A very warm Love Bytes welcome to author Lisa Henry !

She is visiting us on the GRL blog tour talks about looking forward going to her first GRL and offering a giveaway at the end of this post 🙂

Welcome Lisa!

So, GRL is going to be my first convention. Go big or go home, right? I have no idea what to expect, or what’s expected of me, but at this point I’m not even worrying about it. I’m just so happy to be going!

 

I’m so excited. I haven’t been to America since I was a kid, and I’ve never been to Chicago. A friend asked me if I wanted to borrow her Lonely Planet Guide to Chicago. I said no. Because everything is an adventure when you don’t have any idea what you’re doing.

 

When you travel with me, you’ll get lost. You’ll take three days to recognize the street your hotel is on. You’ll get lost. I know I’ve already said that, but it really happens to me a lot. I have no geographical awareness. You might miss every big site on the list, but you’ll make up for it by stumbling over unexpected things.

 

It’s how I once ended up playing with kittens in a book shop near the Grand Bazaar in Turkey. Or getting an impromptu French lesson from a bunch of Aussie school kids in New Caledonia, who clearly felt sorry for my pathetic attempts to buy a bus ticket. Or drinking something that tasted like cough medicine in a pub in a town somewhere near Frankfurt. I don’t know what the pub, or the town, was called. But I have the label from that little bottle stuck in my travel diary with the words “DON’T EVER DRINK THIS AGAIN” written underneath it.

 

It’s America’s turn to surprise me.

 

As for GRL itself, I also have no idea what to expect. Mostly, I’m excited to finally get to meet – in real life – the friends I’ve made online, through Goodreads and Facebook and Twitter. I can’t wait to talk books with people who also love this genre. And I’m looking forward to stalking some of my favourite authors too!

 

So if you’re coming to GRL in October, I’d love it if you’d come and say hello to me. I’d love to meet you!

 

 

Meanwhile, I’d like to tell you about my latest upcoming release: Bliss, co-written with Heidi Belleau:

Blurb:

They’re always happy.

 

Rory James has worked hard all his life to become a citizen of the idyllic city-state of Beulah. Like every other kid born in the neighboring country of Tophet, he’s heard the stories: No crime or pollution. A house and food for everyone. It’s perfect, and Rory is finally getting a piece of it.

 

So is Tate Patterson. He’s from Tophet, too, but he’s not a legal immigrant; he snuck in as a thief. A city without crime seems like an easy score, until he crashes into Rory during a getaway and is arrested for assaulting a citizen. Instead of jail, Tate is enrolled in Beulah’s Rehabilitation through Restitution program. By living with and serving his victim for seven years, Tate will learn the human face of his crimes.

 

If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Tate is fitted with a behavior-modifying chip that leaves him unable to disobey orders—any orders, no matter how dehumanizing. Worse, the chip prevents him from telling Rory, the one man in all of Beulah who might care about him, the truth: in a country without prisons, Tate is locked inside his own mind.

Tate could still feel the bruise on his spine where the cop with the bony knees had knelt on him. His shoulders hurt from having his arms wrenched back. He’d caught a glimpse of the poor bastard he’d hit, lying on the platform with blood pissing out of his nose, and then the cop had pushed Tate’s face down again and scraped it across the rough concrete.

Six hours later it was still stinging, but Tate wasn’t complaining.

He was in shock.

“What do you mean I should take the plea bargain?” He felt the blood drain from his face.

His lawyer, Cal Mitchell, leaned back in his chair and smiled. “I’m saying, Mr. Patterson, that I would strongly advise you not to go to trial.”

It would have been smarter to look up the peculiarities of the Beulah legal system before arriving, but he hadn’t really thought it would come to this. He knew there were no prisons in Beulah, and that was good enough for him. It hadn’t occurred to him until he was talking to his government-appointed lawyer that maybe the locals had come up with a system of punishment altogether more cruel and unusual.

“Why not?”

Not that he was innocent in any way, shape, or form but surely he had a better chance with a jury.

“If you go to trial and you lose,” Mitchell said, “you’ll get life servitude. No parole.”

Tate swallowed. “What?”

“That’s how things work here in Beulah. Just as a man is rewarded for taking responsibility for his crimes early on, he is penalized for tying up the system with lies.”

Tate’s jaw dropped. Never in all his life, and in all his run-ins with the law, had he heard the right to trial referred to as tying up the system. What next? A perjury charge for pleading not guilty?

“If you take the plea bargain,” Mitchell drawled, “you’ll be free in seven years.”

Seven years. Tate’s vision swam. It was better than life though, wasn’t it?

“But, um, what would my chances be at trial?” His chest hurt. Was he having a heart attack? Every breath stabbed him.

“Take the plea bargain, Mr. Patterson.” Mitchell reached over the scratched surface of the table and patted Tate’s cold hand. “You’re young.”

Tate tried another tactic. “But what if I’m innocent?”

“You do realize the attack was recorded by CCTV, don’t you?” Mitchell raised his bushy eyebrows. “You’re not innocent.” He smiled slightly. “But then, nobody ever is. That’s why they always take the plea bargain.”

God. Tate squeezed his eyes shut. Not happening. Not happening.

Mitchell patted his hand again. “It’s not so bad. You’ll do your seven years, and then you’ll be a free man. All will be forgiven.”

Tate’s guts twisted. He wanted to laugh, it was so absurd. So he’d hit some guy. How was that worth seven years? Or life? He clenched his jaw. Only in a self-proclaimed paradise like Beulah would that shit fly.

 

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER FROM RIPTIDE. RELEASE DATE – AUGUST 18, 2014.

 

About the Author :

 

Lisa likes to tell stories, mostly with hot guys and happily ever afters.

Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn’t know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she’s too lazy to move. She spends half her time slaving away as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.

She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly.

She shares her house with too many cats, a dog, a green tree frog that swims in the toilet, and as many possums as can break in every night. This is not how she imagined life as a grown-up.

You can email her at lisahenryonline@gmail.com

Or check out her website at lisahenryonline.com

Got Twitter? Follow her at https://twitter.com/LisaHenryOnline

Hanging out on Goodreads? So is she: Lisa Henry

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.henry.1441

 

To celebrate GRL, if you leave a comment telling me something random about yourself, and if you’re coming to GRL, you can win any ebook from my back catalogue, which you can check out here.