Sith-ing it up at Star Wars Celebrations

 

Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of sci-fi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions.

And this year I was lucky enough to have Star Wars Celebrations revisit my home country. It was last here in 2016, when I had the great privilege of being gifted a three day pass by a very generous friend and fellow SW fan.

When the announcement came of its return, I spent a long time debating whether to go. Neither of my boys were interested. My daughter was away at uni. Train fares keep on rising, and aren't even always running with strikes and regular weekend maintenance meaning buses instead.

But then a work colleague/new friend mentioned she was thinking of going. I mentioned I'd thought about it too. So we decided to go together!

I loaned her my daughter's Rey costume, and spent an intense two weeks putting together my own Sith character costume. I was really happy with it despite the time pressure.

I managed to blow up my lightsaber the night before, had a disaster with my makeup, lost one of the special coloured contact lenses, and forgot to put on my fake nails, but aside from that I think we looked awesome. We got several compliments, and unlike so many of my previous cosplay, this was by far the most comfortable. We also took LOTS of photos!

We loved it. I wish I could have taken even more photos, but then I find that cuts into looking around and enjoying it. But this has definitely been my favourite thing of 2023 so far!

How Many Sleeps Until Christmas?

 Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of sci-fi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions. It's that time of year again when Halloween is paste and I'm thinking of Christmas, so here are a few seasonal reads to consider for the holiday season.

Four-year-old Maggie Bock loves living aboard her parents’ space cruiser, but it’s almost Christmas. What if Santa doesn’t know where she is now? Someone will have to find him and tell him, of course. But when she stows away on her mother’s transport to Terr, she sets off a chain of events that brings the holidays to the Atlantis.

Join Maggie and her family for a hilarious and heart-warming adventure as Matirans and Terrians come together to celebrate what makes the holiday season so very special.

(Blue Christmas is a companion story to my novel Prophecy, Book One of the Prophecy Series. This story takes place three months after the end of Prophecy.)

Stranded on Earth after a hyperdrive malfunction, the five surviving members of the Zau’gaut’s crew learn to blend in and survive on a backwater world. Opening a seasonal decorating company, their captain hopes it will help them blend in while learning about Earther culture. Despite Earth’s primitive state, they find themselves growing attached to the planet and its people. When one crew member takes a chance and finds himself growing attached to a certain human woman, the crew begins to wonder if being stranded on Earth means they must also give up their chances at finding love.

Our heart has its own compass. It knows where we should be heading, even if the rest of us doesn’t. Through loss and love, our heart’s compass guides us through life, often to somewhere completely unexpected. When the world ends, the heart’s compass of several people has them headed in directions they may have never traveled otherwise.

Each book in the series is a stand-alone story, but is written within the same fictional setting in which the Earth has just been struck with several massive solar flares. All modern technology has been rendered inoperable. Cars, computers, city infrastructure, phones – all gone in an instant and without warning. In the days directly following the end of the modern world, people must learn to depend on each other, and on their heart’s compass, if they hope to survive.

She doesn’t want a lot for Christmas…

Claire Otton dreads spending another holiday alone. When her best friend convinces her to approach the sexy mall Santa, she takes the chance and asks him out, hoping for so much more.

He’s waiting under the mistletoe…

Although Andreas Castellanos blends in on Earth, he knows he will never belong. But when the gorgeous woman he’d been staring at invites him to dinner, he has a hard time saying no.

All they’re asking for…

Can these two lonely souls find magic together or will their secrets steal their chance of a happy Christmas?

To find more, please visit the SFR Station.

 

Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of sci-fi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions. And I have three of my favourite quotes to share with you. See if you can spot where they come from.

1. Do or do not. There is no try.

I'm not even sure why I like this because I'm not sure it's true - at least, not for everyone. I think it's more about having faith in yourself at being able to achieve something eventually even if it takes several failures, rather than an absolute. Sometimes you have to try and fail. As someone who learns by doing rather than reading instructions (I would totally be the one who pushes the big red button) I guess I really am a 'do or do not' at heart while feeling this is a bit harsh on those who try. I think I just contradicted myself!

2. Never give up! Never surrender!

I've always considered my stubbornness a positive trait because it's given me the strength never to give up even when I want to. However, it does mean persisting past the point where it might be the wiser option, lol. Surprisingly, it doesn't make me incapable of changing my mind, although having to change my plans is incredibly painful.

3. Don't Panic. 

This was never a piece of advice I could follow despite the sense in it. However, I have developed a very good mask to dealing with things eg when my youngest split his head open in an argument with an automatic door and my daughter was screaming, my husband panicking, and my child crying his eyes out. While I might have been completely freaking out internally, I calmly sat him down and held the wound closed having dispatched my husband to locate a member of staff to get a first aider and talking my daughter back down. Only after returning from A&E and some surgical glue did I spend a quiet ten minutes alone in a corner until the shakes had passed. What's the saying? If you can keep your head wile those about youare losing theirs...?

Anyway, hope you had some fun trying to figure out where those three came from - gold star if you get all three!

Word Hoarder Extraordinaire!

My name is Pippa Jay, and I am a hoarder, of both physical and digital things. My stories are no exception. I never throw anything away! I have files full of the early drafts of my first published novel - all the paper versions I wrote, and every version I sent out to agents as I sought the traditional path (I rewrote it every time I sent it out). I kept all the digital versions too, though the computer they were written on has long since gone to the great junkyard in the sky. I just can't bear to delete them.

But it's not all pointlessly taking up space. Some of the earlier works from my teenage years have been reworked into later pieces. Characters, names, planets, storylines - many have been recycled and found new life in another form or book. I even have a OneNote file called Bunny Plot Storage Facility where random names, words, one sentence ideas, pieces of technology or random scientific discoveries are hoarded for a time I might need them. Because while I might be a hoarder, I don't like anything to go to waste if I could find a use for it later on.

