I’ve had new covers designed for my SKY RAIDERS series, and to celebrate, I’ve made Sky Raiders free from today until September 12th. To get your copy on Amazon, you can click here.
Category Archives: Sky Raiders
Release Day for Shadow Warrior (with Giveaway!)
Shadow Warrior is now available!
The last book in the SKY RAIDERS trilogy, SHADOW WARRIOR, is now for sale on Amazon.
For all my new release notification subscribers, please feel free to enter the following Rafflecopter giveaway. There are five copies of Shadow Warrior up for grabs!
About SHADOW WARRIOR:
Taya and Garek have survived the worst of what the sky raiders and their own fellow Illians have thrown at them. But now, they’ll have to deal with both their enemies working together.
As three of the Illian states close in on what they see as the weakness of West Lathor, Garek and Taya have to shore up their defences, call in favors, and forge friendships with whoever they can to protect their friends and family. When the signs that there is an alliance between an Illian liege and the sky raiders becomes harder to ignore, they have to face the fact that they may be defeated.
The arrival of a new group of sky raiders, looking for information and help, opens up a new possibility. Garek sees no choice but to make a deal with the devil, but the gamble is, will the enemy of their enemy help them, or betray them?
I hope my readers find the last book a satisfying ending to what has been a great series to write. I’ve loved Taya and Garek since I first thought them up 🙂
Other New Releases:
I just released a new short novel, INSURGENCY, which is set in the VERDANT STRING world, and I boxed it together with INTERFERENCE, the novella also set in the VERDANT STRING which appeared last year in the ORPHANS IN THE BLACK anthology. INTERFERENCE & INSURGENCY is now available.
Happy reading!
Best wishes
Michelle
Calling the Change Release Day (With Sky Raiders Free!)
I’m thrilled to announce the release of CALLING THE CHANGE, the second book in the SKY RAIDERS trilogy, and to also let my readers know that from July 17 -July 21, SKY RAIDERS, the first book in the series, is free on Amazon.
Buy Calling the Change
Get Sky Raiders for free
About Calling the Change:
He rescued her despite impossible odds—Garek has rescued Taya and the rest of his village from the sky raiders, but their return home doesn’t bring easier times. The sky raiders aren’t simply going to go away—they still need the shadow ore they came for, and they want the ships Garek stole from them back. But they aren’t the only threat . . .
First she was in danger from the aliens who abducted her, now she’s in danger from her own people—Taya’s been rescued, but she isn’t home a week before she’s taken again, this time by men who walked the walls with Garek. They’ve taken her as a consolation prize of sorts, having failed to get hold of Garek himself. They think Taya’s value to the people they’re working for is her relationship to Garek, but they are wrong . . .
Garek and Taya never gave up on each other before, even when the distance between them was impossibly far, and they aren’t giving up on each other now. As Garek searches for her, and Taya engineers her escape, they discover the motivations behind the new attacks on them are darker than the endless reaches of space they’ve just escaped from.
Exclusive Excerpt: Calling the Change
For those of you wanting an early taste of what you’ll find in Calling the Change, the second Sky Raiders novel, hop on over to USA Today to read an exclusive excerpt. Calling the Change will release on July 17th, and it is available for preorder on Amazon.
About Calling the Change:
He rescued her despite impossible odds—Garek has rescued Taya and the rest of his village from the sky raiders, but their return home doesn’t bring easier times. The sky raiders aren’t simply going to go away—they still need the shadow ore they came for, and they want the ships Garek stole from them back. But they aren’t the only threat . . .
First she was in danger from the aliens who abducted her, now she’s in danger from her own people—Taya’s been rescued, but she isn’t home a week before she’s taken again, this time by men who walked the walls with Garek. They’ve taken her as a consolation prize of sorts, having failed to get hold of Garek himself. They think Taya’s value to the people they’re working for is her relationship to Garek, but they are wrong . . .
