Dylan Madeley's Blog, page 10

Saturday Roundup: Newmarket Market and Garden Dedication

On Saturday afternoon at the Thornhill Village Library, I gladly stood in the hot sun and watched some speeches. The Jarrells are friends of the family, and the late Dr. Richard A. Jarrell did many things for his community and for the world beyond his work as a professor at York University. One of these ongoing projects was the garden at the Thornhill Village Library–not just maintaining it over the years with the assistance of his wife Martha, but also making sure it ever existed. I did spend my earliest years in the area but my memory of this library is fuzzy; I’m told it was all a bunch of gravel parking lot before someone stepped in and did something. And that someone was Richard. The bench in the Featured Image of this post had already been dedicated to him, but now the rest of the garden is too; there is a more official plaque that I managed not to get a picture of this time, because by the time there wasn’t such a crowd around it, I was being somewhat social, drinking lemonade and eating peanut butter cookies etc. The refreshments were welcome, as in my long morning I was running on a pack of fruit snacks, a Snickers bar, and a single coffee.

Anyway, pictures:

Martha gives a speech at the dedication of the Richard A. Jarrell Memorial Garden.

Court gives a speech at the dedication of the Richard A. Jarrell Memorial Garden.

Mayor Frank Scarpitti gives a speech at the dedication of the Richard A. Jarrell Memorial Garden.

That was my later afternoon event, where I had the easy tasks of listening and sweating. Court also loaned me Dark Night: A True Batman Story, which I read cover to cover in a single sitting; I was left to wonder if that was really the first graphic novel I had ever read, or whether a picturebook from Brom that I read for Morbid Outlook once counts as a graphic novel. I wouldn’t mind if Dini’s personal story was my first graphic novel, no problem at all.

The morning was actually consumed by a Newmarket’s farmer’s market (with The Bookshelf event running indoors in the community centre). I was a vendor at The Bookshelf that morning, and so was Allison Cosgrove of the Stan Brookshire novels fame. And she drives, and I don’t, so she helped me out, which is wonderful.

My book vendor setup in Newmarket.

This was the first event where I set up a monitor to play book trailers on looping playback. The first major upgrade to my vendor setup, so just imagine what a nice real tablecloth would do! A few observations about the video aspect:

I don’t know how to put captions on to the videos as they exist on my hard drive, so that I could just loop trailers without need for internet access. Not all my YouTube videos have captions, but I made sure both trailers do, and new videos tend to; I type them myself, since the automatic captions look rather sad.
Fortunately, I had free internet access at this event (which seemed even faster than my connection at home), so I made a YouTube playlist off my own channel and looped that, full-screen. But then I had to manually click away Swiss Chalet banner ads and skip other video ads after the requisite 5 seconds.
Choosing one of the two trailers and looping that seemed to cut down on the ads.

Captions are important because I didn’t bring speakers, and markets are noisy rooms/spaces anyway; if I turned up my laptop speakers you could hear my echoey lo-fidelity voice to a point, but not even the nice background music from Satie. So captions are already important for accessibility’s sake (which is why I typed my own for YouTube), but if I want anybody to have any idea what I’m saying in these looping trailers, now they’re mandatory for everyone. People told me it was just nice to have the pictures and minimal text, but come on, you don’t get told the trailer’s story at all that way.

The Crown Princess’ Voyage: Free Full Preview On Wattpad

Are you on Wattpad? Do you have a Facebook account you can use to access Wattpad? If so, you have an early opportunity to read The Crown Princess’ Voyage, Book 2 of The Gift-Knight Trilogy.

Wattpad is a great resource for readers to discover new authors, and likewise for emerging authors who want readers to discover them. I’ve had some limited works up there for a while now, and other authors who are on a similar path (i.e. have to do a lot on their own or with services/help, not always traditional publishing) have told me they use Wattpad to “test the waters” and see the response to a new work.

I decided to give my readers a similar opportunity.

