Release Celebration Day Three: Sky Raiders by Michelle Diener (Giveaway)

On Tour with Prism Book Tours.

Welcome to day three of the Release Celebration for

Sky Raiders

By Michelle Diener

Sky Raiders is the first book in Michelle's new space opera series. She's sharing about how it came together today. If you missed Michelle's release-day message, go read it HERE, if you missed her talking about her leading characters, go check that out HERE, and don't forget to enter the giveaway below...

Sky Raiders

by Michelle Diener

Adult Sci-Fi, Space Opera

ebook, 349 Pages

December 15th 2016

Sky Raiders #1

First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.

Garek's one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.

Taya can't bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she's lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he'll look, but he'll never find her.

She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they'll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they've given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that's exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.

What Taya doesn't realize is she'll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn't giving up on finding her. And he's even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.

Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.

Goodreads│Amazon

Release Celebration Day Two: Sky Raiders by Michelle Diener (Giveaway)

On Tour with Prism Book Tours.

Welcome to day two of the Release Celebration for

Sky Raiders

By Michelle Diener

Sky Raiders is the first book in Michelle's new space opera series. If you missed Michelle's release-day message, go read it HERE, and be sure to come back on Tuesday, December 20th, HERE to read about the how the story came together. Today Michelle is sharing about the the star-crossed lovers in her story, so check that and the giveaway out below...

Sky Raiders

by Michelle Diener

Adult Sci-Fi, Space Opera

ebook, 349 Pages

December 15th 2016

Sky Raiders #1

First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.

Garek's one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.

Taya can't bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she's lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he'll look, but he'll never find her.

She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they'll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they've given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that's exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.

What Taya doesn't realize is she'll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn't giving up on finding her. And he's even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.

Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.

Amazon

Star-crossed Lovers Who Won't Bow to Their Fate

The official definition of star-crossed lovers is two people who love each other deeply but cannot be together because fate is against them. Whatever is written in their stars means they are doomed to never find happiness, never be together.

Obviously, this is not a HEA or even a HFN situation :)

Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde . . . they're the gold standard of star-crossed lovers, but when I was writing Sky Raiders, I thought a lot about the concept, because I kept thinking of Garek and Taya, my hero and heroine, as star-crossed, but only to a point. They love each other, and fate keeps them apart, but neither of them accepts this.

Garek throws caution to the wind and never lets the obstacles in front of him even slow him down in his determination to get to Taya. And she, equally, is driven not only to survive, but also to work a way out of her situation, because she will not give up her desire to be with Garek again.

It was so much fun, but also really poignant, to write a love story like Garek and Taya's, and I loved every minute of it. I hope my readers enjoy it just as much. Tristan and Isolde, but without the downer at the end :)

— Michelle

About the Author

Michelle Diener is the award-winning, bestselling author of the Class 5 series. She writes historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction and lives in Australia with her husband and two children.

Website│Goodreads│Facebook│Twitter│Pinterest

Release Celebration Giveaway

10 winners will receive a ebook of Sky Raiders
Open internationally
Ends December 22nd

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Release Celebration Day One: Sky Raiders by Michelle Diener (Giveaway)

On Tour with Prism Book Tours.

Welcome to the Release Celebration for

Sky Raiders

By Michelle Diener

Sky Raiders is the first book in Michelle's new space opera series. Michelle has a message below and you can come back on Sunday, December 18th, HERE to learn about her leading characters, and on Tuesday, December 20th, HERE to read about how the book came together. Definitely check out the giveaway below as well. Enjoy!

Sky Raiders

by Michelle Diener

Adult Sci-Fi, Space Opera

ebook, 349 pages

December 15th 2016

Sky Raiders #1

First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.

Garek's one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.

Taya can't bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she's lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he'll look, but he'll never find her.

She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they'll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they've given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that's exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.

What Taya doesn't realize is she'll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn't giving up on finding her. And he's even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.

Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.

Amazon

My Roots Are Showing

My latest novel, SKY RAIDERS, the first book in a new space opera trilogy, is in many strange ways a return to my writing roots.

While I wrote fantasy and even time travel novels before I was published by Simon & Schuster in 2011, my first published books were all historical novels.

I've always been a voracious reader of historicals, fantasies and science fiction, and I've always felt that they sit together comfortably because they are all, to a greater or lesser degree, true escapism. I find it as challenging, technically, to write a historical scene as a science fiction scene, needing to draw on the world I'm working with and its rules to create something believable. In historicals, this means research and in science fiction or fantasy, this means the rules and backstory I have made up.

As I worked on the Sky Raiders series, with SKY RAIDERS the first novel, and it was only after a while that I realized I was writing a novel that easily mirrored the invasion of Kwa-Zulu Natal by the Victorian Empire that I'd written about in my historical novel DAUGHTER OF THE SKY, as it was about a planet, Barit, invaded by aliens who were far more technically advanced.

That Victorian theme continued when I was thinking hard about the way one of the cultures on Barit treat their women. The idea of putting women on a pedestal as a way to disempower them is extremely Victorian. The Victorians pretended they were honoring the feminine, but instead were condescending to women by denying them experiences and power 'for their own good'. But I obviously like to mix things up, because rather than a Victorian level of technology on Barit, the level is more analogous to the Renaissance, with walled cities. But I didn't stop there. Into the mix, I threw the Hallstatt Culture. This Celtic culture which gets its name from Hallstatt, near Salzburg in Austria, has always fascinated me, and there are definite threads of this culture in the people of Barit.

Another fun tradition I incorporated was the Viking Clap – although it isn't exactly the same in Sky Raiders, the inspiration definitely comes from this. (Those who want to see it in action, performed by 100,000 Icelanders on the triumphant return of the Icelandic soccer team after a big win during the European Cup, can check it out here. The Viking Clap wasn't actually invented by the Icelanders, it's from Motherwell in Scotland, but whoever is doing it, it's awesome to watch. And staying with Iceland, I also used their real women's Day Off, which happened in 1975, where over 90% of Icelandic women took a day off and didn't do any work to protest their lower pay (60% of what men were earning) and the general inequality of women in the workforce. Laws were passed the following year guaranteeing gender equality in the workforce (the Day Off literally shut the country down for the day) and although true change was a little slower, Iceland does now have one of the highest levels of gender equality in the workforce in the world.

I think it was inevitable that my years of writing historicals would find a way to touch my science fiction work, and I had a lot of fun, and gave a lot of thought, to the use to which I put my historical background. I think fictional cultures with some basis in real culture, however much of a mix they are, make for a more believable, more interesting world, and I hope my readers think so, too.

— Michelle

About the Author

Michelle Diener is the award-winning, bestselling author of the Class 5 series. She writes historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction and lives in Australia with her husband and two children.

Website│Goodreads│Facebook│Twitter│Pinterest

Release Celebration Giveaway

10 winners will receive a ebook of Sky Raiders
Open internationally
Ends December 22nd

a Rafflecopter giveaway