Blog Tour: Doomed by Tracy Deebs (Giveaway)

Hey y'all! Welcome to my stop in the Doomed blog tour. Thanks to Shane @ Itching for books, for the chance to be part of the blog tour for this amazing book..

For my stop, I have the honor of introduce you the incredible author Tracy Deebs!!

First off, thanks so much for hosting a stop on my blog tour!  I really appreciate it :)

7 Things You Might Not Know About Doomed… by Tracy Deebs

1. It’s a Pandora’s Box story

Pandora has always been a favorite of mine in Greek mythology and I’ve always thought she kind of got a bad rap.  She was created by Zeus and programmed with insatiable curiosity for the express purpose of  punishing the Titan Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods.  He’s smart enough to refuse the gift that Zeus offers him, but his brother, Epimetheus isn’t.  He marries Pandora and leaves her in possession of a box that they all know she shouldn’t open.  But she’s been created for just this purpose, so of course she opens the box and then she gets blamed for  unleashing evil when really she was only doing what she was created to do.

So when I told my agent I wanted to write a Pandora book, she and I did some brainstorming and about an hour into the conversation, she asks me “What if Pandora opened an attachment instead of a box?”  The concept fascinated me from the moment she came up with it and I spent the next few weeks buried in ideas and trying to figure out how they fit.  Eventually, I managed to piece everything —the MMO, the scavenger hunt, the email from her father, the blog, the countdown to nuclear annihilation—together the way I wanted it.  But it all started with that  one comment from my agent. 

2. Theo and Eli are Titans (straight out of Greek Mythology)

In the real Pandora myth, Prometheus (Theo in Doomed) and Epimetheus (Eli in Doomed) were charged with creating all the creatures on earth.  Epimetheus, the impetuous one, created things like the platypus and the sloth and the hippopotamus while Prometheus labored and labored over only one creature.  The gods gave them a certain number of gifts to give out to these creatures that they created and by the time that Prometheus was done with his creation—humanity—Eli had used all the gifts on the other animals.  So Prometheus stole fire from the gods as his gift for humanity and the gods’ answer was to create Pandora to punish him, as I mentioned above.  In Doomed, Theo steals symbolic fire from the gods in the form of the game matrix, Pandora opens a link instead of a box, and … there’s a lot more of the myth in the book but I don’t want to ruin all the twists and turns ;)

3. The research for Doomed was the hardest and most extensive I’ve ever done.

I spent months talking to dozens of software, hardware, electrical, telecom, power and control systems engineers (including my husband and his friends, whom I hounded nearly to death with questions about how things work and what was possible and what wasn’t).  I also spent a lot of time researching the Stuxnet worm (the worm unleashed by the US  and Israeli governments on the Iranian nuclear program).  I talked to numerous experts on the worm to find out how it worked and what they believe the future of cyber warfare will be now that this worm exists. I researched nuclear power plants in America as well as what precisely caused the meltdown at Fukishima and what would happen if a leak like that happened at an American nuclear plant (and even if it was possible, considering the design was flawed at Fukishima).  Plus, I talked to numerous sociology and psychology professors about the dynamics of Armageddon type incidents, did a lot of research on how massive epidemics would shift societal mores and watched a bunch of documentaries of what happens when societies collapse in on themselves.  Oh, and I also talked to three law enforcement officers and played a bunch of MMOs J

4. There’s a sort of love triangle in Doomed

The love triangle between Pandora, Epimetheus and Prometheus is one of the first love triangles ever written about and while I take liberties with it in Doomed, I didn’t feel comfortable writing it out—not when I wanted to stick as close to the myth as a modern techno story could.  But at the same time, I’ve definitely got a favorite, as do most of the readers, it seems.

5. The monsters Pandora, Theo and Eli fight in the game are all children of Gaia (Mother Earth).  I chose to do this because of the environmental aspects of the book and I wanted the added layer of the earth fighting against its own destruction.

6. The title, Doomed, is a shout-out to the first major MMO, Doom.

7. A lot of people think this is a stand-alone book, but I’m actually hard at work on its sequel.  Its working title is Splintered, but I don’t think that title will last.

 

Beat the game. Save the world.

Pandora’s just your average teen, glued to her cell phone and laptop, surfing Facebook and e-mailing with her friends, until the day her long-lost father sends her a link to a mysterious site featuring twelve photos of her as a child. Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora enters the site, where she is prompted to play her favorite virtual-reality game, Zero Day. This unleashes a global computer virus that plunges the whole world into panic: suddenly, there is no Internet. No cell phones. No utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, law enforcement. Pandora teams up with handsome stepbrothers Eli and Theo to enter the virtual world of Zero Day. Simultaneously, she continues to follow the photographs from her childhood in an attempt to beat the game and track down her father, her one key to saving the world as we know it. Part The Matrix, part retelling of the Pandora myth, Doomed has something for gaming fans, dystopian fans, and romance fans alike.

 

Tracy Deebs collects books, English degrees and lipsticks and has been known to forget where—and sometimes who—she is when immersed in a great novel. At six she wrote her first short story—something with a rainbow and a prince—and at seven she forayed into the wonderful world of girls lit with her first Judy Blume novel. From the first page of that first book, she knew she’d found her life-long love. Now a writing instructor at her local community college, Tracy writes YA novels that run the gamut from dark mermaids and witches to kissing clubs and techno-Armageddon stories… and she still has a soft spot for Judy Blume.
Find her: Website/ Twitter/ Goodreads

Don't forget to check out the other tour stops HERE to find awesome reviews, interviews and more things you don't know about this great book.

Now, for the giveaway, you have the chance to win 1 finished copy of Doomed. To 2 Winners. 

This giveaway is open to US entries only.

  

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