Blog Tour: (Guest Post + Giveaway) The Antithesis (The Antithesis, #1) By Terra Whiteman

I would like to welcome Terra Whiteman to The Avid Reader today. Thanks for stopping by Terra. Terra will be telling us what type of material (influences, etc) went into writing The Antithesis. Thanks to the Terra Whiteman there will be a giveaway on The Avid Reader today. The giveaway is for The Series. For more details and to enter see Rafflecopter below.

The Series

Book Title: The Antithesis

Series: The Antithesis, #1

Author: Terra Whiteman

Genre: Dark, Fantasy, Dystopian, Philosophical, Science Fiction, Speculative

Publisher: 1889 Labs

Paperback/Ebook:

Pages: 450

Purchase

Amazon Kindle

Smashwords

PRINT (ISBN: 978-1926959085)

Book Description

Justice Alezair Czynri is the newest recruit of the Jury, a group of powerful beings who reside in Purgatory and enforce the Code between Heaven and Hell. However, Justice Czynri could not have come at a worse time. A storm lays just over the horizon…

One that brings with it a war.

SERIES BLURB

This is a story about God and the Devil, but not how you were taught to believe.

This is also a story about love and hate, and the suffering both can bring.

This is about rights and wrongs, and all of the spaces in between.

This is about revenge, courage, death, passion; with no villains, no heroes… only those left scorned.

This is a story about Heaven, Hell, and the Jury that holds them together.

This is The Antithesis.

Excerpt

The Terabicz Ruins was a collection of towers composed of black rock and sharp peaks, complete with floating circular platforms hovering in the sky like halos. Vines could be seen wedged between surface fractures, though I didn’t understand how any vegetation could survive in this perpetual darkness.

A winding staircase led to the first platform a thousand feet up. As we approached the base, Leid tripped over her own feet, landing on her knees.

I moved forward, but she shot out a hand to stop me. I froze.

Then she lurched, vomiting blood all over the first step.

I reeled back, eyes wide, fear rising in my throat. Leid only crouched on the steps, panting.

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, the confusion and fear now propelling into anger. “Are you dying?!”

“No,” she responded coarsely.

Leid tried to get up, but collapsed. She attempted getting up a second time, made it one more step, but then collapsed again.

I frowned, kneeling in front of her with my back turned. “Get on.”

Reluctantly she crawled over me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, legs hooking my elbows. She couldn’t protest this time; walking was out of the question.

I began up the stairs, Leid now on my back.

“Thank you,” I heard her murmur quietly.

“Sure thing. Just don’t puke on me.”

The climb was exhausting, seeming to never end. Leid wasn’t heavy in the least, and in fact Vel’Haru could probably lift three hundred times their own weight; but the last four days of almost nonexistent sleep and nonstop traveling had finally caught up with me. I was tired, and it was showing.

I took a breather on the first platform. The second, I’d decided to just keep going. By the apex, I was staggering.

The apex platform was shockingly covered in moss. An iron gate surrounded a stone temple with a courtyard covered in…statues.

“What is this place?” I whispered.

“Civen’s old temple. Since the Deadland’s decline, another has been built in Alatonia.”

I now understood why she’d placed the statue here. It would have blended in perfectly with the garden of others surrounding the temple. My eyes drifted over the platform, a frown pulling at my lips. Something didn’t feel right. It was so quiet, though that had been consistent throughout the entire area. I really couldn’t explain why I had this sense of impending doom.

Slowly, I carried Leid toward the gate.

My hand pushed against it; it opened with a creak.

I stepped inside, eyes surveying the courtyard.

It was isolated, save for the ever still and silent stone army surrounding us. I moved to the side of the wall, kneeling and letting Leid slide off. She collapsed against the ground, limply sitting up.

I had to admit I was a little pissed off for the fact that there weren’t any demons here. All of this for practically nothing? Though I supposed it would have been considerably bad otherwise since Leid could barely move and I currently wasn’t at my best.

“Hurry,” she pleaded.

I nodded, and she hadn’t needed to point out which statue was the target. Despite the clever hiding spot, it stuck out like a sore thumb.

Surrounded in marble soldiers and half-naked maidens, a woman knelt; arm outstretched, eyes wide and lips parted in the beginnings of a despairing cry. She seemed carved out of black glass, shimmering like an obsidian beacon within the otherwise white wash of the garden.

…Obsidian. This woman.

I momentarily forget about my sick noble, slowly moving toward it, seamlessly weaving through the other nondescript statues. My eyes were narrowed, head slightly tilted in curious awe.

I stopped in front of her, drifting over the details of her face; all the while my face had become a contortion of disarray. I spun, pointing at the statue.

“Why does this thing look exactly like you?”

Leid tried to respond but coughed instead. When she was finished, she tried again:

“Will you just kill it, please? We’ll talk about this later.”

“…How do I kill it?”

“With your fists, you genius. Smash it to bits.”

“Exactly how were you expecting to destroy this thing on your own, by the way?”

“Shut up and finish it!”

“Not until you take back what you said.”

Leid stared, falling silent. She knew what I meant.

I waited, silent as well.

Conceding, she looked away shamefully. “I was angry; I didn’t mean it.”

“What didn’t you mean?”

