March Melodies: Monthly Missives from The Dream Pedlar
Pre-order links for The Folly Of Memory, giving the gift of reading, and musings on a life non-optimized
It's still cool for the most part here in Burlington, Ontario, where I live, but the abundance of sunshine and the lingering evening light offer the promise of warmer, sunnier days not too far away.
(Not-s0-) Little D has a copy of the latest Wings of Fire book in his hands, The Hybrid Prince, so I've been given this rare gift of time on a Monday evening after school to write to you.
This missive comes bearing news about pre-orders for my upcoming fantasy novel, The Folly Of Memory, as well as the gift of reading in the form of a number of free books of mine across several promotions for a limited time.
So grab a cuppa, and read on!
On Writing
Pre-order from your favourite ebook retailer now!
The Folly Of Memory
The Organization for the Cleansing and Resurrection of Earth (OCRE) has arrived. Its soldiers have Awakened. Flawless beings who wield the extraordinary power of their minds, unfettered by fear, doubt, or weakness.
They’re on a mission to cast out frail and defective human beings, and elevate the rest of humanity towards its utmost divine potential.
There’s only one problem: Rolam, the OCRE’s newly Awakened soldier. Something is wrong with him. He’s not perfect.
He errs. He stumbles. He doubts. While his fellow soldiers move with assurance, Rolam is haunted by the faint, persistent drag of something amiss within him.
In the OCRE, imperfection is a scourge. It must be purged. Every mistake erodes the pristine core that sustains the OCRE’s mission of transcendence.
But the harder Rolam chases that ideal of infallibility, the more he falters. Each misstep thrusts him ever closer to obliteration.
Can a hopelessly flawed soldier survive the OCRE’s ruthless regime of perfection? Or will he ultimately fall apart?
The Folly of Memory is a bold and immersive metaphysical fantasy novel about identity, belonging, and the perilous cost of jettisoning who you are to become who the world thinks you should be.
Book One of The Separation of Souls Saga.
Releasing on 16 July!
More Books To Read
A number of my books are available for free until mid-April as part of several ongoing promotions over on BookFunnel.
My short stories, The Mind Meddler, and Mrs. D'Souza's Dispute with God, can be found in the Free Fiction To Explore promotion.
Hide-and-Seek, and A Benevolent Goddess, are part of the Small Books, Big Thoughts campaign.
Memory Games is in the Science Fantasy collection.
And finally, my paranormal mystery novel, Erased From Existence, is still up for grabs in the Rabid Indie Fantasy Fan Reading Challenge.
Phew! I didn't realize I'd end up with so many campaigns running all at once, but hey, there's a first time for everything, and I'm not complaining. So take a look, and I'd love to hear from you when you've read these stories.
Tales For Dreamers
This month's pick for flash fiction is a tale I wrote in the depths of a winter five years ago.
It's funny and devious, so I wanted to share this now even though winter appears to be on its way out. But fingers crossed, because who knows what surprises lie in store for April?!
Anitha Krishnan
Life, Unadulterated
We went to Cancún for a week over March break with family friends. As lovely as that sounds, it was a trip marked by so many unprecedented occurrences I'd forever remember it for the many life lessons it dished out.
Up until a few days before we were scheduled to fly out, we were on the verge of cancelling the trip. News about El Mencho's death had just broken out, and we were quite terrified of traveling with our child to a place of likely unrest, even though Cancún is on the opposite end of the map from Jalisco where the military operation was carried out.
I had never known travel anxiety in my life until then. It's insane how being a parent can significantly alter a person's risk appetite.
It helped that we were travelling with friends — having good company was an effective distraction from all my worries.
Our first day at the resort entailed a lot of time spent in water — at the beach, at a swimming pool, and another water play area. Bliss!
At 2 a.m., the vomiting began. Little D came down with some gastro bug in the middle of the night, and the next day he was in hospital with an IV drip inserted in his arm, feeding him essential electrolytes to bring him back from dehydration.
