Subject: I finished reading!
Author:
Posted on: 2023-06-27 21:52:56 UTC
Wonderful. I do love a good cozy mystery. I'm further impressed that my complete non-understanding of Welsh didn't make the story hard to understand.
I don't have a lot else to say at present, unfortunately. I did quite enjoy the story though.
And published a book! And, and, and [hyperventilates]
~
Being a tale of mystery on the coast of South Wales, during the seventh year of the glorious reign of King Edward VII.
It is perfectly proper that Miss Arianrhod Ellis, acclaimed author of fantastical novels for children, should be invited to visit Llanelli. Cadoc Bevan, owner of the grand house at Plas-y-Dun, is after all an old friend of her father; why should she not call on him and his family?
The brutal murder which follows is entirely improper. A lady author would be forgiven for taking to her bed after such a shock, but Miss Ellis would much rather dedicate herself to solving the riddle the murder presents. For Miss Ellis is a mystery author...
Available in paperback & Kindle eBook format: Amazon.co.uk & Amazon.com (also on Amazons DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, SE, JP, CA, and AU, though at least some appear to drop one format)
~
A Dragon at Llanelli is a 20,000-word novella. I genuinely have no idea why I - reader and writer of sci-fi and fantasy - have turned out a historial-fiction cozy murder mystery, but... there it is? Slightly tarnished thanks go to Amazon's Kindle Direct, which really does pretty much let you upload a (properly-formatted) manuscript and just push the button. (Kindle Direct does have a Criticism section on Wikipedia, but it's more about the kind of things they allow to go to print than about them ripping off authors. Amazon is an omnipresent Problem.)
And, and, yeah.
aaaaaaaaaaa [runs around flailing]
hS is happy to answer questions, and also aaaaaaaa
And the extra copy is settled into the take-a-book-leave-a-book mailbox, awaiting its future reader, with some good company in the meantime:
(Can't promise I'll be getting to read it soon; not much free time, plus I'm already working through Painter of the Dead at the moment. But I will get to ADaL when I can!)
—doctorlit does not know how to make that image smaller . . .
I still have a copy waiting to drop off in our own little library (a former red phone box about a mile down the road); I need to figure out what to write in it first. ^_^
hS
<img src="url" width="500"/>
The number is in pixels. The height is automatically calculated from the width; no need to specify it. You can probably go as high as 800 and it'll still be comfortable on a PC.
~Neshomeh
Wonderful. I do love a good cozy mystery. I'm further impressed that my complete non-understanding of Welsh didn't make the story hard to understand.
I don't have a lot else to say at present, unfortunately. I did quite enjoy the story though.
My Welsh knowledge is mostly limited to placenames, so everything in there was based on internet research. I tried to treat it like I do Quenya in my PPC stories - exclamations and terms of address can go by untranslated (you don't need much to tell you that cariad is an endearment), but anything else needs some kind of translation in the narrative.
In the few pages I have of the sequel, there's actually a third type of Welsh-use: people deliberately using it to talk past Arthur (who sometimes deserves it). I need to work on exactly how translated that will be; it's all very rough right now.
hS
And I have ordered a copy! Looking forward to reading it. Cosy murder mysteries are entirely my vibe, and it looks like it'll arrive just in time for summer holiday too. =D Gonna second Iximaz's idea further down about making you sign it at the next Gathering!
Congratulations!
/Ekwy
Is it weird that I'm more nervous about you reading it, knowing that it's in-genre for you, than about other people who are just trying it out? Maybe you'll spot all the massive problems that nobody else has picked up on... [Frets]
hS
I've been away from the Board for a bit so I didn't notice this right away, but this is really cool! Dunno if I'm able to pick it up at the moment due to time and resources and whatnot, but I'm definitely putting this on my mental bookshelf for future reads if I ever get the opportunity to get back to that. Fun stuff!
-Fox
It is a long way from the book I would have expected to publish, but hopefully it's good despite that. :)
hS
An unspecified agent team makes a cameo appearance. The first person to quote the relevant passage in this thread will win the opportunity to choose an agent pair (not necessarily their own) to make a brief but vaguely identifiable cameo in the sequel (if and when it gets written). ("Brief but identifiable" means Agent Jay could be "a tall woman of anxious appearance wielding a Brownie camera".)
hS
Page 24, paragraph 1:
... to be guarded by a pair of severely-dressed women whose role appeared to be to take notes on absolutely everything.
That sure sounds like a pair of agents compiling a charge list to me! No hints as to who they might be, though.
