Happy Friday, friend! Welcome to an interview with author T. Newyear about her book, Starfall. This book is a mix of historical fiction and climate fiction and I am excited to dive into it myself. Let’s welcome T. and learn about the book.
Get to know the author: T. Newyear
Hi T! Welcome to Armed with A Book. Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!
Hi, I’m T. Newyear, and I work in music and tech when not writing fiction. I live in a tiny town in the rural Midwest surrounded by a very high-energy family and a menagerie of various animals. I am a historian by training and spent many, many years researching the history of Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia.
What inspired you to write this book?
New Harmony, IN itself. It’s a very quirky little town out in the middle of nowhere, even by rural Midwestern standards. And yet this little town is full of surprises: It has a town library with a gallery of Italian Renaissance paintings, as well as a museum filled with curious natural history artefacts; we’re talking skulls, rocks, old scientific instruments, that kind of thing. It has several labyrinths, one of which is based on an original on the site that was constructed in the 1810s. And It’s eerily quiet and calm there.
There’s just something there that’s hard to describe, an atmosphere that lots of folks feel. The town, once a utopian community 200 years ago, still attracts artists and craftspeople and seekers to this day.
After a trip there many years ago, I began to research some of the people involved in the early communities at New Harmony. Like a lot of folks of their era, they wrote A LOT of amazing letters, journals, essays, histories, and other accounts, and much of this material has been digitized, making the communities there easy to learn more about online. The people were eccentric, erudite, and oddly emotionally compelling, but I didn’t really know how to tell their stories.
So I sat on my obsession for years, almost a decade actually. I wrote other books. In the end, I realized that telling a straight-up, costume drama-like tale where everyone runs around crying “Let’s build utopia!” would be very cheesy. I wanted to find a way to convey the spirit of those times, that urgent sense that things could be gradually (or rapidly) improved and that life could be better for all. I decided I needed to have two different storylines that turn out quite differently, one in the historical past and one in the not-too-distant future post-climate change, but both anchored by the same place, a place I’ve come to love.
Who would enjoy reading your book?
Folks curious about American history, folks wanting to explore new ways to think and feel about technology and climate change, and anyone who’s looking for a character-driven, long-read adventure that’s emotionally intense but overall optimistic and loving.
Did you bring any of your experiences into this book?
Yes! I’m lucky to get to talk to interesting people working at the intersection of music, entertainment, art, and technology every day. That means I hear a lot about fascinating new developments in how we humans can make and use sound, and that often inspires bouts of wild imagination in me. I mean, how can you not be inspired by the thought of a synthesizer on a satellite in low-earth orbit that you can play, for example? Or the way AI is changing how we interact with machines and each other? All of that got woven into this book.
I’m also a very avid walker and hiker, and I love exploring my home state and the Midwest in general. There are so many crazy nooks and crannies, and totally unexpected stories, both past and present, and some of those have sneaked their way into my writing. One of the main influences, though, is something I experience every day: The stunning beauty of nature, the patterns of plants and animals, the way water and soil interact… That is something I poured into the book, drawing on my own experience of discovery and wonder wandering on backroads and trails.
What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?
That there is hope, and that the doom loop is escapable and not inevitable. That we control tech, not the other way around. That nature will get us all in the end, and we have to realize we are part of nature, not set apart.
In the end, though, I hope readers will just have a good time meeting the characters and enjoy the ride. That’s more than enough to hope for, honestly!
What is something you have learned on your author journey so far?
Keep going, be patient, but leap when you get that urge, that bolt of inspiration to push things a bit. I have a very full life, so I’ve had to learn to be a gradualist, to run the marathon, though my natural inclination is to want to sprint. The world of publishing and self-publishing wants us to create in vast amounts or at regular intervals. Neither is really how our imagination, heart, or soul works. Good things need to mature, like good soy sauce or wine.
Where can readers find you on the Internet?
Starfallbook.info, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin.com (if you want to hear more about music/tech)
Starfall Book 1
Sci-fi/Historical Fiction
Publication Year: 2023
In this extended tale of sci-fi-meets-historical fiction, Xenia, a woman with an integrated artificial intelligence, embarks on a mission to repair a malfunctioning relay at the edge of the wilderness now called the Flood Zone. As the mission turns to disaster, Xenia and her security contractor find themselves confronting a greater mystery, one that eventually leads them to a strange town in the middle of nowhere, where nothing is quite as it seems.
The town, called Harmonie, has a long utopian history. Half-abandoned for years, it has been revived by a group of secretive scientists and artists, who are still dealing with the echoes of a long and complex American past. Its traces appear in a set of peculiar 19th-century documents that chronicle the life of a free-spirited woman, the long forgotten reformer and troublemaker Camilla Wright, which only deepens riddles lurking in the heart of the forest.
