Author Guest Post With Dawn Prough & GIVEAWAY!

Dawn Prough, has kindly agreed to guest post about her inspiration for becoming a writer in honor of her newest release, City Of Promise.

 About The Author:

Dawn was born in rural Illinois to a dairy farmer and English teacher. As a child, it was assumed she'd become a librarian or a writer, since she always had her nose in a book. As it turns out, she is both: she works as a library assistant at Anthem College in Kansas City, Missouri and her first book was published in August of 2012.

Her interests, when she’s not jacked into the Internet, include horses, crocheting, action and horror movies and reading urban fantasy and fantasy.  She has a Bachelors in General Studies, also known as a basic degree in flipping hamburgers, and is working toward a Masters in Library Sciences.   

Dawn enjoys books with strong female leads of any genre. She is also drawn to unique and unusual worlds. Her favorite authors are Jacqueline Carey, Kim Harrison and Jim Butcher, and she wants to be all of them when she finally grows up.

Find Dawn Prough on the Web:
Blog | Amazon | Twitter | Goodreads

 Guest Post:

 

I’ve always told stories, from ones I made up about the toys I had to writing myself into my favorite movies and books.  As a child, I kept them in my head—tales of being a great adventurer, an amazing humanitarian and a world-changing hero.  As I grew older, I began to write them down, though I never finished them.  There were far too many to focus on just one!

As I matured, I began to finish the stories I was writing down.  At first it was short stories; then longer ones.  And then my life was altered by finding Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series.  There were only three of the books in the store, and I grabbed them all that day.  I read them quickly and went back for more.  It was my introduction to paranormal fantasy, and I wanted to be a part of it. 

In time, I found more authors and when Ms. Hamilton went to erotica, I stayed with paranormal fantasy.  Patricia Briggs, Kim Harrison and Jim Butcher all became my new “must-haves” and with each book, the urge to tell a story that had been brewing in my head for a while grew.  It had started with the seed of an idea: discontents building a country in the middle of the ocean.   I started to think about who would think that building a city in the middle of the ocean, and decided that scientists in general had the right kind of faith in technology, coupled with the desire to make the rules for their research.  Gideon was born.

Later, watching a show with a samurai in it, I realized that the main characters in this story would be a samurai, a vampire and a robot.  In time, the robot idea went away (thankfully) and the samurai became a former Yakuza.  He’d made mistakes as a teen that were haunting him as a father; all Li wants is to raise his family in peace.  The vampire remained and gradually became the vampire in my story, Misty Sauval.  I’ve always enjoyed stories where vampires are known and part of our world, and for my world, I decided that vampires were known, and feared and hunted.  Misty is an orphan; she’s lost her vampire family and is trying to make a life on Gideon.   These elements and more were incorporated into my book, City of Promise.

Though I have my own favorite take on a world with the undead, the different ways those worlds are built by other authors are very interesting.  One author chooses to make them the end result of the penal system, while another makes them businesspeople hiding a bloody world of mystical enslavement.  This is a far cry from the stories we used to find in vampire literature, or as one acquaintance put it, “There are no real vampires in popular culture anymore.”  What she meant was that the most common representation you see of vampires today is the brooding bleeding heart type.  You know the type: they’re usually male and young in appearance.  They are decent people who happen to have a nasty sun allergy and a need for blood.  They still have impulse control issues around blood, usually expressed through prominent veins that appear, eyes that turn red or fangs that extend from their jaw.  They are vampires, but are they vampires?

What the person I was speaking with meant was: “where are all the monstrous vampires?”  When I pressed her for what a real vampire was, she described the sociopathic, inhuman monsters that don’t need human connections.  She wanted vampires to again be the monsters they’d once been.  She wanted Lost Boys. 

The problem I’d always had with those vampires was that they weren’t very sympathetic.  They don’t make very good subjects for romance, or heroism.  If your story is horror, then they are perfect.  But outside of horror, is there a place in stories for the Lost Boys types?  Or do we humanize them because we want some aspects of vampirism, but not the ugly ones?

Why are we drawn to put vampires into our stories?  They’re technically corpses; legend gives them all kinds of unsexy qualities, including being cold and bad breath.  Often those are ignored for other features, and I think that’s why they pop up so often in modern stories, particularly in a romantic context.  Those features that tend to get noticed are key to why we’re drawn to them.  They are eternally young; they have a terrible need and struggle with monstrous temptations.  He is dangerous, but deep inside, he wishes so much that he wasn’t.

I think that a large part of the lure of the supernatural is that danger, and the chance to give a part of yourself to your love.  That’s a heady feeling: to give of your very essence for your love.  Maybe that’s why we like vampires so much: we can develop that depth of relationship with them.  It’s a theme I want to explore in my books, later.

Do you have any comments or opinions on the allure of vampires in our media?  If so, leave a comment!  While you’re leaving one, let Lucy and I know if you want to be entered for a chance to win a free electronic copy of my book, City of Promise.  It’s open to all countries; you just need to have a valid email address to enter.  Good luck!

  City of Promise:

Title: City of Promise

Author: Dawn Prough
Release Date: August 15, 2012

In the year 2063, Misty Sauval is one of the few surviving vampires residing in the world's only safe haven for them: the independent metropolis of Gideon. Built on pillars rising from the ocean on the Atlantic ridge, Gideon is governed by scientists and maintains light-proof residential buildings and a “work for blood” program.

Misty, who doesn't need to breathe, is employed as a diver, doing maintenance work on Gideon's underwater foundation and machinery. Tonight her job is complicated by an ugly discovery: a weighted body sunk to the seafloor beneath the city.

Vampires in Gideon don't want to be associated with murders of any kind. But there's another side to the story of this body, and Misty meets it on her way home from work: a stranger dripping blood from multiple wounds, lying on a high ledge as though he'd been thrown--or had jumped--from a helicopter.

Against all her self-preserving instincts, Misty feels compelled to help this stranger. Taking ever more daring risks, she and her friends are drawn into Gideon's dark underworld of warring organized crime. The gleaming city which had been part sanctuary and part prison suddenly is more dangerous than she could have imagined.

Find City of Promise Online:  

Goodreads | Amazon

  GIVEAWAY:

Thanks to Dawn Prough, one lucky commenter will win an ebook 
copy of the novel! 

***INTERNATIONAL!***

Giveaway policies:

·         To Enter: Please leave a comment thanking the author and leave your e-mail.

·         This giveaway ends on September 30^th, 2012

·         This giveaway is open to those 13 years of age or older. 

·         All giveaway winners will be announced on the blog.

·         I can disqualify any entry as I see fit. 

·         I will use Random.org to select the winners.

·         Once the winners have been notified, they will have 24 hours to confirm their interest otherwise new winners will be selected.

 

Happy reading until next time!