“I would never regret meeting you, Alezair. I’m sorry.”

Though I’d coerced her into saying this, I could tell she was being sincere. Her expression was somber, painfully so.

I grinned. “Thanks. One pile of black sand coming right up.”

I turned, just as a thwump broke through the air. I felt a pinch. My grin faded into a confused wince and I looked down at the source of the sharp pain.

…There was a dart sticking out of my chest.

I looked up at Leid, though my vision was already beginning to blur; the world around me swayed. She was screaming something, pointing behind me, but now everything was moving in slow motion and I was having trouble comprehending.

I was about to turn but was tackled; a group of hands held me down, shoving my face into the moss. I thrashed, snarling, still strong enough to fling some of my assailants off. But each time a pair of hands left, another instantly replaced them. I couldn’t see anything—just a cluster of feet as the crowd scurried around, trying to keep me down.

Another group of feet left the crowd and began for Leid, who at this moment was hopelessly trying to crawl away. As they got further from us I could see them clearly:

Demons. Tons of them; at least two dozen.

Instead of retreating for the gate, Leid deliriously went the wrong way. During the struggle I’d been shoved about twenty feet from the statue. She was crawling toward us.

The demons pursuing her eventually backed off, waiting at the first row of statues. When Leid passed the third row, a shadow slid out from one of them, advancing slowly in a steady, calculated gait.

I squinted, teeth clenched and still struggling, trying to see the demon clearly. And then I did.

It was Caym Stroth, Raith’s second general. Unusually dressed in a black suit, the Obsidian Court insignia on his right shoulder, he held a giant serrated axe, swinging it nonchalantly at his side. He whistled an unfamiliar tune as Leid scrambled toward the statue. It seemed she was too delirious to even see him.

“Leid!” I screamed, though it was pointless because she couldn’t hear me. “Leid, behind you!”

She was now within a foot of the statue. Gasping, she reached toward it with a trembling outstretched hand.

Caym stopped behind her, lifting the axe over his head, his lips curling into a malicious sneer.

Guest Post

WHAT TYPE OF MATERIAL (INFLUENCES, ETC) WENT INTO WRITING THE ANTITHESIS?

The Antithesis wasn't a project where I sat down and thought, "okay, I'm going to write about this, so I need to look up and research this, this and this."

Actually, I didn't look up anything or read anything for the two years that I worked on it. I didn't need to. It was one of those remarkable things that just came to me and all I used was my infallible ingenuity.

... Tee-hee, but on a more serious :

The book's premise is deceiving in the sense that it is all about Heaven and Hell and the 'Jury that holds them together', but that's where the religion stops. Right there. In fact, this will probably be the most irreverent take on a Judeo-Christian theme that you'll ever read.

I’ve always been interested in Theology, but never in a specific sense and more in a general one. I’ve taken numerous classes on varying religions, from Ancient Egyptian to Buddhism, and I found religion’s philosophy and influence on human behavior to be very interesting. This story contains angels and demons (even God and Satan) as actual characters, but none of them are omnipotent or ethereal the way religion portrays them to be. They are just like us—flawed, intelligent beings who mostly mean well—living in a world that although is far away from ours, is actually very similar. To be honest, I didn’t really give the deeper meaning of the setting much thought when I started writing it. It was just a neat idea to devise a completely different approach to angel and demon mythology than I’d ever read before. But I can say now that the setting makes a very ironic (and deservingly so) atmosphere for a series that explores areas between the duality of good and evil.

The Antithesis is about human relationships in both a setting and environment that are almost completely nonhuman. In this series you'll find a lot of things that I've been interested in over the course of my academics, such as philosophy, physical sciences and psychology. I'm a science major who is now a real life scientist (and I get to wear a lab coat and everything!), and that influenced a great deal of the story.

It's extremely difficult to talk about this without giving anything away. I suppose a majority of the ideas for the book came from life experiences, but not just my life. Actually, my life is pretty boring compared to any of my characters. I'm a soon-to-be mom living in Kansas City suburbia. Lately, the most exciting thing about my day is lunch.

What I mean by life experiences, in this case, is the collective human life experiences we've had throughout history. This includes conflicting moral theories and ethics, love and loss and the ideas behind them, social conflicts and inequalities, and all of the other stuff you probably don't want to curl up into bed and read about. The good news is that The Antithesis is craftily disguised with a lot of drama and some interesting characters that do a pretty good job of keeping the weight of the story from crushing your floor.

I'll be the first to say that this story isn't for everyone. But that's okay; this was more like something that I just had to write. It almost felt as if my life couldn't proceed until I finished it. That probably sounds extremely odd to someone whose brain chemicals are working properly, but I can't really explain it any better than that.

About the Author

Terra Whiteman is a scientist who writes whenever she's not doing things that scientists do. She loves philosophy, chemistry, biology, classical literature, graphic novels, loud, obnoxious music, frog slippers and beer.

Find the Author

Website

Facebook

Goodreads

1889 Labs

Giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Be sure and check out all the other stops on the tour.

Tour Schedule

September 10th- Simply Infatuated (Book Playlist Post)

September 11th- Fighting Monkey Press (Guest Post)

September 12th- My Seryniti (Review/Excerpt)