The SFR Brigade 2nd Midsummer Blog Hop - Pippa's Post

Excerpt - 

Her manta ray-shaped flitter ship sat, in camouflage mode, nearby. The craft shimmered into a reality of silver and black at her touch, gleaming in the hazy sunlight. Jiona slipped inside, harnessed herself into the pilot’s seat, and fired up the engines. As soon as it left the ground, she gunned the engines and plummeted over the edge of the TransGalactic Bank’s three hundred story tower into the airborne tumult of the traffic below.

As she dived into the busy lanes of Chupalla, sirens blared. Jiona dodged oncoming vehicles with ease, laughing. The criss-crossing exhaust trails and energy signals would throw any pursuer off her track, and few law enforcers would be suicidal enough to try following her. Still smiling, she dropped through the last lane and into the sea of fuel fumes clouding the lower levels of the city, and headed for her base. Only the smallest sliver of guilt tightened her chest as she thought of the handsome man she’d left lying under a ticking bomb.

I've borrowed the video from the Fifth Element as I see 'the busy lanes of Chupalla' something like the traffic in Korben's city. The excerpt above is taken from my short story Imprint - part of the Science Fiction Romance Brigade's first and FREE anthology. 

World building is my favourite part of writing - not just the description of a city or a planet, but the culture and people too. Whether it's completely alien, or whether it's a far future human society and world, or perhaps one that's regressed or still developing. I've had everything from a medieval culture with torturous similarities to the Spanish Inquisition, to a high tech hidden scientific base. A tropical paradise inhabited by a race of intelligent saurians to a decopunk city on an alternative Earth. I love them all. While my feet may be firmly fixed in my hometown of Colchester, I wander the rest of the universe in my head. Here's another.

Excerpt - 

Once more he found himself somewhere strangely other. An alien planet. A fierce thrill flowed through him, and he drew a long breath. It was early evening on this world, and humidly warm, as Quin had warned him. The blue of the sky was streaked with the colors of sunset, the red-gold sun sinking behind them, throwing long shadows. They stood before a building that put the palace of Adalucien to shame with its splendor, twisting up into the sky and reminding him of the convoluted interior of a tall cone shell, broken open to reveal the chambers inside. 

It had a fluid, organic shape to it, as though it had been grown rather than built. Made of a pale, marbled orange material and shot through with threads of different colors–pinks and mauves, greens and blues–it looked as though it were flaming in the scarlet light of the evening sky. There was no regularity to its structure. Numerous pillars of varying thicknesses seemed to have sprung up like trees wherever they had felt they were needed, curving into broad ribs to support the ceilings. 

It was hard to be sure with such an asymmetrical construction but Keir estimated it to be perhaps twenty stories upward, soaring in ever-tapering tiers into the clouds. Terracing curled around the outside of each level, aerial walkways lit by tiny blue-white stars strung like beads. He could see people walking along them and hoped they would not have to travel quite so high.

~The Shell Palace from Keir~

 Keir - a scifi romance.

All digital formats and the print format are available from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, B&N

and Lyrical Press Inc. 
A 2012 Readers Favorite Award Finalist and 2012 SFR Galaxy Award Winner.

And because I love to share these worlds with other people, I'm offering a copy of my GCC RWA Contest finalist Science Fiction Romance Short - Terms & Conditions Apply - to one random person who leaves a comment on this post, telling me their favourite setting. But wait! Don't forget to enter the rafflecopter too. Want to know what that could win you? Well...

Blog Hop Grand Prizes

1st Prize - $150 Amazon or B&N gift card (winner's choice) and an ebook bundle (currently Ghost in the Machine, Bayne, Recast Book 1:Wither, Recast Book 2:Clash, Alien Adoration, Switched, Reckless Rescue, Wreck of the Nebula Dream, Keir, Terms & Conditions Apply, The Key, The Plan, Starburst, Marya, The Iron Admiral, Sasha’s Calling, Trouble at the Hotel Baba Ghanoush, Winter in Paradise, Once Upon a Time in Space, the Telomere trilogy, Winter Fusion, Blue Nebula, Demential, Wytchfire, Maven, Fires of Justice, Interface, Girl under Glass, and Breakout. Bonus books – Ghost Planet, The Iron Admiral: Conspiracy and Deception, and Games of Command.)

2nd Prize - $50 Amazon or B&N gift card (winner's choice)

3rd Prizes - four $25 Amazon or B&N gift cards (given to separate winners and their choice)

All of these goodies are available internationally, but for your chance to win you need to enter the rafflecopter below. And for a chance to win at the other blogs on the hop, go to the participant list below and hop along! Good luck. :)

a Rafflecopter giveaway