Guest Post by K.S. Augustin author of The Complete Check Your Luck Agency

Today my friend Kaz has a guest post about world building in her book The Complete Check Your Luck Agency.  (Scroll down to the next post or click here to read my review)  Before you read how she cheated you should know a little about her.  

After you read her post be sure to leave a comment as Kaz is giving away a $25.00 Amazon gift card to one lucky commenter on the tour.  

KS "Kaz" Augustin loves writing human stories, whether set on Earth or out among the stars. Malaysian-born, she has travelled a goodly portion of the world and lived to tell the tale! Her urban fantasy release, The Complete Check Your Luck Agency, consists of five books, exploring the myths and legends of the melting-pot that is south-east Asia. Come for the food, stay for the monsters! (Ghosts included at no extra charge.)

As if all that's not enough, she's also ChiefEditor of the free online quarterly magazine, Sci-Fi Romance Quarterly.http://www.scifiromancequarterly.org/

Worldbuilding and Checking Your Luck

I'm supposed to talk to you about world-building today; specifically, how I did it for The Complete Check Your Luck Agency. That's easy and will take two words: I cheated.

You see, the idea of The Check Your Luck Agency came to me when I was listening to a taxi-driver. We were on our way to Suntec City in Singapore, and had to pass the Marina Sands resort, still under construction. I'm not sure if I can fully relate the kind of modern, skyscraper newness around Singapore. The towers of blinding white and blue tinted glass rising out of thick greenery, cut through by six-lane freeways. Arcs and bubbles, bridges resembling nets, theatres looking like thorned fruit, all gleaming and polished to the last square centimetre. And, in the middle of all this modernity, my Indian taxi-driver was telling me about the curse on his newly-born son, the brother and sister-in-law responsible for it, and the priests and bomohs (witch-doctors) he had been consulting in order to get the curse lifted. I'm a writer so I knew there was a good story in all this. What my taxi-driver was telling me was no different to other stories I'd heard since coming back to live in Malaysia. All I had to do was open my ears and eyes, listen and observe.

And that's what I did. To be honest, I had to leave out more material than I put in, and I still ended up with 227,000 words, spread across five books! This is in complete contrast to how I normally work, where I build up elements of my universes and then populate as I see fit. (So sorry, Jo, no great insights in this particular post!) South-east Asia is just so...huge, so full of myths and legends that I had to be honest with myself from the beginning and come to terms with the fact that I was barely going to scratch the surface of the region.

As an added benefit, you'll also find an extensive glossary at the back to help the reader, and explanations and descriptions of the local food. One reviewer said that the Check Your Luck books are “food porn”, a term that really tickled me, so I'll mention that here. I've also tried to keep the characters and way of speaking as authentic as possible. If you're interested in an urban fantasy that takes place absolutely outside of a Western setting, with lots of food (lol), I'd be happy for you to join the Check Your Luck gang and try your luck against the latest bad guy set to take over the world!

Remember, Kaz is giving away a $25.00 Amazon gift card to one lucky commenter on the tour.  

Follow the tour and comment; the more you comment, the better your chances of winning. The tour dates can be found here: 

http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2014/04/virtual-book-tour-complete-check-your.html

Links:

Kaz's website is at http://www.KSAugustin.com and a list of her books can also be found at http://www.SandalPressOnline.comShe occasionally tweets as @SandalPress

The Complete Check Your Luck Agency is available from:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IJZQ106

Amazon UK:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00IJZQ106

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/complete-check-your-luck-agency/id836499220?mt=11&uo=4

Barnes & Noble:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-complete-check-your-luck-agency-ks-augustin/1118612994?ean=9780987317483

OmniLit: https://www.omnilit.com/product-thecompletecheckyourluckagency-1325285-234.html

Tomely:http://sandalpress.tomely.com/the-complete-check-your-luck-agency

The Complete Check Your Luck Agency by K.S. (Kaz) Augustin

Paranormal Mystery

FromGoodreads:

After the tragic death of her parents, and with nothing left tying her to the United Kingdom, Ursula Formosa returns to her homeland of Malaysia and a job with the eccentrically-named Singapore firm, “The Check Your Luck Agency”.

What begins as an attempt to stave off boredom turns into a new way of life as the scales drop from Ursula’s eyes and she tentatively enters a realm that contains vengeful ghosts, toyol, demons, pontianak and curses, not to mention old-fashioned fraud and larceny. As she befriends bomohs, mediums and a young woman already centuries old, Ursula’s ideas of friendship expand into a fresh view of the world that surrounds her.

But she isn’t going to be left to ease into things. A criminal mastermind, who is also a powerful sorcerer, is gathering mythical creatures to help him possess every living soul in Singapore, and he isn’t about to let the members of  The Check Your Luck Agency stand in his way!

I discovered K. S. Augustin’s books when I purchased my first e-reader and found her Science Fiction books at Fictionwise.  Both my eBookwise eReader and Fictionwise are long gone but I have stayed a Kaz Augustin fan. 

While Kaz usually writes Science Fiction The Complete Check Your Luck Agency is different.  It is set in today’s world and is a paranormal mystery filled with both great human and paranormal characters.  Look for vampires that are different, a cat that is not what he seems, and many, many ghosts.  Those are just a few of the paranormal creatures that come to life in the book.

The setting is perfect.  Singapore is a cross roads for Southeast Asia.  It is very modern in some areas and not so modern in others.  There is a diverse population to draw from and right across the border is Malaysia to add even more to the mix.

The Complete Check Your Luck Agency uses all of these factors to tell a fast moving, riveting story.  Ursula Formosa is drawn into a world she did not believe existed and must join with others from The Check Your Luck Agency to prevent evil from spreading.

The story is told in five parts each labeled a book (each about 100 pages).  Together they make a large book with some repeat as each section has back-story explaining what happened in the previous volumes.  There is a common threat to each part.  The characters grow and change, the plot becomes more complicated, and the world building more complex as each book progresses.

I loved the story and the characters.  It was fun watching Ursula change as she acknowledged there were things out there that most people could not see. My favorite character was Simon.  He is a ghost who is often with Ursula and causes her a more than a few problems.  While the end of The Complete Check Your Luck Agency handles the main threat there is room for the characters to return for more adventures.  I hope to see them all again soon.

Sandal Press published The Compete Check Your Luck Agency by K. S. Augustine in 2014.