Garek and Taya never gave up on each other before, even when the distance between them was impossibly far, and they aren’t giving up on each other now. As Garek searches for her, and Taya engineers her escape, they discover the motivations behind the new attacks on them are darker than the endless reaches of space they’ve just escaped from.
Release Celebration for Sky Raiders (with giveaway): Day 2
Welcome to the Release Celebration for Sky Raiders
Sky Raiders is the first book in Michelle’s new space opera series. Michelle has a message below and if you miss the Friday post, you can go HERE, and on Tuesday, December 20th, you can go HERE to read about how the book came together. Definitely check out the giveaway below as well. Enjoy!
Sky Raiders
(Sky Raiders #1)
by Michelle Diener
Adult Sci-Fi, Space Opera
ebook, 349 Pages
December 15th 2016
First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.
Garek’s one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.
Taya can’t bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she’s lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he’ll look, but he’ll never find her.
She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they’ll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they’ve given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that’s exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.
What Taya doesn’t realize is she’ll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn’t giving up on finding her. And he’s even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.
Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.
Star-crossed Lovers Who Won’t Bow to Their Fate
The official definition of star-crossed lovers is two people who love each other deeply but cannot be together because fate is against them. Whatever is written in their stars means they are doomed to never find happiness, never be together.
Obviously, this is not a HEA or even a HFN situation 🙂
Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde . . . they’re the gold standard of star-crossed lovers, but when I was writing Sky Raiders, I thought a lot about the concept, because I kept thinking of Garek and Taya, my hero and heroine, as star-crossed, but only to a point. They love each other, and fate keeps them apart, but neither of them accepts this.
Garek throws caution to the wind and never lets the obstacles in front of him even slow him down in his determination to get to Taya. And she, equally, is driven not only to survive, but also to work a way out of her situation, because she will not give up her desire to be with Garek again.
It was so much fun, but also really poignant, to write a love story like Garek and Taya’s, and I loved every minute of it. I hope my readers enjoy it just as much. Tristan and Isolde, but without the downer at the end 🙂
–Michelle
Michelle Diener is the award-winning, bestselling author of the Class 5 series. She writes historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction and lives in Australia with her husband and two children.
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Release Celebration Giveaway
10 winners will receive a ebook of Sky Raiders
Open internationally
Ends December 22nd
Release Celebration for Sky Raiders (with giveaway): Day 1
It’s a fun coincidence that the SFR Brigade Showcase (click link for more giveaways & posts from other great SFR authors) coincided with my release of SKY Raiders, so for those on the SFRB Showcase trail, please read on for more information about my new release, and enter the Rafflecopter giveaway below!
Welcome to the Release Celebration for Sky Raiders
Sky Raiders is the first book in Michelle’s new space opera series. Michelle has a message below and you can come back on Sunday, December 18th, HERE to learn about her leading characters, and on Tuesday, December 20th, HERE to read about how the book came together. Definitely check out the giveaway below as well. Enjoy!
Sky Raiders
(Sky Raiders #1)
by Michelle Diener
Adult Sci-Fi, Space Opera
ebook, 349 Pages
December 15th 2016
First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.
Garek’s one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.
Taya can’t bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she’s lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he’ll look, but he’ll never find her.
She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they’ll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they’ve given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that’s exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.
What Taya doesn’t realize is she’ll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn’t giving up on finding her. And he’s even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.
Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.
My Roots Are Showing
My latest novel, SKY RAIDERS, the first book in a new space opera trilogy, is in many strange ways a return to my writing roots.
While I wrote fantasy and even time travel novels before I was published by Simon & Schuster in 2011, my first published books were all historical novels.
I’ve always been a voracious reader of historicals, fantasies and science fiction, and I’ve always felt that they sit together comfortably because they are all, to a greater or lesser degree, true escapism. I find it as challenging, technically, to write a historical scene as a science fiction scene, needing to draw on the world I’m working with and its rules to create something believable. In historicals, this means research and in science fiction or fantasy, this means the rules and backstory I have made up.
