Restoration Day – Page 10 – Deborah Makarios

August 4, 2017October 19, 2017

Blurbs: Your Opinion, Please!

After the helpful feedback I garnered from my last appeal for opinions (#2 is looking like a winner), I am moved to ask again. This time, your opinion is sought on the matter of blurbs.

The blurb text will appear on the back cover of the hardcopy, and in the online sales pages for both hardcopy and ebook. It’s the first thing after the cover that has the chance to pique a reader’s interest in the book. It’s gotta be good, and it’s gotta be short. Brevity is the soul of wit, Polonius informs us, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes. Brief, therefore, let me be.

There are two groups of people I want to hear from in particular:

People who have read the book.
People who have not read the book.

If you fall into the former category, let me know which of the following blurbs you think best fits the content and tone of the book (always bearing in mind that Some Changes Have Been Made).

If you fall into the latter category, your task is simple: say which of the following blurbs you find most intriguing; which most piques your interest in reading the book.

Feel free to make your feedback as detailed as you like – approve some sentences, denounce others, critique the commas, substitute the shoutlines – all feedback is welcomed. Bear in mind that the illustrations are provided purely for, er, illustrative purposes, and won’t actually be involved in the end product.

Now, with no further ado, let us bring on the contestants!

Contestant Number One:

It should have been a fairytale…

Lily was born to be queen of Arcelia, where the land itself has life and magic growing in it. The royal rite of Restoration Day renews that life, restoring every family to their ancestral lands.
A quest for the Restoration Requisites is Lily’s chance to leave her enchanted castle for the world beyond, taking her rightful place at last. Her fairytale is finally coming true. Or so she thought…
But Arcelia has changed in ways she never imagined possible. Lily’s quest soon turns deadly serious: if she doesn’t find the Requisites in time, the life of the land will be lost – and so will hers.

Restoration Day is coming…

Contestant Number Two:

Princess, pawn – or queen?

Princess Lily was born to be queen, but she lives like a pawn in the shadow of her aunt’s control. She dreams of the day when she will take her place in the world. At last her chance arrives, with a quest for the three Requisites of Restoration Day, the royal rite which renews the life of the land.
But she’s been hidden away too long, and Arcelia has changed. Stripped of everything but the identity which has become a life-threatening liability, Lily will need to do more than cross the board if she is to emerge triumphant as the queen she knows she must be.
The land she thought was hers becomes the field for a gripping game of chess – and this time she’s playing for her life.

Contestant Number Three:

When the people are divided
from each other and the land…

So runs the Fate, a warning of dark times for the land of Arcelia, where the land itself has life and magic growing in it. Arcelia’s Princess Lily escapes the confines of her sequestered childhood to seek the Requisites for Restoration Day, a once in a lifetime rite that restores ancestral lands and renews the land’s own life.
But Lily soon finds that being a princess in a magic land is nothing like a fairytale. Stripped of all she thought was hers, and running for her life, she must see through her quest before the Fate falls on her land and they both are lost forever.

…to a foreigner’s dominion
shall the land at last be lost.

So what will it be? Contestant Number One, Contestant Number Two, Contestant Number Three, or Other? Have your say below!

July 21, 2017

The Month of Prunen

I feel rather sorry for those who had to live under the French Revolutionary Calendar. Imagine making it through the months of Mist and Frost, only to have Snowy, Rainy and Windy to look forward to! Not to mention the rather unpleasant idea of having to work nine days before you get a single day off.

So when it came to the world-building task of creating a calendar for Restoration Day, I knew some things I wanted to do, and some things I wanted to avoid. Like the Jacobins, I created a round of months which reflected the natural world. Unlike the Jacobins, I had more sense than to try to introduce decimal weeks.

