Virtual Book Tour for A Beginner's Guide to Invading Earth by Gerhard Gehrke

A Beginner's Guide to Invading Earth

by Gerhard Gehrke

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GENRE: Science Fiction

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BLURB:

What would you do if you found a dead alien on a lonely highway?

Was it an accident, sabotage, or murder? And why is everyone blaming Jeff?

The extraterrestrials aren’t waiting for answers. They want revenge. And Jeff isn’t ready for company.

His only hope is an outcast mechanic from another world and a woman who might do anything to get off planet, including selling out her own kind. Jeff has to get to the bottom of why there are so many alien bodies piling up and who is really responsible.

A science fiction adventure novel, A Beginner’s Guide to Invading Earth tells the story of a reclusive ex-computer programmer who is the unwitting central figure of a plot to keep humanity from ever making first contact.

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Excerpt:

First contact with the humans wasn’t going as planned, as was obvious by the rank smells that choked the air of the alien visitorsʹ craft. But no one called them aliens where they came from.

Seven little Greys, short bipeds with large heads and big eyes and delicate limbs, sat in the flight seats of their ship’s crew compartments and listened as the Mission Commander lectured them from the Command Module. The harangue lingered in the air, not as words or even sounds but as a smell, a ripe one replete with pheromones and scent packets that the Greys used to speak with one another. A new string of curses from the Commander’s glands smelled of licorice. The Mission Commander composed itself. It wiped sticky sweat from its hairless frontal lobe.

The lights and displays in front of the seven crewmembers blinked and flashed. No one would so much as touch a button until the Commander was finished addressing the crew.

“I’ll hear no more of it,” the Commander said. “We’re on the human world. We go forward. Probability calculations for success show at 100%. The computer will be trusted.”

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Gerhard Gehrke studied film at San Francisco State University. He wrote and produced several shows for community television. His Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror short stories have appeared in several publications, including an Editor’s Choice-winning short story at AnotheRealm.com. A Beginner’s Guide to Invading Earth is his first novel.

You can connect with him at Gerhardgehrke.com.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/gerhardgehrke

Facebook: www.facebook.com/gerhardgehrkeauthor   

Blog: www.capriciousnarrator.wordpress.com/   

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=a+beginner%27s+guide+to+invading+earth+

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-beginners-guide-to-invading-earth-gerhard-gehrke/1122581957

Also available on iBooks

Link to YouTube Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwExDzGD6Js

Guest post by Gerhard Gehrke 

Topic: What’s the first thing you remember writing?

In grade school two friends and I produced a regular series of Pac-Man comic books with dozens of reoccurring characters, convoluted plot lines, and questionable artwork. As my collaborators had input, I was forced to allow vampires and Shogun Warriors into the mix. The Shogun Warriors (giant Japanese robots) had Pac-Man heads and would invariably get involved into literally swirling brawls with dismemberments galore. The vampires would suck other characters dry so that they looked like shriveled mounds of Pac-Flesh that just lost an encounter with one of their world's ghosts.

My parents asked the math teacher about this, as it went on under his watch and I brought home each issue for them to see. He reasoned that we were getting our work done correctly and keeping ourselves busy. With the amount of weapons and violence in each issue, I am certain that today this would have gotten the three of us making the comics put into therapy and possibly suspended, and the teacher fired.

What I find interesting is one of my comic writers went on to putting himself through college while majoring in both math and computer science. He later wrote an essay on professional wrestling and why he was a fan. It addressed nicely how even low-brow entertainment serves a purpose and can bring us joy. I'd like to believe that his time making comics with me contributed a measure of happiness.

And the tragedy is that none of these comics exist anymore. Some things get thrown out to make room for more important things. I had a sizable comic collection too that served as an inspiration for the comics we made. The collection has since been sold for pennies on the dollar of the original cover prices.

I never did much drawing from that point forward, and the writing moved to long hand in spiral notebooks. What I remember best is the flurry of inspiration after charging through our math work so we could bring our nutty creations into their next adventure. 

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE

Gerhard Gehrke will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway