Posts Tagged: Meagan Spooner

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Inspirations for This Shattered World & Giveaway!

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[Banner Image Credit: Amie Kaufman Facebook Page]
I was a huge fan of These Broken Stars when I read it a few months ago, and I’m really excited to have the blog tour for this second book stop by the blog today. I’ve got both authors over here talking about the inspiration behind Starbound! Here’s a bit of info on this book first:

Inspirations for This Shattered World & Giveaway!This Shattered World by Amie Kaufman, Meagan Spooner
Published by Disney Hyperion on December 23rd 2014
Genres: Sci-Fi, YA
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads

The second installment in the epic Starbound trilogy introduces a new pair of star-crossed lovers on two sides of a bloody war.

Jubilee Chase and Flynn Cormac should never have met.

Lee is captain of the forces sent to Avon to crush the terraformed planet's rebellious colonists, but she has her own reasons for hating the insurgents.

Rebellion is in Flynn's blood. Terraforming corporations make their fortune by recruiting colonists to make the inhospitable planets livable, with the promise of a better life for their children. But they never fulfilled their promise on Avon, and decades later, Flynn is leading the rebellion.

Desperate for any advantage in a bloody and unrelentingly war, Flynn does the only thing that makes sense when he and Lee cross paths: he returns to base with her as prisoner. But as his fellow rebels prepare to execute this tough-talking girl with nerves of steel, Flynn makes another choice that will change him forever. He and Lee escape the rebel base together, caught between two sides of a senseless war.

TSW-preorder


Guest Post by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner


What Inspires Us
The question “how do you come up with your ideas” is hands down the most frequent question we stumble across when talking to readers. As much as we’d love to say “from the corner mart,” the real answer is that inspiration comes from everywhere. It comes from the conversations we have with friends, from the stories we read in the news, from the advancements that scientific pioneers are making every day. It comes from everything we do and see, including art, music, television, movies, and, of course… other books!

Those who’ve been reading about These Broken Stars know that a lot of the inspiration for the story came from our joint love of space and shipwreck stories. This Shattered World comes from an entirely different fascination of ours: star-crossed friendships, the moral grey area issues involving loyalty and treachery in times of war, and how just one person—or two!—can make a difference.

So here are a few of our favorite inspirations for This Shattered World… some of them might surprise you!
Firefly/Serenity: Okay, this one’s not a surprise. Cowboys in space? There’s no question our fascination with the idea of newly developed planets full of abandoned and angry colonists aligns nicely with this show’s premise! Not to mention the fact that the character of Zoe Washburne would definitely, definitely, be pals with Jubilee Chase.

Firefly-Serenity

Pride & Prejudice: This was a great inspiration for all three of our books. We love friendships and romances that spring up in unlikely places, between unlikely people. Any time two people start off hating each other on principle but find that first impression changing as they grow… well, we’re sold.

Pride and Prejudice

Doctor Who: We’re both Whovians, and we’ve never tried to deny it. Sure, the show can get campy (really campy) but it’s got heart, and characters you love, and in the midst of the worst kinds of hardship the Doctor can find hope and humor. We try to do that in our books, as well—and in This Shattered World especially, they have to search and work hard to keep that hope alive.

Doctor Who

Far and Away: There’s no doubt that a big inspiration for the culture and political situation on Avon comes from a mutual fascination with immigrant culture, particularly that of Irish immigrants to America—hence the fierce Fianna, our mostly-Irish band of rebels living in the swamps of Avon.

Far and Away

Star Trek: Space. The final frontier. Need we say more? (Okay, just one more thing: we love how often Star Trek episodes deal with philosophical and moral conundrums… it’s classic science fiction, and something we love to explore in our books as well!)

Star Trek

Romeo & Juliet: While the literary references in These Broken Stars are harder to spot because we didn’t want to spoil certain twists, it’s not hard to see that a big, big inspiration for This Shattered World came from the Bard himself. There’s a reason we named our planet Avon…

 


About the Authors



Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner are longtime friends and sometime flatmates who have traveled the world (but not yet the galaxy), covering every continent between them. They are sure outer space is only a matter of time. Meagan, who is also the author of the Skylark trilogy, currently lives in Asheville, NC, while Amie lives in Melbourne, Australia. Although they currently live apart, they are united by their love of space opera, road trips, and second breakfasts.

Visit the These Broken Stars website for the latest news on the series and follow the authors on Twitter at @AmieKaufman and @MeaganSpooner. You may also sign up for their newsletter as well! These Broken Stars will be available in North America on December 10, 2013.


