Blog Tour: Guest Post: GB Gordon

Riptide Publishing is now a year old! The company has great LGBTQ titles that you can find through their website! As part of their celebration, they have asked several blogs to participate in a blog tour. They were nice enough to ask Ed and me if we wanted to be a part of it. As you can see, we readily agreed. Our first post is a guest post from author, GB Gordon and a giveaway for $10 towards Riptide titles.

Today, Edwin and I are happy to have GB Gordon share a bit about his new M/M Romance, Santuario.

The blurb as seen on Goodreads:

Release Date: October 8, 2012

Publisher: Riptide Publishing

224 Pages

Police teniente Alex Rukow has spent his life trapped on Santuario, his people’s isolated home-slash-prison-island. They’ve been living in poverty under the tyrannical regime of their own elite familias for the last two-hundred years, ever since their generation ship landed on the planet and found it already populated by earlier Earth settlers, the Skanians, who banished them to the inhospitable south.

Increasingly shamed by the decisions of their ancestors, the Skanians seek to open their borders. But dissent exists on both sides, and in the midst of this explosive political situation, a dead body appears on the island.

Bengt, a Skanian investigator, is shipped to Santuario to lead the murder investigation—which, he quickly realizes, the local teniente wants nothing to do with. As far as Bengt is concerned, things can’t get worse than the brutal climate, his own memories, and a growing attraction to a partner who will barely say two words to him. But then he and Alex run afoul of the local familias, and the problems with their investigation and their budding relationship seem like nothing compared to just getting out of this whole mess alive.

Read an excerpt and purchase Santuario HERE.

VISIT THE AUTHOR:

Goodreads.Twitter.Website

FIND THE BOOK:

Goodreads.Amazon.Barnes & Noble

GUEST POST:

Thanks everyone for joining me on my very first book tour, and a big thank you to Edwin and Emily for letting me hang out. Fantastic wallpaper, btw.This tour is about peeking behind the curtain on all things Santuario, which is now available for purchase via the Riptide Publishing website. If you followed me here from yesterdays tour stop, you know this already, but for those who just joined: Don't forget to comment for a chance to win a $10 credit to Riptide Publishing. All comments with email address included that are left by 11:59 pm on Sunday, Oct 14th will enter into the draw.

I wanted to share some of my process of world building. The muse and I were trying to create a (almost) perfect society (mine) and a scary, cruel society (hers). I wanted my guys to start their settlement in a place where they'd have to huddle and rely heavily on each other. So the planet they were trying to settle had its main landmass in one big continent around the north pole, much of it too cold for permanent settlements, but with a more temperate zone along its coastlines (think Finland, Canada, that sort of thing). I was also reasoning that whoever prepared the planet and selected the people for the trip would know that and round up volunteers from the northern countries, like Scandinavia and Iceland, mutual language roots being considered a plus and over time coalescing into the Skanian I use in the book.

The muse started to tap her fingers. An incessant nail on wood noise, designed to break my concentration and drive me bonkers.

"What?" I snarled.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" She smiled sweetly at me. "Where do my people end up?"

"I don't care, some rock in the equatorial zone that’s too hot for my Vikings."

"A rock?" She has a pretty pout, but I mainly wanted to get on with my settlers.

"Fine, an island. Don't push it."

"How big?" she immediately shot back.

"Would have to be a decent size, allow for some agriculture and general development. Something the size of Britain."

"I want palm trees. And beaches."

"Whatever." I still had Vikings to get back to. "It's not going to be Paradise, though. Remember, these are the bad guys. Let's see, by the time they leave Earth, things have taken a turn for the worse, the terraforming technology has been lost or sabotaged, so they need to be sent to an already prepped planet."

She nodded. "And since everyone wants to get off Earth, it's a jumbled mess of nations on the ship."

"Predominant languages Chinese and English?"

She gave me her best don't-be-stupid look. "Been done. Gimme your Firefly card back. We’ll take Russian and Spanish, with maybe English as a lingua franca."

I forgave her. I was starting to get caught up in her fantasy. "They're used to 'everyone for themselves' kind of thinking."

"So when they land, the strongest hog the valuable resources (the ship) and set everyone else to work."

"Over time establishing a ruling class."

She smiled. A pretty scary smile, now that I come to think of it. "Who controls the rabble with access to firearms."

"A personal army. Like the Savaks."

"The Securitate."

"The Tonton Macoute."

"The Gestapo."

"Okay, enough. I still have some Vikings to get settled here. Your guys are not coming for hundreds of years."

She admired her nails. "They’ll be in the book. So anything before they arrive is background."

"It’s world building. It shapes the people that’ll be in the book."

"What people?"

But that would spill over from world building into character building. Want to meet the guys? Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow at All I Want and More. Full tour schedule available HERE.

Big thank you to GB for that entertaining guest post and don't forget to comment to be entered to win a $10 credit for Riptide titles!