Guest Post & Giveaway - The Silvers by JA Rock

Hi! I’m J.A. Rock, and right now I’m touring the internet talking about my latest release, The Silvers. Thanks so much to the blogs that are hosting me on this tour, and be sure to leave comments on the tour posts for a chance to win a $15 Riptide Publishing gift card!

~The Silver Planet~

The Silvers is told in two parts: Part One takes place on Imms’s home planet, which humans have dubbed the Silver Planet. And Part Two takes place on Earth.

The Silver Planet was very vivid to me when I started writing. I had an image of a place where light comes out of the ground, and there are huge, metallic-looking lakes, and other than that…a whole lot of nothing. An atmosphere that keeps the sky black at all times. Nothing sentient except for blind snakes and the Silvers. No plants except for a flowering stalk called quilopea whose flowers look like corpse lips. I wanted to create a place that suited the Silvers—a place that to humans might seem cold, bleak, uninteresting, but that to the Silvers is peaceful and orderly in its barrenness.

The Silver Planet becomes a point of contention for B and Imms. Even though Imms wants to see the universe beyond his planet, even though he sometimes finds the Silver Planet dull, it’s still his home. To B, the Silver Planet is a place that drained his humanity—that made him colder, less loving, more violent. He doesn’t particularly want to remember his time there, and once he and Imms are on Earth together, he finds himself wishing Imms would let go of his home planet. To the point where he starts pressuring Imms to act more human, to sever ties with his past.                                                                                    

Home is a major theme in The Silvers: leaving home, returning, searching for permanence and stability within other people… so it was a really cool as a writer to write about the same setting from two very different points of view, and to find those places where the two perspectives intersect—the moments B can see the Silver Planet through Imms’s eyes and assess it less harshly. Or the moments Imms sees it through B’s eyes and wonders if he should be ashamed of it.

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About The Silvers

What humans want from the Silver Planet is water. What they find is a race of humanoids who are sentient, but as emotionless and serene as the plants and placid lakes they tend.

B, captain of the mission, doesn’t believe that the “Silvers” are intelligent, and lets his crew experiment on them. But then he bonds with Imms, who seems different from the others—interested in learning, intrigued by human feelings. And B realizes that capturing, studying, and killing this planet’s natives has done incalculable damage.

When a fire aboard B’s ship kills most of the crew and endangers Imms, B decides to take him back to Earth. But the simplicity of the Silver Planet doesn’t follow them. Imms learns the full spectrum of human emotions, including a love B is frightened to return, and a mistrust of the bureaucracy that wants to treat Imms like a test subject, even if they have to eliminate B to do it.

AMAZON

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About the Author:

J.A. Rock is the author of queer romance and suspense novels, including By His Rules, Take the Long Way Home, and, with Lisa Henry, The Good Boy and When All The World Sleeps. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and a BA in theater from Case Western Reserve University. J.A. also writes queer fiction and essays under the name Jill Smith. Raised in Ohio and West Virginia, she now lives in Chicago with her dog, Professor Anne Studebaker.

·                     Website: www.jarockauthor.com

·                     Blog: http://jarockauthor.blogspot.com

·                     Twitter: https://twitter.com/jarockauthor

·                     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ja.rock.39

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Giveaway:

To celebrate the release of The Silvers, J.A. Rock is giving away $15 in Riptide Publishing credit.

Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest.

Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on July 16, 2016.

Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries.

Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!