Friday, June 17, 2016

Interview with Jadah McCoy, ARTIFICIAL


Can you give us a brief overview of your latest book? Is it part of a series?
Sure! ARTIFICIAL is the story of a young woman, Syl, who lives in a post-apocalyptic city ravaged by Cull—genetically spliced bug monsters. She’s abducted while scavenging and her genes are spliced. Syl slowly begins to turn into one of the Cull and ventures to an android city to find a cure and stop the person responsible for the splicing. ARTIFICIAL is the first in a trilogy.
Do you have a favorite character?
My favorite character (and yours, too—you’ll see!) is Bastion. He’s the male main character and second POV in the novel. Bastion is an android living in New Elite and working as a pleasure bot in the slums. He is the sassiest robot, and while he plays the perfect anti-hero, he has a caring heart—er, cortex? The relationship between Syl and Bastion—their banter and chemistry—is one of my favorite parts of the novel.

Did you try the traditional route to publishing, i.e. querying agents/publishers?
I queried agents as well as querying small publishing houses directly. I had a couple of bites from agents, but more from the smaller houses. I queried for maybe a month or two when Curiosity Quills asked for my full. A week later they offered me a contract!

If you used a graphic designer/publisher’s designer, how involved were you during the creative process for your cover?
I used Regina Wamba with MaeIDesign. When I hired her, she gave me an extensive questionnaire to fill out, listing the novel’s themes, my vision, etc. I left her to do her thing, and she later sent me a mock up, which I made comments and changes to. Overall, I would say I was very involved in the process.

What is your writing process? Do you listen to music or do you like silence?
My writing process is to vom words onto a page. Honestly, if I didn’t do that, I would nit-pick the story to death. I find the most efficient way for me to draft is in “layers.” Get the ugly first draft down, then keep writing drafts until all the details I want are there. I can only write in absolute silence. I’m very easily distracted!!

Do you outline your story or just go where your muse takes you?
I am a master plotter. I’m paralyzed in my story until I plot everything out. Prior to this series, I was never like that at all—a pantser to the nth degree. However, I find plot to be the hardest part to get down, so I resolved to plot this series. It’s made my writing process so much smoother.

Did you hire an editor to review your manuscript before publishing?
Yes. I have a very intensive editing process. I finish my drafts and have a product I feel is safe for public consumption, then send it to critique partner one. After I get that feedback and make changes, it goes to critique partner two. After that, I hire a professional editor. Then I submit that product to my publisher, who has their own in house editor take a look at it. I ain’t playin’ with no typos!! I don’t want to see one typo in that book when I’m finished with it!

Besides Amazon, are there any other sites where your books are for sale?
You can also find my book on Barnes & Noble!

Besides writing, do you have any other passions?
When not writing, I’m usually traveling. I’ve been to seven countries so far: Costa Rica, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Indonesia. Next on my list is Japan!

What’s next for you?
Book two in this series, titled ORGANIC, is slated for a Spring 2017 release. I’m currently writing the third book in the series, due out 2018. And I have lots of shiny ideas in my head, including a horror and fantasy series, as well as a prequel for my Kepler Chronicles trilogy. So, lots to work on!!

Thanks for having me! 



Book & Author Details:
Artificial by Jadah McCoy
Published by: Curiosity Quills Press
Publication date: April 4th 2016
Genres: New Adult, Science Fiction

Synopsis:
She struggles to feel human.
In 2256, the only remnants of civilization on Earth’s first colonized planet, Kepler, are the plant-covered buildings and the nocturnal, genetically spliced bug-people nesting within them: the Cull. During the day, Syl leaves her home in the sewers beneath Elite City to scavenge for food, but at night the Cull come looking for a meal of their own. Syl thought gene splicing died with the Android War a century ago. She thought the bugs could be exterminated, Elite city rebuilt, and the population replenished. She’s wrong.
Whoever engineered the Cull isn’t done playing God. Syl is abducted and tortured in horrific experiments which result in her own DNA being spliced, slowly turning her into one of the bugs. Now she must find a cure and stop the person responsible before every remaining man, woman, and child on Kepler is transformed into the abomination they fear.

He struggles not to.

For Bastion, being an android in the sex industry isn’t so bad. Clubbing beneath the streets of New Elite by day and seducing the rich by night isn’t an altogether undesirable occupation. But every day a new android cadaver appears in the slum gutters, and each caved in metal skull and heap of mangled wires whittles away at him.
Glitches—androids with empathy—are being murdered, their models discontinued and strung up as a warning. Show emotion, you die. Good thing Bastion can keep a secret, or he would be the next body lining the street.

He can almost live with hiding his emotions. That is, until a girl shows up in the slums—a human girl, who claims she was an experiment. And in New Elite, being a human is even worse than being a Glitch. Now Bastion must help the girl escape before he becomes victim to his too-human emotions, one way or another.


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AUTHOR BIO:
Jadah currently lives in Nashville, TN and works in law. When not babysitting attorneys, she can be found juicing her brain for creative ideas or fantasizing about her next trip out of the country (or about Tom Hiddleston as Loki - it’s always a toss up when she fantasizes).

She grew up in rural Arkansas, yet can still write good and sometimes even wears shoes! She did date her first cousin for a while but they decided against marriage for the sake of the gene pool.

Her true loves are elephants, cursing, and sangria - in that order. If you find an elephant that curses like a sailor whilst drinking sangria, you’re dangerously close to becoming her next romantic victim - er, partner.

She cut her writing teeth on badly written, hormone-driven fanfiction (be glad that’s out of her system), and her one true dream is to have wildly erotic fanfiction with dubious grammar written about her own novels. Please make her dreams come true.

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