July 26, 2021
GIVEAWAY – Uprising
Week 30 – Uprising
Genre: Dystopian
Release Date: May 21, 2018
Cover Design: Kate L. Mary
Formats: Kindle, Apple Books, Nook, Kobo, audiobook, and paperback – get the ebook for just $0.99 for a limited time!
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It’s Uprising week, which is book 2 in The Outliers Saga!
This series is one of the few that I released all the books really close to one another. Normally I can get a little distracted when I’m writing – too many ideas and not enough time – and tend to hop from series to series, but with Outliers, I really enjoyed the world and wanted to find out what happened to the characters myself, which made it easier to stay focused. In the second book, I got to really dive into Indra’s world, which required creating the four Outlier tribes and giving them all unique locations, names, and traditions. The name part really had me stumped at first, but once I developed them a little, it got easier. Since the Mountari lived close to the Lygan Cliffs, I was able to use a variation of the word mountain, which also worked for the Trelite – they live in the trees. The Huni and Winta were more difficult to come up with, but I ended up looking through a list of names for Native American tribes for inspiration. Coming up with the different traditions for each group was equally challenging, but in the end I was able to mold the four groups in such a way that it made sense why they’d been at odds for so long, and why at least one of them would never be able to work with the others.
I borrowed A LOT of names from The 100 television show for this book (Ontario, Emori, Roan, Gaia, etc.) but I also looked through lists of unique names. I wanted the reader to be able to pronounce the names, but I also wanted them to stand out as something that isn’t common.
In this book, I was really able to build on the relationship between Asa and Indra. There’s such a big gap between them, and being able to bridge it and create something that could be sustainable took work, which is why so much time goes by in the second book. People – my husband included – were not thrilled with the fate of Indra’s husband in book one, and rushing the relationship between Asa and Indra would have felt both forced and wrong. In the end, I really enjoy the way it turned out.
