Blog Tour: Apocalypse Alley by Don Allmon ~ Guest Post #Giveaway

Author: Don Allmon
Title: Apocalypse Alley
Series: Blue Unicorn #2
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Cover Artist: Simone
Publication Date: February 26, 2018
Length: 201 pages

About Apocalypse Alley

Home from a six-month assignment to war-torn East Asia, genetically engineered supersoldier Noah "Comet" Wu just wants to kick back, share a beer, and talk shit with his best friend, JT. But JT's home has been shot up like a war zone, and his friend has gone missing.

Comet's only lead is a smart-mouthed criminal he finds amid the mess. His name's Buzz Howdy. He's a con man and a hacker and deserves to be in jail. Or in handcuffs, at least. The only thing the two have in common is JT. Unless you count the steamy glances they're sneaking at one another. They have those in common too. But that just makes Comet all the more wary.

Despite their mutual distrust, they'll have to work together to rescue JT before a cyborg assassin gets to him first. Racing down a miserable stretch of road called Apocalypse Alley, they must dodge radioactive spiders, a killer Buick, and rampaging cannibals. They also try to dodge each other. That last bit doesn't work out so well.

Buy Links

Riptide Publishing

Amazon

Hello, all! I’m Don Allmon and this week I’ll be touring the web to promote my new book, APOCALYPSE ALLEY, the second in the Blue Unicorn series.

If you’re looking for fast-paced cyberpunk/fantasy romance – Terminator 2 meets Fury Road with two sexy guys and a dragon – this is your jam.

Join in the fun by leaving a comment which enters you to win a Riptide gift card!

Cyberpunk Pinocchio

Back before I signed the contract with Riptide for the Blue Unicorn series, the editor suggested Book 2 be about a couple other than JT and Austin. I said, “No problem!” more enthusiastically than I should have because I had no effing idea who Book 2 would be about if not about my orc and elf.

A week of panic later I sat in a bar with a writer friend (much more accomplished than I) and laid out the problem: “I can do Buzz plus someone, but who and what? He can’t be human or an orc or an elf.”

“Dragon,” she said.

“Too all-powerful.” (And dragons are assholes, and not sexy ones. Sorry, dragon-shifter fans, but no.)

“Satyr.”

“Sexy. Too pastoral.” (Though I filed that idea away for later, and someday I’ll tell you about Benjamin the satyr who is hot af.)

“Cyborg,” my friend said.

“That’s the villain.” (This is why my writer friends don’t talk to me much. I ask for help and then say no to everything they suggest.)

“Frankenstein.” (She meant the monster, not the doctor.)

“That’s just a biological cyborg,” I complained. (See what I mean?)

But that idea stuck in my head and I slept on it and showered with it (all my good ideas come in the shower when I can’t write them down). And eventually I thought the chain of thoughts that you’ll find in Chapter 6:

Comet, rebuilt, was some kind of Frankenstein’s monster.

Except Victor Frankenstein had never loved his creation, and Buzz had no doubt that Duke loved Comet deeply.

A different story, then: Pinocchio.

I identify with the story of Pinocchio in so many ways. When I was a young man trying to work out who I was, Pinocchio’s misplaced desire to become a “real boy” made a powerful metaphor. Lampwick was so many of the wrong guys I found myself attracted to (Oh, Pleasure Island!!!). And now that I’m older, Geppetto’s desire for a son is far more understandable.

And though Pinocchio is all magic and fairy-wishes, its subject (like Frankenstein) is cyberpunk. At the risk of swinging way too academic, Pinocchio is about bodies as a technology of identity. (I’ll just leave that here for y’all to mess with.) Pinocchio is Spielberg/Kubrick’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence except with an ending that doesn’t break your heart.

I admit APOCALYPSE ALLEY doesn’t delve too deep into the Pinocchio metaphor or my thoughts on it (that’s why it’s here). I’d rather write about crashing cars and having sex. But if you’re wondering where Comet came from, there you have it: a talk with a friend who’s convinced I never listen to her suggestions, and a 78-year-old Disney flick. 

About Blue Unicorn

JT is an orc on the way up. He’s got his own boutique robotics shop, high-end clientele, and deep-pocketed investors. He’s even mentoring an orc teen who reminds him a bit too much of himself back in the day.

