Tin Star Blog Tour {Interview and Giveaway}

I'm so excited to have the Tin Star Blog Tour stopping by today with my Author Interview with Cecil Castellucci and Giveaway...

Tin Star

(Tin Star #1)

by Cecil Castellucci

2/25/14

Macmillan

On their way to start a new life, Tula and her family travel on the Prairie Rose, a colony ship headed to a planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy. All is going well until the ship makes a stop at a remote space station, the Yertina Feray, and the colonist's leader, Brother Blue, beats Tula within an inch of her life. An alien, Heckleck, saves her and teaches her the ways of life on the space station.

When three humans crash land onto the station, Tula's desire for escape becomes irresistible, and her desire for companionship becomes unavoidable. But just as Tula begins to concoct a plan to get off the space station and kill Brother Blue, everything goes awry, and suddenly romance is the farthest thing from her mind.

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What three words best describe Tin Star?

Savvy. Space. Survivor.

Can you give us your best one sentence pitch to convince readers, especially reluctant readers, to give this book a try?

Tin Star is about Tula Bane, a human girl who is left for dead and abandoned on an alien space station at the brink of a galactic war.

Grab a copy of Tin Star and answer the following:

This answer will always be changing! Today I will say:

favorite chapter? Chapter Four

favorite page?  52

favorite character? Tula Bane

flip to a random page and give us a 1-2 sentence teaser: «He laughed in double harmony as I listened to the chatter from Earth.» teaser log line for page 91

How did the idea and story of Tin Star come to be? Did you find inspiration any pop cultural elements (movies, tv shows, other books)?

Actually I was inspired by a movie!  I was watching Casablanca and I thought that the idea of this city during a world war where people went while in transit was totally fascinating.  You`ve got the Nazi`s there and the resistance so there is this wonderful tension there.  And of course you`ve got Rick and his Café Americain and his broken heart and bitterness at his lot in life and his reaction to Elsa coming back into his life.  It`s so rich!  It also made me think about westerns and how those new towns were transienient places at the very edges of civilized society where people – even enemies - have to make do and get along in order to survive. Of course Tin Star is a completely fractured and mashed up version of that.  But the seeds of Casablanca and western movies are there.  I think this will become even more evident in book two.

Can you tell us a bit about your heroine, Tula? What sets her apart from other YA heroines?

I also really wanted to write a character who has to become an alien to survive her terrible circumstance of being abandoned on a space station and then have to confront that and try to reconcile her humanness. I mean Tula is the only human on the Yertina Feray space station.  She`s surrounded by aliens who don`t particularly like humans because in my universe we haven`t really spread out into the galaxy and are mostly unknown.  I wanted to write a character who kind of forgets who she is and where she`s from and then has to make her way back to herself.  I think Tula is savvy and sassy in a different way then we see in a lot of books because of that alieness that she has to adopt to survive.  She went to space with a kind of a cult whose aim is to make humans a part of the galaxy.  She`s failed by being left behind.  I also wanted to write a character who has to depend on her wits rather than her brawn.  Tula is an expert at bartering and social interaction with aliens but she can`t fight.  She doesn`t have a special power, she doesn`t know how to use a weapon, she just has an incredible will to survive.  I think that is a little bit different from a lot of YA heroines.  

Since Tin Star takes places in outer space, it has to have some really cool settings and places Tula visits. Do you have a favorite setting in the book or one that was especially fun to create?

Tin Star takes place exclusively on the Yertina Feray space station.  So in a way it`s in space and she`s travelled there but we are confined to this claustrophobic area.  Like I mentioned before, that was my aim with this book.  To make the station a character in the way that the town is in a western or Casablanca was during World War 2.  It was fun to try to come up with the ways that different aliens speak to each other and breathe.   That is why I invented the nanites, tiny robots that regulate the gases from the station in your body so you can breathe and that also lodge in the brain to aide in translation.

Fill in the blanks:

I’m really awesome at making crepes.

I’m really embarrassed to admit that I`ve never seen the movie Before Sunrise.

If I had a spaceship I would name it The Lady Bird.

When it comes to space aliens I believe they totally exist and I would like to talk to them.

The last great book I read was Far, Far Away by Tom McNeal.  

If you were to create and bake a cupcake inspired by Tin Star, what would it look and taste like, and what would you call it?

Well, I`m all about chocolate.  So it would probably be a dark chocolate cupcake with white chocolate chips so that it looked like space filled with stars on the inside.  The frosting would be black with a corner of it blue green to represent the planet Quint and star sprinkles on the chocolate.

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Cecil Castellucci is the author of books and graphic novels for young adults including Boy Proof, The Plain Janes, First Day on Earth, The Year of the Beasts and Odd Duck. Her picture book, Grandma’s Gloves, won the California Book Award Gold Medal. Her short stories have been published in Strange Horizons, YARN, Tor.com, and various anthologies including, Teeth, After and Interfictions 2. She is the YA editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Children’s Correspondence Coordinator for The Rumpus and a two time Macdowell Fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.

Win a hardcover copy of Tin Star!

The awesome people at Macmillan have generously offered one hc copy for one winner.

DETAILS

-US/CAN only

-will end 2/28

-must be 13+, one free entry per person

-winner will be emailed and must claim prize within 48 hours

-Word Spelunking is NOT responsible for lost, damaged, or stolen prizes

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Check out all the blog tour stops:

Monday February 17

My Bookish Ways

Tuesday February 18

Word Spelunking

Wednesday February 19

Paperback Princess

Thursday February 20

Working for the Mandroid

Friday February 21

ExLibris

Monday February 24

Read.Sleep.Repeat

Tuesday February 25

A Reader’s Adventure

Wednesday February 26

Two Chicks on Books

Thursday February 27

MacTeenBooks

Friday February 28

Jenna Does Books