#CharactersTell Background Character Week - Interview with Amanda Levi

And we're back for another week, and another #CharactersTell interview!

And as with every fourth week of the month, we're focusing on the background characters - the sort of people that live into your worlds, but that us, as readers, don't get to know much about: one of the faces in the crowds, one of the bodies hidden from sight in the houses of your books cities and villages, one of the drivers in the cars of that high-octane speed chase that just end up caught in the crossfire. They deserve some love too!

That's me! Some time ago...

Tonight we're hosting Amanda Levi. She's a woman, a wife and a mother coming from Cerulean Springs. A well mannered person, that tries to keep her neighborhood orderly along with her husband.

She comes from Tiogair, my recently released book now available on Kindle and Amazon - You can find the blogpost with the pitch, my experience writing it and all the links to get it following this link.
Of course, you can find me on Twitter (where you can follow me on this page). And if you wanna know more about me, there's the handy about section!


But! Let's get to it, shall we?

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Well, good evening there! Welcome to the blog! Would you please introduce yourself, your author and the book you're from, please?

Why yes. Good evening. I'm Amanda Levi, wife of Arnold Levi. I'm an housewife, and I tend to our child, Leonard. He's such a nice boy, he's ten now. We live in Cerulean Springs, ex Colorado Springs, in the Evergreen Boulevard gated community. I mean, at least we still have that. Even if things went...a bit downhill since the Gatecrash. I'm from Manuel Arbanassi's Tiogair, his newest novel. He called it a cyberfantasy thriller with erotica elements.

Can't say I really approve of his choice of Main Character, though.

Aren't we off to a great start... Interesting. Why don't you approve of that choice?

Well, it's simple, really. It's glorifying what can be considered a disease. I really can't understand how people can't see it. Not to mention, me and my husband have seen this woman and honestly? She's not a good role model. She's violent. Foul mouthed. Last time my husband spoke to her, she even threatened him, can you believe that? Just because he went to talk to that...damn orc woman that lives on the other side of the street. It wasn't enough that her gardening almost got us attacked, now she stubbornly keeps living in this area. It's just wrong, what will the children think? They'll think it's normal! Do you know she's not even from here? She came from Wales or something.

You do sound pretty opinionated on the manner. Some would even say... a bit on the extremist side? I know for a fact there is quite a bit of backlash against this point of view in your world.

Oh, please. Don't tell me you are one of those blind people as well? You all should listen to the morning broadcasts on Springtime radio with Tatiana Fairwater. That woman is a genius. She knows what's up. Everyone seems to hide behind the shield of us being 'racist' or some other awful epithet when we're just trying to look after humanity and the future generations. Tell me, did you know Gatecrashers are a lot less compatible with implantation technology? Human technology? Doesn't it sound strange to you?

Then again, you're barking against something that mutated a lot of the population. Between a quarter and a fifth. It's not something that has an easy solution, especially due to the fact society still does need people to function.

This is such a trite argument. I could understand it three years ago, after the riots - God, it was such a terrible time, we were locked in our houses for days! - But now? Now we need to face reality. We need to do something about the Gatecrashers, and Ether and all this...this weirdness! This is not a safe environment for us or our children!

Is this what puts your family into conflict with the Orc woman? By all accounts, she sounds like a lovely lady.

For the love of- Listen. Please. It's not that we didn't like July. She was a lovely woman, and we all know that, but since the Gatecrash we really can't let all these weird stuff spill over into our little community. We managed to be all spared by the Gatecrash except July, and what does that do for our kids? How-How do we explain this? We already have to send him to school with other weird kids, and it's all so normalized. We're not saying we hate Gatecrashers and Ether, but we need to face facts, as Tatiana says. We need to realize they're not *normal*. They're victims, but, again, as she said in her article she posted earlier this month, if they really had the best interest of our community in their mind, they'd take steps *themselves* to be studied and hopefully cured.

Who says they need a cure, though? I mean, there's plenty of Gatecrashers and Ether users that are perfectly integrated in all aspects of society. Doesn't that invalidate your point?

That's just anti-humanist propaganda. For every good example you can give me, there's plenty of others that completely disprove your points. For every doctor that uses Corpus Magic to do good, there's someone who suffers from C.D.E.D, Corpus Dis...basically, they become monsters. For every good application of alchemy, there's another weird, poisonous substance on the market. For every adjusted member of society there's some sort of new racist, anti-human Gatecrasher society. It's time to put a stop to this.

Well...I guess that's an interesting rebuttal. Anyway, I'm afraid we're kinda out of time for tonight. Anything you'd like to say?

