Author Spaulding Taylor is here today to give us a peek inside her new speculative thriller, Last Star Standing, and a little peek inside her life. Enjoy this excerpt and author interview and feel free to ask more questions in the comments section! Download your copy and follow the tour for more. Best of luck in the giveaway!
Engineering a daring escape, Aiden’s growing feud with the new rebel leader leaves him out in the cold and smouldering with resentment. Faced with deceit and betrayals on every side, he recruits a group of overlooked outcasts and stakes everything on one last mission.
Can the restless, reckless Aiden take a stand long enough to save humanity from enslavement?
Read an excerpt:
Lips parted, the woman pressed eagerly forward. The target smiled at her but instead selected a pudgy lad of about six. He passed a skinny guy – who looked, the poor sap, practically broken-hearted. He was almost upon us. My heart sped until it seemed ready to jerk straight out of my chest. Choose me. Choose me. CHOOSE ME.
The Enlightened One seemed – or was it only my imagination? – to be gazing directly at me. Pushing swiftly past Petra I extended my hand. He turned, made a strange gesture, almost of benediction, then wired the back of my hand with that thick blackened stump. An instant surge of heat pulsed up my arm and throughout my torso. Then a wild swirl of fuchsia-slashed-with-orange flashed beneath my eyelids, as if the same stars, fiery and spot-lit against the black, had been injected into my brain. My every corpuscle felt fired, an almost intoxicating sensation, especially after the chill of the poison. I half-stumbled, almost squashing a smallish alien, and only saved myself from falling at the last second.
Through a haze – my eyeballs felt as if they were swimming in flaming waterfalls – I saw Petra and moved towards her. Of course. She couldn’t risk being stamped, in case the creature died too fast. As we walked the ornate brand began to swell on my hand – a warming, tightening feeling. The sense of strangeness accelerated, though this might have been from my borrowed DNA, the chilled poison in my blood, or the fiery stamp. But nothing could dent my happiness, because – I’d done it. I’d assassinated The Enlightened One.
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I think. And my thinking – in common with most writer’s – is often pretty weird.
What is your favorite quote and why?
“Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was, I had such friends.”
It’s Yeats, but you probably knew that. Have been blessed, my whole life, with true friends.
My husband is my truest friend, but… so many others, too!!! So, that’s why.
Who is your favorite author and why?
I can’t begin to answer this question – it’s crazy hard – but I can give you a few.
Tolkien, Ursula le Guin, John le Carre, Jane Austen. But so many! In some ways, science fiction has been blessed more than any other genres, in terms of fantastic leading authors.
What, in your opinion, are the most important elements of good writing?
There are two parts to my answer, as you might expect from someone who spent 15 years ghostwriting.
The first is to passionately believe that everything you write matters.
The second is to passionately believe your editor when they tell you to “lose that section – it’s wrecking the pacing”.
Where did you get the idea for this book?
I did a whole tell-all interview about this, for Alli, which went viral.
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/author-interview-alice-mcveigh/
Basically, I was trying to meditate when it suddenly worked. Yes! I was meditating! And for only the second time in my life, while I was meditating I had a vision. And it was weird. And this was it: I was on the surface of the Earth, but looking down a metallic shaft maybe 75 feet or so, to where a guy was chained to chair. I saw the guy. I “saw” the chair. And when I snapped out of it, the image stuck with me, until – much against my better judgement – I started writing about it. Why he had been captured. Who he was, in 2094, on this wrecked Earth.
As for the reason it annoyed me, it derailed me. I had a plan – which is succeeding, by the way – to write a series of seriously good Jane Austenesque books. The “vision” of Aiden messed me up.
But now, I’m glad he did.
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A professional London cellist, Alice lives in London and Crete with her professor husband: their only child is completing her Masters in Chinese Literature. They also share two miniature long-haired dachshunds and an incurable addiction to tennis.
Links:
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Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/Alice-Mcveigh/e/B07TDKZPVT
OR https://www.amazon.com/Spaulding-Taylor/e/B08TRLNW31
Amazon.co.uk: www.amazon.co.uk/Alice-Mcveigh/e/B07TDKZPVT
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Video for Last Star Standing:
https://www.tiktok.com/@alicemcveigh0/video/7092364955680279813
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Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteHi Andi, and thanks so much for featuring Last Star Standing!!! Yours gratefully, ASTMcVeigh
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great excerpt. The book sounds very interesting. Great cover!
ReplyDeleteGreat interview, fantastic excerpt, nice cover and Last Star Standing sounds like my kind of book! Thanks for sharing it with me and have a spectacular day!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your interview and book details, I have enjoyed reading about you and your work and I am looking forward to reading Last Star Standing
ReplyDelete