This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. The author will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner. Please click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
Hookers and hawkers.
Mosques and mosquitos.
Paul has had enough of Southeast Asia.
He’s only here ‘cos it’s cheap.
He’s on the run from police after leaving Australia.
No, that place wasn’t much better either.
Well, it was when he was young.
When his life was full of promise. An up-and-coming boxer. And he had friends. And fun.
Then a bit of bad luck later and he found himself on the run in outback Australia. Paranoid. Hiding from shadows. The heat. The dust. The sweat.
Next stop, Southeast Asia.
Read an Excerpt
He wondered again if they would come for him tonight. The hotel porter and counter staff were looking at him suspiciously when he last went out for food. Or was he just looking at them weird? If they came for him tonight, for which crime would they come? Would it be Interpol? What he did to the man in Bali might warrant that. He didn’t feel too bad about that one because he was only some fag who came onto him after seeing him in Kuta one night when Paul was hungry and standing alone in the darkness. The man asked if he was ok and invited him back to his house and made dinner. Paul knew his old coach would be ashamed that he had beaten the man, not to mention taken his money. He saw his coach in his mind again – this time holding pads for him in the ring. If only Paul had made more money from boxing, then he would never have had to come to Asia. He never would have been standing hungry and lost and standing with street dogs and feeling like a failure. That was the worst moment in Paul’s life and he didn’t want to remember it again.
About the Author: Gregory Pakis is an Australian author, film-maker, actor and wacky vlogger.
He has written the short story, The Lonely Australian of the Asian Night; the soon to be released horror-suspense novellas, The Regressor and He., and Memoir of a Suburban Hoe-Bo, which is partly an account of when he lived out of a van for ten years in Melbourne.
Gregory Pakis is also the writer / director of the feature films, The Garth Method (2005) and The Joe Manifesto (2013), which have won national and international awards and been distributed through Accent Entertainment, Label, Vanguard Cinema.
Gregory’s more informal video projects are the feature documentaries, Garth Goes Hitch-Hiking (2007) and Garth Lives in a Van (2011) which have screened at film festivals in Australia.
More recently, he has created the comedy series, suBURPieS and his Wacky Vlog which can found on his socials.
Gregory has been featured in articles in newspapers, The Age, The Herald Sun, Beat Magazine, Inpress, FILMINK, and the Neos Kosmos. He has been interviewed on radio by the ABC, 3RRR, SYN FM, 3CR.
The Wild Rose and the Sea Raven by Jennifer Ivy Walker
GENRE: Paranormal fantasy medieval romance
BLURB
In this dark fairy tale adaptation of a medieval French legend, Issylte must flee the wicked queen, finding shelter with a fairy witch who teaches her the verdant magic of the forest. Fate leads her to the otherworldly realm of the Lady of the Lake and the Elves of Avalon, where she must choose between her life as a healer or fight to save her ravaged kingdom. Tristan of Lyonesse is a Knight of the Round Table who must overcome the horrors of his past and defend his king or lose everything. When he becomes a warrior of the Tribe of Dana, a gift of Druidic magic might hold the key he seeks. Haunted and hunted. Entwined by fate. Can their passion and power prevail?
EXCERPT
He opened the brilliant blue eyes that she’d seen in the vision.
As she gazed into them, the earth tilted. Her heart raced; her bearings were lost. In the depths of his eyes, she glimpsed a fountain in a forest. The turquoise waters of the ocean. An underground well encased by sacred stones. She, the forest fairy, was immersed in the blue waters of the warrior’s eyes, the waves emanating from him flowing through her, cleansing her. Beckoning her.
In Tristan’s eyes, Issylte glimpsed a black bird—a sea raven—soaring over an open sea, hovering now before her. A small dove fluttered in her breast, called forth from her soul. White wings unfurled as she took flight, rising into the azure sky alongside the black seabird—-floating together through the diaphanous clouds scattered across the vast ocean.
In the breadth of an instant, Issylte was bound to this warrior, the Blue Knight of Cornwall, as if fate had indeed entwined them. Through the windows of his eyes, she peered into his soul, her own blending with his, as if they were the forest and the ocean, encircled now within the three layers of protective stones, the holy trinity of sacred elements of the Goddess.
AUTHOR Bio and Links
Enthralled with legends of medieval knights and ladies, dark fairy tales and fantasies about Druids, wizards and magic, Jennifer Ivy Walker always dreamed of becoming a writer. She fell in love with French in junior high school, continuing her study of the language throughout college, eventually becoming a high school teacher and college professor of French.
