Author Spotlight - Excerpt from "Kidnapped"

Thank you so much for supporting Maria during her spotlight week. Leave a comment today, tomorrow and Sunday on the Excerpt post and included your email. Maria is giving away a PDF copy of her story, Kidnapped. One lucky winner will be chosen on the following Monday, 11 JUN. Enjoy the Excerpt!

Moderator Steph

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Something poked Patricia, awakening her from a deep sleep, and she yelped, thinking it might be a rat. When she focused her eyes, she stared at Travis's legs right in front of her. He had nudged her with the toe of his boot. She still held the soft little cup clutched to her chest, and didn't let it go even as she fought to sit up. "Oh no."

He answered dryly, "Yes, I'm happy to see you too."

It took a couple of seconds for reality to sink into her mind. Offending him would be bad, maybe even lethal, and she tried to talk her way out of the slip, "I was hoping it was a dream."

His next words weren't at all what she expected. "You wouldn't cause any trouble for me if I were to let you out, right?"

The prospect of seeing something besides the bare walls of the cell felt almost intoxicating, and she shook her head eagerly. Travis smirked, "You wouldn't, say, try to overpower me with that really dangerous cup or anything, would you?"

Had he seen her? Had he been watching her? All night? She felt herself blush, but still clutched the cup harder. It was hers, the only thing she had, and she wanted to keep it. She still dropped it when he reached a hand down to pull her up. Accepting the offering seemed dangerous, but rejecting it even more so. Putting her hand carefully in his, half expecting pain and death, it surprised her to find it warm and human.

"It'll take us a few days to reach Central. Any mischief and you get to spend all that time in here, do you understand? If you try to contact William, try to steal the ship, sabotage it, anything, it's back to the cell. Am I making myself clear?"

She nodded obediently and glanced down at her hand still holding his. It surprised her she wasn't as afraid of him anymore. He almost seemed like a real person. Looking up, she found herself staring at the ruined part of his face. That too seemed less frightening and revolting now. If anything, it looked painful and filled her with sympathy. "Why are you doing this? Being nice to me, I mean?"

He made a dismissive gesture, "I don't know. I should kill you and get it over with, but I guess you're harmless."

Dropping her hand and turning abruptly, he walked out with long strides, and she hurried to follow. As soon as she got into the corridor her head started to spin, trying to take in all the unfamiliar sights and smells, and she had to jog to keep up with him to the elevator. If she'd still had doubts about where she was they evaporated. This thing, whatever it was, couldn't have been made on Earth.


*****

Review snippets:

"Kidnapped will hold your attention from beginning to end. You MUST read it."
Paula L. McElwee

"I highly recommend "Kidnapped" to anyone who enjoys, action, romance, sci-fi and a spectacular read!"
Mrs. Michael

"With taut, escalating action, Kidnapped is a thoroughly intriguing read."
Chelsea Perry, Apex Reviews

"In a genre where minutely-detailed descriptions of nanorobots in the blood stream make quite a few appearances, Maria Hammarblad makes her traditional narrative refreshing -- not cliché. The jury approves."
The Scattering


Book trailer link: http://youtu.be/GDmhI7c69iM

Website: http://www.hammarblad.com
Blog: http://www.scifiromance.info
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mariahammarblad
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mariahammarblad

Buy-link Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00825645A
Buy-link Desert Breeze Publishing: http://stores.desertbreezepublishing.com/-strse-292/Kidnapped-Maria-Hammarblad/Detail.bok

Author Spotlight - Human Aliens by Maria Hammarblad

From time to time, people ask me why my aliens seem so human. Shouldn't they be eight foot tall, blue, and have tentacles and ray guns? Well, some do, but in my imagination most people the heroine runs into are more or less human. I concoct a convenient explanation of a common past, where the race spread or was sent all over the universe. The species might have developed differently on different worlds, but is basically the same. There are definitely culture clashes, though.

Why do I do this? It is interesting to imagine what life on other worlds might look like. If there is life out there, I'm convinced it doesn't look anything like us. (I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!) Life takes on so many forms on our planet alone, and it might develop along quite different lines on another world.

