Tigerpetal Press : Defying Gravity by Tony B. Richard

Earth’s Secret Alliance Book 4: Defying Gravity

Tony B. Richard

Published: December 26, 2022

Synopsis: In 1947, there’s an alien invasion looming and humankind’s best hope is a brilliant nineteen-year-old woman.
When the A-bomb ended the war, with a power unlike anything humans had ever witnessed, Mary Goss was driven to gain the knowledge to prevent another war from ever beginning. Now the Army has come calling, looking for “a few good men” for a top-secret project. Instead, they find that the best and brightest is Mary.
Much to Mary’s horror, the project reveals an alien invasion. Yet at every turn, her efforts to intervene are thwarted by small-minded engineers who can’t look past her gender and age. She’d dealt with her fair share of discrimination in university, but with the fate of the world on the line, there isn’t time to waste on petty differences.

Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Young Adult

Available in: eBook
Pages: 95

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Visit Tony B. Richard’s author website

As this book has a female protagonist, I most connected with it and her story. I am quite proud of the arc Mary’s character goes through, and while I can’t directly empathize with her struggles, being born almost 70 years after her, I still find her familiar.

The Process

This book, being the first with a female lead, was written slightly differently than the others. As Tony (the author) is a man, he happily accepted help from Lydia Payge in writing the protagonist, Mary Goss. I also played a large role in defining characters and their relationships with one another, which was part of the developmental editing stage.

The next stage of editing was all about reviewing beta comments and making changes so that the book was as true to the time period as possible, and so each of the scenes was as efficient as possible. In the end, I went through with a round of copyediting, and I am so happy with how it turned out.

As this is the fourth book of a series, no major changes needed to be made to the design, however, unlike the last three books in the series, this book will only be available in eBook format, but don’t worry; Volume 1, a collection of all five stories, will be available in print.

This is the first book in the series that wasn’t designed by Alex, who went on to other projects, but by an artist on Fiverr by the name of Lesia (username: germancreative). She did very well in matching Alex’s theme, imagery, and tone so the covers as a whole are consistent. I didn’t work with her at all directly, but I know that Tony is very happy with her work.