Hi, and welcome to the Juggernaut blog tour!

Almost before I was done writing Strain, my mind began trying to fill in the blanks of the world we saw in Strain, trying to piece together what had led up to that point. I decided I wanted to write a story chronicling the apocalyptic pandemic, both the events leading up to it and the immediate aftermath. The result, of course, was Juggernaut.

On the Juggernaut blog tour, I’ll be sharing my thoughts about the world of Juggernaut/Strain/Bane, including several cut scenes from Juggernaut which I felt contained important world-building details that in the end just didn’t fit the flow of the story. I’ll also be sharing a couple sneak previews of the third book in the Strain universe, Bane (coming September 21 from Riptide Publishing) as well as giving away three e-copies of Bane before it hits the shelves!

To enter to win, leave a comment on this post including a way to contact you (email, Twitter, or Facebook.) Each stop along the blog tour that you visit offers you another chance to enter. Be sure to check the Riptide blog tour schedule for a complete list of other stops. The contest will close Saturday, August 15^th, 2015 and the winner will be contacted no later than Monday, August 17^th. Any entries made without a way to contact the winner will be invalidated, so please don’t forget to provide your email, or your Twitter or Facebook address. Contest is NOT limited to US entries.

Good luck, and enjoy the tour!

Guest Post

A significant chunk of the story in Juggernaut takes place in the quarantine pens outside a suburb near Cheyenne Mountain, which becomes known as the Colorado Springs Clean Zone. It’s in quarantine that Zach and Nico begin to see that safety in numbers . . . isn’t as safe as they would have assumed.

The people who survived the first wave of the pandemic, particularly those who were already EOTWAWKI (End of the World as We Know It) survivalists, would want to seek the most secure and isolated circumstances they could. Most doomsday preppers have a list of underground bunkers in which they can seek shelter. One of these lies within Cheyenne Mountain, in the form of a large underground military installment that once housed the North American Aerospace Defense Command, popularly known as NORAD.

The problem is, the martial law committee that has taken the reins of authority within Cheyenne Mountain isn’t letting anyone in, because of course if they allow an infected person into the bunker, it could kill all the remaining government and military high command personnel who managed to survive the pandemic. They establish the Clean Zone, or an area where they are setting up shelter for uninfected people, but before you can take your place with the uninfected population in the Clean Zone, you have to spend three months in quarantine.

Why so long? Well, the incubation period of the Bane virus is anywhere from three to eight weeks, which means a person can arrive completely asymptomatic and not show any signs of infection for almost two months. The military government establishes three months as the mandatory quarantine period to be extra certain that the surviving population is protected.

It’s a complicated system. They have to quarantine people not only from the Clean Zone population, but also from each other, which means housing them becomes a problem. They can’t use multi-unit housing such as apartment buildings or even, say, a prison, because people who arrive in quarantine uninfected might then become infected by proximity to another person in quarantine who has the virus. The pens have to be large enough to allow a tent for shelter for the detainees, as well as an outhouse/latrine. They also have to be far enough apart from one another to prevent the possibility of airborne contagion from other detainees (the “hot zone” is considered to be twenty feet, minimum.)

Right away, exposure is going to be a problem. There is no air conditioning or heating. The only water is pumped via windmill-pressurized pipes from the river and must be boiled. A poorly dug or improperly placed latrine could cause sanitation issues.

Then there is the matter of supplies. The first arrivals to the Colorado Springs Clean Zone survive on rations stockpiled within the bunker at Cheyenne Mountain, but those rations are going to quickly be depleted and the days of the mass production of food are gone. No one is stocking the grocery store shelves, obviously. Agriculture and animal husbandry will take time and people with skill in those areas to establish. Going out foraging for supplies in the surrounding areas is a risky proposition, because there is no way of knowing if the scavenging teams might run into victims of the Beta or Gamma strains of the virus.

