Today, The Warbler is glad to feature RH Webster, another contestant in the Inkshares / Nerdist contest. Her novel, Lucky, sounds like a wonderful space-romance. Check it out!
About the book:
This novel is everything a reader could want from a space opera: space ships, romance, mystery, bar brawls, and a high speed car chase!
Lucky is the story of down-on-her-luck graduate student Cassandra “Lucky” Luckenbach, who has been stranded on a far-flung, dusty, run down mining colony on the planet known as San Pedro. After working odd jobs around the colony for close to three years, she finally saves up enough money to get back to her family on Earth. She books passage on the freighter Rosebud (the spaceship), unaware that one of the crew members had been killed the night before (the bar brawl). She is offered an opportunity to work her way back to Earth as an administrative assistant to the ever-confusing, often-grumpy commander of the Rosebud, Trigg Donner.
What neither Trigg nor Lucky planned on was the attraction they feel for each other (the romance), nor the strange goings-on that continue to occur on board the ship as they make their way to Puerto Nuevo (the mystery). Life only gets stranger as they find themselves embroiled in a smuggling scandal (the high speed car chase, another bar brawl) and they’re forced to make difficult decisions in order to save what is most important to them.
About RH Webster:
I have been telling stories since I was old enough to hold a pen in my hand. Before I knew how to write, I would draw unbelievably bad stick figure cartoons with dramatic titles such as “Baby Deer by a Fireplace” or “Mermaid Seeks Lost Sister”. Finally, to every one’s joy, I stopped drawing and started writing stories. My first stories were the typical fan fiction and fantasy stories one would expect from a shy pre-teen kid with very little social life. As I aged, my writing aged with me and I like to think became something actually worth reading.
Lucky arose my final year of graduate school. I had recently gotten married and had only 12 hours before put my new husband on a military transport plane to do a nine-month tour of Afghanistan. I was taking his pick up home from El Paso, Texas to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The drive regularly takes 21 hours, even with excellent interstates connecting the two places. I was bored, there was nothing to look at in west Texas, and one can only sing along to “Fat Bottom Girls” before being bored to death. I began to imagine a universe with far flung mining colonies on dusty and inhospitable planets connected by a network of interstellar highways and only occasionally visited by freighters and military transports. By the time I reached the eastern border of Texas, I had my first notes for Trigg and Lucky scratched on napkins and ready to go.
Q: What about your universe really excites you?
A: One thing I loved about the universe and is a theme I like to keep going throughout this book and the draft for its sequel is the distance from Earth, where the central government resides, and the far flung colonies that supply Earth with income and valuable materials. While nominally the central government runs the colonies, mostly they govern themselves, relying mainly on martial law to keep criminals in check.
The second thing I enjoy weaving into the story is the fact that paper books are no longer produced. All literary content is produced and distributed digitally. However, the numerous books that are already in existence are locked into vaults in universities and are only seen by the extremely wealthy and privileged. However, a few beat up copies of some books still exist around the rest of the colonies, where they can be bought and sold in flea markets. This element of the universe actually leads to several interesting scenes between my protagonists.
