Music and My Characters: Guest Blog by Lea Kirk

Happy almost 4th of July! Need some great science fiction romance reading for the holiday? Well, read on.

Today, my friend and peer, Lea Kirk, is here to guest blog on Spacefreighters Lounge. Lea just released Collision, the fourth book in her Prophecy series and she's here to talk about some of the inspiration for her stories.

Music and My Characters

I love music. I can’t hold a tune or play an instrument to save my life, but songs and music definitely inspire me when I write. In fact, every one of my books has at least one song I associate with it. Let’s start from the beginning:

Prophecy: Being that this is my first book, darn near every character has a song. (I see you rolling your eyes.) But, we’ll stick to just my hero and heroine, Alex and Gryf. I Won’t Give Up by Jason Mraz reminded me of them from the moment I first heard it. I have to mention here that 93 Million Miles by Jason Mraz also got a lot of playtime on my iPod.

All of Me: Currently the only non-novel-length book in the series. Within a couple of weeks after I came up with the title, I heard a new song by John Legend entitled…All of Me. The words even fit Garrison and April’s relationship. For over a week I struggled with the idea of finding a new title for my story. In the end, I kept it.

Salvation: Hands down, the one song that is forever stuck to Nick and Sakura’s story in my mind is Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol. Folks, this has got to be the most perfect love song ever. In my opinion, of course. I can almost hear Nick strumming his guitar and singing this song.

Collision (Just released! Yay!): Again, several songs inspired me while writing Flora and Fander’s story. The one song that perfectly embodies their relationship is Perfect by Ed Sheeran. Whatever It Takes by Imagine Dragons really captures the feel of the storyline.

I hope you enjoyed this small insight to the songs that best fit my characters and stories. Thanks for visiting my guest blog on Spacefreighters!

(P.S. – I do have a vampire novella, Made for Her, that is unrelated to my Prophecy series. Two songs inspired me for that story. Demons by Imagine Dragons, and Back in Black by AC/DC. Mikhail is a “classic rock” kind of vampire. Kinda like his author-mom, who is rocking out to BiB as she puts the final touches to this blog post.)

~*~*~

Collision, Book Three of the Prophecy Series

A heart-rending loss…

Flora Bock will never forgive the Anferthian invaders for murdering her birth-parents. Growing up with the grandson of her sworn enemies is living a nightmare—until the day she sees him through the eyes of a young woman. But giving her heart to him is the ultimate betrayal of her parents’ memory.

A life in peril…

There are precious few places in the galaxy where Fander K’nil is safe. One look into Flora’s beautiful, hate-filled eyes is proof enough that Terr is not one of those places. He must keep her at a distance and stay alive long enough to fulfill his destiny. No matter what his heart desires.

An empire at stake…

Just as Fander and Flora begin to discover the depth of their feelings for each other, they are thrust into a deadly game of politics and assassination with an enemy who stops at nothing to stay in power. With the lives of everyone they love at risk, they must find a way to avert a new invasion before it’s too late—even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice.

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LOOK! UP IN THE SKY! ASTEROIDS?

Just when you thought you could go back outside . . .

The excitement of a total eclipse of the sun over a wide swath of the United States has only just died down when this announcement comes from NASA: a huge asteroid of more than 2.7 miles in diameter will pass within 4.4 million miles of Earth on September 1, 2017. In astronomical terms, that’s pretty close, though it is 18 times further than the distance to the moon. So, don’t worry, we’re in no danger of going the way of the dinosaurs—this time. The asteroid, named Florence, will be just near enough to give space scientists a thrill as they observe the surface of the rocky object up close and personal.

Far more potentially dangerous are the many smaller asteroids lurking out there in the dark that we can’t see. One of these little chunks of orbiting rock entered the Earth’s atmosphere as a meteor on February 13, 2013 and exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The meteor glowed 30 times brighter than the sun as it screamed toward the ground, and the 500-kiloton blast when it hit was the biggest of its kind in 100 years. The blast and resulting fire injured 1,500 people and damaged thousands of buildings.

According to physicist Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratories, “The chances are virtually certain that we are going to be next hit by a little asteroid that is a ‘city buster’ long before we are hit by a bigger one." Scientists have worked hard to identify the potential "end-of-the-world" asteroids that are at least one kilometer (.6 miles) wide and believe they have found nearly 95 percent of them. But there may be over one million near-Earth asteroids at least 30 m (100 feet) wide, and less than one percent of these have been discovered.

 

The U.N. action team on Near Earth Objects has proposed the creation of an International Asteroid Warning Network to scan for these smaller asteroids and give advanced warning of their approach. A Space Mission Planning Advisory Group has taken up the subject.But so far the actual network is just talk.

A nonprofit organization, the B612 Foundation, already exists which is dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroids. The organization’s current focus is the "Sentinel Mission," a space-based infrared (IR) survey mission to discover and catalog asteroids larger than 140 meters in Earth’s neighborhood. Sentinel is set to launch in 2018.

Of course, the question is what could be done to protect Earth if one of these rogue asteroids was detected heading straight for us. Well, in case you missed the movie Armageddon, you could check out CBS Network’s summer-lite version of that scenario, Salvation. The overwrought script’s plot takes its hand-wringing scientists through the options, including trying to knock the big rock off course with a convenient planetary probe, pushing it with the little thrusters from the ISS, intercepting it with a heavy rocket powered by a technology that hasn’t been invented yet, and, their last hope, interception on Earth’s doorstep with nuclear weapons. No one wants that option because, of course, hundreds of tiny radioactive meteors landing all over several continents is not really a good solution. (And, since the asteroid problem is not nearly enough to keep us entertained, someone is trying to sabotage the good guys’ efforts to save us, too!)

Salvation is bad SF writing, but good schlocky fun, and it has the benefit of Ian Anthony Dale (Hawaii Five O’s Adam Noshimuri) in a lead role. You could watch this preposterous enactment of the end of the world and shiver and laugh at the same time.

Or you could just go about your business in the great outdoors believing there’s nothing overhead but blue sky. Your choice.

Cheers, Donna

Information for this post drawn from:

“Now Playing: They Come From Outer Space to Destroy the World,” by Peter Micheli, Labroots.com, August 26, 2014.

“Huge Asteroid to Pass Closely to Earth on September 1st, 2017,” by Anthony Bouchard, Labroots.com, August 18, 2017.