Sunday, June 14, 2015

Answer the Author's Question and win: Sophia Grey



Out of Time – a peek into the future



World building. Love it or hate it, as an author, creating a fictional playground for our characters is a necessary evil. When I started work on the structure of my time travel series, I needed to build in some rules, and to figure out how stuff worked. Technical, huh? More than that, I needed to understand why my characters would behave as they did.


Imagine a society five hundred years in the future. World War III has shaped society into something we wouldn’t recognise now. The world is stable, wars are a thing of the past, and technology has continued to evolve. There’s a trade-off though. People have learned to quash their emotions. Love is a thing of the past. Without love or hate, or any of the strong emotions, society is more stable, right?

With that premise, my characters head back into the past, to 1941, on a data-gathering exercise. When Isabella experiences love for the first time, it hits hard. She has no frame of reference for falling in love, and feels adrift on a tide of unfamiliar emotions.


Excerpt from Isabella’s Airman


As before, we perched on hard chairs and tried not to stare at the stern man sitting opposite us. He scratched out more notes in his little book and then fixed his icy gaze on me. “Student Gillman. At our last session, I asked you to expand your social analysis. What have you learned?”
How to fall in love? How to die on the inside?
Next to me, Juliet cleared her throat. “May I go first, sir?”
“I want to hear from Student Gillman.”
Despite spending the entire previous day in bed, I was tired beyond belief. I’d not slept properly since we arrived here, and I was exhausted. Weariness pressed down on me, sapping my strength and dissolving my common sense. I licked dry lips, swallowed, and tried to find something to say.
Juliet fidgeted in her seat. The clock ticked. I stayed silent.
“Student Gillman. I am waiting.”
I was waiting too. I wanted this to be over.
“I can’t do this.” My voice quavered, but I dug deep. “It’s wrong. We’re sitting here watching while they are dying. A few hundred miles away on the other side of the English Channel, soldiers are fighting and falling. The men here are risking their lives every few days, while we observe. How is that right?”
The sentinel’s eyebrows rose. Beside me, Juliet made a shocked noise, but I wasn’t stopping now. “In the news today, I read about the raid on London. The worst since the war began. And it’s more than I can cope with, to be immersed like this.” I swung around to face my friend. Her face was white, her eyes red-rimmed like mine. “I wish I’d never listened to you. I wish I’d never come here.”
If I’d stayed at home, I would have never met Davy, but I would still be intact, not the broken shell I was now. How did my heart continue to beat, to pump blood through my arteries?
Why did Davy have to die?




Giveaway:

How do you think society will change in the next 500 years? One lucky commenter will win an ecopy of Lila’s Wolf (Out of Time #1), and a swag bundle.




Isabella’s Airman (Out of Time #2)

Time travel student Isabella Gillman is about to embark on her most challenging assignment--leaping back to 1941 to observe World War II. The rules are simple: don’t get emotionally involved, and don’t interfere.

She breaks the first rule when she falls in love with rear-gunner Davy Porteous. The second is on its way out as well, when she realizes history says he won’t survive the war. Torn between the fundamental laws of her society, and the man she loves, Isabella faces a harsh reality: does she risk both their lives for a future that may not happen?

She can’t predict the results if she corrupts the timelines, but without her actions, Davy is out of time.


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Author bio:

Romance author Sofia Grey spends her days managing projects in the corporate world and her nights hanging out with wolf shifters and alpha males. She devours pretty much anything in the fiction line, but she prefers her romances to be hot, and her heroes to have hidden depths. When writing, she enjoys peeling back the layers to expose her characters’ flaws and always makes them work hard for their happy endings.

Music is interwoven so tightly into my writing that I can’t untangle the two. Either I’m listening to a playlist on my iPod, have music seeping from my laptop speakers, or there’s a song playing in my head – sometimes on auto-repeat.

Check out my playlists on Pinterest and Spotify


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