Today I’d like to welcome author Joseph Devon to my blog!
Joseph is currently touring around the web to promote book two in the Matthew
and Epp Stories, Persistent Illusions!
As part of his tour here on The Backseat Writer, he asked a character to write
you all a letter. Please allow me to post the letter for you to read:
Hi. My name’s
Madeline. The author guy? Mr Devon? He asked me to write this to you. I don’t
know why he picked me. I don’t have any fu--he also told me not to swear a lot.
Which shouldn’t be hard because I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to say
to you anyway. I’m sure Epp would have been a better choice but he’s probably
off giving grand speeches somewhere. Or Matthew. He’s new to all of this and
loves playing tour guide.
Ummm...I don’t
know. God I hate this. The last thing I want to be doing is writing a
letter to someone I don’t know. I don’t even write letters to people I do know.
I mean, well I can’t write letters to anyone I know because they all died a few
hundred years ago and all. Right. You probably want that explained.
See I’m what’s
known as a tester? I’m not alive. I died and when I did I was given a choice to
stick around on this stupid rock, or move on to whatever comes next. I chose to
stick around, mainly because Epp made it sound pretty good. Epp is kind of a
mentor for a lot of us. He’s like two-thousand years old so he knows where the
bathrooms are and shit. So when I died he was there to explain my choices to
me.
So I became a
tester. I’m supposed to enter your lives and make sure you’re living up to your
potential. I guess it’s not too bad. But it’s hard work a lot of the time. See
if I don’t periodically interfere in the life of one of you humans in order to
try and make you better than you are, I rot away. That’s why we’re called
testers. Because we test you.
I guess that
was obvious.
Whatever.
Anyway it’s haaaaard. Testing a human, if you like push them too much,
or they have too much potential when you engage, it can fucking kill you. And
even if you are successful and you get fed your energy and everything, you also
get crazy fucking tired and you go to sleep for decades. Up on a mountain.
That’s another
thing. I don’t know why I’m writing you a letter. I’ve been asleep for decades
up on Mount Everest. I was asleep all through the first book Mr. Devon wrote
and apparently I wake up about a third of the way through this one. Which
sucked, by the way.
After my last
push, that Einstein guy? I slept for seventy years, and I wake up and all this
shit is different. There’s been an uprising and a lot of testers who haven’t
been doing their fucking job and have rotted away, have actually been brought
back from near death. They stay a little rotted on some part of their body, but
otherwise they come back faster and stronger than us and, oh yeah, they eat us.
It’s like, “Good morning. Did you sleep well? Good job with Einstein. By the
way everything you knew about the world of testers is different. There’s a
civil war going on. You might get pounced on and eaten at any given moment. And
not in the fun way.”
Great. Point me
to the nearest opium pipe.
I mean, yeah.
So it’s maybe not that bad. There was a pretty big fight when the uprising
first started but the rotted ones were driven back. So that’s good. And it
turns out that just because you’re a back-from-the-dead rotted thing who can eat
our kind, that doesn’t mean you’re evil. A lot of them chose to figure out a
peaceful way to coexist. Yay for free will! So we have some of them on our
side, which is good because they can guard us.
Plus, well,
we’re pretty fucking bad-ass. I mean, I know I’m only a teenager, but I
interact with the universe on a subatomic level just like the rest of my crew.
Some are better at manipulating one way, some are better at another, some learn
faster, so it’s not like everyone can do everything, but, you know, when you
can mess with the universe on a subatomic level you can rip shit up.
Mary, the stuffy looking hot chick, can fry you with lightning. Bartleby? He’s
a walking inferno waiting to happen. Even I can...actually I can’t do anything.
I’m supposed to be this whiz with gravity but, um, no thank you? Because I’m
not going to mess around with gravity.
This isn’t even
my fight.
I was asleep,
right?
And I have to
wake up to this?
Fuck that.
Joseph Devon was born in New Jersey and currently lives in
New York. He’s been a student, a nanny, worked at the Ground Zero recovery
project after 9/11, and of all the things he’s created he is probably most
proud of the character Kyo. He writes a blog, enjoys photography and he’s also
at flickr, and tumblr, and twitter — sometimes he thinks that he might have one
too many social networking outlets. Joseph’s Annual Fan Art Contest has a lot
of great prizes to choose from for simply submitting art based on his books —
check it out at: http://josephdevon.com/contest/the-third-annual-joseph-devon-art-contest/.
Yet, over the past few months, a strained peace has settled over his world and Matthew is starting to feel like he can finally get back to training at his usual New York haunts.
However, things are more fragile than they appear. Nobody can see the stress lines already clawing away at the new peace. Nobody has guessed the toll that was taken on those at the forefront of their war. And, when a new tester wakes up with the power to possibly unravel the universe…well that’s when things really start to get interesting.
Come see how a zombie can protect and serve, a photographic memory can earn you a permanent place on Mount Everest, and a teenage drug addict can hold everyone’s fate in her nail-bitten fingers.
You can find the complete tour schedule on the Nurture Virtual Book Tour Blog.
Find & Follow Joseph Devon:
Author WebsiteGoodreads
Buy the Book:
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.ca
Barnes & Noble
Joseph is offering one lucky reader
the chance to win an eBook copy of Persistent
Illusions! To enter, use the nifty Rafflecopter widget below:
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Later Taters!
Tonia