Straight from the Library: Straight Chatting from the Library: E.B. Brooks

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. One randomly chosen winner via rafflecopter will win a $25 Amazon/BN.com gift card. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

READ THE INTERVIEW

What would we find under your bed?

Now that’s a provocative question to ask a happily married man, isn’t it? Kidding aside, items under my bed would include a hunting bow, a spare grounding rod (I don’t remember why, now), some leftover floorboards, a veterinary first-aid kit (my wife is quite the duck surgeon, at this point), and whatever toys and paper balls our cats hauled into the abyss.

What was the scariest moment of your life?

Does stressful count as scary? The time in December 2019 when my family was riding in the car with me to go holiday shopping and a truck pulled out on the highway…that would work. My car died to save my wife, breaking a wheel off to halt before we could strike a utility pole. I have weird luck with driving in general, or have had, since. Dodging random wheels rolling down the highway, or ladders falling out of truck beds in front of me. Tie your stuff down, folks. And keep good spacing between vehicles.

Off the road, the scariest moment was probably the time there was a manhunt in our area. A couple of people had committed murder and arson, then fled to the nearby area. We woke in the middle of the night to a drone flying over the yard; when I went out to see what was up, I had five troopers stopping me at gunpoint. (I was armed as well, but I’d declared it before anything could come of it.) My wife and I were up the rest of the night, weapons in hand and listening for signs of trouble. There’s a scene in Sandstorm that probably got a lot of color from that incident.

Do you listen to music while writing? If so, what?

All the time! It varies from book to book, but I’ve got a playlist for the Emissary Quintet with some of my favorites. Highlights from that would include Lindsey Stirling’s “Shatter Me” (which suits Emissary nicely), Beth Patterson’s “Take Some Fire”, Trailerhead’s “Tales of the Electric Romeo”, and Sub Pub Music’s “Face the World”.

What is something you'd like to accomplish in your writing career next year?

I need to get back on track with new books! Rereleasing Emissary is totally worth it, but it’s also delayed the release of Neverborn by over a year. There are two more books past that, and I’m feeling the time pressure to get them out. Hard to believe it’s been almost nine years since I started drafting this series…

How long did it take you to write this book?

Ah, what a nice segue! I knew Emissary was Book 1 of a series, so after drafting it in 2014 (which took like a month, in the speedy, crazed teen-love way only a first draft can go) I spent the next few years drafting out the rest of the series. That gave me the chance to tighten the plot and layer in foreshadowing, to say nothing of giving my writing skills time to improve. Once Book 5, Transcendence, was drafted at the end of 2016, I started going back and rewriting Emissary. That took a while, because day job, but eventually I got it ready to query in late 2018. I spent a year or so in the query trenches before deciding to go the indie route after all. (My primary reason was the realization that with a quintet already drafted, I wasn’t likely to be flexible to agency or publisher requests to make fundamental changes.) So I hired a cover artist and editor, and on Earth Day 2020, I published the first edition. Covid was fresh at the time, so the marketing was, shall we say, nonexistent. Life happened, and in May 2021 I published Sandstorm. This one had a new cover artist (the same as with the rerelease and the rest of the series) and several elements that I later wished I’d added to Emissary, like an epigram in the front. Since I was doing this as an indie author, I decided to hold off on Book 3 and redo Emissary to help define the series aesthetic (and address some of the criticisms I saw in the reviews). The second edition has updated cover art that’s based on the original but much more in-line with the series tone, and it has a new prologue (the old one’s in the back, as bonus content) and several minor changes that I believe add up to a more mature, inclusive tone. And now it’s out there in the wild again!

READ THE BLURB

Two Worlds. One Future.

Ewan O’Meara is no stranger to death: in recent months, he’s found his way to limbo at least once per week, much to his parents’ concern. It’s a necessary price for getting experience to become the greatest adventurer his homeland of Veridor has ever known, but the overbearing Veridian Church has him pinned down, soaking him for the penance gold to unlock his stats each time he respawns. And because the Church’s ancient war put an end to both the godlike Gems and the epic quests they once bestowed, Ewan has no better alternative.

That is, until he encounters a young woman fleeing arrest from the Church’s soldiers. At first glance, Treanna Rothchild needs it: she’s clueless about Veridian life. But she has other skills that defy Ewan’s understanding, and she knows things. Unsettling, seditious things the Church wants kept secret at any cost.

And she’s in Veridor to raise an army, to fight an enemy only she can see.

Risking both life and soul, Ewan follows Treanna where no Veridian has ever been and there is no respawning. But for him to have a chance at making a real difference in the strange, harsh world she reveals to him, he must first come to terms with it. Especially as he and Treanna discover how much it has in common with Veridor—and how much they depend on each other to survive.

New-adult science fiction, wrapped in gaming and fantasy around a hopepunk core, Emissary is an immersive, thought-provoking adventure with a little teen romance and a lot of heart.

READ AN EXCERPT

The other party wasted no time splitting off, and before long, Ewan was stumbling down a broken street with Tree and Nathan, its surface pitted and cracked into a ghastly parody of Whitehaven’s cobblestones under the dusty sky. Sand trickled across it, ushered on by the stiff winds; it stung Ewan’s cheeks where the mask didn’t cover.

They kept an eye out for anyone else in the ruins, but it was painfully obvious to Ewan that there wasn’t anything alive in this place. Hadn’t been, for centuries.

The sand crunched underfoot as they made their way, but more trickled past to pool up against the husks of hundreds if not thousands of small metal carriages lined up along the crumbled sidewalks, apparently abandoned long ago. Most of them had frames so pitted and rusted through that Kate wouldn’t have bothered with them, and their broken wheels held only scraps of some mix of metal and rubber, an older and less durable version of Gertrude’s treads.

Overhead, the dull sunlight cast its usual yellowed tinge on the skeletons of buildings, taller by far than anything Veridor had to offer. Their steel bones, also stained red with rust, swayed ominously in the winds, threatening to join their less fortunate brothers, already toppled across the ground to block the party’s way here and there. Half-emptied window frames groaned as the wind blew through them, a haunted echo of what must have been a city bursting with activity before everyone left and the sands came in to patiently bury it all, an inch at a time.

MEET THE AUTHOR