Most of the world’s medical personnel died in the pandemic, trying to care for the victims of the virus. Which means medical treatment of any ailments within quarantine is going to be crudely administered field medicine attempted by poorly trained medics.

The military government isn’t going to want to waste supplies on people who might be dying anyway, so the detainees in quarantine will be on starvation rations for their three-month incarceration. This goes double for medical supplies. Drugs such as antibiotics will be at a premium, and again, the people in charge will be reluctant to use them on someone who might turn out to be infected.

Due to these scarcities, the military government is going to be heavy-handed in their application of euthanasia, particularly of people who have been exposed to the Bane virus. If one person within the quarantine pen turns out to be infected, all will be killed, regardless of whether or not they’re showing any symptoms yet. This means that if there are people who are immune (and there are, they’re just exceedingly rare) they’ll be euthanized before anyone has a chance to realize it.

Eventually corruption also becomes an issue. Being virtually untouchable is going to give the personnel within Cheyenne Mountain a great deal of freedom to skim from the top of the supply stores. If the guards and security officers policing the quarantine pens turn out to abuse their authority, the detainees will have almost no recourse, and it will be all too easy to falsely identify someone who is too vocal in their complaints as being infected and thus slated to be put down.

In short, following the first wave of the pandemic, it may turn out that the greatest danger humanity faces—is other humans.

They helped destroy the world. Now they have to survive the new one.

For rentboy Nico Fernández, it’s a simple job: seduce a presidential advisor to help cement approval to launch Project Juggernaut. He’s done similar work for General Logan McClosky before, and manipulating people for his favorite client beats the hell out of being trafficked for slave wages in some corporate brothel.

Zach Houtman feels called to work with the most vulnerable outcasts of society. But his father, the Reverend Maurice Houtman, insists that Zach work for him instead as he runs for Senate. Zach reluctantly agrees, but is horrified to see his father leave behind Christ’s mandate of love and mercy to preach malicious zealotry and violence instead. Zach even starts to suspect his father is working with fundamentalist terrorists.

When Project Juggernaut accidentally unleashes a deadly plague that claims billions of lives, Nico and Zach are thrown together, each bearing a burden of guilt. With only each other for safety and solace, they must make their way through a new world, one where the handful of people left alive are willing to do anything—and kill anyone—to survive.

Amelia C. Gormley may seem like anyone else. But the truth is she sings in the shower, dances doing laundry, and writes blisteringly hot m/m erotic romance while her son is at school. When she’s not writing in her Pacific Northwest home, Amelia single-handedly juggles her husband, her son, their home, and the obstacles of life by turning into an everyday superhero. And that, she supposes, is just like anyone else.

Blog: http://ameliacgormley.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ACGormley

Tumblr: http://ameliacgormley.tumblr.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ameliacgormley

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6445292.Amelia_C_Gormley

Hi, and welcome to the Player vs. Player blog tour. Today I’m going to be sharing a scene from Chapter Four of PvP. This is a book very close to my heart, as a gamer and as an activist, and I think this scene is pretty important because it addresses something that plagued me from the first time I started seeing the toxic backlash against feminist critics in gaming: that the harassment could so very easily escalate, and that while it’s easy to dismiss it as mere trolling, all it takes is one person deciding to up the ante before the situation becomes truly dangerous.

Thankfully, this has not happened yet. But in recent months, we’ve seen a number of female game developers and feminist critics of gaming driven from their homes by threats that were credible enough to merit the precaution. We’ve even seen a college campus massacre threatened if one feminist critic spoke about issues relating to the portrayal of women in gaming.

This isn’t just harmless trolling.

