City of Hope and Ruin by Kit Campbell and Siri Paulson ♥ Fun Facts, Book Tour & GIVEAWAY ♥ (LGBTQ+ Fantasy Romance)

Every night the monsters hunt.

A city that is the whole world: Theosophy and her companions in the City militia do their best to protect the civilians from the monsters, but they keep crawling from the Rift and there’s nowhere to run. Theosophy knows she’ll die fighting. It’s the best kind of death she’s seen, and at least she can save lives in the meantime.

They say the Scarred carve you up while you’re still alive.

A village in the shadow of a forest: Refugees from the border whisper about the oncoming Scarred, but Briony can’t convince her brother to relocate his children to safety. Briony will do anything to protect them. She owes them that much, even if it means turning to forbidden magic.

When Theosophy and Briony accidentally make contact across the boundaries of their worlds, they realize that solutions might finally be within reach. A world beyond the City would give Theosophy’s people an escape, and the City’s warriors could help Briony protect her family from the Scarred. Each woman sees in the other a strength she lacks—and maybe something more.

All they need to do is find a way across the dimensions to each other before their enemies close in.

1. Kit and Siri live in different countries (Colorado, USA, and Ontario, Canada respectively) and have been friends online for a decade but have never met.

2. Kit and Siri "met" through National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Each of them has completed NaNoWriMo multiple times.

3. City of Hope and Ruin was published by Turtleduck Press, a publishing co-op run by Kit, Siri, and two other authors, KD Sarge and Erin Zarro. #1 and #2 are mostly applicable to KD and Erin, too.

4. The subtitle of the book, A Fractured World Novel, refers to a shared world that all four Turtleduck Press authors will be playing in. More stories about the world are available for free here.

5. Kit has an obsession with squid.

6. Siri has an obsession with obscure facts that are useless except when doing cryptic crosswords.

7. Neither of these obsessions was much help during the writing of City of Hope and Ruin.

8. Kit and Siri are both pantsing plotters. They planned out the major turning points (or act endings, if you prefer), then wrote and edited the book in chunks. This is much like their normal planning process, but unlike their normal editing process – both of them usually write a complete draft before going back to edit.

9. Each POV (point of view) was written mostly independently. Whenever the two protagonists were in the same scene together, Kit and Siri composed the dialogue together online like an RPG, then went back and filled in the rest of the prose.

10. Technologies used during the planning and writing of the book: Google Docs, Google Hangouts, live text chat, and copious amounts of email.

11. Kit and Siri have both written romance before, but this is the first F/F romance for both. They both feel it wasn't too different from writing M/F, although their answer might be different if the book had been more spicy...

12. It's also the first F/F romance for Turtleduck Press, although KD Sarge has written several M/M romances – a high fantasy novel available here, and a series of SF romances available here. (If it's M/F you like, we have that too!)

The spirit was beautiful, a tall, statuesque woman who had a hard glint in her eyes. Her hair was short, indigo blue through the glow and tightly curled, her skin a lighter shade over wiry muscles. One hand clenched a smallish item made of metal, the other a long tube with some kind of blade on the end. Briony had never seen anyone like her. Though she glanced around and held her body like someone expecting danger, her bearing was proud and strong, and every inch of her spoke of power and competency. A warrior. Briony had heard stories of them, left over from the Great War, but had never seen one herself.

Was that when this woman was from? The War?

“The trio—the monsters—where am I?”

Briony realized she hadn’t responded, and that perhaps this spirit had been looking for someone to talk to for a very long time, and maybe she would assume Briony couldn’t see or hear her either. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

The spirit's eyebrows rose. "That's a...never mind. What is this place?"

“Well,” Briony started, taking a step forward. But her ankle buckled and she stumbled, managing to catch herself before she fell.

“You’re injured,” said the spirit. “Were you attacked?”

“Yes—you see, there was a Fracture back there, and—” Confusion crossed the spirit’s face. Maybe she was even older; maybe she didn’t know about the War.

   

  

Kit Campbell

It is a little known fact that Kit was raised in the wild by a marauding gang of octopuses. It wasn't until she was 25 that she was discovered by a traveling National Geographic scientist and brought back to civilization. This is sometimes apparent in the way that she attempts to escape through tubes when startled.

Her transition to normalcy has been slow, but scientists predict that she will have mastered basics such as fork use sometime in the next year. More complex skills, such as proper grocery store etiquette, may be forever outside her reach.

Kit can be found cavorting about the web at her blog (http://landsquidattack.wordpress.com) or website (http://kitcampbellbooks.com), on Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/campbell1091/), and even occasionally on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/KitCampbell).

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Siri Paulson

Siri Paulson writes all over the fantasy and science fiction spectrum, including (so far) secondary-world fantasy, urban fantasy, steampunk, Gothic, historical paranormal, and YA with spaceships. She is also the chief editor at Turtleduck Press (http://turtleduckpress.com/). Siri grew up in Alberta, Canada, but now lives in an old house in Toronto. By day, she edits non-fiction for the government. Her other current passion is contra dance, a social/folk dance done to live Celtic and roots music. Her favourite places in the world are the Canadian Rocky Mountains and a little valley in Norway.

Siri's short fiction and the anthologies she has edited can be found on Turtleduck Press, at  http://turtleduckpress.com/wordpress/2010/11/30/who-is-siri-paulson/ . She blogs at https://siripaulson.wordpress.com and tweets at http://twitter.com/Siri_Paulson.

   

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