As a high school teacher, she took her students every year to the annual French competition, where they performed a play she had written, “Yseult la Belle et Tristan la Bête”–an imaginative blend of the medieval French legend of “Tristan et Yseult” and the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast”, enhanced with fantasy elements of a Celtic fairy and a wicked witch.
Her debut novel, “The Wild Rose and the Sea Raven”–the first of a trilogy– is a blend of her love for medieval legends, the romantic French language, and paranormal fantasy. It is a retelling of the medieval French romance of “Tristan et Yseult”, interwoven with Arthurian myth, dark fairy tales from the enchanted Forest of Brocéliande, and otherworldy elements such as Avalonian Elves, Druids, forest fairies and magic.
Explore her realm of Medieval French Fantasy. She hopes her novels will enchant you.
I love learning about the author’s inspiration for a cover, the characters and even the setting of the novel. So let’s give a hearty welcome to Ryan Lawrence.
Crafting the Canadian Landscape of Vindictive
It is often said to write what you know.
Sometimes, there is a strong desire to write about where you know, too—so to speak.
From
the beginning, before laying a finger on my keyboard, I knew my novel, Vindictive, would take place in Canada.
While I planned to set scenes in several well-known Canadian locales, my
primary objective was to create a totally original city to position the bulk of
the story within.
The
desire was present, the innovative passion robust, but truthfully, the idea to
create this city did not burst from my noggin like Athena from Zeus’s head,
dynamic and unexpected. Instead, it was inspired by Mark Frost and David
Lynch’s quirky, totally original town of Twin Peaks. The notion that I could
craft a place wholly from my imagination and fill it with sexy, crazy, and
dramatic—okay, melodramatic characters greatly appealed to me.
Growing
up in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, I read many books set in non-Canadian cities.
From Charles Dickens’s London to James Baldwin’s Paris to Anne Rice’s New
Orleans to countless books set in New York. I rarely got taken to a Canadian
landscape. If I did, these novels usually took place in rural prairies,
small-town Northern Ontario or the bucolic countryside and fishing villages of
Maritime provinces.
While
these stories were entertaining, their settings authentic to many Canadian
voices and experiences, I wanted something to reflect a landscape nearer to my
personal urban upbringing. I yearned to read stories where a location I was
more familiar with was brought to the forefront. I had little in common with
the depression-era backdrop of Hugh Garner’s Toronto-set Cabbagetown—a high-school reading requirement.
In
University, I complained to anyone who would listen, professors and fellow
students alike, that I was desperate to read something modern set in Toronto,
Montreal or Vancouver. Something with nary a cliff or prairie thistle to be
found.
Thanks
to suggestions from amazing people, I discovered Tanya Huff and Brad Fraser.
These are two Canadian writers who set their work in Toronto, Ontario and
Edmonton, Alberta, respectively. The contemporary, urban feel of these novels
blew my mind. The use of modern locales, familiar cultural settings, and trendy
establishments in Huff’s Blood Books
series and in Fraser’s play Unidentified
Human Remains and the True Nature of Love was refreshing. It was a
different Canadian flavour, a welcome change, and one that resonated with me.
This was the engaging fiction I was looking for.
When
the time came for me to breathe life into Vindictive,
I wanted my readers to feel the same connection to contemporary urban Canada I
felt reading these works.
Crafting a Canadian setting for Vindictive was not only important to me
as a Canadian writer, born and bred, but it was pivotal to the authenticity of
the book. The reader had to know unequivocally that this book possessed a
modern but still accessible Canadian self-identity.
Vindictive takes place primarily in the
fictional city of Fairporte, Ontario, Canada. As I write in the novel,
Fairporte is a city “very much like Montreal, but one drenched in its own
unique blend of French and English culture.” As a Canadian, it was important to
me to acknowledge the unique duality of our French and English cultures. Due to
this, the novel’s text encompasses both English and Quebecois dialogue (with
English translation following). If anything aside from Poutine, Nanaimo bars,
and Jimbo the Drag Queen reflects the uniqueness of the Canadian identity, it
is our official bilingualism.
A small, playful
element of language I feature in Vindictive
is something others might consider a cultural stereotype. Still, that label
and opinion do not negate fact: it is a real thing. “Eh” is a confirmational, a
word attached at the end of sentences to confirm if something is a truth, and
it is peppered throughout my novel. Specific characters have this colloquial
expression tagged at the end of certain statements because I hear it in
conversation regularly. Many do not even realize they speak it. I know I say
it, so I wanted to incorporate it within my story. It may seem silly, but I
find its use comforting, a familiar element of the Canadian identity, of home,
however cliché it may seem.