I write science fiction romance, and while I like to think love is indifferent to species - I love my dogs, for example - I do think romantic love and attraction is connected to more basic needs. Romance is about falling in love, about physical attraction as well as attraction of the soul, and there has to be a certain genetic compatibility to make it feasible. Would a human heroine from Earth fall for a spaceman that looked like a giant purple jellyfish? Maybe, but it seems more likely she'd fall for a humanoid.

Book trailer link: http://youtu.be/GDmhI7c69iM

Website: http://www.hammarblad.com
Blog: http://www.scifiromance.info
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mariahammarblad
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mariahammarblad

Buy-link Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00825645A
Buy-link Desert Breeze Publishing: http://stores.desertbreezepublishing.com/-strse-292/Kidnapped-Maria-Hammarblad/Detail.bok

Author Spotlight - Interview with Patricia, heroine of Kidnapped

STEPH: Patricia, what was the worst part of being in space?

PATRICIA: Being in space! It was absolutely horrifying. It's beautiful, but really big and scary. Well, after I got past the first shock, I think it was the food. These people are so fixed on efficiency you wouldn't believe it. It's like… eating a bar of cereal, but more like hay, day after day after day. I would have killed someone for some real food. Not killed, exactly, but you know what I mean…

STEPH: Travis took you to a restaurant though, right?

PATRICA: Yes, he did. I was so scared at the time, but he did his best. I don't think he understood why I didn't want to eat anymore hay-bars, but he tried to fix it for me. He even got me chocolate!

STEPH: I hear you had a problem with your clothes too?

PATRICIA: Oh, yes, what an ordeal that day was. I stepped into this personal cleanser; it's a tube that's their version of a shower. It's a carwash - it sprays stuff over you and dries you off. You get clean, but it's not pleasant. Anyway, when I got out of the tube, my clothes were gone, and I thought someone took them. Imagine standing on a spaceship in the middle of nowhere, no clue of how to get home, without a thread to wear. I had to put on some alien clothes, Travis said they were from prisoners, I don't even want to know where he got them.

STEPH: If your life was a movie, who would play you?

PATRICIA: Mila Kunis, definitely. Everyone says I look just like her. *fluffs hair* My writer says it might be hard to accomplish because she's very famous and probably busy, but hey, a girl can dream, right! I always say if you do something, you should do it right.


Book trailer link: http://youtu.be/GDmhI7c69iM

Website: http://www.hammarblad.com
Blog: http://www.scifiromance.info
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mariahammarblad
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mariahammarblad

Buy-link Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00825645A
Buy-link Desert Breeze Publishing: http://stores.desertbreezepublishing.com/-strse-292/Kidnapped-Maria-Hammarblad/Detail.bok

Author Spotlight - Free-floating chips, ants, and black holes! by Maria Hammarblad

In documentaries, cartoons, and some science fiction movies, one can see astronauts float around in zero gravity. Being able to push oneself from one wall to another does look cool, but not very practical. In The Simpsons, Homer goes to space and has to utilize his zero-gravity chips-eating skills when he spills snacks all over the cockpit. Unfortunately, he also spills ants. I don't remember how the episode ends, but it's rather funny.

I thought a lot about gravity and the lack thereof when I wrote Kidnapped, and I had an explanation to how Travis's ship can have artificial gravity in one of the first drafts. It slowed the story too much, so I took it out. Patricia is in the middle of an adventure, and who cares how she can walk. She walks. Right…?

Anyway, the subject intrigues me. The common trick in novels and movies is making a spaceship spin, creating an illusion of weight through centripetal force. I don't know if it would work in a bigger scale or not; at least in my mind, the ship would have to spin rather quickly to have an effect. I wonder if a person inside would know the ship was spinning? Sounds like a way to get motion sick, for sure.

Truth is, we don't really understand gravity. It's connected to mass, and we know what it does, but the theory behind it is still iffy. When I wrote "Kidnapped," I thought, "You'd need something really heavy. Lots of mass, so high density to make it smaller than a planet…" What is the one thing we know of that has extremely high density and high mass? So high it eats anything that comes to close? A black hole!

In my imagination, Travis's people have learned to master the science of black holes, putting one the size of a pinhead in the bottom of the ship. It's surrounded by a nifty containment field, controlled by the computer. Ta-da, all gravitational problems solved. Patricia can run around, jump, and feel quite at home without having to worry about drifting to the ceiling. If she were to spill something, it would end up on the floor where it belongs. Travis's floor is self-cleaning. I want one!

