October Opulence: Monthly Missives from The Dream Pedlar
Ebook gifts for you, Halloween-themed flash fiction and audio tales, and reflecting on how stories foster human connection in unexpected ways
What's not to love about October! The month of Thanksgiving (here in Canada), Diwali and Halloween. The month of blue skies and autumn reds and golds.
And equally the month of cold rains and darker evenings with the promise of unknowable things lurking in the shadows, listening keenly to your footfall, latching on to every word you whisper in your sleep, wondering how to twist your mind for their amusement, while you remain blissfully oblivious to their watchful existence.
It's also the month of curling up indoors by a warm fireplace, wrapped in a favourite blanket, sipping a hot beverage, lost between the pages of an astounding book, and being utterly indifferent to the passage of time for once.
Which is why this missive comes bearing an entire cornucopia of goodies for your reading pleasure. Grab a cuppa and read on!
On Writing
A number of my books are available to download for free for a short time!
You can grab my fantasy short stories — Memory Games, and Mrs. D'Souza's Dispute With God — as part of the Stories For Every Season group promotion over on BookFunnel.
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Another title of mine, Blue-Skinned Mystics, is available for free for the next five days only, as part of a promotion by the International Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors (IASFA).
Grab your copy before the sun sets on Thursday, 30 October!
And, if you haven't yet got a copy of one of my long-standing popular tales, A Benevolent Goddess, guess what?! It too is free for the next few days on all retailer platforms!
So download your copies, and curl up to read some gentle, soul-soothing stories that will make you feel all is perfectly alright with the world after all, even if only briefly.
Tales For Dreamers
The 5 weekly tales on the website and the additional 5 audio-stories over on my YouTube channel are all Halloween specials this month!
(The 5th tale and story will both go live on Halloween, the last Friday of this month!)
Treat yourself to spooky ghost stories, entertain fantasies of transgressing the boundaries between the living and the dead, and enjoy all the mischiefs the neighbourhood monsters are getting up to!
The stories are 'when the monsters take over', 'skeletons from your closet', 'the head with two faces', 'new caretakers in charge', and 'fair compensation for hardworking monsters'. Check them out here!
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Over on my YouTube channel, come listen to the Halloween Specials playlist, featuring 'messages from beyond', 'the street of the dead', 'sermons of a very angry ghost', 'waiting for permission to belong', and 'the ghosts are leaving'.
Perhaps you could play a little game of matching the image with the story title and see how many you get right.
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I also composed a special audio-story for Diwali! 🪔
Check out 'An Orange Offering' and let me know how you like it.
Life, Unadulterated
Many years ago — what feels like half a lifetime ago — when KrA and I were young and carefree, we went through a phase of binge-watching a lot of murder mystery TV shows.
We began with all kinds of Sherlock Holmes shows ever made, then found our way to Midsomer Murders, Foyle's War, Inspector Morse, and so on.
Watching those shows together after returning from work was couple-bonding time for us back then.
When we came across Murdoch Mysteries, which follows detective William Murdoch and is set in Toronto during the late 1800s and early 1900s, we instantly fell in love with it.
The show stood apart from all others in the way it portrayed early-stage forensic techniques in the light of Murdoch's keen scientific inquiry.
So imagine my wild delight when the local library announced that it was hosting a panel talk with four Canadian mystery writers, one of whom was Maureen Jennings — the author of the Murdoch Mysteries books on which the TV show is based. She has also written some of the screenplays for the show.
And that is how, one fine Sunday afternoon this month, I made my way to the library to attend the event.
It was a fantastic panel! One of the authors — Vicki Delany — defined the various sub-genres of the mystery genre as follows:
Mystery is what has happened in the past (and the protagonist tries to solve it),
suspense is what is happening right now (and we follow along with the protagonist as it happens),
and thriller is what we're afraid will happen in the future (and we race with the protagonist to prevent that dreadful thing from happening).
Made a lot of sense to me! What do you think?
Anyhoo, after the talk, I got to meet with Maureen Jennings and tell her how much KrA and I loved the Murdoch Mysteries show and what a huge difference in our lives she has made through her characters.
I bought one of her books, Let Loose The Dogs, and got it autographed!
Maureen very kindly honoured my request to address her autograph to both KrA and me. (Naturally, I haven't shown the autographed page to little D!)
Books You May Love
It's been a sparse month for reading in a way. I only have two books to share.
The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling's pseudonym) is a 900+ page delight. As with all other books in this series, the mystery is convoluted, there is an entire host of characters and suspects to keep track of, and what feeds the tension is the ever-evolving romantic dance between the detective partners, Strike and Robin, who're in love with each other but are uncertain whether the other feels the same way too.
Unlike earlier books, I didn't disappear for four days at a time to finish this book. I savoured it a few pages every night, both wanting to know what happens next but also not wanting the book to end too soon.
Little D has read and re-read all the books in the Wings Of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland several times, and he recommended them to me. Naturally, wanting to take up my little one on whatever invitation he extends to me, I started to read the first book in the series – The Dragonet Prophecy.
I had only read a chapter or two when D suggested I read it to him at bed-time. And that is how, dear Dreamers, I'm back to reading aloud to my child at bed-time once more!
The series centres around five dragonets (little dragons) who are destined to fulfil a prophecy of ending a long-lasting war between various dragon tribes. Sutherland's writing is very vivid and engrossing, and the stories she has woven are brilliant!
Our reading sessions are punctuated with D asking me every now and then, "Do you want to know whether this dragon will survive?" "Do you know So-and-So killed her own father unknowingly?"
This is the first time I'm reading a book with almost full foreknowledge of all the spoilers in the entire series, haha! It doesn't spoil the reading for me one bit though. The moments of connection with my little one that have come about because of this series are priceless!
Well, we come to the end of yet another edition of Monthly Missives, dear Dreamer!
It's funny how this month has been a reminder that stories allow us to connect with each other in such fundamentally human ways.
Imagine if Maureen Jennings hadn't written the Murdoch Mysteries books! Or if Tui Sutherland thought writing her Wings Of Fire books was an utter waste of time!
Without those stories, my life would have been several shades paler, devoid of some of its sparkle and joy.
This is what I tell myself as I head over to the local library in the mornings for some quiet writing time.
Progress is steady on Book 2 of the fantasy duology I've been working on. The words are flowing, the characters are doing rather unexpected things, and the story is carving out new paths to meander on.
It won't tell me where it's going, how we'll get wherever it is we're headed, or even when, but compels me to type alongside it and capture everything that unfolds in words on a Pages document.
And that is how it is meant to be.
Until next month then, dear Dreamer!
~ Anitha
"As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colours enough to paint the beautiful things I see." – Vincent Van Gogh