Then Austin shows up, and the elf’s got the same hard body and silver tongue as he did two years ago when they used to be friends and might have been more. He’s also got a stolen car to bribe JT to saying yes to one last scheme: stealing the virtual intelligence called Blue Unicorn.

Soon JT’s up to his tusks in trouble, and it ain’t just zombies and Chinese triads threatening to tear his new life apart. Austin wants a second chance with JT—this time as more than just a friend—and even the Blue Unicorn is trying to play matchmaker.

Check out the Blue Unicorn universe!

About Don Allmon

In his night job, Don Allmon writes science fiction, fantasy, and romance. In his day job, he’s an IT drone. He holds a master of arts in English literature from the University of Kansas and wrote his thesis on the influence of royal hunting culture on medieval werewolf stories. He’s a fan of role-playing games, both video and tabletop. He has lived all over from New York to San Francisco, but currently lives on the prairies of Kansas with many animals.

Connect with Don:

• Website: www.donallmon.com
• Twitter: @dallmon
• Pinterest

Giveaway

To celebrate the release of Apocalypse Alley, one lucky winner will receive a $20 Riptide credit! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on March 3, 2018. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info! 

Blog Tour: The Glamour Thieves by Don Allmon #Excerpt #Giveaway

Author: Don Allmon
Book: The Glamour Thieves
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Cover artist: Simone
Publication date: August 28, 2017
Length: 177 pages


Synopsis


JT is an orc on the way up. He’s got his own boutique robotics shop, high-end clientele, and deep-pocketed investors. He’s even mentoring an orc teen who reminds him a bit too much of himself back in the day.

Then Austin shows up, and the elf’s got the same hard body and silver tongue as he did two years ago when they used to be friends and might have been more. He’s also got a stolen car to bribe JT to saying yes to one last scheme: stealing the virtual intelligence called Blue Unicorn.

Soon JT’s up to his tusks in trouble, and it ain’t just zombies and Chinese triads threatening to tear his new life apart. Austin wants a second chance with JT—this time as more than just a friend—and even the Blue Unicorn is trying to play matchmaker.

