Love Bytes is happy to participate in Riptide’s 4th Anniversary Celebration 🙂
We like to welcome author Jane Davitt to talk about her book as part of the Share the Love anthology

Congrats Riptide ! and welcome Jane 🙂

Thank you for joining Riptide on our 4th Anniversary blog tour! We are excited to bring you new guest posts from our authors and a behind the scenes insights from Riptide.

The full tour schedule can be found at http://riptidepublishing.com/events/tours/riptides-4th-anniversary-celebration. Don’t miss the limited time discounts and Free Books for a Year giveaway at the end of this post!

Please welcome Jane Davitt to the tour.

“To boldly go” has to be one of the most famous split infinitives out there. It works, though. There’s a rhythm to it, a brash confidence coupled with a lurking nervousness. Because space travel requires boldness. It’s risky, scary, dangerous.

So is writing science fiction with a gay ménage romance in the mix. Well, the scary part, anyway.

I mean, I’ve read SF. Lots of it. From an early age. I know my parsecs from my Plutos, my warp drives from my wormholes. And I’ve both read and written gay romance featuring threesomes. Merging the two should’ve been as easy as assembling a club sandwich.

And in some ways, it was. Once I got Jake and Rill involved with Lian’s adventure as he tried desperately to get home for Leap, bearing dreadful news and pursued by a bear in the shape of a treacherous and deadly relative (hey, we’ve all got one…) it was pure fun.

But the future is a foreign land and at times I got lost. I’m the least techie person out there. Give me a memory stick to put into a USB port and I will try it up, then down, then up again about four times before the damn thing finally goes in. Feel free to insert a lube joke if you’re so inclined.

I had to create a society far advanced enough to have interstellar travel and Really Cool Stuff without knowing how all the Really Cool Stuff around me in this century works.

I did research. I stretched my imagination until it rebounded back and left me making an odd ‘rrrrr’ sound as I vibrated gently and stared into space (not Outer Space. The regular sort). And I realized, sod the tech and the gadgets. People are people. I know people. I write about them all the time.

And then it got fun again.

I used the time-honored device of world building through snippets at the start of each chapter. Asimov did that in his Foundation series (it was a trilogy when I first read it, which is probably not something I should make a big deal about since it reveals my advanced age.) I have no qualms about following in his footsteps. There was a man who knew a lot about everything.

Those snippets were hard to dream up at times. I wanted to squish chapters together to save me writing so many when I hit a wall. Then I’d wake up in the middle of the night with an idea for one and drift back to sleep mentally writing it.

I think my favorite were these three because they could, with tweaks, be taken from headlines today. Careless drivers, pretentious artists, and shoppers lusting after the latest status symbol…they’ve been with us since the days when the car was a chariot or the artist drawing on a cave wall.

In a freak accident, a man using an illegal boom-bang to bring down a tree on his property killed a passer-by when a flying branch struck an aircycle, causing it to plummet and land on the victim.

The owner of the aircycle, seventeen-year-old Justin, who asked his full name be withheld, was unharmed and described the landing as ‘rocky but a zap’ and said he’d steered at the passer-by as a way of cushioning his fall. Police are considering pressing charges against him and have taken the boom-bang user into custody.

[News report, Amabale stream]

A new detcord tapestry is on display at Landon National Gallery. The forty square meter piece by renowned fabricist Selena Dilento, the tapestry, depicts the infamous Siege of Reskill. The specially commissioned detcord took three months to produce and includes realistic blood-colored “wet look” fiber.

Dilento, who spent four years weaving the tapestry, intends to display it over Leap before detonating it at midnight on Leap Day itself. Following the event, a holorecord of the explosion will remain on display in the gallery’s permanent collection.

Tickets for the event are available from the Landon National Gallery.

[News report, Amabale stream]

Collectors on Amabale besieged the flagship store of Carisak on the first day of Leap, desperate to buy the addition to the Carisak line of gravpurses. Retailing at twenty thousand credits before personalization, the tiny accessories literally flew off the shelves. Promo models floating around the store, out of reach, were later confirmed to be for display purposes only.

“The Singleton purse has a limiter preventing it from rising above two meters,” a Carisak representative told reporters. “We don’t want customers sustaining injuries using our products.”

[News report, Amabale stream]

So in the end, Lucky Strike wasn’t a challenge because of its futuristic setting and the future wasn’t such a foreign land after all

People were still falling in love and getting their happily ever afters. Felt like home.

About Jane Davitt

Jane Davitt is English, and has been living in Canada with her husband, two children, and two cats, since 1997. Writing and reading are her main occupations but if she ever had any spare time she might spend it gardening, walking, or doing cross stitch. She’s recently taken up yoga and loves discovering her ability to bend.

Jane has been writing since 2002 and wishes she’d started earlier. She is a huge fan of SF, fantasy, erotica, and mystery novels and has a tendency to get addicted to TV shows that get cancelled all too soon.

She owns over 4,000 books, rarely gives any away, but is happy to loan them, and is of the firm opinion that there is no such thing as “too many books.”

Connect with Jane:

Website:janedavitt.com

Twitter: @janedavitt

Goodreads:goodreads.com/Jane_Davitt

 

About Lucky Strike

Death’s a heartbeat away, but love is even closer.Flying a traveler to Leap celebrations on the luxury planet Crestal is no problem for intrepid partners Jake and Rill, even if they have to navigate a deadly meteor shower to get there. But their fresh-faced, privileged passenger is carrying more than Leap gifts: Lian has a message to deliver, treachery and murder to avenge, and a killer close on his heels.Lian thought he was ready for independence from his overbearing extended family, but his first solo trip off-planet has landed him in a nightmare of deadly intrigue. Though he’s devastated by betrayal, and no longer able to tell friend from foe, he’s fascinated by the gruff pilot and scorchingly handsome first mate who’ve become his reluctant rescuers.With a dazzling fortune at stake and the fate of the United Protectorate of Planets in their hands, there’s no time for the three men to fall in love. But with their future measured in hours, crew and passenger may have just enough time to discover that three can become one, and that together they are strong enough to beat any odds.

Riptide

Amazon

About Share the Love

Each year, Riptide Publishing releases a holiday collection in support of an LGBTQ charity. Twenty percent of all proceeds from this year’s collection will be donated to the It Gets Better Project.This collection would not be possible without the talent and generosity of its authors, who have brought us the following holiday stories:Three of Hearts by Kelly Jamieson Three the Hard Way by Sydney Croft

Riptide

 

Anniversary Sale

The Share the Love collection is being sold in a special discounted bundle by Riptide this week only. Check out the sale on this series and other bundles at Riptide

To celebrate our anniversary, Riptide Publishing is giving away free books for a year! Your first comment at each blog stop on the Anniversary Tour will count as an entry and give you a chance to win this great prize. Giveaway ends at midnight, October 31, 2015, and is not restricted to US entries.
a Rafflecopter giveaway