Interview with thriller author Spaulding Taylor

Today’s special guest is speculative thriller author Spaulding Taylor to chat about Last Star Standing.

During her virtual book tour, Spaulding will be giving away a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there, too!

Sales link:  Book will be on sale for $0.99 during the tour

Bio:
Alice (Spaulding Taylor) McVeigh has been published by Orion/Hachette in contemporary fiction, by Unbound Publishing in action/adventure and by Warleigh Hall Press in Austenesque fiction. Her novels have won Gold Medal/First Place is the Global, eLit and Pencraft Book Awards, been runner-up in the Independent Press Awards, finalists in the Eric Hoffer, Rone and Wishing Shelf Book Awards and selected by Shelf Unbound as one of the “top indies” of 2021. Two of her novels are currently finalists in the CIBA Book Awards (the Cygnus and Goethe Awards). Her most recent novel (Harriet: A Jane Austen Variation) was just selected as Editors’ Pick “outstanding” on Publishers Weekly.

A professional London cellist, Alice lives in London and Crete with her professor husband: their only child is completing her Masters in Chinese Literature. They also share two miniature long-haired dachshunds and an incurable addiction to tennis.

Welcome, Spaulding. Please tell us about your new release.
Aiden has always felt like an outsider. After the rebel assassin is captured and imprisoned by the world’s galactic overlords, he awaits execution. Then a mole working for the occupying regime alerts him to a plot that could destroy the entire resistance…

Engineering a daring escape, Aiden’s growing feud with the new rebel leader leaves him out in the cold and smouldering with resentment. Faced with deceit and betrayals on every side, he recruits a group of overlooked outcasts and stakes everything on one last mission.

Can the restless, reckless Aiden take a stand long enough to save humanity from enslavement?

Tell us something about Last Star Standing that is NOT in the blurb.
Helluva good book.

Sorry! Sorry, I will be serious!! OK, it’d make a great buddy movie. The hero, Aiden – messed-up guy in his thirties – has an alien friend who would definitely die for him. Their relationship binds the book together. Bully (the alien) is just so real. And they’re so real, together. It’s not perfection: Aiden hates Bully’s cooking – Bully hates Aiden’s recklessness. But the bond is very deep and very real.

 

Excerpt from Last Star Standing:
Nothing. Clean as a whistle. Until my massive hand grasped hold of something, something which must have blended into its background so perfectly that I hadn’t even spotted it. Something alive, nestling under the co-pilot’s seat. I couldn’t believe it. A live gromeline. Trembling, possibly with fury, and trying in vain to squeeze back. Grabbing my trophy – I could feel its hot little heart throbbing like an injury against my palm – I hopped out of the plane so fast that my wound protested.

‘Bully!’

Bully raised one eyebrow. Two would have been overkill.

‘Bully, you are not going to believe this. I found a gromeline!’ The gromeline – only about fifteen centimetres – bit my finger, hard, even though I could have easily crushed its entire body with my fist – and probably would have, had I been a tester, and not merely disguised as one.

Feisty little gromeline. I flicked it lightly with my sausage-sized finger. When it protested, I growled, ‘Cheese it, munchkin,’ though I could feel it struggling obstreperously against my palm.

Bully was intrigued. ‘Is it genuine?’ ‘Of course it’s genuine. It just bit me, didn’t it?’

Bully probably considered this no proof. But they’re rarer than clean air these days and his fascination was obvious. Now gromelines come from the farthest galaxy so far discovered, can speak any tongue and own enviable mental powers. They are also brave to the point of stupidity and ludicrously small. This one was mouse-coloured – they can be spectacular – with tiny red eyes. Few humans have ever seen one.

 

How long have you been writing?
Since I could form letters. My earliest poems date back to when I was four, and I completed my first novel – which was soooooo BAD I now die laughing reading it – at thirteen.

But I come from an intensely bookish family. My late father was a biographer, my mother a famous editor. My uncle was a scriptwriter, and my sister edits for a living. I was six when I assured my mother – OK, I lied – that I was going to be a famous poet. That was why she wrote to the aged Robert Frost, and got me his autograph. Sadly, my poetry isn’t anything like as good as my prose, but I was always a writer waiting to happen…

What advice would you give a new writer just starting out?
Me: Are you planning to write romance?
Newbie: Yes!
Me: Go for it!!!

Me: Are you planning to write romance?
Newbie: Um, no. I rather thought of something rather more like Tolstoy…
Me: Think harder.

No, but seriously, genre matters. When I returned to writing seriously, I discovered that I’d been a fathead by writing in two very different genres. (My pen name was also a mistake – try maintaining one profile in social media – and then imagine DOUBLING all the trouble!).

So, seriously, I’d have two pieces of advice.

First, choose a genre and stick to it. That’s the key to success.

And secondly, choose not TOO literary a genre. There IS an audience for poetic, literary fiction, but I’m afraid that it’s tiny. And also shrinking.

Do you have any tattoos?  Where? When did you get it/them? Where are they on your body?
No, not even a little one. I think tattoos look amazing on some people, just not my thing.

But if they WOULD look good on me I’d def. have a cello. My one degree is in cello performance, and I spent a wonderful decade touring 44 countries with lots of London orchestras. I’d have a cello on my shoulder – with a cello bow!

Is your life anything like it was two years ago?
Two years and a few months ago I had Covid. This was BEFORE any vaccine, and I honestly thought I was about to die. (Am asthmatic, is why – I couldn’t breathe.) I pulled through, only to find that all my (cello) work for the year had been cancelled, overnight. Sooooooooooo, I thought, here’s where I get busier with the books.

Which I did.

In other words, no: my life has utterly changed, since Covid.

I’ve always written fiction, and was lucky enough to have my first two novels chosen for publication by Orion/Hachette. But whether I’d have gone back to it full-time, without the lockdown, I don’t know.

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Sales link:  Book will be on sale for $0.99 during the tour

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