Vindictive
takes the reader on a journey across Canada. From the snowy landscape of
British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley to the student hub of downtown Montreal.
From Toronto’s upscale residential neighbourhood “The Bridle Path” to the
LGBTQ-oriented corner of Church and Wellesley. Danger, adventure, and romance
flow in abundance across this diverse Canadian terrain, converging at the
nucleus that is the enigmatic city of Fairporte.
Vindictive states that: “No form of
revenge is petty; all revenge is reasonable.” Setting a novel entirely in
Canada is also reasonable—and quite entertaining!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Ryan…and kudos on a fantastic cover!
The
best revenge is revenge. Getting it is all that matters.
Jules Cartell has it
all: wealth; beauty; a handsome, loving husband; a partnership in her father’s
law firm; and the top executive position at one of Canada’s leading
corporations, Cartell Worldwide. Aside from her secret, problematic desire for
the married owner of the internationally renowned Château Bergé, Jules believes
she and her life are pretty perfect. But the discovery of an unforgivable crime
perpetrated against her family by her husband, Phillip, years before the two
met sets Jules down the path of revenge. There is no option for forgiveness.
Phillip has to pay. An eye for an eye.
It is said that when
seeking revenge, you should dig two graves. Someone from Jules’s past, someone
aggrieved by her actions, seeks vengeance for themselves. This is an enemy
without compassion, without morality, without mercy. An enemy who will accept
no restitution short of Jules’s death.
In the city of
Fairporte, ON, secrets, lies, and betrayal can be found everywhere. As
adversaries close in, will Jules get revenge before her past catches up with
her? Unexpected allies may be instrumental to her success. They may also be the
key to her very survival.
EXCERPT
She cried for Ethan and for the bright-eyed girl she could
no longer be. Jules wanted to run away from this place of death. She also wanted
to run away from her selfish choice to ensure her survival, her future. Jules
wished all of it had never happened. But it did happen, and she would have to
live with it for the rest of her life.
“Ethan! No! Ethan!”
Startled, Jules quickly turned and looked in the direction
of the shrieking bellow. It was William, tearing down the woods, screaming his
brother’s name over and over again.
Having discovered his charges missing from the house,
William had reluctantly gone about searching for them outside. Sadly, it was
not soon enough to intervene and prevent the devastating incident.
When William finally reached the clearing, he stopped at the
edge of the lake and looked out upon the scene of broken ice and still water.
With clenched fists, he fell to his knees and screamed in anguish. His brother
was dead and gone, swallowed whole by the cold, murky depths.
Angrily turning towards Jules, William showered upon her a
rage so pure, so palpable it might as well have been a physical smack across
her face. His glare was full of hate. And so were his words.
“Why didn’t you help him, you fucking bitch?! You did
nothing! You let him drown!”
Jules stood as immobile as a stone and ate her emotions,
swallowing all her sadness, guilt, and self-reproach. She owned the choice she
had made. The only one possible. The correct choice. She understood William’s
pain, but she was well aware of his vile nature.
Jules had her suspicions of what might diffuse her attacker:
using his own words—his ignorance and prejudice—against him. Maybe then he
would leave her alone. She had only done what was necessary. All she could do.
And who was he to blame her anyway? Was he there when it
happened? No! He had been too busy playing video games to look after them, too
busy to save his brother, too busy to have prevented all of this in the first
place.
Be mean, Jules silently told herself. Act like a grown-up.
With unwavering resolve, staring William down with cold,
hard eyes, Jules scoffed, “What the hell could I have done? I’m just a girl.
Right?”
AUTHOR Bio and Links
Ryan Lawrence
was born and raised in Guelph, Ontario. He is a 2000 graduate of The University
of Guelph in English. Ryan has worn many hats professionally, including working
over 12 years as a custom art framer. While writing has always been a part of
his life, it was only after leaving this profession that Ryan seriously took
his education and passion for writing by the horns and began the journey towards
Vindictive, his first novel.
Since 2002,
Ryan has lived in London, Ontario, with his husband, Todd, together since 1997,
their cat Dora, and his massive comic book collection that once fell on Todd.
He’s okay.
I love book covers and I love the cover for Shelter From Our Secrets, Silence & Shame. I am delighted to have Rebecca Brown visiting fundinmental to share her own thoughts on the cover.