I can see how it is. Let me tell you. You won't be able to deny us for much longer. People are starting to see the truth, and luckily I'm married to an amazing man who is still trying to do his best for the community. We'll see who's right or wrong when that happens. We just want the best.

I'm sure you do. Thank you for your time, Amanda. Have a nice evening.

Thank you for having me, I guess. Not for much else. Goodbye. I'll leave you the links to the morning broadcasts, please do listen to them.

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This concludes our brief (albeit intense) interview for tonight! I wonder what is it with characters from my book treating me badly...

But remember! You can have YOUR characters interviewed on this blog by sending me a direct message on Twitter! You can find the link to do so on the right-hand side of the page!

See you soon! Toodles!

TIOGAIR

Book pitch:

It's 2067. 

It's been 3 years since the Gatecrash, the cataclysmic event that mutated a quarter of the human population.
Magic - known as Ether - returned to the world, and monsters roam again in the wilderness, crossing the portals opening to unknown worlds that appear throughout the globe. 

As a constant reminder of this event stands the azure sphere of chaotic energy, glowing in the hills northeast of ex-Colorado Springs, now rebaptized Cerulean Springs due to that unending glimmer: a city that changed its face just as quickly as its name, becoming an enormous metropolis with its own dark sides in the span of a few decades.

These sudden, worldwide changes caused chaos at first - but, with the 'humanitarian' support of the corporations, the flash-fire riots were quelled, and the population settled - the rise in power and standing of the corps being just a side effect, of course.

Society evolved, assimilated the new and adapted: from fear to unease, from unease to new business venues and research fields, just as it did in the last decades with the blindingly fast development of technology and the discovery of the almost mystical Essences. After all, what's a new weirdness in a world where mechanical implants are common and the body is nothing but a canvas to change and adapt to one's wishes?

Despite all this, certain things never change: there's still the need for shadowy figures able to do things that others wouldn't.
Zoe is one of them: a mutated human - a Gatecrasher - and a combat mage by trade, introduced into the life of an underground mercenary after the Gatecrash riots.

She's minding her own business between jobs, when the disappearance of a woman working in her favorite Pleasure House pushes her to go on the hunt to uncover the dancer's fate - free of charge.

Once on the trail, though, she will quickly realize she might have bitten more than she can chew: what started as a simple investigation will bring her to uncover darker and more dangerous secrets, forcing the Irish mage to use all her tricks and delve into the dirtiest parts of Cerulean Springs to keep her word, while trying to keep sane indulging in the pleasure of the flesh.

One of the ways she keeps her mind busy from the painful memories of a past she's still trying to cope with.

My experience writing it

This is my second novel!

And...it's been quite a surprise, really. Last year I was working on Elemental 2 and I was starting to get a tad burned out (I was coming out of translating, formatting, etc Elemental 1, and the whole publishing thing, which can be somewhat stressful), so I decided to write a short just for the heck of it.

Just for kicks, I decided to make it an erotic short.

In the meantime I was continuing to promote Elemental on Twitter, where I've seen some erotic books being promoted.

And that was pretty much the moment I decided I wanted to try my hand writing something that still had erotic contents, but had a serious story and well rounded characters into it.

I had the Cerulean Springs setting in mind for quite a long time now, and I always had an intention to write in that universe. And I thought to myself "Why not now?"

Soooo... I did!

I wrote the first draft in about a month or so. I was completely engrossed in the story, and in the end I got this missing person thriller going, with some spicy elements to it - elements being the keyword since in the end the erotic parts are more tied to character fleshing out and development than the story itself. It's a story about someone who's extremely sexual, but the driving plot is actually something much darker and 'detached' from sex, to the point that in one specific pitch (which I still hold dear to this day!) I've been told the naughty bits took too much of a backseat to the story for that house. And that was the most brilliant and helpful rejection letter I received, one that I still am thankful for.

This experience helped me cement my views on sexuality in fiction, which I talked about in detail in this blog post.

And in the end, Tiogair had its big launch party during #MCchat on Twitter last week!

There are a lot of projects I'm tying to this universe as well - one that I'm currently working on a Tabletop Roleplaying Game based in it, still in the works - and I do intend to write more stories in this setting, along with Elemental 2.

Where can you find it?

First, a warning: Tiogair contains mature themes that place it in the 'adult only' category (graphic sex and violence, use of substances, foul language). With that out of the way you can find it through these links:

English Versions:

- Tiogair - Kindle eBook

- Tiogair - POD Paperback on Amazon

Italian Versions:

- Tiogair - Kindle eBook

- Tiogair - POD Paperback su Amazon

Goodreads:

- Tiogair page (all editions available)