For example, the tyrant and her medic and race in Keir's Fall came from a very early Doctor Who short I wrote as a teen (what's now called fan fiction). My main character Quin came from one too. 

So when my editor says cut, nothing gets deleted. It just joins the other plot bunnies in storage to be resurrected in another time and place (sometimes quite literally). Why let a good word (or several) go to waste when some days finding any is like pulling teeth?! 

I Missed It!

 

Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of scifi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions.

And the irony of this month's topic - In Case You Missed It - feels very apt. Because this month I totally missed the fact that it was my tenth anniversary as a published author. Oops?

To be fair, world events are enough to make anyone forget the odd thing. Add brain fog to that, plus some horrible side effects from my latest medications, and I think I earn a pass. At least I didn't forget my wedding anniversary this month...

The brain fog is definitely making it hard to get back into my writing. I know many authors can struggle to remember key features about their characters, or a vital clue from a previous chapter. Don't they?!

So now I've added my book anniversary to my calendar just to be on the safe side. At least hubs will remind me about our wedding anniversary (even if he did mix mine and my daughter's birthday dates up this year (we're only a week apart) and book our short break away for the wrong one. Getting old sucks!

Does that mean the end of my writing? I have to say a few weeks back, I really felt it was. But now I'm back on the 'good' medication, my mind is clearing and I'm starting to think about my main characters again. At least I haven't forgotten what they look like!

A Small Epiphany by Pippa Jay

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT is our Theme this month in honor of our Eleventh Blog-o-versary! I found some very special posts from past years to repost in case you missed them the first time around. 

In "A Small Epiphany", first published Jan. 17, 2014, SciFi and Superhero Romance Author Pippa Jay recounts the discovery that transformed her into a professional writer. (File this one under "Writer's Life")

In the summer of 2009 I sat and watched my three little monsters playing in the garden. My youngest had just got mobile enough to chase his older siblings around the place and play with them on more equal terms. Me - I was overweight, bored and miserable. I felt I'd lost myself. I was proud of being a mum and wife, but beyond those labels I felt I had no purpose. No identity. Who and what was I?

So I sat at my computer, pulled out an old short story that I'd left in storage and put on some music. Having not written in nearly 20 years, I decided to give it another go.

A six week frenzy of scribbling and typing followed. My husband thought I'd gone mad. Maybe I had a bit. Because once I'd started putting down the words, I just couldn't stop. They poured out of me. At the end of those six weeks I had a 40 000 word rough draft, which I then split in two. By the end of 2009 I had a 100K novel ready to pitch, and nearly as much for a sequel.

At the same time I went on a diet, started a dance class, changed my hairstyle and dyed my hair, and completely changed my wardrobe, from baggy black to tailored reds, blues and greens. Hubs refers to it as my midlife crisis. I call it my epiphany. Because after 40 years I'd found myself and my real passion - writing. Until that point I hadn't realised how much I loved to write, and that it's what had been missing. And I haven't looked back. It took another eighteen months of rejections and rewrites and a change of tack before that first novel got a publishing contract with a small press but I count myself lucky. And now, four and a half years down the line I have five titles out, two contracted, one request on a full and one out on submission. I have two short stories scheduled for release in October and November this year. My only regret is that it took me nearly forty years to figure out what I really wanted to do. >.<

Right now, that debut novel isn't available to buy. My publisher - Lyrical Press Inc - has just been bought by Kensington, and titles have had to be taken down as the transfer occurs. But in the meantime, I'm doing a giveaway at Goodreads for three now rare paperback editions of that novel, and you can enter here.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Keir

by Pippa Jay

Giveaway ends February 14, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

And my scifi romance short went up at All Romance Ebooks just last week at the discounted price of $1.01 until the 23rd HERE. :)

EXCERPT | Available at... B&N
|ARe | Amazon US | Amazon UK
| Smashwords |

Happy New Year and happy reading!

Unnatural Nature

Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of scifi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions.

Coming from and working in a scientific area, I do try to base at least some of my writing on actual or at least theoretical science to give it some realism. 

For example, my blue-skinned hero, Keir. Did you know there was actually an entire family of blue-skinned people in Kentucky? The discolouration was caused by a blood disorder that gave their skin a bluish tinge. Or that a condition called argyrosis, caused by over-exposure to silver compounds, can turn you literally blue? Or you can look back into the history of Britain and the Celtic people known by the Romans as Picts (literally 'painted ones'), who coloured their skin blue with a natural dye called woad. Blue skin, based in fact. 

The beaches of my tropical planet Metraxi are famously pink (the photo above is actually of a local beach coloured by the sunset - a fortuitous fluke of conditions and timing!) due to being composed mostly of native corals. Here on Earth, we have white sand beaches also due to coral, but much less glamorously caused by parrot fish eating and pooping out the coral they eat as colourless calcium carbonate! Or the black beaches of Tenerife (basalt from the volcano) or Iceland's magnetite sands (I'm really hoping to visit the famous diamond beach there where chunks of ice shimmer on the black sand). 

The palace on Metraxi visited by my characters is also built of coral. As here, artificial reefs can be started often by sinking man made structures no longer wanted - oil rigs, tanks, concrete building blocks - to help regenerate those destroyed. But on Metraxi, the sunken structures are raised again and the coral carved to make a grand and unique building for their queen.  

So there are certainly enough oddities in nature to create alien worlds and creatures without much of a stretch. Our world is an amazing place with endless variety, and now my children are older and our mortgage paid off, we're hoping to see a bit more of it.