Buy Links

Riptide Publishing

Amazon

Excerpt

Chapter One

Austin Shea was wearing the same damn Sanzi wraparound sunglasses and blue-and-green-flowered Hawaiian shirt he’d been wearing the last time JT had seen him. The same khaki pants, tight through the crotch and thighs, loose through the legs. Same shoeless feet like he was a druid and couldn’t lose touch with the ground without losing his power, which was almost true.
Austin took the sunglasses off, and his eyes glittered under the Arizona sky like gold-flecked emeralds. He let the glasses dangle from his fingers as he draped his arms over the winged-open door of the Corvette Dawnstrike FX27. He cocked his head and smiled his winning smile, lopsided. That meant he was about to lie his ass off.
“Hey, JT,” he said. “Been a while. Nice place ya got here.”
JT’s place: The yard was filled with recyclable scrap plastics and metals like it was a junkyard. The work sheds were prefab, and all of it was surrounded by a turreted wall that made the place look like a prison. There were a dozen urban-support vehicles all lined up in a row being prepped for shipping. Four-legged robots the size of Great Danes crawled among them, polishing. The air smelled of paint and desert heat.
JT folded his arms. “My place makes you trespassing. Get off my land.”
The smile didn’t let up. “I missed ya. You’re looking good.”
JT’s looks: Baggy overalls covered in axle grease and transmission fluid. Plastic baseball cap stained with six years of sweat that smashed his Mohawked hair down and made his green ears stick out even more than usual. He hadn’t shaved in four days.
JT nodded at the car. “Who’d you steal that from?”
“I didn’t ask his name.”
“I’m calling the police.”
“Fine. Go ahead. Christ. I can’t even say hi.”
They both turned away simultaneously, like they were reverse images of each other—an expression of frustration one had learned from the other, and who could say which one had done it first?
Neither of them moved. JT didn’t call the police.
The Corvette was a coupe on the old design. It was painted Event Horizon Black, same color they were using these days for stealth tech. Illegal in Pacifica. The car was rumored to get six hundred KPH on the magway, plenty of speed to make paste of yourself if you made a mistake. It was an off-balance kind of car, took the right touch to drive—a better touch than Austin had. It took a touch like JT had.
Just knowing that car was there, not even having to see it, made JT’s blood pump a little bit faster. Seeing it, yeah, JT went a little hard. And no, none of that had anything to do with Austin standing there, hair too long and falling over his eyes, long knife-ears swept back and pale in the sun, long, hard-muscled arm draped over the upturned wing of the open door. And thank god for baggy overalls, or Austin might have seen JT hard—might have thought it was him JT was hard for and gotten all kinds of wrongheaded ideas. It was the car, JT told himself. Only the car.
“You can’t bribe me with a stolen car, Austin.”
“Ain’t no need.”
“Because whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”
“Don’t want nothing, JT,” Austin said, the damned liar.
JT rubbed his hands on his coveralls, except now they were just as filthy as his hands, so he stripped out of them and left them lying there on the pavement, blue jeans and a Nochi’iru Kitty T-shirt underneath. He touched the fender of the car the same way old Catholics touched statues of the Virgin Mary, except there was nothing virgin about this car here.
JT circled around, and Austin circled around like they needed to keep the car between them. And maybe they did. JT slid into the driver’s seat, and Austin slid into the passenger’s side. The seat molded to JT’s broader frame and shorter legs, and still the cabin was a bit cramped. Had he been any bigger, he wouldn’t have fit. They never sized the nice cars for orc bodies. Orcs never got anything nice.
Austin said, “It’s unlocked.”
JT tapped the wireless key and initiated the handshake between his neurals and the car’s brain. “How did you even steal this thing? This is state-of-the-art. You shouldn’t have gotten five blocks without a police lockdown.”
“I’m not helpless.”
“How’d you do it?”
Austin ignored him, evasive as always.
Controls passed to JT’s neurals, and his senses bled into the car’s nav array. High-end as this array was, it took less than a second for the additional senses to integrate, all sliding together like oiled glass. He let out a shaky sigh. His sense of self slipped, a bit of vertigo, and now the car and his body were all one thing. He could feel the car’s engine the same way he could feel his own heartbeat. The dash lit with hologram displays. JT didn’t need them, but not many people had the built-in tech to the extent he had.
Austin jutted his chin out. “You aren’t going to comment on my beard?” What Austin called a “beard” was a patch of short dark peach fuzz on the point of his chin. It tapered out along the edge of his jaw.
“How long did it take you to grow?” JT kept it icy because he sure as hell didn’t want Austin thinking this car was going to work on him.
“Two years. Started it right after you left.”
“I suppose it just grew in like that. Didn’t have to trim it or shape it or anything.”
“Well, yes.”
JT shook his head. “Fucking elves.”
“You’re bound and determined not to pay me a compliment. You know I said you were looking good. Second thing I said to you.”
“But not the first thing. You don’t need me to stroke your ego.”
“Returning a compliment, it’s only polite.”
“Fine. You look like an elf. You’re gorgeous. Same as every other elf.”
“I’m going to pretend you meant that sincerely. Thank you. I’ve been working out.” Austin flexed a biceps, rock-hard and scar covered.
“You have not.”
“No, I haven’t. It’s all genetic.” He looked out the window. “So I fucked a guy until he fell in love with me and gave me the code to his car.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true. I’m a very good fuck.”
“I ain’t fucking you.”
“I ain’t this, I ain’t that—that’s all I’m hearing from you. When did you get so negative?”
JT laid his heavy hands on the dash and sighed. “What do you want?”
“I want you to drive this car. The way it’s supposed to be driven, not the half-assed way I drive it.”

About Don Allmon

In his night job, Don Allmon writes science fiction, fantasy, and romance. In his day job, he’s an IT drone. He holds a master of arts in English literature from the University of Kansas and wrote his thesis on the influence of royal hunting culture on medieval werewolf stories. He’s a fan of role-playing games, both video and tabletop. He has lived all over from New York to San Francisco, but currently lives on the prairies of Kansas with many animals.

Connect with Don:

• Website: www.donallmon.com
• Twitter: @dallmon
• Pinterest

Giveaway

To celebrate the release of The Glamour Thieves, one lucky winner will receive a $20 Riptide gift card! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on September 2, 2017. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!