—they’ve been there all along, even back when publishing was a long way off. And each other. We keep each other going, often having the exact same idea at the exact same moment. We’ve taken to calling these occurrences “Borg moments.”

Darcy: Charity is my cheerleader. Not only did she help me when my son was sick, she was the first one to push me to take my writing seriously. My life would be completely different if I hadn’t met her.

AC: You mention American Cheerleader in the book! We loved the shout-out, by the way! What made you think to include us?

Charity: Research, again! We wanted to familiarize ourselves with what was going on in cheerleading today (since it has been *ahem* a while since either of us cheered). In addition, we also wanted to round out the character of Sheila, the cheerleading coach. Sometimes that extra research into characters doesn’t make it into the book, and sometimes it does. In this case, Coach Sheila and American Cheerleader were a natural fit.

AC: Any cheers you want to share with our readers?
Charity: Sure! Early in the book, to annoy her best guy friend, the main character Bethany invents a cheer for the chess club that goes like this:
“Gambit to the left, castle to the right, end game, end game, now in sight!”

**You can pick up a copy of The Geek Girl’s Guide To Cheerleading in bookstores now!

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