Topic: Discuss your cover — how it
came to be, what it represents, what you love or don’t love about it,
etc. Anything you’d like to share about it.
I’m excited to be part of this Fundinmental blog tour, and I love
that I can take this opportunity to talk about my book’s cover. I know
that we shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but I wanted my book’s cover to
catch people’s attention and hopefully draw them to it and start reading.
I took the photograph myself in May 2021 when I was out in my
kayak on Lake Huron, where I am lucky to live and work as a mental health
clinician. I need to find ways to burn off and let go of the difficult
stories that I collect in my day. One of my favourite ways to release the
stress is to paddle into the sunset and feel the tension release from my
body. I begin my book with this prologue:
I am floating.
On the water
calm
clear
soft
quiet.
Dusk,
the sun is setting.
The sky will hold light
for another half an hour
or so.
The beauty is often just after the sun sinks into the water, then the colours are
spectacular.
Or just softer.
It’s been a long day;
hard
heavy
yet healing.
I have no words left in me.
I cannot talk
or listen anymore.
I need quiet
peace
calm
presence.
I have found the shelter that I seek today
on the open water.
My kayak is my shelter this day.
I will paddle until I physically feel the release in my
body.
I will watch the sun set until I find the peace in my soul.
I hope to sleep tonight.
Rebuild my resilience.
I will wake and do it all again.
I may need to seek shelter differently tomorrow
Or not.
Knowing that I must still seek shelter sometimes,
makes it safe for me to continue in this work that I love.
Later in the book, I share a chapter which digs further into why
this particular photograph means so much to me.
Chapter Fourteen: Spring 2021
I couldn’t wait to get my little yellow kayak
in the water. It had been three years since I moved to the shores of the Great
Lake Huron. We live in a home that has a story of its own (more on this to
come), and it was built to look out at the beautiful water, which is a gift we
cherish every day. The sunsets have been called among the most beautiful in the
world, and the water itself changes from day to day: from calm, like glass, to
rough and choppy. We’ve referred to it as both Lake Atlantic and the Pond
Lake, all within twenty-four hours. The soft sand and miles of beach are what
draw people from afar, but what makes it the most magnificent sight always is
its colour. The water looks almost tropical. It can resemble a Caribbean
turquoise blue, so soft that it takes your breath away. Looking at the colour
of this beautiful water is a moment of awe that I treasure every day.
We’ve had a warm, mild spring, and this year
feeling confined to the house, working from home, unable to see people in
person, I have been trying to spend even more time outdoors in nature and, as
often as possible, down at the water.
On May 17, our temperature rose to twenty
degrees Celsius (68 F), and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. After dinner, I pulled
my little yellow kayak out from under the deck where it had been stored all
winter. I hosed it off to get rid of any spiders and dirt that had been hiding
there all winter, and within half an hour had it in the water.
Due to the State of Emergency and lockdown in
our area, there was virtually no one in the cottages that dot the shoreline of
our secluded little bay. I was able to paddle in silence for an hour. The sun
was high in the blue sky when I started, and once I went as far as I needed to,
I let my paddles rest, pulled out my phone, and took a couple of photos to
celebrate the moment. I floated and rested and let the warmth of the sun sink
deep into my skin, and I meditated silently for a few minutes, noticing the
slightest movement of the calm water swaying my boat.
It was both a moment of
happiness and awe that I was so grateful for.
Then I turned my little yellow Pelican kayak
in the direction I had come and started to paddle slowly and rhythmically back
home. My cup of happiness was full.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of
my dog beside my bed telling me the sun was up. I went downstairs with her, my
other dog, and two cats, and while I let all the animals out into the back
yard, I poured myself a cup of coffee and cued up a guided mindfulness
meditation. I let the small herd back inside and then made my way to my comfy
chair in my office to practice ten minutes of mindfulness. The meditation I
listened to this day was on Headspace.com, one of my favourite mindfulness
apps. I easily slipped away with the narrator’s voice as she guided me through
a visualization about balance, using the visual of a blue sky as a focal point.
This image of a blue sky is often one used in
guided mindfulness meditations, and it’s a lovely image to think about. We can
visualize the blue sky as something we always have access to; it’s the clear,
calm, uncluttered mind, but it can be buried beneath our busy, racing thoughts,
or the clouds. If we visualize clearing away the thoughts/clouds by
intentionally focussing on our breath for a few minutes, the clouds gently float
away to reveal the beautiful, calm, blue sky that is always somewhere in the
background of our minds. The meditation suggested visualizing a photograph of a
beautiful blue sky to help enhance this visualization, so I instantly
visualized the beautiful blue sky I had experienced just the evening before
when I was out in my kayak.