This post is part of the This Shattered World blog tour hosted by The Midnight Garden.

Monday, December 8 – The Midnight Garden
Tuesday, December 9 –  The Book Smugglers
Wednesday, December 10 – Ivy Book Bindings
Thursday, December 11 – Cuddlebuggery
Friday, December 12 – Little Book Owl
Monday, December 15 – Mundie Moms
Tuesday, December 16 – Xpresso Reads
Wednesday, December 17 – A Book Utopia
Thursday, December 18 – Supernatural Snark
Friday, December 19 – Love is Not a Triangle


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Giveaway

These wonderful authors and Disney-Hyperion have generously offered up some fab prizes during this blog tour! See what’s up for grabs:

Autographed copies of These Broken Stars and This Shattered World
— Starbound swag
— A secret letter from Tarver to Lilac, which you may keep secret for yourself, or may be posted and shared with others
— Your choice of coffee with the authors at one of their upcoming U.S. tour stops (locations TBD) OR a Skype chat!

 

Use the Rafflecopter below to enter:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Let’s Role-Play! A Guest Post by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner

Let’s Role-Play! A Guest Post by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner

Posted by on 11/20/2013 • 40 Comments

Have you read this book yet? If not you’re definitely missing out! You can find my full review here if you missed it but it’s a awesome read! I’m excited to have the wonderful ladies behind this great novel on the blog for a fun guest post on how they created these characters together! First, in case you live under a rock and missed what this book was all about:

Guest Post by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner

Let It Play Out: Role-playing scenes to establish characters

One of the challenges in any story is ensuring that every character her their own very definitive point of view. They need opinions, a backstory, goals and their own personal motivation to do whatever they’re going to do…

Review: These Broken Stars by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

Review: These Broken Stars by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

Posted by on 11/15/2013 • 33 Comments

Guys! This is not a story about a girl flying in space in a dress! That’s only in the first chapter. I swear!

Actually, most of this book is a survival story. After a crash land on an anonymous planet, Tarver and Lilac have to find a way to get along and stay alive amongst the wild animals and Lilac’s questionable state of mind. It’s not a fast paced read, but rather a slow trek on this mysterious planet full of whispers, visions, ghosts, and other bizarre happenings. This is what keeps it completely enthralling. You get that constant need to read just one more chapter to try and get some answers as to what exactly is happening in this weird place. Is Lilac going insane, or are the voices…

Shadowlark Tour Stop – Sneak Peek + Giveaway!

Posted by on 09/23/2013 • 6 Comments

Today I’m happy to have the Shadowlark blog tour stop by to give you a sneak peek as well as a giveaway! I enjoyed Skylark when I read it last year and I’m excited to find out what the sequel has in store for us! If you missed if, you can find my review of Slykark here!

Chapter 1 Sneak Peek

Chapter 1:

The clockwork dawn is loudest in the old sewers. The sound of the machines pushing the sun across its track in the sky echoes through the tunnels, shaking the ground beneath my feet. Mortar crumbles from the ceiling and falls like snow- flakes, surrounding me in a column of white. “Don’t worry,” I say, reaching out for Tansy’s hand. “This happens every day. It’s…

Review: Skylark by Meagan Spooner

Posted by on 08/09/2012 • 37 Comments

Combining magic, science-fiction, and a scary futuristic setting, Skylark is original in its concept that brings forth a dark, twisted world where magic, and monsters, run rampant.

I was wary at first because I wasn’t sure how well the mix of dystopian and magic would mingle, but I found myself quite captivated by it all, though this did not happen right away. At the very start there’s a lot of confusion when it comes to the world building: What exactly is this harvesting and why is it done? Where does the magic come from? How does society live before and after the harvesting? These are some of the questions that accumulates after the first few chapters, making it hard to get into initially. Due to this showing rather than telling…

Interview with Meagan Spooner

Posted by on 08/04/2012 • 9 Comments

Today I’m very happy to have Meagan Spooner visit Xpresso Reads for a fun interview. She’s the author of Skylark which, as you can see on my sidebar, I’m reading at the moment and I can tell you it rocks! My review will be posted next week so keep an eye out! 😉 Now let’s see what Meagan has to say about BEA, Science Fiction, and of course, Skylark.

Interview with Meagan Spooner

Q. Let’s start with telling us a bit about how Skylark came to be.

A. SKYLARK was a result of a lot of factors conspiring to hit me in the right way, at the right time. I’d attended the wonderful Odyssey Writing Workshop the year before, and had spent about six months digesting what I’d learned there…