Release Blitz: Ice Country by David Estes with Guest Post PLUS a Giveaway!

Ice Country (The Country Saga #2)
by David Estes

Book Synopsis

Dazz, a hard-edged, fun-loving Icer, likes fighting, particularly while at his favorite watering hole. However, while recovering from a particularly bad break up, his decision to engage in a brutal pubroom brawl leads to a series of events that thrust him into a dark and mysterious scandal involving King Goff, the ice country ruler.

When his seven-year-old sister is abducted in the dark of night, Dazz pledges to do whatever it takes to get her back, embarking on a quest that threatens to rip apart the very fabric that's barely holding his shattered family together.
Along the way he meets a group of unlikely allies in the form of a travelling group of fire country natives. Can Dazz, when joined with his best friend, Buff, and new tan-skinned friends, defeat the King and his guards before it's too late for his sister?




PRAISE FOR "ICE COUNTRY"

-"5 stars! David Estes creates captivating and original worlds that you love to get lost in!" Alexandria Theodosopoulos- Goodreads

-"Richly filled with new characters and story without leaving the old behind...a seamless transition into another side of a fantastic world." Kerri Hughes- Goodreads

Quick Facts

Released: April 4th, 2013

Genre: YA Dystopian

Formats Available for Purchase: Paperback (only through Amazon), Kindle, ePub and Smashwords.

Excerpt

It all starts with a girl. Nay, more like a witch. An evil witch, disguised as a young seventeen-year-old princess, complete with a cute button nose, full red lips, long dark eyelashes, and deep, mesmerizing baby blues. Not a real, magic-wielding witch, but a witch just the same.
Oh yah, and a really good throwing arm. “Get out!” she screams, flinging yet another ceramic vase in my general direction.
I duck and it rebounds off the wall, not shattering until it hits the shiny marble floor. Thousands of vase-crumbles crunch under my feet as I scramble for the door. I fling it open and slip through, slamming it hard behind me. Just in time, too, as I hear the thud of something heavy on the other side. Evidently she’s taken to throwing something new, maybe boots or perhaps herself.
Luckily, her father’s not home, or he’d probably be throwing things too. After all, he warned his daughter about Brown District boys.
Taking a deep breath, I cringe as a spout of obscenities shrieks through the painted-red door and whirls around my head, stinging me in a dozen places. You’d think I was the one who ran around with a four-toed eighteen-year-old womanizer named LaRoy. (That’s LaRoy with a “La”, as he likes to say.) As it turns out, I think LaRoy has softer hands than she does.
As I slink away from the witch’s upscale residence licking my wounds, I try to figure out where the chill I went wrong. Despite her constant insults, narrow-mindedness, and niggling reminders of how I am nothing more than a lazy, liquid-ice-drinking, no-good scoundrel, I think I managed to treat her pretty well. I was faithful, always there for her—not once was I employed while courting her—and known on occasion to show up at her door with gifts, like snowflake flowers or frosty delights from Gobbler’s Bakery down the road. She said the flowers made her feel inadequate, on account of them being too beautiful—as if there was such a thing—and the frosty’s, well, she said I gave them to her to make her fat.
She was my first ever girlfriend from the White District. I should’ve listened to my best friend, Buff, when he said it would end in disaster.

 

Guest Post:

Earth…100 Years Into the Future (or how I think it will be)

By David Estes (Proud to be an Indie!)

Eek! What a topic! When Marni gave it to me, my first thought was “What could I possibly know about what the future will be like in 100 years?” But then I realized: I can say whatever I want and I won’t be alive for anyone to know whether I was right! *Rubbing hands together gleefully* Now it sounds more like coming up with the plot for a dystopian novel, which happens to be my specialty. Thanks Marni!

OK, let’s see, I guess a good place to start is the past, because it tends to be a pretty good predictor of the future. As the saying goes, history usually repeats itself, or at least history buffs think so. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around 100 years ago, nor am I a scholar of history, so most of my limited knowledge will come from watching the amazing TV show, Downton Abbey, set in England around World War I time. World-changing inventions, like cars, telephones, and electricity became more widely used. People were changing too, becoming slightly more open to women’s rights (although it was still a long way from where it needed to be). The rich were getting richer and the poor poorer.

 

Today, a hundred years later, technology is advancing more and more rapidly, and things like phones, TV, cars and electricity have changed so much they hardly resemble their former selves. Women, while still fighting for their rights in many parts of the world, are on much more equal footing with men (as they should be), and work in every field, rising to the top in many. And the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Some things never change.

 

So what do I see 100 years from now? Flying cars? Perhaps. Internet wired into our brains? It ain’t out of the question (that would be awesome, right? Hmm, that sounds like a good way to increase the incidence of brain cancer if you ask me). A woman U.S. president? There had better have been about 10 of them by then! A colony on Mars? Less likely, but still in the realm of possibility. War? Most definitely. The key natural resources won’t last forever, and renewable energy is expensive and, despite the efforts of environmentalists and scientists, is still not an area of significant focus.

 

Give governments a prize worth fighting over and guess what? They’ll fight over it. So there will be a big war over resources, only it won’t be humans risking their lives. It will be fought by robots, big and Transformer-like, some that fly, some that stomp, all that wreak havoc on each other. Once one side breaks through, the humans will have no choice but to blast them with lasers and bomb them with nukes.