I opened my phone and turned to the photo I
had taken just twelve hours earlier, out on the water on my kayak, with the
beautiful blue sky in the background.
I knew instantly that I this photograph held so much meaning, which is why I chose it for my book cover.
As
a mental health clinician, Rebecca Brown has been a safe place for many to seek
shelter from their secrets, silence and shame. Inspired to finally slow down,
stop running from herself and share her own story, she found ways to seek and
savour her own shelter.
Rebecca’s personal
journey takes us through sadness, tragedy, self-sabotage, the impossible
pursuit of perfection, distorted thinking and eating, engaging with her shadow
self, divorce, and numbing with alcohol, all in an attempt to avoid the story
needing to be shared.
Dispelling the limiting
beliefs we hold about ourselves can unlock our limitless potential to reach
goals we never dared to dream. From the Boston Marathon to working with horses,
Rebecca sets out to prove to herself that anything is possible when you don’t
listen to the negative stories you tell yourself.
Everyone has a story.
We become who we are because of what has happened to us, and because of the
stories we tell ourselves. But do our stories continue to serve us well, or
keep us stuck? Are our stories fact or fiction? Is it time to rewrite the
versions we have been telling ourselves?
Shelter provides
strategies to help reframe the thinking patterns we have developed, and offers
tools to recognize when we are suffering from our own thoughts, feelings and
actions. Resilience-building techniques are woven through the pages, and
encouragement for the lifelong journey of collecting moments of awe and
happiness.
Seeking and reading
Shelter is a gift of self-compassion and self-discovery. Rebecca’s hope is that
it will be read with a highlighter in hand, pages folded down, re-read,
recommended to a friend, and used as a guide to start sharing our own stories
with those we love.
We may not have written
our beginnings, but we have the ability to write every word from this point
forward and just imagine where our stories can take us when we are free of
secrets, silence and shame.
EXCERPT
I give my talk.
The room erupts in applause.
A dozen people line up to thank me or say a few words at the
end of my session.
One man in particular stands out.
He is well over six feet tall and wearing a full Texas
sheriff uniform.
He has greying hair and is likely close to the end of his
career.
He pumps my hand as he shakes it, almost leaving it numb.
He thanks me for my talk. “Great stuff,” he says.
And then he hands me his business card.
But it’s not quite a business card.
It’s a photo card, like a baseball card, or a kid’s hockey
card, with the player’s name, position, and smiling face as they stand posed to
take a shot in their team uniform.
Only this is of a man on a black horse.
More precisely, it’s this man, a Texas sheriff on his
beautiful black police horse.
“I thought you’d like to have this,” he says. “My horse is
Canadian, like you.” And then he says something that has stayed with me,
because he couldn’t be more right: “Everyone in this business should have a
good horse!”
He meant the business of trauma.
I couldn’t have agreed more.
I still have his “business card.”
Two years later, I went back to Texas to teach a three-day
workshop on resilience to youth detention workers. I tried to look up my Texas
sheriff, but he had retired. I hope he’s finding more time to enjoy his good
horse. I’ve shared the story of our brief encounter and his photo card with
many police officers over the years. And every one of them agrees: horses can
heal humans. I’ve found shelter with horses. Sometimes in the saddle, but
mostly not. My story will get there. Eventually.
I finished my keynote address and spent the rest of the day
at the conference on Youth in the Justice System. People stopped me in the
halls of the hotel, telling me how much they enjoyed my talk. Later that
evening, I went for a run.
And then I drank a bottle of wine and went to bed.
AUTHOR Bio and Links
REBECCA BROWN is a clinical social worker with over 35 years in practice ranging from medical social work, childhood trauma, vicarious trauma for first responders, international psychological first aid, and Equine Assisted Therapy. She is honoured to hold a faculty appointment with the Department of Family Medicine at Western University in London, Ontario. She teaches extensively on the topics of trauma and resilience and has delivered keynote presentations throughout North America. She shares her life and career with her husband, a family physician and trailblazer in the field of Lifestyle Medicine. Together they live and work on the shores of the Great Lake Huron, where they seek and share shelter with their six adult children, four grandchildren, extended family and friends, two dogs, two cats and one horse.
