July Jollity: Monthly Missives from The Dream Pedlar

I had written and scheduled this missive in mid-July, but it would have been remiss of me to send this out without mentioning the passing of Ozzy Osbourne earlier this week.

I've always been a Pink Floyd girl but one simply didn't grow up in that era oblivious to Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne.

Exactly a decade ago, I read his first memoir — I Am Ozzy — which was wicked, hilarious and, quite frankly, mental. I remember reading it and thinking no one could have made this up. What a full, even if manic, life this man lived!

For some reason, I vividly remember his descriptions of working in a slaughterhouse, and his claims of having bitten off a dove's head during a meeting with a record label team.

Not to romanticize all of his antics because Osbourne certainly flirted with madness and danger and must have caused a great deal of anguish and heartache to those around him, no doubt.

Yet ... Rest in peace, Ozzy! The world has lost some of its lustre and verve now that you're gone.

On to our regular missive now ...

July has been a month of surprises weather-wise. Heatwaves alternating with thunderstorms, punctuated by days of blissful warmth and cool breeze.

When D's away at summer day camp, the days still have some semblance of rhythm and routine. The one week he was at home in the beginning of July was a different story altogether.

That week, the days gained a peculiar tendency to melt into each other, and time spun away erratically like candy-floss, so much so that one evening we forgot to turn up for his piano lesson and realized it only an hour after the fact!

It's a little psychedelic, how time unravels when we don't imprison it behind the metronome of hours and days, months and minutes.

Incidentally, one of my Tales For Dreamers stories — Guardians of Time — delves into the theme of time's amorphous nature; you can read it here or listen to it here.

In keeping with that spirit of abandon, I too feel like releasing this month's missive from the constraints of its usual subheadings, merging the On Writing and Life, Unadulterated sections into this unnamed one here, because one is the other, after all, for me.

How goes it for you? Are you able to compartmentalize work from the rest of your life? Or do they bleed into each other for you too and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins?

Programming Update

We have family visiting right now, and after that D is not attending camps for the remaining three weeks of summer. I was working to create and schedule content for August in advance, but all that ended up pushing my current fiction manuscript to the back-burner.

So I've decided to press the pause button for August instead, and all the Tales for Dreamers stories and videos I've created will be scheduled for release in September instead. Hopefully that will give me time to refocus on the manuscript and make steady progress on it.

So this is where archives come in handy. There are more than 150 Tales For Dreamers stories for your reading pleasure and 6 videos up on YouTube.

Monthly Missives will continue as usual but with a modification for next month.

The Dream Caravan

Meanwhile, I've also created a page titled The Dream Caravan, where you can find all your subscriber gifts: free ebook copies of A Benevolent Goddess, Hide-and-Seek, and a 25-tale excerpt from the 100-story collection, Tales for Dreamers: Volume 1; as well as bonus scenes from some of my books.

If you're asked to sign in, simply use the email address you receive this missive at, and you'll be good to go!

Tales For Dreamers

This month's collection includes one wicked tale with a twist you won't see coming (an unexpected offering), one spooky story (dangers lurking on the bridge), and two thought-provoking ones (messages from the otherworld, and up? or down?).

Check them out here!

Books You May Love

This month I turned to authors I've read before and ended up reading three outstanding books.

I had previously raved about The Centaur's Wife by Amanda Leduc, so when I saw her new book, Wild Life, I couldn't resist picking it up. And wow! What a fantastical ride!

It involves two walking, talking hyenas, and their interactions with humans — specifically several generations of a particular family — over decades. It's a wildly imaginative read, and a great reminder of what excellent speculative fiction looks like.

Megan Abbott's The End of Everything had previously enthralled me, so it was a no-brainer for me to pick up El Dorado Drive. It's a story about three sisters who get entangled in a pyramid scheme, and then one of them is murdered.

Abbott has a way of writing that makes the words crackle with tension. The murder doesn't even happen until we're halfway into the book, but the first part was just as riveting as the second.

If you've been around for long enough, you know by now that I'd read anything Charles Todd has written. I picked up A Duty To The Dead, a Bess Crawford mystery; she serves as a nurse in WWI and all her stories are set against this backdrop.

In this novel, Crawford delivers the message of a dying soldier to his family only to get entangled in their murky past. I thought this was the best Bess Crawford mystery I had read, only to later find out that this is, in fact, the first book in the series!

Another missive comes to an end, dear Dreamer!

I must admit it has become increasingly difficult of late to find alliterative titles to these monthly missives. There are three months beginning with J, so I've run through many good words beginning with J in these past three years. Looks like I may have to start making up words now.

As I write this missive, D is on his last week of summer camp. So we have an entire month of doing-nothing-ness to look forward to. It is truly a gift. Sometimes we just forget that.

And that is my wish for you too in these remaining few weeks of summer. To have plenty of warm sunshine and cool breeze, and to be able to slow down enough to savour it all.

~ Anitha