Just bear in mind that this is a sequel! This is not meant as a standalone. You can still jump into the series’ middle first if that’s how you usually roll, but if you haven’t read The Gift-Knight’s Quest first then I don’t know how that would alter your enjoyment of The Crown Princess’ Voyage.

Rona Dijkhuis’ cover will be the first edition’s official cover.

I’ll have another post up Monday. Saturday was interesting, and I have a couple of pics from a couple of events I attended.

Monarch caterpillars project

You probably haven’t heard from me as often in the last while as you used to–at least not through this blog.

Well, busy, sick, various things one after the other; and also the fact that I’m raising five monarch caterpillars into butterflies. This is my life now, and it’ll stay that way until they hatch and flutter away. Here are some images of what they’re up to. And the blog header image (another Rona Dijkhuis masterwork) doesn’t count, that’s a sort of Luna moth if you really examine it.

 

Monarch caterpillar.

Monarch chrysalis.

One chrysalis; one caterpillar about to become a chrysalis; one caterpillar crawling up the jar to join them.

I have planted thousands of milkweed seeds, of different varieties of the plant, in a nearby greenspace. Some dozens of them have come up, others haven’t, but it was a pretty disorganized effort on the whole and I’m glad anything happened. The plants have been waiting for monarch butterflies to come land and lay their eggs, but sightings in my area have been few so far (we all hope they’re just late to the party).

So I’m augmenting this effort in a way I can afford, by acquiring five monarch caterpillars, raising them on local clean milkweed, and I will release them into that same greenspace once they hatch from their “chrysalids” phase. I hope by then some late arrivals from south of here will flutter along to join the party. The area is dotted with wild flowers and milkweed.

Goodbye Hafla at Habeeba’s

Many of my event photos don’t make it to Flickr these days, because I give the memory stick to an event organizer who can then choose what goes online, what needs editing… it’s a better form of quality control because I don’t have as much knowledge of what I’m looking at. I can see “someone’s facial expression doesn’t seem flattering in my opinion” but it’s always the little things.

Check out Serpentina North Ensemble’s instagram and they’re just gradually putting up my pics of the Goodbye Hafla event from Habeeba’s Dance Studio.

Further Dedications

The name on that plaque might look vaguely familiar if you’ve read the dedications for The Gift-Knight’s Quest. Granted that for the purposes of the book, I used a different and more colloquial form that many of us called him, whereas I believe the plaque bears his legal name.

He was a handyman, knowing a lot about carpentry and having practical knowledge of electrical work; he could do a lot more than that. The park bench which bears this dedication looks a lot more like the wood he worked with, not having the same stain as the other benches.

This past Sunday a bunch of us celebrated his birthday in a manner he would have wanted, and I’m just about recovered from it now…

Coming to a word processor not near you

A standalone tale. You can place it in the same series but someone should also be able to read this book without being aware of the existence of the others.

For over a hundred years, the rest of the world wrote off her homeland and ignored the struggles of the peoples there, occasionally speaking of them like they were doomed to strife and not even worth considering. Born into this chaos was Alathea, who from a young age would be challenged with piecing together a broken empire; the same Sisyphean task that every would-be emperor has failed at for the longest time. But what if she succeeds where others have failed? And what will it mean for the rest of the world when she’s prepared to take by force more than just their undivided attention?

A Peek In The Oven

As some of the last-hurrah promotional efforts for my debut gradually fizzle out, I am looking ahead, and you can too.

I sometimes get asked when the next book will be written, or if I’ve “written another one”, or if I plan to continue the series. This post should be a nice comprehensive answer. I am listing all the ongoing projects I have, and just for you, I’ve even decided to come up with working titles off the top of my head for things that are either in first draft or pretty far down the pipe.

When you’ve been a writer for several years, sometimes it’s less a question of what you’ve written, and more about what you’ve finished.

The titles are presented in the plot chronology of the series, with the year of first draft on the left side and year of publication on the right side (in the one case where that’s applicable). Everything bolded is either written or exists in a first draft; stuff in italics is either a working title/first draft, or where not bolded at all, planned/not written yet.

