Curling Up With A Good Book: Rockstar Book Tours, Guest Post, & Giveaway: Revelations (J.A. Souders)

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Rockstar Book Tours, Guest Post, & Giveaway: Revelations (J.A. Souders)

Title: REVELATIONS
Author: J.A. Souders
Pub. Date: November 5, 2013
Publisher: TOR Teen
Pages: 352

Six weeks after her arrival on the Surface, Evelyn Winters is no closer to unlocking the memories lost in her subconscious than she was when she first came. Isolated in a strange new society, Evie has only Gavin Hunter to remind her of who she once was.
But even with a clean slate, it’s easy to see that Evie doesn’t fit in on the Surface. And as her differences make her feel more and more alone, she can’t help but yearn for that place she doesn’t remember: the isolated city hidden in the depths of the ocean. Elysium. Home.
But she can’t exactly tell Gavin what she’s feeling. Not when he’s the one who helped her escape Elysium in the first place, and has the scars to prove it. Though the doctors say otherwise, Gavin believes that Evie just needs time. And if her memories don’t come back, well, maybe she’s better off not remembering her past.
But the decision may be out of their hands when Evie’s ever-elusive memories begin to collide with reality. People and images from her past appear in the most unlikely places, haunting her, provoking her…and making her seem not only strange but dangerous.
Evie and Gavin can’t wait around for her memories to return. They’ll have to journey across the Outlands of the Surface to find help, and in the end, their search may just lead them back to the place it all started…

Find it:

Amazon * Barnes& Noble * Goodreads

J.A. SOUDERS is the author of the Elysium Chronicles and lives in the land of sunshine and palm trees with her husband and two children where she spends her time writing about the monsters under the bed, day dreaming about living in an underwater colony, and failing miserably at playing video games.

Website/Blog/Twitter/Facebook/Goodreads/Pinterest

Yay! I’m so glad to be here today! Thank you so much for having me! And what a fun topic?! I haven’t been asked this question yet and I’ve been dying to answer it.

The scene I’m most proud of in REVELATIONS is actually toward the middle of the book. It’s actually a quite pivotal scene and I didn’t know it while writing it. It came about as simply one of those, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” type questions. So I wrote it and threw it in there to see if it worked. Not only did it work, but it pretty much shaped the entire novel from that point out. In fact, it’s the scene that helped me figure out how to write myself back out of the corner I’d written myself INTO at the end of RENEGADE.

The fun part about that whole scene was that while I tweaked it a bit here and there for edits and revisions and to make my copy editor happy (*grins*), it never really changed from the original draft. It was just one of those rare times that you get it right the first time.

So what is this awesome scene, you’re asking. :P I kind of just want to leave it as I’ve answered it and see if you can guess what it is, but I’ll go ahead and describe it a bit without spoilers.

It takes place in a city that Evie and Asher comes across on their adventure across the Outlands to get her help in Rushlake City, which is several days’ walk from Gavin’s village.

Now the city they’ve come across is creepy on it’s own (I’ll let you see that one yourselves), but they happen upon this city in the middle of the night, after being chased and attacked by coyotes. In order to protect themselves from the freezing temperatures and possibly more coyotes they take refuge in what appears to be a home, but inside they stumble upon what appears to be an old military compound hidden inside.

What happens after this point is the part I’m incredibly proud of. It’s so creepy and terrifying that I got the chills while writing it and had to actually step away from the computer and go outside to warm up in the sunshine after I’d finished it. And even now when I go back and read it, goose bumps pop up all over my skin.

To me, the worst part of the scene, isn’t just the creepy vibe or the gore, but the full emotional gambit that Evie has in this scene. And how it made me feel. It wasn’t just scary, it was heart wrenching to imagine anyone going through this and feeling what she was feeling. The overwhelming horror at what she’s seeing, the guilt she’s feeling, but has no idea why, the fear of not knowing what’s real and what’s not.

I can’t go into too much detail obviously, with it losing it’s impact, but I really hope that when you all read this scene, it causes the same rat’s nest of emotions in you as it did to me.