Hi Readers!
Happy Monday-Before-the-Return-of-Stars-Wars Week! (Can't. Wait.)
I won't have a post this week due to my special Once Upon a Cover Design blog and Exclusive Cover Reveal of artwork for The Outer Planets on the SFR Brigade blog tomorrow, December 8th!
Woohoo! Can't wait to share the behind the scenes of how this cover came to be and whipping off that veil for the big reveal of the artwork.
It will include a giveaway for two random commenters, so hope you'll join me there Tuesday!
Here's the link to the blog: SFR Brigade Blog
Have a great week!
Laurie
Monday, December 7, 2015
Friday, December 4, 2015
THE GRAYS: CHAMELEONS OF THE GALAXY
According to research published in 2013 from Arizona State University, chameleons change color as a means of communicating with one another. For example, when two males fight over territory or a female, their color becomes brighter and more vivid.
That means the little lizards don’t just use their ability to change colors as camouflage, blending into their surroundings to hide from predators or to make themselves invisible to prey. The color of their skin reflects more of what’s happening on the inside than what scientists had previously thought.
I found this scientific factoid interesting because the bad guy aliens of my Interstellar Rescue series, the “Grays,” are of reptilian descent and project colorful “auras” to communicate emotion. The colors of their auras, normally a neutral silver-gray, change in accordance with their emotions—deepest black for thunderous rage, red for mere anger, purple for grief, bright blue for sexual arousal, green for fear, etc.
Of course, my Grays don’t
look anything like chameleons. They look like the little gray aliens of
everyone’s alien abduction nightmares, small of stature, with long, thin limbs,
big heads and big, black, almond-shaped eyes. They look delicate and generally
are. Still, their evolution in the swamps of their homeworld yielded this particular
body structure, ideal for moving quickly over terrain in which heavier bodies
would have been mired and easy prey for predators. When they began to require
heavy labor for agriculture, mining and factories, they acquired slaves to do
the work.The Grays’s evolution gave them certain advantages over other, stronger species once they began to move out into the galaxy. Since they had been able to communicate emotion through their auras from earliest times, they bypassed the use of verbal language in favor of developing a nascent talent for telepathy. Modern Grays are a fully telepathic race; all Grays can communicate with each other without special training and without touch. They cannot read the thoughts of non-telepaths, but to them that has never been an obstacle. Their auditory senses are fully functional, there are translators, and, of course, there is the mindwipe technique.
Slave rebellions in the early days of the Minertsan Empire (Minertsa is the Gray homeworld), revealed the need for a way to control the populations of bigger, stronger slaves. A lowly analyst working in the Bureau of Labor Sciences developed the technique that allowed the Grays to wipe the minds of their freshly-acquired slaves, most of which were human, eliminating all of the higher emotions—love, hate, anger, sadness, joy—and memories of people and places they had known, leaving only a basic instinct for self-preservation and a willingness to obey. That worker, well-rewarded by his employers, went on to found a major house of the Empire.
Not everyone is susceptible to the mindwipe. Perhaps ten percent of humans, and an unknown percentage of other races, is immune to its effects. The heroine of my first book, Unchained Memory, Asia Burdette, is part of the ten percent, as are Sam Murphy and Rayna Carver, hero and heroine of my third book, Fools Rush In (coming out next year). Lucky for us!
We
learn a lot about the Grays, their homeworld of Minertsa, and how they
communicate through their colorful auras in the second book of my Interstellar Rescue series, Trouble in Mind, releasing February 16,
2016. Be sure to pre-order your copy NOW on Amazon!
Image adapted from Yemen Chameleon image by Kupos at Wikimedia Commons. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
http://ifuckinglovescience.com/color-chameleon-meme-science-biology/
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Veronica Scott's favourite character
I'm delighted to welcome Veronica Scott to Spacefreighters so we can all read about (and hear) her favourite character.
When this topic was first brought up as
a possible blog post, I thought how on Earth would I ever be able
to choose a favorite character from all the people in my novels???
But now that I’ve read a few of the posts – and they’re so much
fun! – I’m going to take the tack that it’s not so much anyone
is my favorite, as it is that I’ll tell you why the character is
who he is.
That would be Nick Jameson from Wreck
of the Nebula Dream, which was my first published science fiction
novel – a best seller and award winner that launched me on my
independent publishing career. Wreck is loosely based on the
sinking of the Titanic so when I was doing the plotting, I
pondered who I’d want to be on the ship with me in a disaster of
this nature. I was always impressed with Second Officer Lightoller of
the Titanic, as he was portrayed in the nonfiction book and
subsequent movie adaptation “A Night to Remember.” So I wanted
the character of Nick to have some aspects of this brave man, but I
didn’t want him to be ship’s crew. I wanted Nick to be a
passenger, and a Sectors Special Forces soldier.