*****

Jordan’s phone had already been vibrating with texts, warning him, before he arrived to see that there were people with signs picketing on the sidewalk outside the Third Wave Studios offices. Signs which read, “Protect our Children!” and “End the Violence.” There were even a couple about stopping the homosexual agenda. That was new, at least as far as the real-life picketers went. It wasn’t the first time antigaming crusaders had taken aim at Third Wave for their content, and those groups had been on a rampage since the Sandy Hook shooting, courtesy of the NRA attempting to divert blame to the gaming industry. The Phoenix Force franchise was no more graphically violent than any other first-person shooter game, nor was the sexual content any more explicit than any other RPG. It was considerably milder than many titles in the genre, in fact, and none of the violence was sexualized, which couldn’t be said for many other games.

But logic had little to do with the protesters’ platform.

Great. Just great. Because the harassment Niles was already getting wasn’t enough.

Jordan frowned again as he recalled the texts Niles had received last night. It was harder than he would have thought, seeing what some of the trolls were saying to and about Niles. Now the occasional glum and besieged phases Niles and Rosie went through made a lot more sense. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since, even after he’d left the guy he’d picked up.

He’d lied to Niles about where he’d been all night. After leaving the twink, he’d gone into the office and started looking through the stacks of fan mail, as well as the email from the contact box on the studio website. There was much more where the harassing texts had come from. There were entire fan forums dedicated to malcontents who were unhappy with the gay storylines in Third Wave games. The shit the twerps said on the various forums, showing their internet dicks and talking big to try to impress one another, seeing who could say the vilest thing, was even worse. Jordan had started making accounts on every board and forum and mailing list he could find to keep track of them all, under the rationale that as Third Wave’s marketing director, he should know what the fans were saying, even the negative stuff. They kept egging each other on, prompting ever more extravagant threats and insults, and the big brother in him—admittedly only by six minutes, but still—wanted to start bashing heads together.

Sighing, he drove past the protesters, then hung his laptop case on his shoulder, and headed inside to where Niles and Rosie were talking in the door of the break room, cradling cups of coffee and looking far more tense than the picketers accounted for.

“So what’s their beef today?” Jordan asked, striding toward his office as they fell in step with him.

“They found a new angle,” Rosie nearly growled. “That video went up on YouTube just like I predicted it would, and now Niles is the poster boy for fags everywhere trying to push the gay agenda on unsuspecting kids.”

Jordan set his bag down a little harder than necessary in his chair. “Wait. They got that from you informing them that Niles wasn’t on the writing staff for Age of Valiance?”

“He’s our lead writer, even if he’s not working on a specific title. Or that’s the argument they’re using.”

Niles grabbed a remote off the filing cabinet and turned on the TV on the wall in the corner of Jordan’s office. “They’ve called the news outlets. There are going to be interviews.”

“Shit.” Jordan closed his eyes, imagining declining sales after the news broadcast claimed that Third Wave was shoving gay storylines on people’s kids. This was going to take some spin control. “We need to get ahead of this. Start a marketing campaign immediately touting the message of acceptance and diversity inherent in Third Wave’s games. Get it out to liberal parenting sites, not just LGBT and ally sites. We need to hammer home the message that equality is the ultimate family value. I’m going to draft a post for our social forums to be released immediately and start scheduling interviews.”

“Get on it, then,” Rosie said shortly. “In the meantime, we’ve got another problem.”

“It’s not a problem.” Niles spoke between gritted teeth.

“The fuck it isn’t!” She snatched an envelope from his hands and threw it on Jordan’s desk. He picked it up. It had Niles’s name and address on it and inside was a plain, white sheet of paper with two large, stark words:

WATCH YOURSELF

Jordan blinked at it. “You still going to tell me they’re not threatening you?”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it.” Niles ran a hand through his hair. “We might not get many of these sorts of fan letters by snail mail, but they do come.”

“To your home address?” Rosie folded her arms across her chest, her posture aggressive. Yesterday, she’d been on Niles’s side of this issue, but today she was clearly in Jordan’s camp. “It’s bad enough that they’ve got your personal cell phone number.”

Niles rubbed his forehead as if he were getting a headache. “It doesn’t matter. It’s still just a bunch of punks talking big.”

She narrowed her eyes. “If they’ve tracked down your physical address, we have to assume it’s more than talk.”

