Our next Featured Author, Melisse Aires, donated three copies of one of my favorite books, Alien Blood, for our raffles and drawings. Thank you, Melisse! She said she picked this one to give away because two of the secondary characters are the main characters of her upcoming book. Um, more info please! That is all she said. LOL. Well, you still have one chance left to win this and lots of other great goodies in the final prize bundle. Answer the question at the end of the post to enter the drawing.
THE BOOK
Alien Blood
Kellac is everything Gema secretly wants, but a future together is impossible.
Kellac, younger brother of Kaistril, HER CYBORG AWAKES, ends up on planet Toph in military prison. While not at fault, Kellac must wait for diplomatic solutions while the military keeps him in lock up.
Stranded on the planet Toph as a child, Gema is in the Women’s Penitentiary for vagrancy. Not PureGen (lab perfected human), she cannot be a citizen and has no legal status.
They are chosen to be contestants on the wildly popular Survival Game, in which two prisoners compete to win credits and their freedom on a planet, soon to be open for immigration. With every moved recorded by a swarm of flying cameras, Kellac and Gema fight their attraction to each other and work together to earn credits.The competition goes well–until the spaceship carrying the show’s production team crashes onto their wilderness planet. They are stranded and survival is no longer a game.
40k Novella, Scifi Romance, Space Opera, Adult Content
Get it on Amazon or other retailers.
THE AUTHOR
Take a shy bookworm from Montana. Hand her a stack of her much older brother’s sci fi and fantasy novels, James Bond books and horror comics. Later, introduce Barbara Cartland and the world of romance fiction. Get her a teaching job or two in authentic, one room Montana schools, ala Laura Ingels Wilder. Marry her off to a great guy, move her to a big city in Tornado Alley, then pop three daughters out of her in twenty two months(one set of identical twins).
Then, make her a jinx-every great genre TV show she loves gets the ax- Beauty and the Beast, Dark Angel-and Buffy and Spike NEVER have a happy ending! She gets upset about no romance in the world, and fires up to write her own stories with happy endings. Throw this all together into a small house in Wyoming, along with a small bouncy dog named Baxter and too many cats, shake constantly and pour it out onto a computer keyboard.
There! You have Melisse Aires.
Mini-Interview
Q. When did you realize SFR was a genre?
A. Sometime in the very early nineties I started running into futuristics. A nice UBS in Wichita had a whole section for them!
Q. What SFR book had the most impact on your reading and/or writing?
A. Anne McCaffery and Zenna Henderson were SF writers with some romance, as was Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, and I read them all. Dara Joy, Knight of Trillion Sun came along with the futuristic romances and seemed to usher in the romance subgenre, also Jayne Castle’s Curtain books. Those were early influences.
Q. Do your books lean more SF or Romance?
A. I would say romance, but I do write space opera so if you are unfamiliar with SF that might jump out at you, since it is not Earth based.
Melisse’s question for readers:
What is one favorite book?
Smart Girls love SciFi 
I would say my favorite book is The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith. Like your book, Alien Blood, the heroine’s space ship crash lands on an alien planet. The survivors, originally destined to colonize another world, struggle in the alien environment, antagonize(often very comically) the alien they hope will lead them to civilization and rescue and eventually devolve into a state of anarchy with the exception of the heroine and her alien rescuer. Full of mystery, adventure and romance, Smith’s world and characters are superbly crafted. You feel as if this alien world and the events in it are actually possible.
I Dare by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.
This is such a very hard question. I really dislike “what is your favorite” questions. I love books – all of them. I read voraciously. All genres. Picking just one favorite – well I am going to say impossible. However, I will give you two. The first introduced me to the romance genre – Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt. I maintain a hard copy in my personal library. I fell in love with romance with that book. It has been a love affair ever since.
But, since this is a sci-fi site, I will also name a sci-fi book. An obscure little number that I absolutely adored when I read it the first time in the early 90’s. Ismael (Star Trek No 23) by Barbara Hambly. This little read took two of my favorite TV shows of the late sixties and early seventies and smashed them together – Star Trek and Here Come the Brides. It was so fun. Spock on Bridalveil mountain helping find matches for all those brides, all to prevent the Klingons from changing history and destroying the federation. Not a huge classic, and only us die hard Trekkies may have even read it, but it is a prime example of early SFR and has always stayed with me.
How about my favorite nonfiction book, to narrow it down?
Coming of Age in the Milky Way, by Timothy Ferris
It’s about the history of cosmology from the ancients to the nineties. I loved finding out what the concept of the universe, the galaxy, and earth has been to different people.
Thanks for hosting me, Charlee.
Lol, I will blog about my upcoming book Salvage. The characters are the cyborg 2ln and Dooley, the transport pilot in Alien Blood. It takes place about a decade after Alien Blood. I’m planning a 4 book miniseries about the group of cyborgs rescued from an abandoned asteroid battlefield by Dooley.
It is always interesting to read about favorite books…ones that stayed in a person’s mind, especially heavy readers who have read so many books . I know I read a lot and remember authors more than individual books. Sometimes a book or author will come along that really stands out. Then of course they become auto-buys!