I have immense respect for the Special
Forces soldiers of our time, and try to make my fictional military
operators worthy of the name. I can’t think of anyone better to
have on your side if you’re stuck on a wrecked, drifting spaceship
behind enemy lines. Those men don’t know the meaning of the word
failure, they’re deadly, and they never give up while there’s
breath remaining. That led to the question of why such a person would
be traveling on a luxury spaceliner in the first place. Once I had
that plot hole solved to my own satisfaction – his trip is a result
of his last, disastrous mission where everyone else was killed
through no fault of Nick’s, and his unsavory commanding officer
wanting him off the base as soon as possible – I knew who he was,
and that informed his character and his actions aboard the Nebula
Dream for me.
When the story starts Nick is
battle-scarred, tired and a bit too prone to hard drinking. (During
the edits, I was surprised myself at how much I had him imbibing
LOL.) He’s attracted to Mara, a highly successful intergalatic
businesswoman who seems interested in him, but his self-confidence is
pretty much in tatters. As soon as disaster hits though, he’s
there, ready to do whatever it takes to ensure other passengers
survive. He loads up a lifeboat, he helps Mara rescue two trapped
children…and the adventure goes on from there. The Navy SEALs have
a saying, “Yesterday was the only easy day.”
That pretty much
applies to surviving the Nebula Dream disaster, which just
keeps getting worse.
Michael Riffle,
the actor who narrates my audiobooks, captures Nick perfectly, in my
opinion. The first time I heard Michael read from Wreck, I had
actual goosebumps because he was Nick. It was like my
character was talking to me. So, want to hear Nick for yourself?
Click on this Soundcloud sample (not trying to sell you an audiobook,
I promise!) It’s just a rare treat for me to be able to offer you
the chance to ‘hear’ the character’s voice. Wreck
of the Nebula Dream sound sample
Amazon best-seller Veronica Scott is
a three-time recipient of the SFR Galaxy Award, as well as a National
Excellence in Romance Fiction Award, and has written a number of
science-fiction and fantasy romances. Her latest release is Star
Cruise: Marooned. She’s also the USA Today/HEA blog’s SciFi
Encounters columnist.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/vscotttheauthor
Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/Veronica-Scott/e/B006CUCJ92/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1448154672&sr=1-2-ent
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Delights in December #TheForceAwakens #KeirsFall #scifi #spaceopera
First up, The Force Awakens. Oh, yes! Being a Brit I get to see it a whole day before most of the US (though my Star Wars buddy in Sweden is getting to see it the 16th, and I know that our Laurie here at Spacefreighters is also seeing it the 17th...but I'm a few hours ahead, bwahahaa!)). I could see it one minute after midnight on the 17th here in the UK, but aside from the fact I don't give up my sleep for ANYTHING, I'd be going alone. Instead, I'll be seeing it at a more reasonable time with my two Star Wars loving boys, the daughter I'm hoping to finally convert to the Dark Side, and my long suffering husband (he's banned us from dressing up. Boo! We'll be wearing our SW tees though). I'm both excited and terrified! I've spent the last few days rewatching the original trilogy in the hope of disproving a theory about Luke Skywalker in TFA. >_< I can't bear it if Disney break my heart with this film! But now I only have to wait for a few more days until I know.
In the past month it's mostly been one scene - just 9 pages long, a mere 3000 words - that was killing me. But we did it (though Hades knows how my editor stuck with me on this). Keir's Fall will release on the 7th December. One month behind schedule (and about two years late) and with only a few days on pre-order instead of a couple of weeks, with any launch plan abandoned back in October, but it'll be out! I thought I'd never get there.
And the bonus is, you're also getting a bit of book three in the back. The actual MS is a disaster zone, but I'd started fixing the opening scene a few days ago and Dani volunteered to go over it. Fortunately it wasn't in too bad a way (after I switched it from the omniscient POV it was originally in to 3rd). I have to admit, there are some really cool things in book three that I can't wait to share, and the opening scene is one of my favourites so I hope you'll enjoy it. Book three is unlikely to release until 2017. I promise it will be worth the wait!
So, here's the newly edited blurb for book two - Keir's Fall - and the first of the buy links. If you haven't read book one, that's still on sale for just 99cents/Euros/pence until the end of this month.
Blurb:
It's been a year in paradise for Keir and Quin, but now the idyll is over. After Quin falls sick, they return to the hidden sanctuary of Lyagnius, and what she learns there will not only change their lives, but set them on a journey that could separate them forever.
When Keir falls victim to a ruthless Nercaandi Empress bent on conquering the galaxy with her cybernetic army, it will take all Quin's diminishing powers and the help of her son to find him. But what waits for her aboard the tyrant's ship will test her strength and the limits of their love, and put everything she cares about at risk. Including Keir.
With the galaxy itself about to fall, will she be able to save him?
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| A Science Fiction Romance Novel Goodreads | Webpage Available from... Amazon | All Romance eBooks Kobo Pick up Keir for just 99 cents/99 Euros/99p until the end of December. |
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| A Science Fiction Romance Novel Goodreads | Available from... Amazon | All Romance eBooks Kobo | iTunes | B&N | Smashwords Print available from... Amazon | B&N | CreateSpace The Book Depository |
Just two more blog posts until I leave the interwebs for my Christmas break! Unfortunately I won't get to post about The Force Awakens until my return on the 5th of January.
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