“Oh, come on! Finding someone’s physical address is a search away these days. I don’t remember you reacting this way when the Google Earth images of your house went online.”

Rosie went very still. “You’re right. I didn’t react. I just sold the house I loved and moved into a cookie-cutter high-rise condo building downtown with a doorman and a security system.” The ragged edge to her voice cut through the heated debate, and Niles fell silent. “I let them make me afraid. I let them drive me out of my house, Niles, and if you didn’t see me react to that, you weren’t paying attention.”

“Rosie—” Niles reached out to her, but she was still closed off, pulled into herself. Making an admission like that had to have cost her.

A detail caught Jordan’s eye, and he felt himself go cold. “Jesus! Niles, there’s no stamp on the fucking envelope.”

“So?”

“You didn’t notice?” Jordan slid it across the desk back at him, and Niles stared at it, blinking. “Whoever sent this hand delivered it.”

“Oh Christ.” Rosie covered her mouth with her hand. “Niles, they were at your house.”

“Fuck.” Niles dropped into a chair, closing his eyes and letting his head tip back.

“Okay, we should call the cops about this.” Jordan picked up the envelope Niles had left sitting on his desk, and studied it again.

Niles scoffed. “And say what? A bunch of gaming geeks are stalking me because they have a stick up their ass about queer characters in their games? The cops aren’t exactly well-known for taking gay issues all that seriously.”

Jordan rolled his eyes. “C’mon. This is Portland, not the Deep South, and you know it. Besides, getting them to investigate isn’t the point, at least not yet. Starting a paper trail of complaints is, so if it escalates, they can see that it’s an ongoing problem.”

“Or if it ever does get serious—which it won’t—they won’t believe me because they think I’ve been overreacting to every troll who tries to bait me.”

Rosie gave him a flat look, leaning against the wall. “Okay, Niles, I get it. You know I do. It’s nearly impossible in gaming culture to separate out the genuine threats from the usual smack talk. You don’t want to overreact because you don’t want to make it look like you can’t cut it. You don’t want to seem like some precious snowflake. I get it. But this is not trolling. This is menacing. They’ve crossed the line. At the very least, whoever left that note for you was trespassing. And probably in violation of some postal laws.”

“Fine. Okay.” Niles’s jaw shifted as he glanced back and forth between them. “If I make the complaint, will the two of you quit nagging me and let me get back to writing? In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve got a production deadline for the Gairi DLC.”

“I’ll go with you to the police bureau at lunch.” Jordan gave him a tight smile, and Niles tensed as though he was going to argue again. Then he pushed himself up out of the chair and strode from Jordan’s office. They stared after him.

“I get why he didn’t want to overreact, which is why I backed him at the club last night.” Rosie slipped into the chair Niles had vacated. “But why am I getting the vibe that his resistance to the idea that this might be a problem goes deeper than that?”

“He’s a pacifist.” Jordan tapped the end of a pen against his desk blotter. He was far more edgy and energized now than he’d been when he’d arrived at the office. He hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, either, and this wasn’t going to do a thing to help him rest tonight. “Always has been. I don’t think he’s really ever internalized how serious homophobic violence can be. He can’t conceive of someone having that much hate in themselves.”

She smiled at him, her eyes soft. “I don’t think you realize just how sappy you get when you talk about him.”

Jordan ducked his head, coloring. “He’s my brother. Good thing, too. Someone’s got to look out for him because he’ll never look out for himself.”

“You think they realize that about him?” She jerked her head toward the exterior wall of the building and ostensibly the picketers outside. “This guy they’re so up in arms about, who is such a threat to their kids, is just a gentle little lamb who wants to write stories about people like himself finding love and being heroes.”

“Do you think it matters to them?” Jordan grimaced and turned up the volume on the TV. The local morning show had just cut to the reporter outside Third Wave’s headquarters, where an officious-looking guy had handed off his picket sign to act as spokesman.