Yet, the very next afternoon he felt brave enough to venture out once again for short periods of time.
After that, I fell ill. The day after, it was D's friend who was bed-bound. And on the last night, KrA (my husband) decided it was his turn.
We've never had so much illness on a trip before. But the more insane bit was that despite this forced downtime, we still managed to find significant pockets of time to enjoy the beach and even head out on a day-trip to Chichén Itzá and for a swim in a cenote!
This experience got me thinking about how much we try to optimize our lives on a daily basis. This tendency is amplified when it comes to travel, because when you only have 7 days in a place you're visiting, who wants to spend 3 days in bed?!
But things like weather, illness, traffic, delays, local unrest are just so utterly out of our control.
Yet, in those days of forced downtime, it was just so nice to sit in the balcony and watch the waves, and listen to the soothing sounds of their repetitive, relentless motion. It was such a relief to not have places to be, appointments to keep, or road trips to set out on.
D and I read a lot of books, watched a number of basketball games, and I even found a new TV channel that I love — Stingray CMusic! — I could watch it all day but it is sadly not available in Canada.
The more I live, the more I see how little we really need to be happy in our lives.
On an interstate bus ride, we passed a handful of tiny villages that seemed like they were in the middle of nowhere.
Little shacks with bright-coloured walls that served as houses, a woman walking with a small bag filled with carrots, tomatoes and other vegetables — perhaps enough to cook that day's lunch and dinner — an old, toothless man sitting on a boulder by the roadside, watching the cars and buses go by.
It might as well have been a scene from an Indian village or town. How simple! How beautifully ordinary!
I don't know where humanity as a whole is heading ... but in our relentless quest for the extraordinary, we've somehow cheapened the ordinary.
It's as if it's no longer enough to simply breathe, but somehow we feel pressured to make every moment count, forgetting that without breath, we wouldn't even exist.
But how easy it is to forget this simple truth in the mad busyness of everyday life!
Your turn now. Have you ever had a vacation or any other experience that turned out completely different than expected and changed your outlook towards life? Write to me and let me know!
Books You May Love
I've read an interesting collection of books this month.
First, D and I finished reading Book 5 in the Wings of Fire series. The Brightest Night marks the end of the story of the five little dragonets who are destined to end an ongoing war between three Sandwing sisters who are vying for the throne.
The series continues in Book 6, Moon Rising, and is set in the Jade Mountain Academy that the dragonets of destiny establish in the end of Book 5. Such an excellent and engrossing series of books!
Other reads included The Aayakudi Murders by Indra Soundar Rajan. This was an English translation of a pulp fiction mystery novel originally written in Tamil, my mother tongue. It's set in rural Tamil Nadu and is a murder mystery coupled with supernatural elements and tons of rural superstition.
Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins is a thriller set in a remote island in the Pacific Ocean and features a bunch of six young men and women, purportedly on a two-week adventure. They inevitably get entangled in each others' past secrets. The book is very atmospheric and has an uneasy undercurrent throughout. I also found the ending very satisfying, which has become a rare find of late.
And of course, I turned to an old-time favourite, Charles Todd. A Hanging At Dawn is a prequel novella featuring the backstory of a beloved character, Simon Brandon, who is a prominent secondary character in the Bess Crawford mystery novels set in and around the time of WW1. This novella is set in India and entails a Maharani and a murder, and is full of unexpected twists and turns.
In an attempt at being more discerning and intentional in my reading habits, I've taken to writing about the books I read shortly after finishing them instead of jumping to the next book to fill the void.
Not every book elicits a heartfelt response from me, but many do. Here is this month's collection.
Well, it's time to bid goodbye once again, dear Dreamer!
Monthly Missives will turn 4 years old next month! The passage of time always fills me with bewilderment.
It's one the greatest blessings of my life to have this privilege of writing to you on the last Sunday of every month. I hope you derive as much, or more, pleasure in reading these missives as I find in writing them.
Much love,
Anitha
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