I'm not quite done with the book yet, but nearly! Have been enjoying so far. I have my chief suspect, I'm certain I know what the daughter and the maid are about, and I think I know what's missing and where the poison was. Possibly the chalice from the palace, but definitely not the flagon with the dragon. ^_^
~Neshomeh
I actually forgot they were there between writing the thing and going back to edit it; I initially passed over that passage as them just being exactly what Arthur assumes them to be, but then I clocked that nobody in the book ever acknowledges their presence, and remembered what I've done.
They're not identifiable; off the top of my head I don't know who Upstairs would send in to check out a new canon. Intel? Action agents who might take it on? Or just whoever they had to hand? There was a petition to get Jay and Acacia to kill Fifty Shades of Gray once, but it didn't go anywhere. I decided not to answer the question.
... but now you get to instead! Congratulotions, you win the prize! I'll message you about who you want to send into the next one (don't want to spoil it for anyone else if and when I actually finish the thing!).
I have to confess, I did strongly consider including a butler so that Arthur could suspect him of having Done It. Maybe next time. ^_^
hS
I was right about whodunnit! Also the daughter and the maid, and what was missing and why! (Dunno where it went, though. Can't be the place I thought was hinted at, because Arianrhod and Arthur would surely have noticed the blood...)
I was wrong about the poison, though, in that there, uh, wasn't any. Just an innocent glass spilled by accident. If that was a deliberate red herring, well played.
And I definitely didn't put the whole thing together until the Big Reveal, which is okay, because it's more fun that way. ^_^
Re. what the PPC would be doing there: I'm not sure about the pair observing the story, but I reckon the Musée des Univers Perdus and possibly the Canon Librarian want to get their hands on copies of Miss Ellis' books—and as of this moment it's 100% my headcanon that my characters' kids will have read them, because they sound fun. {= D
~Neshomeh
I think the thing you're thinking of is probably in the unlabelled cupboard behind the cloakroom (unless I moved the label and that's now part of the cloakroom). It's dark and cluttered, easy to lose things in. I actually tweaked the line mentioning that to make it more obvious, because I skipped over it myself on the last reread.
I treat this book like a TV murder mystery - it's fun to be able to partially solve it, but you don't want to get the whole thing five minutes in. There's at least one show which consistently uses the gimmick that the murder didn't happen when you think it did - which is fine, except a) we all know that now, and b) sometimes only one person's alibi is time-dependent. Kind of gives it away. (There's also another one where it's consistently the most innocent and sympathetic suspect Wot Dun It; we were getting the right person 80%+ of the time. Not great.)
I really, really want to either write or read Miss Ellis' books. Ceridwen the Myrddina, the three Edwardian children she hangs out with, and little Ddraig are incredible characters to imagine. But I felt a Nesbit pastiche would be a bit much for me; maybe in a few years.
(I did actually write a Ceridwen solo version of "A Dragon at Castell-y-Bere" as a short story in one of my NaNos. It got eaten by Google though.)
hS
That was one hell of a read, if I may say so myself. I love how overwhelmingly Welsh it is—I'd been learning the language for several years, so you had me roped in from the start. :) I loaned the copy to my dad now and he's enjoying it!
As for my guess for the cameo... page 39?
"There was a soft click, and a sudden murmur of voices, shockingly loud in the quiet bower. Cloth rustled somewhere in the room, and then there came a startled gasp and the sound of a door slamming shut."
(Sounds to me like Jay's camera went off!)
The click is just the door opening, but that's a good guess!
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I did a lot of research (of the online variety) for the Welsh - one problem I ran into is that some current Welsh idioms are actually late 20th century creations, so it was hard to find the accurate older versions. The most fun idiom comes late in the book; Hefina uses esgob annwyl, which is equivalent to "oh my God" but literally means "Dear Bishop!". Esgob was the only word Amazon insisted was a typo, so I guess their Welsh dictionary was pretty good.
I also had to unlearn a lot of stereotypical Welsh speech patterns. English depictions tend to be heavy on the "look you" and the "boyo"; the former is apparently not common in Welsh (they do use altered sentence structure for emphasis, which I did a lot of), and the latter I retained only for when people are making fun of Arthur.
I've spent pretty much every summer of my life in Wales, so a lot of the inspiration for A Dragon at Llanelli was as a love letter to Wales and its culture. I hope I've done it justice.
hS
I doubt I'll be able to participate, sadly, but this just a great idea.
-Ls
I'm happy to see this out. Will place an order ASAP! Must continue to populate my special bookshelf for authors I know. ^_^
~Neshomeh
I'm also sorry I couldn't help like I wanted to.
