Full
of adventure and discovery, these stories examine complex people in situations
fraught with conflict as they search for truth in increasingly violent and
complicated worlds.
FINDING INSPIRATION
I asked J.P. how he found the inspiration for his writing. Here is his response:
So, UP
THE TOWER is my new young adult dystopian action novel. It’s a fun,
short stand-alone book that I think any fans of stuff like China Meiville’s RAILSEA or Suzanne Collins’ THE HUNGER GAMES would love. It’s got a
crazy cloned assassin, a boy genius, robot cops, gangsters with crazy
techno-arms and mech-suits, and all sorts of fun stuff.
So I took that idea, added a couple more main characters,
made it vertical, and set in a dystopian slum beset with a catastrophic
earthquake. Thus, UP THE TOWER was
born.
Originally, I had wanted the characters to be completely
hating each other, but somehow getting along by the end. That sort of
happens now, but not (I think) in the way you might expect.
I often realize who characters are by the way of their
dynamics with other characters. This makes the most sense to me, because most
of us can be understood as just responses to the people and situations around
us.
So, the first character I really started to get a hold of
was Ana. I knew I wanted Ana to be this painfully pretty young woman, and that
I wanted the character of Gary to idolize her in an almost-creepy way. So I
started exploring that a little, and I knew I had this character of Victor, who
was a cloned assassin, and whose arc was supposed to have something to do with
how he had never really experienced family before. Well, when it comes to the
way men idolize women, we typically have two big roles—ideal mate and ideal
mother. So I intensified the creepiness factor for Gary, and really upped the
game with Victor, who subconsciously and irreversibly (and rather disastrously)
recognizes Ana as a mother figure.
So, if Ana becomes this sort of character who is a response
to all the negative ways men idolize women, then I wanted a foil to that; that
character became Ore. Ore is also a woman, but she's horribly disfigured, with
only one eye and a metal exo-skeleton arm and scars everywhere. She's basically
just this very cunning brute, and she's everything that Ana isn't, but she's
still marginalized even by her own world of gangsterism because of her
womanhood (all her physical scars are due to this in some form or another).
But, where Ana ends up being a little crazy because of the
way she's been shaped by patriarchy, I wanted Ore to end up basically all
right—and the way to funnel this was by having her possess a positive
interaction with some family figure, and that became Samson. Samson is a boy
genius, separated from his sister when he was very young, and he ends up trying
to form familial attachments with an amoral gang boss (typically a bad idea),
who uses Samson for his own nefarious ends. In the novel, Samson forms an
attachment with Partner, a robot, who is basically everything a lonely boy could
ever want: loyal, strong, happy, and powerful. Partner is kind of like Optimus
Prime, except a little bit dimmer and with a grappling hook.
Disaster brings everybody together. A cloned corporate assassin; a
boy genius and his new robot; a tech-modified gangster with nothing to lose; a
beautiful, damaged woman and her unbalanced stalker—these folks couldn't be
more different, but somehow they must work together to save their own skin.
Stranded in the epicenter of a monumental earthquake in the dystopian slum,
Junktown, there is only one way to survive. These unlikely teammates must go...UP
THE TOWER.
AN EXCERPT
Before anything else—before the
riot, before the flood, before the gap and the deaths and the fires and the
pain—before all of that, Ana just wanted to get the hell out of Junktown.
But she was stuck there with Raj,
and Raj had all the bodyguards, so she couldn't very well leave on her own.
Walk into Junktown without any protection? No, thank you. She had a knife on
her, but that was hardly enough. The knife fit neatly in a small, luxury
Cardion-brand sheath at her side.
The rest of her outfit was direct
out from a fashion magazine. She wore tight black Cardion slacks, her patent
leather Aushwere ankle boots sexy and stylish and perfect for inner-city walking.
Her dark blue blouse was Cardion again (there had been a sale); already she had
noticed the way Raj had been hugging his eyes to how it cupped and clung to her
body. He would have been looking a bit more, perhaps, but she wore her favorite
Kadaya Sarin-brand leather jacket, allowing her a bit of modesty with the long
sleeves and tight collar, despite the thinness of the material. She was a woman
dressed to impress, but also was no whore—she had her man. He liked her dressed
attractive, but not like some slut. Ana knew what he wanted, because that was
her entire life, as she saw it, from now on.
They were inside the ground floor of
a tall building. Cleanbots rushed around them, sweeping up dust, guided along
by retrofitted eyebots that spied out areas of dust and disrepair.
“Here's where we'll have the lobby,” said Raj,
opening his hands out wide to the open space.
Ana had presence of mind to hold her
tongue.
What she wanted to say was, “Really,
dear? Here in the first possible place that someone could enter from the
street? That's where you'll have the lobby? That's so inventive. You're so
smart.”
CONNECT WITH THE AUTHOR
Blog/website:
http://jplantern.com
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/JpLanternBooks
twitter:
@jplantern
The author will
be awarding a backlist ebook copy to a randomly drawn winner at every stop
during the tour and a Grand Prize of a $25 Amazon GC will be awarded to one
randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during this tour.
Follow the tour and comment; the more you comment, the better your chances of winning. The tour dates can be found here:
