Blog Tour: The Heart Forger by Rin Chupeco Author Q&A + Giveaway

Hello everybody! Today I’m here participating in The Heart Forger tour! I have a review of me gushing about the first and second one down below if you haven’t seen it, so I’m excited to help Rin Chupeco promote her book!

Author: Rin Chupeco

Publisher:  Sourcebooks Fire

Publication Date: March 20th 2018

Format: E-ARC

*I’m a Book Depository Affiliate 🙂

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Goodreads Synopsis: In The Bone Witch, Tea mastered resurrection―now she’s after revenge…

No one knows death like Tea. A bone witch who can resurrect the dead, she has the power to take life…and return it. And she is done with her self-imposed exile. Her heart is set on vengeance, and she now possesses all she needs to command the mighty daeva. With the help of these terrifying beasts, she can finally enact revenge against the royals who wronged her―and took the life of her one true love.

But there are those who plot against her, those who would use Tea’s dark power for their own nefarious ends. Because you can’t kill someone who can never die…

War is brewing among the kingdoms, and when dark magic is at play, no one is safe. 

Series Review: The Bone Witch { The Bone Witch #1 }; The Heart Forger { The Bone Witch #2 }

The line between hero and villain becomes a bit more muddled in this installment. How did you decided Tea was going to deal with this? How did you want this to affect the people around her?

I wanted to concentrate on an idea that not a lot of authors usually tackle, which is the We Are All Problematic concept. What we believe is good and honest about ourselves is not necessarily something that other people see, and context and experience plays an important role in how we process other people’s behavior. I wanted Tea to do good things and also do bad things; more importantly, I want readers to see Tea doing bad things in a way that they can understand her motivations, even if they can’t sympathize with them. That’s exactly how other characters around her interpret her situation as well.

Both sides think that they’re the good guys. And the people that I might imply as the bad guys in relation to Tea as a protagonist isn’t necessarily going to do a lot of the bad things that happen in the book. In certain scenes, Teas going to come off as the villain instead. And trying to strike that balance between sympathetic villain and antagonistic hero is one of the more difficult things I’ve had to juggle when writing The Heart Forger.

In the last book, The Bard was a character used to show how present day Tea was doing, yet he wasn’t  really in the forefront of the story. Was the decision to make The Bard a more prominent character something that came up easily?

With The Bone Witch, every idea I was introducing was still new, and so I wanted to limit the bards role in it until details have been hammered down and readers grow accustomed to the general mythology/setting of the universe. There’s a lot of world-building that I wanted to focus on first, and I decided to make things more linear with the main plot thread, albeit through dual perspectives.

But the bard does have an important role to play in the trilogy, and as his importance becomes more apparent, his participation in the present timeline also grows. While some people might think the bard is just a vehicle I used to compare past-timeline Tea and present-timeline Tea, hell also play a significant role in other areas – the third book in particular. There’s a reason Tea singles him out to be her storyteller. There’s a reason the bard doesn’t tell us his name, and there’s also a reason why Tea refuses to call him by it. The specifics weren’t fully fleshed out yet while I was working on The Bone Witch, but I already had a general idea of the part I wanted him to play for the series, but it all won’t come to a head until the third and final book.

The magic system in this series is one I find very unique, from heartglasses to daeva- did the world building come naturally or was it something that had to be stewed on for some time?

Thank you! I’m a plantser (pantser/plotter hybrid), and despite the complexities of some of my world-building I don’t work out all the details at the start. I come up with some very basic notions and laws of how I want the magic to work, and then hone the specifics further with every chapter I write. I try to take careful notes in case one instance of the magic casting contradicts something I specified earlier, so I can go back and try to find some way to join the two ideas – or discard one of them altogether if that wasn’t possible. The method of determining how asha cast runic magic, for example, wasn’t completely locked down until I wrote the chapter where the asha, Hami, was showing Tea the limits of casting large and small runes, where drawing small runes would be quicker to use in close battle but wont be as powerful, while larger runes will be more devastating in a fight, but take longer to cast. Of course, the more laws you weave into the system, the harder its going to be to keep track! Half the time its the plotholes related to these that drive me utterly bonkers.

What do you hope people take away from your books?

I’d like to do away with the whole idea of the strong woman trope altogether, and I hope The Heart Forger does that. I’d like to show people that asha, the most beautiful women in the kingdoms, come in all shapes and sizes – thin, fat, blondes, brunettes, redheads, pale, dark-skinned, straight and gay. That some can fight and some can’t, that some excel in the arts and love pretty feminine things, but they are all powerful strong women in their own right. None of them are perfect, but that none should be held to that kind of standard, anyway.

Last question: Do you have any future books that you’re working on at the moment?

My Mad Max-ish series, The Never Tilting World, will be out next year! It’s about twin goddesses each exiled to the opposite ends of a world that has stopped moving, where day and night – and the extreme weather conditions associated with both – are just as deadly as the political factions and deadly monsters appearing in its aftermath. Now the goddesses have to figure out a way to heal the world before time runs out and the world is ripped apart.

Another WIP I have at the moment, which hopefully shall be out by 2020, is about a world where fairy tale heroes are real historical figures, and where a Scottish-Filipino teen descended from the magical Maria Makiling line allies with an exiled prince to take back his homeland, Avalon, from the Snow Queen after his family’s most powerful weapon – the firebird – lands on her doorstep.

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Thank you so much for answering my questions! I cannot wait for the final Bone Witch installment and any future works coming up !

Despite an unsettling resemblance to Japanese revenants, Rin always maintains her sense of hummus. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, she keeps four pets: a dog, two birds, and a husband. Dances like the neighbors are watching.

She is represented by Rebecca Podos of the Helen Rees Agency. She is also fond of speaking in the third person, and may as well finish this short bio in this manner. While she does not always get to check her Goodreads page, she does answer questions posed to her here as promptly as she is able to. Find her at the following places instead:

Website | Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest

Don’t go yet, we have a giveaway! Enter to win a copy of The Heart Forger, a copy of The Bone Witch, and 3 crochet dolls of Tea, Fox and an Azi… and it’s International!

 

Enter Here.