A warm welcome to Lisa Henry visiting Love Bytes on her Blog Tour announcing new release “Darker Space.”
Welcome Lisa 🙂

Hi! Welcome to the blog tour to celebrate the release of Lisa Henry’s Darker Space. I’m visiting some of my favourite blogs around the place to talk a bit about writing Darker Space and sharing some of my influences, ideas, and even an excerpt or two! Don’t forget to leave a comment, for your chance to win a prize!

Each comment on this blog tour enters you for a chance to win a $20 Amazon gift card. Entries close October 21, 2015, and contest is not restricted to US residents. Remember to leave your email address in the comments so I know how to reach you!

Because I’m Australian, I sometimes get asked why more of my characters aren’t. And I always think, “Hey, I’ve got plenty of stories with Australian characters!” And then I remember that when it comes to some of them, I don’t spell it out. So here it is: Brady and Cam from Dark Space and Darker Space are Australian. Not that Australia is something that exists in their universe—one thing the near destruction of the planet will do is break down meaningless barriers like nationality.

In the world of Darker Space, Brady is from a non-specified administrative district known as Fourteen Beta. In my brain, this corresponds to north eastern Australia. The refugee township of Kopa is in the gulf. I never name the gulf in the book, but it’s always been the Gulf of Carpentaria. The gulf is red dirt, and zinc and bauxite, and droughts and monsoons. It’s mosquitoes and rubber trees and mangroves and crocodile traps half sunk in the water. And it’s remote communities plagued with poverty and alcohol abuse and violence.

When it came to writing Dark Space and Darker Space, it was no real stretch of imagination to think that in a massive humanitarian crisis—the sort that might occur if aliens destroyed took out most of the largest cities in the world—that any influx of refugees would be diverted into camps in the middle of nowhere, denied actual citizenship, and be forced to work in unsafe conditions for very little money in order to survive. That’s the world that Brady was born into.

There are a few hints in the books that give the location away: the eucalyptus trees and the cockatoos, mostly. There’s also the language. Brady calls himself a reffo, a pejorative term for a refugee. The word was common in Australia in the 1950s, referring to the large number of post-WWII European immigrants. Reffo was a blanket term. There were, of course, much more specific words for different ethnicities. Australian racism is nothing if not specific.

In Dark Space, I used the word spruik. It wasn’t my intent to use a word so colloquially Australian, but Brady’s voice is Australian, therefore so are some of his words. When it came to Darker Space, I did the same thing:

I liked to sneak off in the middle of the day to play cards with Mike Marcello. Back on Defender Three, Doc called that patient aftercare. Here, they called it bludging.

Those couple of sentences got me a reminder from my editor that many people wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about.

Huh. Okay. What is bludging? It’s what a bludger does, of course. And no, it has nothing to do with Quidditch. Bludging is the great Australian tradition of skiving, or malingering, and Brady is an expert.

So I worked in a few sentences that would hopefully make that clear. I guess I could have just substituted another word for bludging, but in the end I decided that I really didn’t want to. Mostly, I think, because I like to leave in those little hints that Brady comes from my very unique little corner of the world.

You can find out more about Darker Space at Loose Id.

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 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.

Connect with Lisa: Blog | Twitter | Goodreads

For the chance to win a $20 Amazon gift card, join the tour and leave a comment on any of the wonderful blogs below

Boy Meets Boy Reviews – October 13

Rainbow Gold Reviews – October 14

Boys In Our Books – October 14

MM Does MM – October 15

J.A. Rock’s blog – October 16

Love Bytes Reviews – October 17

Joyfully Jay – October 17

And for a special extra, and a chance to win an ebook copy of Darker Space, visit Crystal’s Many Reviewers on October 21!