Today I am hosting author, Jadah McCoy as part of the blog tour for her new book, Artificial.
Tell me a bit about yourself, your hobbies, likes and dislikes.
Hi!! Pleasure to be here, and thanks for having me! Well, first off, I’m Jadah and I write SciFi! In my spare time I dress as magical creatures, pole dance, teach yoga, travel to different countries, and vlog book reviews while taking shots! Pretty eclectic set of hobbies, right? I like Renaissance festivals, Xbox and PlayStation (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and Devil May Cry being my faves), funky hair colours, elephants, sangria, and travel! My dislikes are rude people, wind, and putting on clothes while wet.
How did you get into writing?
Fan fiction. YOU KNOW YOU WRITE AND/OR READ IT TOO!!!! I started reading fan fiction at the tender and impressionable age of twelve. I started writing it soon after, and let me tell you…it was AWFUL. So many writers get their start writing fan fiction. It’s honestly the best learning experience. You’re able to hone your craft while learning how to handle criticism, all in a forum that you can delete at any time and pretend never existed!! I didn’t write my first novel until eighteen, after several years of practice. And I didn’t publish a novel until twenty-four! ARTIFICIAL is my third complete manuscript.
Did you choose the genre you write in or do your stories lead you?
My stories lead me, always. My first two manuscripts were actually fantasy. I had never written science fiction before ARTIFICIAL. But this amazing world popped into my head, full of relics and monsters, darkness and memories of a lost people. I knew I had to write it.
Give me all the wonderful facts about when I can get a copy and where?
Luckily, you can buy your copy NOW from Amazon or Barnes & Noble! If they don’t carry it in your neighbourhood B&N, be sure to request it! J
How did you come up with the idea for this book?
Well, I knew I wanted to write something post-apocalyptic, but the characters and plot came later—like 5,000 words later. The story actually began as a one line prompt for a short story contest, and that’s where my female main character’s name, Sylvia, came from. These two amazing, complex characters blossomed, Syl and Bastion—both haunted by the worlds they live in, Elite and New Elite, both so dangerous in different ways. The plot confounded me. I thought, what would create the most tension in Syl’s story? And then it came to me—our heroine turns into the creature she fears most. It was all cake from there!
Who is your favourite character in this story and why?
My favourite character (and yours, too—you’ll see!) is Bastion. Bastion is an android living in New Elite and working as a pleasure bot in the slums. He is the sassiest robot, and while he plays the perfect anti-hero, he has a caring heart—er, cortex? The relationship between Syl and Bastion—their banter and chemistry—is one of my favourite parts of the novel.
Will you tell the readers your favourite scene, if you can without giving away too much information? (This is totally an optional question.)
One of my favourite scenes is when Syl’s body begins to deteriorate, and she finally realizes she’s changing and quickly. She breaks down in front of Bastion and through tears asks him if he’s afraid—does he, a robot, feel fear or anything at all? He tells her yes, he’s afraid. It’s just such a tender scene between the two of them. Syl is such a hard, harsh character. She’s had a hard life full of death and loss, so she’s allowed a bit of sharpness. This is the moment she begins to open up and let Bastion in, and likewise, when he gives her an idea of how much he actually does feel.
Published by: Curiosity Quills Press
Publication date: April 4th 2016
Genres: New Adult, Science Fiction
She struggles to feel human.
In 2256, the only remnants of civilization on Earth’s first colonized planet, Kepler, are the plant-covered buildings and the nocturnal, genetically spliced bug-people nesting within them: the Cull. During the day, Syl leaves her home in the sewers beneath Elite City to scavenge for food, but at night the Cull come looking for a meal of their own. Syl thought gene splicing died with the Android War a century ago. She thought the bugs could be exterminated, Elite city rebuilt, and the population replenished. She’s wrong.
Whoever engineered the Cull isn’t done playing God. Syl is abducted and tortured in horrific experiments which result in her own DNA being spliced, slowly turning her into one of the bugs. Now she must find a cure and stop the person responsible before every remaining man, woman, and child on Kepler is transformed into the abomination they fear.
He struggles not to.
For Bastion, being an android in the sex industry isn’t so bad. Clubbing beneath the streets of New Elite by day and seducing the rich by night isn’t an altogether undesirable occupation. But every day a new android cadaver appears in the slum gutters, and each caved in metal skull and heap of mangled wires whittles away at him.
Glitches—androids with empathy—are being murdered, their models discontinued and strung up as a warning. Show emotion, you die. Good thing Bastion can keep a secret, or he would be the next body lining the street.
He can almost live with hiding his emotions. That is, until a girl shows up in the slums—a human girl, who claims she was an experiment. And in New Elite, being a human is even worse than being a Glitch. Now Bastion must help the girl escape before he becomes victim to his too-human emotions, one way or another.
She grew up in rural Arkansas, yet can still write good and sometimes even wears shoes! She did date her first cousin for a while but they decided against marriage for the sake of the gene pool.
Her true loves are elephants, cursing, and sangria – in that order. If you find an elephant that curses like a sailor whilst drinking sangria, you’re dangerously close to becoming her next romantic victim – er, partner.
She cut her writing teeth on badly written, hormone-driven fanfiction (be glad that’s out of her system), and her one true dream is to have wildly erotic fanfiction with dubious grammar written about her own novels. Please make her dreams come true.
Giselle
Thanks for hosting today, Tiffany! 🙂
Tiffany Shand
You’re welcome!