Blog Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway: Tarnished Are The Stars by Rosiee Thor

Tarnished Are The Stars by Rosiee Thor released this week and we are thrilled to be a part of the blog tour and share with you a guest post all about music and a tour-wide giveaway!

Tarnished Are the Stars

by Rosiee Thor
Published by: Scholastic Press
on October 15, 2019
Genres: Young Adult, Sci-Fi
Bookshop, IndieBound, iTunes
Goodreads

The Lunar Chronicles meets Rook in this queer #OwnVoices science-fantasy novel, perfect for fans of Marissa Meyer and Sharon Cameron.

A secret beats inside Anna Thatcher's chest: an illegal clockwork heart. Anna works cog by cog -- donning the moniker Technician -- to supply black market medical technology to the sick and injured, against the Commissioner's tyrannical laws.

Nathaniel Fremont, the Commissioner's son, has never had to fear the law. Determined to earn his father's respect, Nathaniel sets out to capture the Technician. But the more he learns about the outlaw, the more he questions whether his father's elusive affection is worth chasing at all.

Their game of cat and mouse takes an abrupt turn when Eliza, a skilled assassin and spy, arrives. Her mission is to learn the Commissioner's secrets at any cost -- even if it means betraying her own heart.

When these uneasy allies discover the most dangerous secret of all, they must work together despite their differences and put an end to a deadly epidemic -- before the Commissioner ends them first.

Guest Post with Rosiee Thor

Our readers love knowing about music authors listened to while writing, or do you have a soundtrack to go with your book? 

Music is a constant in my writing process, so I always make a playlist when I decide I’m all in on a book. It’s a sort of pavlovian mind trick I play on myself–when the music is playing, I know it’s time to write. The music I pick has to be thematically relevant to the book AND it has to be tonally appropriate AND I have to like it enough that I’m willing to listen to it for the next several years on repeat. This playlist is going to be the soundtrack for my writing time for the foreseeable future and I will absolutely resent every song on it by the end.

I wrote Tarnished Are The Stars over the course of about five years. So I got really, really, really sick of the music on my playlist. As you might imagine, I took that as a grand procrastination opportunity to build a brand new playlist to get sick of along the way. In fact, I made three so I could have a different playlist depending on whose POV I was writing from.

I’m going to go ahead and share some of the music on this playlist, but I’m deeply embarrassed by my lack of elevated music tastes so don’t judge me too hard… I mostly just let my discover weekly tell me what to like so I cannot be held responsible if I picked terrible songs (them’s the rules!)

Here’s a selection of tracks on the TATS playlists:

I Found – Amber Run

A core theme of Tarnished is found family. This song speaks to the surprising ways and places the characters find love and friendship.

Heavy Heart – Handsome and Gretyl

This one’s pretty straightforward… they have metal hearts in TATS… the song’s about heavy hearts… they have literally heavy hearts but also they carry a lot of guilt about various things. A metaphor! Hooray! This song went on the Anna playlist initially, but it ended up on the full book playlist in the end.

I’ll Be Good – James Young

Even though this song is about very different topics that Tarnished, I always saw this as the essential Nathaniel playlist song. At any given point in the story Nathaniel is trying to meet other people’s expectations of goodness–his father wants him to be obedient, Anna wants him to be morally aligned with her… and Nathaniel chases that validation, desperately trying to be “good” based on other people’s definitions.

 You Don’t Own Me – Lesley Gore
(or one of the fun covers/remixes! I’m partial to the Brenna Whitakker cover, but I switched them out over the years to keep it fresh and funky)

This was absolutely an Eliza playlist ballad and it was the first song I added to the playlist dedicated to her. A huge part of Eliza’s story is about deciding to make her own choices and this song is big personal agency banger.

To Build a Home – The Cinematic Orchestra

This song found its way onto my playlist because of the relationship between Anna and her grandfather, but I feel it’s also relevant to a lot of other relationships at various points–Nathaniel and his father, Eliza and the Queen, Eliza and [redacted], Anna and [redacted]… SPOILERS GALORE! But this song is really about the idea of building space for someone and the emptiness left behind when they are no longer part of your life.

The full Tarnished Are The Stars playlist will remain in existence in a deep dark corner of my spotify, but I hope you enjoyed this peek into what has been the soundtrack of my writing life for the past few years. I’m so excited to never listen to any of these songs ever ever again!

Giveaway

Win a signed hard copy of TARNISHED ARE THE STARS by Rosiee Thor (US Only) Closes on 10/29/2019

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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