 

Meanwhile, the ice caps will melt under growing global warning and the sea levels will rise. Chunks of continents will be erased, sent below sea like modern day Atlantis’s. The cost of land will rise beyond salaries. The rich will grow richer and the poor poorer. There will be a mass uprising. Fighting in the streets. Babies being sold on the black market to be used as warriors in the class struggle.

 

And don’t forget about the Plague that will break out. Unleashed accidentally by government scientists researching biological warfare, the Plague will hit every country, wiping out half the world’s population, which people will soon realize is a blessing in disguise because overpopulation was half the problem to begin with.

 

Then come the vampires…oh wait, that’s a different future. Then come…

 

The aliens...yeah, the aliens, they definitely belong in this story. DAs or “damn aliens” as they’ll be referred to by the general public, or “the visitors” as they’ll be called by the diplomats, will solve the rising-water-level problem by sucking a bunch of the earth’s water away through large tubes appropriately called “Big Suckers,” restoring the Earth’s ecosystem to equilibrium while giving them enough water to take back to their barren planet, called “Click Clack Cluck” by their clicking tongues.

 

Ummm…did I miss anything? Hmm, teleportation? Nah, Willy Wonka already tried that and everything shrunk by the time it got to the other side. Zombies? They’ll go the way of the vampires if you ask me. McDonald’s? Thriving, selling billions and billions of burgers per annum, both on Earth and Mars. I think that just about covers it! OK, to summarize:

 

The future 100 years from now (bear in mind, this is just one man’s opinion) will have:

-a robot war (I think that could be a good book idea)

-a global plague (ever heard of the black plague?)

-a class uprising and war (never seen that before, right?)

-a baby market (although I think, sadly, there’s already one of these)

-melting ice caps (don’t give me that virtual look, it’s the darn scientists’ fault for even suggesting it!)

-water-sucking aliens (no comment)

-EQUILIBRIUM!

 

See, even the most cringe-worthy stories can have a happy ending if aliens are involved! (Note to self: add “Robot Wars” and “Earth-saving aliens” to list of book ideas. Cross off “Anything having to do with vampires”)

 

Hi there! *waves* Sorry, just wanted to welcome you to the end of my guest post and to thank you for making it this far! *Slips $20 bill under the computer* I’m surprised and honored that you found my extremely tongue-in-cheek answer to Marni’s dangerous question worthy of being read all the way through! Although most of my books aren’t this silly, they are dystopian, and they do answer the very same question that Marni’s posed today; namely, what will the world look like in the future, so if you like that sort of thing, check them out, they’ll cost you less than a Big Mac!

 

A special thanks to Marni, for taking the risk of letting me post something on her blog (*whispers* I hope you don’t lose too many members over this!) And as always, happy reading!!

 

David Estes

David....Thank you for the guest post, I love it! ~ Marni

The Author:

David Estes was born in El Paso, Texas but moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when he was very young. He grew up in Pittsburgh and then went to Penn State for college. Eventually he moved to Sydney, Australia where he met his wife and soul mate, Adele, who he’s now been happily married to for more than two years.

A reader all his life, David began writing novels for the children's and YA markets in 2010, and has completed 14 novels, 12 of which have been published. In June of 2012, David became a fulltime writer and is now travelling the world with Adele while he writes books, and she writes and takes photographs.

David gleans inspiration from all sorts of crazy places, like watching random people do entertaining things, dreams (which he jots copious notes about immediately after waking up), and even from thin air sometimes!

David’s a writer with OCD, a love of dancing and singing (but only when no one is looking or listening), a mad-skilled ping-pong player, an obsessive Goodreads group member, and prefers writing at the swimming pool to writing at a table. He loves responding to e-mails, Facebook messages, Tweets, blog comments, and Goodreads comments from his readers, all of whom he considers to be his friends.
Learn more about the author at: http://davidestesbooks.blogspot.com

Tour Giveaway

Tour Wide giveaway: 5 e-copies of "Fire Country" (The Country Saga #1) and 2 e-copies of "Ice Country" (The Country Saga #2).

Rules:

• There will be 7 winners.
• The giveaway is open internationally.
• Winners have 48hs to claim their prize since the moment they receive the email.
  

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Remember to check BOOK 1 in "The Country Saga": Fire Country.

Synopsis:

In a changed world where the sky bleeds red, winter is hotter than hell and full of sandstorms, and summer's even hotter with raging fires that roam the desert-like country, the Heaters manage to survive, barely. 

Due to toxic air, life expectancies are so low the only way the tribe can survive is by forcing women to procreate when they turn sixteen and every three years thereafter. It is their duty as Bearers.

Fifteen-year-old Siena is a Youngling, soon to be a Bearer, when she starts hearing rumors of another tribe of all women, called the Wild Ones. They are known to kidnap Youngling girls before the Call, the ceremony in which Bearers are given a husband with whom to bear children with. 

As the desert sands run out on her life's hourglass, Siena must uncover the truth about the Wild Ones while untangling the web of lies and deceit her father has masterfully spun.

AMAZON

SMASHWORDS