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Thursday, October 31, 2024

Week Blast + #Giveaway: A Tainted Heart Bleeds by Sophie Barnes @BarnesSophie @RABTBookTours

Blog Tour + #Giveaway: Tender Temptation by Kaylene Winter @kayleneromance @XpressoTours

Book Tour: Making Up Stories by Susan Myhre Hayes @RABTBookTours

Who Owns You?, Book One

Science Fiction

Date to be Published: October 11th

Set in the early 23rd century, THE STARS RAIN DOWN follows an android woman pursuing a renegade human. At the same time, he searches for his missing wife and child, abducted by alien pirates, and sold into slavery. Special Agent Catherine Mercer, an artificial intelligence and agent of Interplanetary Security (think FBI in space), is given the assignment to pursue and apprehend Rick McCabe, a freighter pilot suspected of illegally smuggling passengers to the free colony of Aranae, some 1300 light years from Earth. Rick, on the other hand, on route to Aranae, was attacked by pirates and separated from his pregnant wife, Sarah, who was captured. But, having come under the suspicion of IPS of illegally transporting passengers, Rick goes rogue and sets off to find Sarah while evading Catherine trying to capture him. Rick and his tech-savvy partner QR follow a trail of clues and tips that lead from one planet to another, from one hostile slave owner and alien race to more pirates and unsavory characters. Along the journey, Catherine learns that being human is more than possessing a flesh and blood body. The transitory body holds an eternal spirit that yearns to be free.

Interview with Glenn Thomas

Have you read anything that made you think differently about fiction?

Thomas: No, I have yet to come across a book that could do that.

How do you select the names of your characters?

T: Sometimes, names will come to me out of the ether, as if the characters had walked up and introduced themselves to me. Other times, I’m not ashamed to admit referring to a name database. Why not? If the tools are there to use, use them. I never use the names of people I know unless it’s coincidental.

Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?

T: There’re a few Easter eggs here and there. Mostly dates, numbers, and names of places. Sometimes, I use street names, streets around close to home that I travel frequently.

What was your hardest scene to write?

T: If I had to choose one, I’d say it was the rooftop confrontation that closed out Chapter 4. A lot was going on in that scene, and it required some careful plate spinning to get the sequence of events to play out in a seamless, natural progression.

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

T: Well, as The Stars Rain Down is a book series, of course, there’s a connecting thread through them all. I’m still uncertain how long the series will run, though. The dynamic of this story is that it can be extended or contracted. I can stretch it out over many books or wrap it up in the next volume if I had to.

What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?

T: We can take that back before the book. The original idea was for a TV series. I’ve even gotten the first five episodes written as screenplays, corresponding with the chapters in the book. I had initially envisioned one season of ten TV episodes for each book, but after writing the first chapter, I could tell the book would end up way too big. So, now the plan is half a season for each book. Volume One of SRD reflects the first five episodes of the TV series. Volume Two will be the second half of the first season, and so on. It’s working out fairly well so far.

What inspired you to write The Stars Rain Down?

T: Ok, how much space you got devoted to this interview? This could take a while, so I’ll condense it as much as possible. Yeah, there’s a story behind the story. It goes back 38 years at the time of this interview. I got an idea for a sci-fi novel and sat down to write it. It was about a guy who loses his pregnant wife to space pirates who sell her into slavery. He spends years crisscrossing the galaxy to find her. It took me two years to write—by hand in pencil on notebook paper. I didn’t have a computer back then. I never sought to publish it; I only let a couple of people read it, and it sat in storage for a few decades. I would think about that manuscript from time to time over the years and thought I should transcribe it into a digital format for archival purposes. Now I had a computer, and in 2017, I sat down to make a digital copy. I didn’t get far into it when it dawned on me that this was the worst piece of crap ever written. Really terrible. The core idea was golden but was suffering from poor execution. As I wrote, I was getting ideas to make it better. All kinds of great stuff came to me. After I finished the transcription, I started writing notes for a new novel, outlining, researching, and getting excited about the new book. First, I tried writing it as a script for a feature film, but I got half way into it and realized the story wouldn’t fit a two-hour framework. So, it had to be a TV series. After writing a few episodes, something got ahold of me, and I started on a new novel. The story got a new title: The Stars Rain Down… and here we are.

Can you tell us a little bit about the next books in The Stars Rain Down or what you have planned for the future?

T: The TV series is still a viable option. I think it would do very well on the screen. No matter what happens there, I’m still committed to Book 2 and have already made some headway into Chapter 1.

Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in The Stars Rain Down?

T: In the original 1986 version, Rick McCabe was the main character. Catherine Mercer was a supporting character and a flesh and blood human, then became a romantic interest later in the story. As I got ideas for the new 21^st Century version, I thought of making Catherine an android. I don’t know where that came from, but now she’s an android. I thought about her a lot, which resulted in Catherine becoming the main character and Rick supporting. The reason for the switch was that by making her an android, she became more interesting and the one with the greatest transformational arc. She goes from machine to human, which is not a new subject in sci-fi, but I put a new twist to it, in my opinion. What is it that makes us human? This is in the Preface where we talk about it. Humans have a body, soul, and spirit. Androids do not. But somewhere along Catherine’s path, she gets a soul. Where did that come from?

What did you enjoy most about writing this book?

T: Seeing the characters and scenes come to life on the computer screen. You get them out of your head, and there they are. You think you got them figured out, then they surprise you and take the scene in another direction you did not expect. But you let them… to a certain point, of course. You’re not there to control them but to let them run, guiding them from time to time. Let them tell you their story, and the whole process becomes a voyage of discovery. You find things you had no idea were there and rush to get them all in your Word doc before you lose them. That’s the creative process that God shares with us. We’re co-creators with God, so approach that writing project, or music or painting, drawing, or sculpture, with boldness. That and holding a printed copy of my book in my hands is pretty cool too.

About the Author

Glenn Thomas’s life path has been a meandering one, setting new life goals at various points along the way, gaining skills in art, photography, film-making, driving, and ultimately, writing in screenplays and prose. As a self-described “high-functioning daydreamer,” Glenn often finds contentment in self-imposed isolation, in conversation with characters only he sees and hears, in universes of his own creation. Once in a while, he writes them down into scripts and novels to share with the world.

Glenn lives in the Los Angeles area and works as a driver for a major motion picture studio. His first self-published work was a series of short Science Fiction stories called The Spiderboys of Aranae, which appeared in 2015.

In 1986, when Glenn was convinced he was at the start of a long and prosperous career as a visual artist, an idea for a sci-fi story came to him. A guy loses his wife to space aliens, and he searches the galaxy to find her. As a fan of the genre, Glenn sat down with paper and pencil to write the story, and two years later, No Longer Mourn for Me was finished. It then sat on the shelf, unpublished, for nearly 35 years. Glenn thought about that crudely executed early work, got ideas to improve it, and sat down at the computer for a rewrite. The original story was completely gutted, retooled, and reborn with a new title: The Stars Rain Down.

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