Chronological Series Listing

(2014) The Fall of Wancyrik

(2015) The Mad King Jonnecht

(postponed-2017?) The Tyrant’s Gold Mask

(planned-2016) The Tides Made Flesh

(2008) The Gift-Knight’s Quest (2015)

(2010) The Crown Princess’ Voyage (late/final draft: due really late 2016/hopefully not too late 2017?)

(2011) The Empress’ Last Hope

One year on: a celebratory ebook sale

If you’re an ebook lover and have been biding your time, not yet committed to buying a copy of The Gift-Knight’s Quest, this weekend will be the best time. I have arranged to submit $2.99 promotional pricing that goes for the USA and Canada, and 1.99 GBP in the UK. According to my sales helper, this should take effect “late Friday” GMT and last until “late Tuesday” GMT. May 28, 2015 is the quasi-official “publishing date” of the book (though it became available as an ebook March 26, it’s a bit late for that!) so I thought why not put on a sale for the anniversary weekend.

So what I would suggest to folks in North America who are interested in this promotion, is look for the promo price on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, solid days when it should be in effect.

This link will take you to the book’s Amazon US page.

This link will take you to the book’s Amazon CA page.

Other ebook site links such as Nook, Kobo, and iTunes are available on this website, on the book’s subsection.

If you already have the book or ebook and would like to help boost the signal, that would be greatly appreciated. Some time like 3PM on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday might work for Twitter; maybe you know the analytics better than I do. You could share the ebook links, or if you prefer to share any of the visual materials such as book trailers, this is the subsection of the site for images and videos pertaining to TGKQ.

Hopefully, TGKQ will have a happy anniversary, generate some interest, and result in some new reviews. when the review count gets up to 50, Amazon starts automatically helping to boost the signal, so that’s a long term goal. At the moment, I haven’t been able to pass 30 reviews, and I thought it was time to generate some new buzz.

Happy Victoria Day

It’s a holiday long weekend in Canada. There’s a history behind celebrating Victoria Day, but to many of us, it really is “big excuse to launch fireworks, part one”. Part Two is Canada Day, on July 1.

I haven’t blogged as frequently because I’ve been trying to fight off a cold while working through work and social commitments. However, I can tell you a bit about what’s in the works now.

If you live closer to Newmarket, Ontario, you can find me at The Bookshelf event in roughly a month from now (June 25). I’m not one of the reading authors at the event, which is fine with me; even a public reading event that goes well can feel a bit intense for me, and I’ve found it’s better to space out my public readings, even to less often than once a month. This is easy to maintain because it takes personal effort to get myself a reading, not like people are beating a path to my door to secure one.

Seasonal milkweed planting’s almost done. It should already be done, but it’s a matter of the last straggler packages of seeds arriving in the mail. It should be finished this week. The creek-side’s full of milkweed, and hopefully it becomes completely overrun with monarch caterpillars shortly.

An audiobook has been in the works, but as a writer you don’t realize how many interesting names you have in your book until you expect someone else to pronounce them. There may be some merit to reading aloud in at least one editing cycle, as at least it should get you to think about the canonical pronunciation of fantasy names. Granted, most of the names in The Gift-Knight’s Quest are derived from different cultures of our world, whether contemporary or historical, with a few glaring exceptions. There is no ETA on the audiobook, but I thought you would be interested to know that it is a thing; some consideration has been put into it.

The Strange Challenge of Monotasking

There’s a huge productivity push these days, there to make sure we can do all the things at once.

But sometimes I find that I can divide my energy and time among all the things, and finish none of them, or have them all be rush jobs; or I can narrow the focus and do better at whatever’s foremost in the queue.

There’s an emotional hurdle where I have to be okay with a queue of things and not think it’s too big, and not panic at the sight of it thinking how can I ever get all these things done. The answer is that I will get them done one at a time, and that way, actually get them done.

Do you feel the same?