Book trailer link: http://youtu.be/GDmhI7c69iM

Website: http://www.hammarblad.com
Blog: http://www.scifiromance.info
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mariahammarblad
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mariahammarblad

Buy-link Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00825645A
Buy-link Desert Breeze Publishing: http://stores.desertbreezepublishing.com/-strse-292/Kidnapped-Maria-Hammarblad/Detail.bok

Author Spotlight - Q&A with Maria Hammarblad

STEPH: I don't know much about "Kidnapped." What's it about?

MARIA: Kidnapped is about a girl who is in the wrong place at the wrong time; she's abducted by mistake. It's a bad situation. She wakes up in a spaceship surrounded by peculiar objects, and a very scary person is interrogating her in a language she doesn't understand. She tells herself it isn't real, but eventually she has to accept what's happening, and try to survive and get back home.

STEPH: How long did it take you to write?

MARIA: I wrote the first version when I was a teenager, and forgot all about it for decades. When I remembered about it, getting the story down was a pretty quick job, but I've rewritten it over and over again.

STEPH: How much research did you have to do?

MARIA: That is an excellent question. The story is set in space, and there are spaceships, other worlds, and a battle between good and evil. I evidently made all that up. However, for any story to become believable, it needs traces of truth. Earlier in my life, I've taken classes in Earth and Space science, and when I wrote Kidnapped, I took a college class in Astrobiology. It was a lot of fun!

Any science in my books is mixed up with lots and lots of imagination. It's fiction, and even though many scifi readers have a good grasp on science, I do think it's okay to ignore some facts in favor of the story. For example, I know a moon would most likely be too small to maintain an atmosphere, and that its gravity would be too low for a human to just walk around on it like we do on Earth, but having someone land on it, seeing a giant planet hang in the sky, is much cooler than reality!





STEPH: How does the cover reflect the story within?

MARIA: Better than I dared dream. I love how you see the Earth in the background; it's there, but ways away, and Patricia works so hard to get back to it. Holographic maps are mentioned a couple of times in the book, and the map has a nice symbolism to it. Patricia is lost in so many ways, and she sure could use some guidance.

STEPH: Patricia is the heroine. What are her strengths? Weakness?

MARIA: She likes people, and she's an optimist. People don't see her as a threat, and she's so likeable they want to help her. She's also impulsive and follows her heart, for better and for worse.

STEPH: What does Travis find appealing about her?

MARIA: She's a pure soul, if that makes any sense… She's innocent, forthright, and very different from everyone else he ever met. She can show kindness without ulterior motives, and no one has been kind to him before, not even when he was a child. Afraid of him, sure. She is afraid of him too, but she still has the ability to feel sympathy.

STEPH: What is the theme of the novel?

MARIA: I'd say, Hope. Bad things happen, but it's important not to give up.

STEPH: As a writer, where do you draw inspiration from?

MARIA: Everything! Things and people I see around me, people I meet online, the news… I see something and my mind starts playing a "What if" game. I'm writing a story right now that started when I was driving to the store and saw a guy on a motorcycle in the rear view mirror. "What if that guy follows the heroine?"

STEPH: Do you have an ebook reader? If so, which one?

MARIA: For the longest time I thought I didn't need one; I read on an iPad and was quite happy with that. Then, I thought that since I write e-books I should at least try a real e-reader, so I bought a Kindle Touch. I like it much more than I thought I would; I love that it works in sunlight, and the text to speech function is convenient. I mean, it misses to pause at periods and new chapters and such, but it's pretty good for being a machine. I plug it into the car stereo and listen to books when I'm driving.

STEPH: Fun question: Summer vacation is coming up. Any plans?

MARIA: I should make something up, shouldn't I, hahaha! I don't have any big plans; I live in Florida and it's pretty much a vacation paradise. If I have some time off, I like to sit in the back yard with the doggies, or go to the beach. I do want to go to Kennedy Space Center, we'll see if I get around to it.




Book trailer link: http://youtu.be/GDmhI7c69iM

Website: http://www.hammarblad.com
Blog: http://www.scifiromance.info
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mariahammarblad
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mariahammarblad

Buy-link Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00825645A
Buy-link Desert Breeze Publishing: http://stores.desertbreezepublishing.com/-strse-292/Kidnapped-Maria-Hammarblad/Detail.bok