As I worked on the Sky Raiders series, with SKY RAIDERS the first novel, and it was only after a while that I realized I was writing a novel that easily mirrored the invasion of Kwa-Zulu Natal by the Victorian Empire that I’d written about in my historical novel DAUGHTER OF THE SKY, as it was about a planet, Barit, invaded by aliens who were far more technically advanced.
That Victorian theme continued when I was thinking hard about the way one of the cultures on Barit treat their women. The idea of putting women on a pedestal as a way to disempower them is extremely Victorian. The Victorians pretended they were honoring the feminine, but instead were condescending to women by denying them experiences and power ‘for their own good’. But I obviously like to mix things up, because rather than a Victorian level of technology on Barit, the level is more analogous to the Renaissance, with walled cities. But I didn’t stop there. Into the mix, I threw the Hallstatt Culture. This Celtic culture which gets its name from Hallstatt, near Salzburg in Austria, has always fascinated me, and there are definite threads of this culture in the people of Barit.
Another fun tradition I incorporated was the Viking Clap – although it isn’t exactly the same in Sky Raiders, the inspiration definitely comes from this. (Those who want to see it in action, performed by 100,000 Icelanders on the triumphant return of the Icelandic soccer team after a big win during the European Cup, can check it out here. The Viking Clap wasn’t actually invented by the Icelanders, it’s from Motherwell in Scotland, but whoever is doing it, it’s awesome to watch. And staying with Iceland, I also used their real women’s Day Off, which happened in 1975, where over 90% of Icelandic women took a day off and didn’t do any work to protest their lower pay (60% of what men were earning) and the general inequality of women in the workforce. Laws were past the following year guaranteeing gender equality in the workforce (the Day Off literally shut the country down for the day) and although true change was a little slower, Iceland does now have one of the highest levels of gender equality in the workforce in the world.
I think it was inevitable that my years of writing historicals would find a way to touch my science fiction work, and I had a lot of fun, and gave a lot of thought, to the use to which I put my historical background. I think fictional cultures with some basis in real culture, however much of a mix they are, make for a more believable, more interesting world, and I hope my readers think so, too.
–Michelle
Michelle Diener is the award-winning, bestselling author of the Class 5 series. She writes historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction and lives in Australia with her husband and two children.
Goodreads │ Facebook │ Twitter │ Pinterest
Release Celebration Giveaway
10 winners will receive a ebook of Sky Raiders
Open internationally
Ends December 22nd
Sky Raiders Release Day
I’m so happy to say Sky Raiders is out today.
I started writing it over three years ago, and so it has been mulling in my head for a long time. It felt so good to finish it and now to have it available to my readers!
About SKY RAIDERS:
First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.
Garek’s one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.
Taya can’t bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she’s lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he’ll look, but he’ll never find her.
She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they’ll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they’ve given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that’s exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.
What she doesn’t realize is she’ll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn’t giving up on finding her. And he’s even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.
Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.
SKY RAIDERS is the first book in the Sky Raiders series, and book 2, Calling the Change, should be available mid-2017.
New book, Sky Raiders, will be released December 15th
I’m really happy to say I have a final date for the release of SKY RAIDERS: December 15th.
In the meanwhile, readers can download the first two chapters from Book Funnel, here, and if you’d like to pre-order, that is possible, too. 🙂
More about SKY RAIDERS:
First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.
Garek’s one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.
Taya can’t bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she’s lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he’ll look, but he’ll never find her.
She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they’ll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they’ve given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that’s exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.
She does have an idea of how she can break free–the sky raiders have brought them to Shadow to mine for ore. A very special ore which Taya has worked out is as dangerous to the sky raiders as it is valuable.
What she doesn’t realize is she’ll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn’t giving up. And he’s even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.
Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.