The Arcelian calendar begins with spring: Grenian (greening), Blosse (blossom) and Molsh – time to fork some mulch onto the garden before the summer heat comes and dries everything out. Summer starts, you see, with Sunnen and ends with Dryden, with Hayen in the middle. Autumn brings Hærfest (time for a party!) followed by Sere (as everything withers) and Misth (you can tell winter is around the corner, can’t you?).

Unlike the Jacobin calendar, the winter months focus less on the doings of the dismal weather, and more on the doings of the people. The first month of winter is Prunen, followed by Diggen, which brings us at last to Budd, holding out the promise of the green of spring returning at last.

I had considered relating these months to the months of the Gregorian calendar, but then it occurred to me that my readers span both hemispheres and Confusion Is Liable To Result.

In the northern continents, for example, it is now Hayen, a time of hotness and dry grass. Down here in New Zealand, hotness is exactly what it isn’t, and as for dry grass, the last time I saw the cat bound across the back yard, it was like watching a skipping stone – splash, splash, splash.

No, down here it is Diggen time, although due to being rather behindhand with the gardening (I don’t like to go out when it’s raining, which is often), we are still at work on the pruning. Not the getting-rid-of-unnecessary-stuff-around-the-house kind of pruning, the actual pruning kind of pruning, with chopping off of branches and the like.

This year’s big effort is on the grapevine, a lordly, shed-eating monster which I suspect had not been pruned in years if not decades. To give you an idea of its size: the Google Earth image of our property does not give any indication that that shed exists. As far as the satellites are concerned, there is nothing but grapevine.

It not only covered the roof of the woodshed, it hung down on all four sides. Obviously, time for a haircut, preferably one that left the grapevine fruiting in places we could reach. Enter the ladder, the loppers and the secateurs. Also, to my surprise, the bucket and trowel.

Things which I did not expect to find in the grapevine:
> loop-de-loops and pretzels of blackened branches which had not seen the sun in years
> a thick layer of loam (the remains of years or decades of rotted-down leaves and grapes)
> earthworms (some white and squirming in the unaccustomed light)
> root systems (yes, some of the branches were putting down roots into the compost. I didn’t even know grapes could do that.)
> snails and slugs (some quite enormous)
> wetas (several)

> literally hundreds of slaters/woodlice and Things With Legs (did you know that slaters aka woodlice are crustaceans? Like lobsters. It does not make me loathe them any less.)
> and a large spider (only one, mercifully. Possibly a black tunnel-web spider, but I think I shall call it a cabochon spider, for its thorax and abdomen were round and smooth and tastefully coloured, at least until I beat it to a pulp with the trowel. After that, not so much.)

After digging up all that, I wouldn’t have been that surprised if I found a lost civilization or the portal to another world in there.

As you can imagine, this was no mere light afternoon’s gardening. I was three afternoons in before the difference was even discernible. But I persevered for two more solid afternoons, and, like Gandalf before me, “Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him… I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin.”

Half the yard is now covered in the monster’s remains (unlike the mountain-side, our land is too squishy to break), and on the other half, two hills of grape-compost stand, ferried there in buckets by my Dearly Beloved.

Job done. At least until my aches fade sufficiently for me to tackle the apple, the redcurrant, the lemon and the Japanese maple. But we shall never see such a Prunen again.

March 24, 2017

Cover Image: Your Opinion, Please

So, here are a range of images I am considering using as a basis for the front cover of Restoration Day. I would love to hear what you think of them – like, dislike, utter revulsion…

For those of you who have read the 3rd draft, which do you think fits best?
For everyone, read it or not, which image grabs you, draws you in?

Three things to bear in mind:
Firstly, these are just images, not finished covers – a beginning, not an end.
Secondly, the image may not fill the whole cover, but might instead be seen through a ‘window’ in an old-fashioned binding (or rather, a 2D rendition thereof) or through a gap in a hedge (ditto).
And thirdly, it will have to work at ‘thumbnail’ size as well as book-size and preferably also in black and white.

So, with those caveats out of the way, here are the contenders! Click on the image to see the original version.

Contestant Number 1: