Hi guys, we have Sunny Moraine popping in with her new release from Riptide Publishing Fall and Rising, we have a fantastic guest post from Sunny, we have a great excerpt and a brilliant giveaway so enjoy the post and leave a comment (with a way to be contacted in the body of the comment) to enter the giveaway! <3 ~Pixie~

Fall and Rising

Sunny Moraine

Adam Yuga is on the run. Three months ago, a miracle saved him from the deadly genetic illness that threatens the entire population of his former home, the Protectorate. Now he and his lover Lochlan are searching for a way to heal his people. When they receive a mysterious coded message promising hope, they make a desperate grab for it, and are imprisoned—by the very race they want to save.

On Lochlan’s distant homeship, a young pilot named Nkiruka faces an agonizing choice: stay with her lover Satya and live a life of happy obscurity, or become the spiritual leader—and the last and only hope—for the Bideshi. Nkiruka doesn’t want to lose Satya, but worse, she fears she lacks the strength to carry anyone through the coming storm, let alone her entire people.

Threads of chance and destiny draw the three together. With the fates of civilizations in their hands, they prepare for a final conflict that might be their only chance for survival—or that might destroy them all.

Guest Post

Welcome to the Fall and Rising blog tour!

Fall and Rising is a story I’ve been trying to make happen for some time. On finishing its predecessor Line and Orbit, I knew Adam and Lochlan’s story couldn’t be over. I knew, in fact, that it was just beginning. In Fall and Rising I wanted to continue to explore their journey, as well as the ways in which their tumultuous meeting and the battle that followed have affected the people they love. In short, this was a world I wanted to return to. I’m very pleased that I was able to do so, and I’m very excited to share the result with you.

On this tour I’ll be talking about the process of writing the book and what it taught me about writing in general, the trials and tribulations of passing through the world of the story, some of the tools I used to put me into a place where I could tell that story, and some of why I wanted to write it at all. I’ll also be giving away a signed copy of the print edition of the book, along with a set of two hand-made (by me) agate, copper, and glass beaded bracelets inspired by the world of Fall and Rising. Additionally, you’ll have a chance to win one of two e-copies!

Every comment on this blog tour enters you for the giveaway. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on September 5th. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Don’t forget to leave your email so we can contact you if you win!

***

I think every writer reaches a point in everything long where they want to fling the thing across the room and just give up. Where they’re sure they’re wasting their time, that this is stupid and pointless and going nowhere, and also that it isn’t very good, and they aren’t very good, and they will never get better and the smart thing to do would be to stop writing entirely and go become a shepherd or something.

I mean, I’ve run into that many times

I definitely ran into it with Fall and Rising. I ran into it at least twice, because the book was technically written twice. Where I just wondered if the whole thing was worth it, if I was sinking a tremendous amount of energy into something that would ultimately end up being a waste of same.

The problem with making any big decisions at that point – if you’re a writer and you reach it, and really I think this could apply to any big project of any kind – is that you feel that way in part because you have lost all objectivity. You’re not in a good place to be making any decisions, mentally or emotionally. Your Writer Brain has fallen into an ill-advised friendship with Troll Brain – has started hanging out with it in pool halls and smoking in alleys and making plans to knock over liquor stores and engaging in meticulously choreographed dance sequences with police – and can no longer be trusted until it shapes up.

So what do you do at this point? You can try a few things.

Sometimes taking a step back is a good idea. Getting perspective can be very helpful, provided stepping back gives it to you; the act of taking a break can also be good, if it gives you a chance to recharge. This can be very scary – or at least it is for me – because you might feel as if you’re risking losing the ability to return to the story at all. And yeah, this can happen. One of the things you need to do as a writer is figure out how you work best, what does and doesn’t help you, your strengths and weaknesses, and which tactics you should employ and which you should avoid like the plague. For some people, this really works.

But what helped me wasn’t taking a step back so much as thinking back, to the book that preceded it and to the process of getting to know the world and its inhabitants, and trying to remember why I fell in love with it all in the first place. Why I wanted to spend time with these people, and why it felt like a story worth telling.

Because generally you don’t get through writing an entire book that you then feel is good enough to publish without loving the world in which you’re working.

This was where I also had to have faith, in the story and especially in the characters – that they would help me through it in their way. That this was a tight spot but that there was something great on the other side of it. I think all writing is to some degree an act of faith – you probably begin not sure where you’re going to end up (or if you feel sure, you may very well be wrong) but you trust that there’s gold in them hills and by God you’re going to dig until you find it. And when you reach that tight spot, you have to remember the love and the faith that originally drove you, and push through even if everything feels wrong until you see what’s on the other side.

Sometimes that doesn’t work. But sometimes it does, and what I found on the other side was a world in which some very important things were happening, where good people were fighting against evil and where a huge amount was at stake. Where the survival of love itself was in doubt, but those same good people were battling to defend it, because they had faith.

How could I do any less for them?

It was a good story, and it needed to be told, and it needed to be finished.

So that’s what I did, and here it is.

Excerpt

Tipping Point

(in medias res)

When Rachel saw they also had Becca and Dion, she began to scream.

It raked her throat, burned high in her chest. But the pain, the fear, the horror—they didn’t quite touch her. Deep down she was numb. Even resigned. Hadn’t there been whispers? About people who’d disappeared? People who hadn’t seemed quite right, who hadn’t seemed themselves. Sick? No, no one on Terra got sick. Long before birth, illness was rendered impossible, the potential for it engineered out of existence. That was where their great civilization had started: with sickness—with its erasure. It was the foundation of who her people were. The endless quest for physical perfection was a tree sprouted from this single seed: people who didn’t get sick.

But her hands had been shaking for weeks now, and she was so often tired. Part of her had known something was wrong, even as the rest of her denied it. Denied there was any truth to the rumors. Of course she wouldn’t vanish. They would never come for her.

She had been so wrong. And now they had her children.

She rose from her bench in the transport shuttle and tried to shove her way past the peacekeepers, ignoring their guns. Trampling everything to get to her children—following an instinct deeper and more profound than any genetic cultivation. Yet if she touched them, she would be sure they were here with her, and she had known the instant she saw them what that meant.

It meant that she and they might share this weakness. This sickness. Rachel might see them shake and fall, which would be worse than seeing her whole world do the same.

She was barely two feet from them when the peacekeepers knocked her to the floor with the butts of their guns. Their faces were covered by the white standard-issue helmets with their reflective blast shields, so she couldn’t see if they felt any pity. If they might show any mercy. Her little boy and girl were crying, clinging and crying, her little boy and her little girl, and clinging to each other as another peacekeeper herded them forward—more gently, and she felt the tiniest sliver of icy relief. They might hurt her, but surely they wouldn’t hurt children.

Rachel wanted to believe that.

She pushed herself up to her knees. “Not them. Please, not them. Look at them, they’re fine, they’re—”

One of the peacekeepers raised their gun as if they meant to strike her again. “Get back in there. Do it. Don’t make this a problem and none of you have to get hurt.”

None of you. It echoed in her mind, heavy and cold. So there was her answer.

They were willing to hurt children. Children. To maintain the carefully engineered, carefully perfected paradise that had birthed that next generation.

People didn’t get sick on Terra. No.

“Where are we going?” Her sweet girl, oh, there were no words for how cruel this was. She would have traded never seeing them again to avoid this. “Mama?”

They hadn’t even been allowed to pack anything, she realized. Somehow that was the worst part of this. They had their coats on but nothing else. None of their toys, no extra clothes, no pad for books or games. They had only each other, hand in hand. If they were going to be traveling, why wouldn’t they have . . .?

She couldn’t. She couldn’t bear that.

The children moved forward, whimpering, and she opened her arms. It was all she could do. Everything was blurry, but she felt them come to her, pulled them both against her, felt their heaving breaths as they tried not to sob. Young but old enough to grasp the concept of stoicism. She was so proud of them. Now perhaps more than ever. Proud of them for simply being alive.

“All right, let’s get in the air. They’re not gonna hang around in orbit for that much longer.”

Two of the peacekeepers slid onto the benches opposite each other. Their heads were bent together, and they were talking, tones low and casual, as if she and her children weren’t there at all. The hatch hissed closed, and the engines rumbled as they fired, the shuttle jolting softly as it began to rise. She raised her head and blinked away her tears, holding on to those two small, trembling bodies—and thinking terrible things.

“You don’t have to do this,” she whispered—knowing it was pointless. “They’re just kids, you don’t have to . . . They’re not even sick.”

She was sure they weren’t going to answer her, but one leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“You know that doesn’t matter. They’re yours. They share your code, so they’re as broken as you are. They should never have happened at all. Even if they don’t seem sick now, they will. You’re not an idiot, don’t act like one.” He sat back and turned his head, appearing to shoot his companion a glance before he directed his attention to her once more. “Maybe you’re genetically degenerate, but you can at least have some dignity.”

Small portholes were set into the shuttle’s sides. As they ascended from the hangar, the light of a beautiful, crisp winter day flooded in, and sunlight gleamed off slender, graceful towers of crystal as they passed them. Left them behind. All those people, some aware of what was happening—and many more not. Many of them with no idea at all. No idea how many things were shaking—not just hands and not just bodies. Foundations.

They didn’t conceive of the idea of an ultimate fall.

It’ll tumble down. She lowered her head and squeezed her eyes closed as the blue sky began to darken. They were leaving all that beauty behind, that perfection, and now she understood—or was beginning to understand—that it was all a lie. A lie that, if there really were more like her, probably couldn’t be sustained forever. It’ll tumble down and never rise again.

And maybe, if this was what it did to children, to the foundation on which the future was built . . .

Maybe that was what had to be.

For more excerpt click here: http://riptidepublishing.com/titles/fall-and-rising (Just click the excerpt tab)

About Sunny

Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, and multiple Year’s Best collections, among other places. They are also responsible for the novels Line and Orbit (cowritten with Lisa Soem), Labyrinthian, and the Casting the Bones trilogy, as well as A Brief History of the Future: collected essays. In addition to authoring, Sunny is a doctoral candidate in sociology and a sometimes college instructor; that last may or may not have been a good move on the part of their department. They unfortunately live just outside Washington DC in a creepy house waith two cats and a very long-suffering husband.

Connect with Sunny:

• Website: com
• Goodreads: com/Sunny_Moraine
• Tumblr: tumblr.com
• Twitter: @dynamicsymmetry
• Facebook: com/sunny.moraine

Giveaway!

Sunny will be giving away a signed copy of the print edition of the book, along with a set of two hand-made (by Sunny) agate, copper, and glass beaded bracelets inspired by the world of Fall and Rising. Additionally, you’ll have a chance to win one of two e-copies!

Don’t forget to leave your email in the body of the comment so Riptide can contact you if you win!

Check out the other blogs on the blog tour