Book Tour: Up the Tower By J. P. Lantern @jplantern @GoddessFish #Giveaway

Up the Tower
by J. P. Lantern

Blurb:

Disaster brings everybody together. A cloned corporate assassin; a boy genius and his new robot; a tech-modified gangster with nothing to lose; a beautiful, damaged woman and her unbalanced stalker-these folks couldn't be more different, but somehow they must work together to save their own skin. Stranded in the epicenter of a monumental earthquake in the dystopian slum, Junktown, there is only one way to survive. These unlikely teammates must go...UP THE TOWER.

  

Excerpt:

Before anything else-before the riot, before the flood, before the gap and the deaths and the fires and the pain-before all of that, Ana just wanted to get the hell out of Junktown.

But she was stuck there with Raj, and Raj had all the bodyguards, so she couldn't very well leave on her own. Walk into Junktown without any protection? No, thank you. She had a knife on her, but that was hardly enough. The knife fit neatly in a small, luxury Cardion-brand sheath at her side.

The rest of her outfit was direct out from a fashion magazine. She wore tight black Cardion slacks, her patent leather Aushwere ankle boots sexy and stylish and perfect for inner-city walking. Her dark blue blouse was Cardion again (there had been a sale); already she had noticed the way Raj had been hugging his eyes to how it cupped and clung to her body. He would have been looking a bit more, perhaps, but she wore her favorite Kadaya Sarin-brand leather jacket, allowing her a bit of modesty with the long sleeves and tight collar, despite the thinness of the material. She was a woman dressed to impress, but also was no whore-she had her man. He liked her dressed attractive, but not like some slut. Ana knew what he wanted, because that was her entire life, as she saw it, from now on.

They were inside the ground floor of a tall building. Cleanbots rushed around them, sweeping up dust, guided along by retrofitted eyebots that spied out areas of dust and disrepair.

"Here's where we'll have the lobby," said Raj, opening his hands out wide to the open space.

Ana had presence of mind to hold her tongue.

What she wanted to say was, "Really, dear? Here in the first possible place that someone could enter from the street? That's where you'll have the lobby? That's so inventive. You're so smart."

What did she say was, "Oh! It will look beautiful, I'm sure."

Guest Post:

WRITING PROCESS

My writing process is organic, most of the time. It's hard for me to force anything when it comes to writing, but it's next to impossible for me to force the writing of a novel. What that means is that I tend to have a lot of small inspirations over time that I record somewhere or another-a notebook or an email draft that I hold onto-and I start building this back-log of ideas that I'm interested in and want to explore.

Finally, after enough of that, something really strikes up the flame with me. So it's sort of like building a fire, collecting all these pieces of tinder and kindling ideas over the course of a whole lot of reading and paying attention, and then by the time the fire starts, you have fuel to last you a while. And you need a LOT of fuel for a novel, because they take so long to write.

Many people use outlines to write, but I don't normally use much of one. I basically walk into a plot knowing that I want it to go to a few specific places, and I have a setting in mind, and then I try and work backward from there. Wondering what sorts of characters would belong in such a place and time, wondering what decisions they could make that would lead them to the places I want the reader to go. A lot of the characters in my latest book, UP THE TOWER-a gangster with a cybernetic arm, a cloned assassin, a kid who is a genius with robotics-came about after I had a good idea of the sort of setting I wanted, and who would fit inside of it, but also because I had ideas about who I wanted to include, and what sort of setting they would need.

You can sort of think about how you could have any number of people in any given situation. But for the situation you're writing, there are only a very small amount of correct people. So, those people are out there, already, in the ether, waiting to be discovered, and you're just unearthing them bit by bit as you're moving forward.

About the Author:

J.P. Lantern lives in the Midwestern US, though his heart and probably some essential parts of his liver and pancreas and whatnot live metaphorically in Texas. He writes speculative science fiction short stories, novellas, and novels which he has deemed "rugged," though he would also be fine with "roughhewn" because that is a terrific and wonderfully apt word.

Full of adventure and discovery, these stories examine complex people in situations fraught with conflict as they search for truth in increasingly violent and complicated worlds.

J. P. Lantern will be awarding a backlist ebook copy to a randomly drawn winner at every stop during the tour and a Grand Prize of a $25 Amazon GC will be awarded to one randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during this tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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