Content notes: The book contains strong language, sexual situations, some limited plot-appropriate violence, mild descriptions of characters’ past traumas
Book Excerpt from
Starfall Book 1
We spend the entire wretched day in alternating periods of panicked flight and pitiful exhaustion. Whoever the men are, they have friends and those friends are clearly upset with us. They tail us. We dash through the woods, trying to keep to the river. They follow. We lose them, try to rest—and then hear them off in the distance once more.
At some point, I twist my ankle. Will takes my pack. “If they get close, you go one way. I’ll go another.” I want to object, terrified at the thought of being separated from him, but he shakes his head and puts a finger to his lips. “No, no, you do as I say, X. Get back to the river once they’re gone. Stay put. I’ll find you.”
At nightfall, that very scenario unfolds. The mob returns. Will distracts them, firing and, by the shouts and cries of pain we hear, hitting our pursuers. I duck away, hobbling into the trees. After a time, the men’s voices recede. I have either escaped them, or they have given up.
I feel relief for a moment, then terrible, freezing-cold fear. Because now I face a different problem. I’m in the woods. It’s dark. And I am alone. I want to scream my friend’s name. Yet I’m afraid to call out for Will and alert the pack on our heels.
I stop. I try to collect myself. I am breathing so hard I can barely stand upright. My head is swimming with fatigue and hunger. But there has to be a way to solve this. I repeat this phrase, over and over, in my mind.
I move forward slowly and deliberately, controlling every step, moving from trunk to trunk in hopes of calming myself. My ankle throbs but feels better. Suddenly, I look up. A wall of cedar and juniper looms in front of me. It stretches off to either side into the deep darkness. But a small gap in the accidental hedge is glowing nearby. I cower, ducking away from it, wondering if it’s a fire, a settlement. Nothing at this moment could be more repulsive to me than humans. Except Will.
I ease over to the source of light and peek through the gap. It isn’t a house or a bonfire.
It is a pool, some stagnant cutoff from the river, glowing with eerie, sickly light. Its water is slicked with something foul. My heart quails. I stifle a scream. I am beholding a horror, a wound. Something has gone terribly, dreadfully wrong.
Yet the longer I stare at the pool, the more obvious its beauty becomes. A rainbow curls in the dark water at its edges. Gangly birds dip slender beaks into its colors. Their wings, impossibly long, spread like silken sails, glowing in the all the shades of summer. Other birds flash and shimmer above, darting from branch to branch. On the downed logs at the edge of the pool, lizards flicker like party holograms, like the casts that entertain infants. And there is a small herd of creatures I can’t name, strange hybrid things with fuzzy muzzles and great soft paws and scaly backs that glow softly. Their dark eyes blink serenely at me.
The dark eyes of the creatures are friendly. Filled with unfamiliar sentience. They will do me no harm. They might even protect me. The birds and lizards bloom like flowers. They entice. What does that water feel like against the skin? Warm and welcoming? Cool and invigorating?
The gap in the bushes is narrow. I push my way through. The rainbowed edge of the pool beckons. It’s very close. The birds and creatures stare at me, calm and undisturbed, as I approach.
“NO!” A voice screams behind me. A hand grips me, jerking me aside. Will yanks me away, his shirt pulled up over his face to cover his nose and mouth. I let him lead me. We hear our pursuers behind us. We run together.
As we tear through the forest, a beast rushes from the pool behind us and overtakes us. It shimmers with iridescence in the night. It darts in front of us, then turns left.
Will is about to head in a different direction, but I drag him after the beast. We leap a small cleft in the ground, then turn back toward the river. The beast takes us swiftly through the forest to the riverbank. As we emerge, to our shock, we see the two men and their comrades shining lights into the trees behind us, separated from us by a raging torrent sparkling with bioluminescent leaves. Will pulls me abruptly into the shadow of a nearby trunk. We carefully walk away, making as little sound as possible.
The beast is waiting for us. Then, when we catch up, it dashes on. When the men are far behind and their voices have faded, I tug at Will’s sleeve. “Do you see the creature up ahead?”
“Don’t fuck with me, X,” is his shaky reply. “I ain’t got the energy to deal with… Oh.” The beast is glimmering right in front of us. It gives a strange yip and gallops away. “Lord save me, yes.”
“It led us away from them…”
Will does something I’ve never seen him do before. He makes the sign of the cross over his chest. “I… we don’t have time to talk. Run.”
So we run. The creature doesn’t desert us. We sprint behind it and then when we’re too tired, we walk. Then we plod and limp. Lights are bobbing across my vision.
The sun begins to rise at last. The beast has vanished. We stop and listen and realize we likely lost our pursuers long ago. We stare blankly at each other. Will’s face is streaked with dirt. His clothes are even more torn and filthy than they were a day ago. He still has his weapon and my pack. His pack, however, is gone. And with it, our source of clean water.
Interested?
Find Starfall on Goodreads, Storygraph, IndieStoryGeek, and Amazon Thanks for taking the time to join us for this interview!
If you are an indie author and would like to do a book excerpt, check out my work with me page for details. Check out other book excerpts here.
Be First to Comment