“What we’re seeing here is a clear-cut agenda, an insidious attempt to work fringe liberal ideology into the hearts and minds of our kids through what is commonly perceived as harmless entertainment. We, the concerned citizens who form the Coalition for Responsible Media, are making a point of bringing to light this sort of brainwashing that’s being embedded in music, television, movies, and even video games, and bring back family-friendly entertainment . . .”

Pushing for change can be dangerous when change starts pushing back.

Video game writer Niles River loves the work he does at Third Wave Studios: creating games with mass appeal that feature women, people of color, and LGBTQ characters. To make his job even better, his best friend is his boss, and his twin brother works beside him. And they mostly agree that being on the forefront of social change is worth dealing with trollish vitriol—Niles is more worried about his clingy ex and their closeted intern’s crush on his brother than he is about internet harassment.

But now the bodies on the ground are no longer virtual, and someone’s started hand-delivering threats to Niles’s door. The vendetta against Third Wave has escalated, and to make matters worse, the investigating detective is an old flame who left Niles heartbroken for a life in the closet.

No change happens without pain, but can Niles justify continuing on with Third Wave when the cost is the blood of others? If he does, the last scene he writes may be his own death.

Amelia C. Gormley may seem like anyone else. But the truth is she sings in the shower, dances doing laundry, and writes blisteringly hot m/m erotic romance while her son is at school. When she’s not writing in her Pacific Northwest home, Amelia single-handedly juggles her husband, her son, their home, and the obstacles of life by turning into an everyday superhero. And that, she supposes, is just like anyone else.

Her self-published novel-in-three-parts, Impulse (Inertia, Book One; Acceleration, Book Two; and Velocity, Book Three) can be found at most major online book retailers, and be sure to check Riptide for her latest releases, including her Highland historical, The Laird’s Forbidden Lover, the The Professor’s Rule series of erotic novelettes (co-written with Heidi Belleau), the post-apocalyptic romance, Strain, her New Adult contemporary, Saugatuck Summer, and of course, Player vs. Player, available now. She is presently at work on two more novels set in the Strain universe, Juggernaut and Bane, coming summer/fall of 2015.

You can contact Amelia on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, BookLikes, Tumblr, or contact her by email using the form at http://ameliacgormley.com/

Every comment on this blog tour enters you in a drawing for a choice of one a book from my backlist (excluding Player vs Player.) Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on December 13th. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. 

Hi, and welcome to the Saugatuck Summer blog tour! Thank you to All I Want and More.

Thanks for hosting me today! For those of you who have seen me talking about it on social media for the last nearly year and a half, you know that Saugatuck Summer was a labor of love far beyond what I would normally claim for one of my books. Of course I love them all, but Saugatuck Summer came from my very soul. Actually, I’m not certain it came from me at all.

Basically, here’s what happened: One day I was driving along, running errands, and Topher Carlisle whispered one line of dialogue in my ear. Just one. When I asked him what I was supposed to do with that, he promptly took over my brain for fifteen absolutely insane days and at the end I had the first draft of Saugatuck Summer.

Topher’s story of recovery, hope, making mistakes, and growing up just told itself, and the experience of being the conduit for that was at times grueling and heartbreaking, but also euphoric and wonderful. It was one of those experiences that, as a creator of some form of art, be it musical, visual, or literary, you have once or twice in a lifetime if you’re extraordinarily lucky, when you know you’re creating something magical. I’m not sure it will ever happen to me again, but I feel absolutely blessed that this book has come of it.

This week on the Saugatuck Summer blog tour, I’ll be sharing some bonus content from the book and a sneak peek at another upcoming book in the Saugatuck universe. I’ll also be having a heart-to-heart discussion with Marie Sexton about our experiences as adult children of alcoholics and how they translated into writing our ACOA characters from Saugatuck Summer and Family Man, giving you a peek at some of “Jace’s” art, and I’ll be sharing the official Saugatuck Summer soundtrack from a brilliant singer/songwriter of my personal acquaintance, Casey Stratton.

