Danita Minnis

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Robert Creekmore will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Author Interview

1. How did you choose your genre? What made you write this book?

I didn’t choose the genre. I just write what comes to my head. I don’t have any control over it.

I’m writing the Prophet’s Debt series to highlight the horrors of conversion therapy and to shine a light on religious zealots who make the lives of others who aren’t like them miserable.

2. Writers write what they know and must observe the world. Are you a firstborn, middle, or last child and how does this shape your view of the world?

I was the firstborn. I have one younger sibling. This has no effect on my view of the world.

3. Where is your favorite place to write?

I write at my desk. I have enough monitor space to allow me to have several documents open at once, which really helps.

4. How do you feel about killing your darlings, and what do you do with the remains?

I’m okay with it. Characters are tools used to teach lessons. Sometimes, that lesson includes showing the reader how valuable life is by demonstrating its finite nature.

5. You are introduced to your favorite author. Who is it, and what is that one burning question you must ask them?

I’d like to meet Ted Hughes so that I could fight him for the way he treated Sylvia Plath. Unfortunately, he’s dead.

6. You are stranded on a deserted island with only a backpack for company. What three items are in your survival pack?

A knife, preferably constructed of VG10 or 154CM steel.

A metal match.

550 cord.

7. If you could have one superpower in your existence, what would it be?

I’d go with Wolverine’s powers. I could deal with immortality and bone claws.

8. Favorite snack?

Blueberries.

9. Indy 500 – Do you know how to get where you’re going, or do you drive the speed limit? Driving in circles is pointless. I always try to move forward.

Prophet’s Lamentation

by Robert Creekmore

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GENRE:   Thriller

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BLURB:

Two years after Naomi murdered the serial killer and rapist Vernon Proffit, she is attempting to adjust to a quiet life with her wife, Tiffany. But Vernon’s flock is not done with her. Under new leadership, their numbers have swollen as they morphed from a single entity into a network of cultists called Apostles of the Cloven Hand.

Naomi has suppressed her abilities since killing Vernon, but she cannot ignore the voices of the young people the new flock tortures and molests. They scream for help in her dreams every night, causing her to question her own sanity.

When she uses her long-dormant abilities to stop an attempted gay-bashing, Naomi’s true identity is exposed. The cult sends an assassin to kill Naomi and her family, forcing them to flee the state while the Apostles move to take everything the family has built.

Naomi fought the cult before and won. But that was before she had her chosen family to worry about. Now, she must choose between hiding on her own to keep her family safe or fighting back to destroy the Apostles. If she hides, the Apostles will continue to victimize those near them. If she fights, her family will be at risk of the same fate they plan for Naomi.

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Excerpt:

“Even after your enemies’ defeat, they are still with you.”

Those are Nate’s words. I hear them whenever I wake up screaming and fighting in the middle of the night. Tiffany has similar episodes.

How do you build an ordinary life when you’re not, well, ordinary? Terror and fury molded me for eleven years. That abruptly ended with the death of Vernon Proffit and his acolytes. Sure, there was a period of celebration following. After vengeance, the anger never completely subsides. Don’t interpret that as regret; some motherfuckers need killing.

What bothers me is that before I fed Vernon to the Atlantic Ocean, the screams that woke me were my own as I relived trauma.

The abilities my guide, Mara, gifted me are still intact, but I choose to shut myself off from them. However, now something new comes pulsing forth from the ground that I have no control over. I’m stirred from sleep by the horrors others are experiencing. They cry out for help, but I don’t know how to save them. Mostly, they’re abused young people. Their voices drive me mad. If I could only find them, maybe I could stop their suffering. Last night, it was a young man named Vincent. I couldn’t see where he was. I could only hear him wail in pain as he experienced abject hopelessness.

But I attempt to tarry forward.

Today, I should be happy. It’s July twentieth, two-thousand-six; my twenty-seventh birthday as Naomi Pace. Legally, as Hannah Sillman, I’m thirty-four and will turn thirty-five on Christmas day. That birthday is celebrated more ominously, as the real Hannah rests with her mother, Milly, under an old oak tree high up in the hills of Yancey County. Her father, Al, gifted me with this new life by giving me her identity for my eighteenth birthday. He was more of a father than my own, Amos, who beat me mercilessly when he found out that I was in love with Tiffany. I still am. Their hate and violence couldn’t destroy that.

I won. Why am I still so sad? Why do I disregard my own life, feeling guilty about those I couldn’t save, like Charles? He died during our escape. There was nothing I could do. I know that, logically, but I can’t convince my heart of it. It eats at me with each heartbeat, saying, ‘you could have done more.’ It does so now, at four-thirty in the morning. I’m sitting up in bed with no one to speak with. I don’t dare wake my beautiful bride, Tiffany, as she sleeps soundly next to me.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Robert Creekmore is from a rural farming community in Eastern North Carolina.

He attended North Carolina State where he studied psychology. While at university, he was active at the student radio station. There, he fell in love with punk rock and its ethos.

Robert acquired several teaching licenses in special education. He was an autism specialist in Raleigh for eight years. He then taught for four years in a small mountain community in western North Carolina.

During his time in the mountains, he lived with his wife Juliana in a remote primitive cabin built in 1875. While there, he grew most of his own food, raised chickens, worked on a cattle farm, as well as participated in subsistence hunting and fishing.

Eventually, the couple moved back to the small farming community where Robert was raised.

Robert’s first novel Afiri, is a science fiction love letter to his childhood hero Carl Sagan. It was nominated for a Manly Wade Wellman award in 2016.

Robert’s second novel is the first in a trilogy of books. Annoyed with the stereotype of the southeastern United States as a monolith of ignorance and hatred, he wanted to bring forth characters from the region who are queer and autistic. They now hold up a disinfecting light to the hatred of the region’s past and to those who still yearn for a return to ways and ideas that should have long ago perished.

Amazon buy link: https://www.amazon.com/Prophets-Lamentation-Robert-Creekmore-ebook/dp/B0BZ6MRPVW/

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