GUEST POST and GIVEAWAY
Dimorphic
by Cy Wyss
Dimorphic by Cy Wyss is currently on tour with Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours. The tour stops here today for a guest post by the author, an excerpt, and a giveaway. Please be sure to visit the other tour stops as well.
Description
It’s easy to become a superhero.
First, discover a superpower. It might take a while to get used to, though - especially if it’s something as weird as being your twin brother half the time.
Second, recruit a sidekick. Or, two. It’d be nice if they weren’t a pyromaniacal sycophant and a foul-mouthed midget, but you get what you get.
Third, and most important, hire a mentor - preferably not a vicious mobster with a God complex, however, this may, realistically, be your only choice.
Finally: go forth and fight crime. Try not to get shot, beaten, tortured, or apprehended in the process.
Good luck!
Excerpt
It would be unfair to blame that crazy year on Batman. Yet who can say how much my love for the Dark Knight was responsible for the whole murderous mess? At the very least, I blame DC Comics for my lifelong hero complex and fanatic ability to take random violence personally. “Why is it,” I would ask, “people are so freaked out by the news, but no one does anything about it?”
My twin brother, Ethan, would answer, “We are doing something about it. We live our lives and make sure those stories aren’t written about us.”
He grew up into a wiry beast of a man, while I grew up into a buxom klutz of a woman. How fair is that?
Throughout our youth, Ethan gallivanted around Atlanta, branding its towering facades with fantastic graffiti. He was a wisp of smoke dissipating in the night air, leaving behind a spray of hieroglyphic taunts. I, on the other hand, spent life in a tent in our backyard
nibbling cheese puffs and devouring the Justice League’s latest escapades by an upended flashlight. By twenty-three Ethan was big in the XGames and had scored a lucrative sponsorship for professional daredevilry. I, on the other hand, had dropped out of law school a week before graduating to join the police academy, from which I was ejected a mere two
weeks later due to irreconcilable clumsiness and an unfortunate inability to defer to authority. It didn’t matter. If I couldn’t be a police officer, then I’d be a bounty hunter. Or a private detective. Or a fireman. I would be something heroic, even if it killed me - reality be damned.
nibbling cheese puffs and devouring the Justice League’s latest escapades by an upended flashlight. By twenty-three Ethan was big in the XGames and had scored a lucrative sponsorship for professional daredevilry. I, on the other hand, had dropped out of law school a week before graduating to join the police academy, from which I was ejected a mere two
weeks later due to irreconcilable clumsiness and an unfortunate inability to defer to authority. It didn’t matter. If I couldn’t be a police officer, then I’d be a bounty hunter. Or a private detective. Or a fireman. I would be something heroic, even if it killed me - reality be damned.
But reality had other ideas. I like to believe the forces of the universe give as much as they take. Unfortunately they also take as much as they give, so if you are going to receive a vast and powerful boon, you have to suffer in equal measure first. Like Batman, whose parents were gunned down before his eyes.
October descended, and the worst happened. In global events, $500 million of U.S. sky supremacy suddenly and rudely vanished over Afghanistan; in regional events, Atlanta underwent a freak drought, which was promptly declared apocalyptic; and, in personal events,
my beloved twin died a prosaic death. It wasn’t a hero’s demise. He simply miscalculated on his motocross. By the time they airlifted him to Brennan Memorial’s trauma center, his cerebral cortex was lifeless.
my beloved twin died a prosaic death. It wasn’t a hero’s demise. He simply miscalculated on his motocross. By the time they airlifted him to Brennan Memorial’s trauma center, his cerebral cortex was lifeless.
A day later, on October 31 at exactly 17:33, Ethan was declared brain-dead by the presiding neurologist. I was there. I sat in an armchair next to Ethan’s bed and stared at his spiritless body. It didn’t seem real. I watched his stomach rise and fall as artificial breath filled his muscular chest. Inside, his organs hummed right along, unaware they no longer constituted life.