And finally, all week long I’ll be asking trivia questions from Saugatuck Summer and this week’s blog tour articles, and each correct answer emailed to me offers you a chance to win your choice of any of my backlist titles!

So put on your sunscreen and let’s go!

***

HOW TO WIN YOUR CHOICE OF ANY SINGLE BOOK FROM MY BACKLIST (all-in-one volumes not included):

At each stop along the blog tour I’ll be asking a trivia question from Saugatuck Summer. Yes, this means some familiarity with the book is required, whether you purchase a copy, have an ARC, or employ the Kindle or B&N lending programs. If you visit some of the other blog tour stops, you might also find the answer in some of the excerpts.

PLEASE DO NOT ANSWER IN THE COMMENTS. Instead, send the answer to me privately by using this contact form. Each response will enter you into the drawing and three winners will be picked. The more questions you answer, the more entries you get. You can choose from any of the following titles:

Inertia (Impulse, Book One) Acceleration (Impulse, Book Two) Velocity (Impulse, Book Three) The Laird’s Forbidden Lover An Inch at a Time (The Professor’s Rule #2) Inch by Inch (The Professor’s Rule #3) Every Inch of the Way (The Professor’s Rule #4) To the Very Last Inch (The Professor’s Rule #5) Strain

(Note: Giving an Inch (The Professor’s Rule #1) is already available free at Riptide, and my pre-Saugatuck novella, The Field of Someone Else’s Dreams, is available for free at Amazon, All Romance eBooks, and elsewhere.)

Again, please do not post your answer in the comments, but submit it to me privately.

To give people time to read and respond, the contest will remain open for one month after the release of Saugatuck Summer. It will close on June 19, and the drawing will be held on June 20.

Today’s Saugatuck Summer trivia question:

Chapter 25, what did Jace’s parents do to him when he was a teenager?

***

One summer can change everything.

Hi, I’m Topher Carlisle: twenty-one, pretty, and fabulous. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. But let’s get real. Walking the fake-it-til-you-make-it road to independence and self-respect isn’t easy. Especially since my mom’s a deadbeat alcoholic, and most of my family expects me to turn out just as worthless. Oh, and I’m close to losing my college swimming scholarship, so let’s add “dropout” to the list.

My BFF has invited me to stay at her beach house on the shore of Lake Michigan. That’ll give me one summer to make money and figure out what I want to do with my life. So of course I decide to have an affair with my BFF’s married, closeted dad. Because that always works out.

Now I’m homeless, friendless, jobless. Worthless. Just like my family expects, right? Except there’s this great guy, Jace, who sees it differently. He’s got it all together in ways I can only dream of—he’s hot, creative, insightful, understanding. He seems to think I don’t give myself enough credit. And if I don’t watch out, I may start to believe him.

***

Be sure to check out the Saugatuck Summer soundtrack by singer/songwriter Casey Stratton!

Amelia C. Gormley may seem like anyone else. But the truth is she sings in the shower, dances doing laundry, and writes blisteringly hot m/m erotic romance while her son is at school. When she’s not writing in her Pacific Northwest home, Amelia single-handedly juggles her husband, her son, their home, and the obstacles of life by turning into an everyday superhero. And that, she supposes, is just like anyone else.

Her self-published novel-in-three-parts, Impulse (Inertia, Book One; Acceleration, Book Two; and Velocity, Book Three) can be found at most major online book retailers, and be sure to check Riptide for her latest releases, including her Highland historical, The Laird’s Forbidden Lover, the The Professor’s Rule series of erotic novelettes (co-written with Heidi Belleau), the post-apocalyptic romance, Strain, and her upcoming, New Adult contemporary, Saugatuck Summer, available now.

You can contact Amelia on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, BookLikes, Tumblr, or contact her by email using the form athttp://ameliacgormley.com/about/