Shadows Fall Away by Kit Forbes Blog Tour and Giveaway :)

ABOUT SHADOWS FALL AWAY:

Shadows Fall Away by Kit Forbes

Publication Date: September 23, 2014

Publisher: Month9Books

Mark Stewart is one incident away from becoming a juvenile delinquent, and his parents have had enough. They ship Mark off to London England to stay with his eccentric aunt Agatha who is obsessed with all things Jack the Ripper. After a strange twist of luck, Mark is struck by lightning, and he wakes to find himself in 1888 Victorian London.

His interest in a string of murders Scotland Yard has yet to solve make him a likely suspect. After all, why would a young boy like Mark know so much about the murders? Could he be the ripper they’ve been searching for? Convinced the only way to get back home is to solve the murders, Mark dives headfirst into uncovering the truth.

Mark’s only distraction comes in the form of the beautiful Genie Trembly, a girl who is totally out of his league and who may have already caught the attention of the infamous ripper. To save her, he’ll endanger both their lives, and risk being trapped in the past forever.

GOODREADS

Purchase Links:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Chapters Indigo! | TBD

ABOUT KIT FORBES:

Kit Forbes has been a lover of books, history, and all things paranormal for as long as she can remember. She lives in Western Pennsylvania with her youngest daughter and an assortment of cats who give new meaning to the world bizarre.

Author Links:  Website  | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

***Author Interview***

I was lucky enough to have Kit Forbes answer a few questions for me and my readers!  Thank you Kit and good luck with your book :)

1.  Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?

When I was eleven, reading mysteries, I imagined that I could write stories like some that I read. I found it wasn’t as easy as some writers made it seem, to me at least. My first attempt was terrible and yet I learned that good writing took effort. After that, whenever I read a story that took me into a new world, showed me something new, or got me to think about things in a new light, I also imagined writing stories like those. Whenever I’ve been away from writing, because life got in the way, I’ve always migrated back, like iron filings to a magnet.

2.  Have you ever hated something you wrote?

The first full-length novel I wrote came about after reading a story I thought I could do better. I wanted to create a variation of a James Bond type character, but one who was tough and unfazed by anything except what he had to do. Unfortunately, what I ended up writing was a character who came across as indifferent. No matter how much I tried to breathe life into him, he remained dead on the page. What that taught me was interesting characters must have passion. I’ve kept that in mind as I’ve developed as a writer. By the way, that story will never see the light of day.

3.  What inspired you to write your first book?

What I consider to be my first novel is Rebels Divided. It is actually the third novel in my Rebel series. It came about as a reaction to all the anger in this country. I imagined what would happen if that rage boiled over and divided the country in a second civil war. As I imagined what this world would look like, I was reading about fertility research intended to help infertile couples. To my knowledge, this hasn’t been achieved yet, but the research was a compelling addition to the story I was writing. Basically, it involved taking skin cells from one person, coaxing them into a stem-cell state, and using the resulting cells to fertilize an egg. While it was intended to help infertile men, it raised the question of two women having a biological child together, and then of a society with only women.

In writing Rebels Divided, one character stood out, Annabelle. When I finished that novel, she bugged me to writer her story. That became The Rebel Within, the first book in the Rebel series. Readers then asked me what happened after this novel, and voila, I wrote The Rebel Trap, being released October 1, 2014

4.  What genre do you consider your book(s)?

The Rebel series has been hard to pigeonhole. With young adult protagonists and storylines, I believe it fits well in this genre. It is near-term science fiction, but it doesn’t fit into traditional science fiction tropes of time travel, space travel, artificial intelligence/robotics, or aliens. The series carries varying amounts of thriller/suspense. Because the storylines have gender-conflict themes, the romantic interests in The Rebel Within and The Rebel Trap have Annabelle and a boy she fancies kept at a distance, vaguely like Romeo and Juliette. In Rebels Divided, there is a romantic element to the conflict between Annabelle and Geo.

5.  While you were writing, did you ever feel as if you were one of the characters?

When I wrote The Rebel Within, I was driven by Annabelle to write her story. I had already researched the world and her character for Rebels Divided and felt I’d gotten to know her pretty well. In reading and in writing other stories, I had experienced getting into a character’s head before, but in this case, she got into mine. I felt I was seeing her world through her eyes and imagining how I/she would deal with what she faced. At first I thought I would find it hard to write from a female perspective. But I had just come off reading Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark, in which she tells the story in the point of view of an autistic boy. I believe she handled the gender difference quite well, and hopefully I have taken something from her writing into The Rebel Within.

6.  Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

While the Rebel series was not written as a morality tale, I hope it will get people thinking about three things. First, if we can’t learn to talk to each other and mediate our differences, we risk tearing this great country apart. Maybe it won’t be a civil war, but it won’t benefit the people. Second, we are on the threshold of scientific advances that offer great benefits, such as fertility research. At the same time, we need to talk about how we will use these advances. Helping infertile couples is one thing. Using the technology to alter the course of human history by excluding some groups for the benefit of others is another. Third, we can and should argue about whether we have or should achieve gender equality, but before we come down too hard on either side, it pays to walk in another’s footsteps. If gender politics can be judged by any yardstick, I believe it should be by how you would react if your gender were reversed.

7.  What are your current projects?

While I’ve enjoyed writing and sharing the Rebel series, I’ve started a new series that is, as yet, untitled. This set of stories takes place three hundred years after abrupt climate change has led to coastal flooding, expanding deserts, wars, and a Great Collapse. There is a new World Federation, a caste system, and outcasts, including our heroine. I hope to have the first of these novels available in 2015.

 

   

Giveaway Information:  Winner will be drawn October 25, 2014

Five (5) winners will receive a digital copy of Shadows Fall Away by Kit Forbes (INT)

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