Guest Post and Giveaway: The Silvers by JA Rock

We’re so pleased to welcome author JA Rock today, on the tour for her new novel, The Silvers. Enjoy JA’s guest post, and also be sure to check out the details about her giveaway.

Good luck!

Hi! I’m J.A. Rock, and right now I’m touring the internet talking about my latest release, The Silvers. Thanks so much to the blogs that are hosting me on this tour, and be sure to leave comments on the tour posts for a chance to win a $15 Riptide Publishing gift card!

How My Mom Made The Silvers Happen

The Silvers is a re-release of the first novel I ever finished. I’d written short stories since I was a kid, but every time I got a couple of chapters into a novel, I’d quit. But I started The Silvers one morning in grad school and didn’t stop for a month, and then suddenly I had a draft of a book, and I had no idea whether I’d done it right. I didn’t know what genre it fit into—didn’t know if I should call it SF when it was so unscience-y. Didn’t know if it could be a love story when the relationship between the two MCs had such an inherent power imbalance. Didn’t know if the presence of a queer alien precluded it from being literary. And most importantly, didn’t know if I could show it to anyone, ever.

So I put it away for a while. But then when I was at my mom’s for winter break, and we went out to eat, and I mentioned that I’d written a book. She really wanted to read it, and I was like hell no, because it had sex in it, and I didn’t yet know that in another few years I’d be handing her things like Pain Slut to read. I recently told my editor that The Silvers feels like a mausoleum to my innocence, because I remember typing the word “cock” for the first time and immediately feeling dirty and embarrassed but also kind of badass. If I had known how many more cocks I was destined to type in the years that followed…

I digress. My mom really wanted to read it, and eventually I compromised. I needed to edit that first draft. And reading things aloud has always helped me catch things my eyes alone don’t. Also, my mom was doing a lot of quilting at the time. So each night, I’d read a few chapters of The Silvers aloud to her while she quilted. And sometimes I’d stop to make notes about things I wanted to edit, or ask her questions about how certain characters were coming across, or whether certain scenes made sense. She was amazingly helpful and supportive. And she was the one who insisted that I had to actually do something with the book. Like try to get it published.

Thanks to her feedback and encouragement, I rewrote the hell out of The Silvers over the next couple of years—while also launching a pen name who uses “cock” all the time. Now I’m excited to bring the relatively cock-free The Silvers under the J.A. Rock umbrella. And I owe my mom the hugest of thank yous for those hours she spent listening.

About The Silvers

What humans want from the Silver Planet is water. What they find is a race of humanoids who are sentient, but as emotionless and serene as the plants and placid lakes they tend.

B, captain of the mission, doesn’t believe that the “Silvers” are intelligent, and lets his crew experiment on them. But then he bonds with Imms, who seems different from the others—interested in learning, intrigued by human feelings. And B realizes that capturing, studying, and killing this planet’s natives has done incalculable damage.

When a fire aboard B’s ship kills most of the crew and endangers Imms, B decides to take him back to Earth. But the simplicity of the Silver Planet doesn’t follow them. Imms learns the full spectrum of human emotions, including a love B is frightened to return, and a mistrust of the bureaucracy that wants to treat Imms like a test subject, even if they have to eliminate B to do it.

About the Author

J.A. Rock is the author of queer romance and suspense novels, including By His Rules, Take the Long Way Home, and, with Lisa Henry, The Good Boy and When All The World Sleeps. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and a BA in theater from Case Western Reserve University. J.A. also writes queer fiction and essays under the name Jill Smith. Raised in Ohio and West Virginia, she now lives in Chicago with her dog, Professor Anne Studebaker.

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The Giveaway

To celebrate the release of The Silvers, J.A. Rock is giving away $15 in Riptide Publishing credit. Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on July 16, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!