Praise for the Book
"Judith is the BOMB! ... The novel reminded me a lot of Kickass, but it was 100 times better." ~ Rabia Tanveer, Readers' Favorite
"Judith somehow slips into Ethan’s body in her sleep. Thus bolstered, she becomes the super-hero she always wanted to be, or something like it, sometimes, anyway. This novel is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, somewhat bawdy account of her adventures. While it’s not my usual reading fare, I have to say Dimorphic was a fun read, and exceptionally well written." ~ Page LaRue
"This is a story which is beautifully written, exciting, original and which demonstrates a technical skill in the handling of a story structure complicated by two differing timelines. The vivid description creates a visual, cinematic feel which can only enhance the exhilarating action scenes. It is not only enjoyable and fresh, but it lingers in the memory and provides potential for further adventures with this kickass heroine and her compatriots. Whether the author intends for this to be a standalone or series I don’t know but I would most definitely look forward to meeting several of these fascinating characters again." ~ E. Sharp
"I fell in love with this book after the very first chapter. It was freakin hilarious! I was laughing so hard, with tears in my eyes all throughout the book! It was exciting, adventurous, and hilarious! I tried to take this story seriously, I really did. But that is hard to do when you are literally laughing all the way through. Character development was EXCELLENT [...] Now this book is definitely not for everybody! But it was definitely for me! It was pretty crazy, but it was all that craziness that I loved." ~ Wall-to-wall books
"A fun read, with bantering, odd characters all rolled up with international spies, torture and a little romance. [...] I live in hope that there will be a sequel." ~ Emma Jaye
Guest Post by the Author
From Academia to Author
When I was very young I assumed I would be an author. It turned out I was good at math as well as writing and along the way I decided to keep that side of me engaged as well. At McGill University if your grades were good they let you make your own degree and I made a joint honors degree in Mathematics and English Literature. I still wanted to be an author. But I wanted to have something to write about other than literature itself. So I started a long detour through history and philosophy of science (masters at Cambridge), computer science (diploma at Cambridge), and artificial intelligence (masters at Edinburgh). I really enjoyed computer programming. It seemed almost like writing stories for the computer.
After all that, I decided to continue in computer science and got my PhD at Indiana University, specializing in database query languages. My research centered around adding expressivity to an existing language. So even though I was far from being an author, I still had this love of languages and their properties. I was fortunate enough to be hired on at Indiana University as an assistant professor. I researched and taught for six years. Increasingly, however, I found myself out of sorts. To get tenure, you have to put your heart and soul into your research, but I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with my chosen profession. Finally, it became clear to me I would have to make a change.
I was lucky around that time to give birth to my daughter. It gave me the excuse I needed to bid goodbye to my career in databases and turn toward a more creative use of my time. While raising her, I stole little bits of time to write Dimorphic. I experienced a surge of writing momentum in 2013 and 2014 and wrote short stories about a San Francisco police detective as well as the manuscript for a full length novel about him. Alongside that, I wrote a prequel to a re-imagined Dimorphic as well as a sequel. In late 2015 I published Dimorphic at last (I had started it in 2011). At the same time I published Eyeshine.
Now, I still revel in my daughter’s upbringing, yet since she is at school it gives me several hours during the day when I can write and revise. I hope to release at least one more full length novel in 2016, perhaps Ballistics, the novel about my San Francisco detective. Beyond that, I’d like to maintain a pace of a novel either every year or every other year. I’m currently struggling with marketing my books; the blog tour helps greatly with that. Thanks for this opportunity.
About the Author
I live and write in the Indianapolis area. After earning a PhD in Computer Science in 2002 and teaching and researching for seven years, I’ve returned to the childhood dream of becoming an author. I better do it now because I won’t get a third life.
Behind me, I have a ton of academic experience and have written about twenty extremely boring papers on query languages and such, for example this one in the ACM Transactions on Databases. (That’s a mouthful.)
Now, I write in the mystery/thriller/suspense genres and sometimes science fiction. I know for some people databases would be the more beloved of the options, but for me, I finally realized that my heart wasn’t in it. So I took up a second life, as a self-published fiction author.
Online, I do the Writer Cy cartoon series about the (mis)adventures of researching, writing, and self-publishing in today’s shifting climate. I also love to design and create my own covers using GIMP.
Giveaway
Enter the tour-wide giveaway for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card.
Links