The advice you offered re. punctuation etc definitely helped the book look better than it would have otherwise. Beyond that, given that I have [checks] five confirmed sales so far, I think anything else would have been a bit overwrought anyway. :)
(I've actually bought more copies than that myself at this point. ^_^ I hope to get a few more by telling Facebook, but I can't do that until I've surprised my mother. Also this is "processed" orders, which means [expressive shrug].)
~
Speaking of your bookshelf, I've also updated the Restricted Section list to include both A Dragon at Llanelli, and the contribution Zingenmir made to Living Legacies back in 2014. That puts Published PPCer Works at 26, which is 2/3 of a Shakespeare.
Question: do we want the Restricted Section list to be transferred to the Wiki? It's an in-universe list of books held in a specific room of the Canon Library, so it shouldn't run into the No Real People restriction.
hS
I should get it Wednesday.
Re. Restricted Section on the wiki, I'm a little leery because I know some folks don't want their real name too closely linked with their online handle(s). Scattered references on an obscure forum and a list buried in a Gdoc probably aren't too prone to being picked up in a Google search, but the wiki is more optimized. It would be nice, but I dunno. {= /
~Neshomeh
As far as I can remember the PPC authors who were mentioned are hS, Ix, Scapegrace, and... one other person. Sorry to whoever I forgot.
Is there anyone who feels the way Nesh suggested here? I'm not trying to say that that's not a totally legitimate, understandable concern, but I'd also like to see if there any people who do have that objection.
-Ls
P.S. I'll be offline until Thursday, just in case any is curious as to my lack of replies in the meantime.
At least three of the 12 PPC authors on the Restricted Section inventory have specifically said that they don't want the two names linked, and a fourth I'm 100% confident would be very upset if we did.
hS
Obviously we could sanitise the list in one direction or the other (just real names would make it impossible to link back to a specific Boarder), but the possibility that someone could search for the book title and go "you were in the (evil, bad, good-for-nothing) PPC!" is real. I shall maintain it on my doc then.
hS
I just went ahead and ordered a copy for myself—so next time we see each other at a Gathering, I'm going to make you sign it. Muahahaha.
My bookshelves are alphabetised, so you'll slot in right in front of Rick Riordan. ^_~
I may have spent a while last night inventing an author signature that's distinct from my legal signature. I may also have let this thing go to my head a bit.
hS
While I don't know that I'll be able to buy it, at least at this time, I'm so glad you were able to do this. Congrats!
-Ls
I'm very pleased with it, and it is quite a pretty book:
hS
I'm entirely willing to pay up, I just would prefer to not deal with trying to wrangle the ebook out of Amazon for format-shifting purposes.
I think you've either got my email or it's available by clicking (I don't know if the email I have for you is still good).
- Tomash
I actually supplied the eBook to Amazon in - if you can believe it - .docx format. The other option was to download and use their Kindle Create app, which seemed like a lot more work given that I'd already cleaned up the .docx for the paperback. When I tried to download a copy of the eBook for testing, it claimed to be in HTML format and landed me with a .zip of 49 files, mostly HTML, some images, and a handful things like .json or .ncx. That did not load onto a Kindle, if you're wondering.
In theory, I can transfer the eBook file manually from the physical Kindle (not the browser version) to a computer, but that will wind up with it in whatever format Amazon use for Kindle eBooks - AZW or KFX apparently. I'm not sure if that will even work, and I think it's what you were trying to avoid anyway. ^_^
I'll email you to discuss details; if I manage to space it, ping my Board email in a few days and I'll go "oh bother, sorry, I got distracted!".
hS
The .ncx file is a table of contents, and in general, the zip file layout you're describing sounds a lot like an epub (epubs are actually just zip files with a different file extension, see...)
Said ZIP file is almost, but not entirely, an EPUB. It doesn't properly open in EPUB readers. It's entirely possible that the directory structure is wrong and that's the main issue.
It really doesn't help that there's not good overviews of what an EPUB is meant to be laid out like ...
(I can pass along the book if you want to join me in playing "how can I get a valid ebook out of this", assuming hS doesn't mind a little light copyright infringement)
- Tomash
I've actually investigated the epub spec at one point, so I might be able to make this happen.
I'll bounce the zip to you when I get a chance. :) I'm never one to stand in the way of mucking about with tech.
hS
At the very least, I'm curious about what said zip file actually contains
Congratulations, Huinesoron! I will order two at my earliest free moment. (One to read, and one to stick in the take-a-book-leave-a-book mailbox, to find its way to a bonus reader!)
—doctorlit, proud
We have a few of those around (they've been repurposing the old red phone boxes in the villages near us); maybe I should get a bunch of author copies and just spam the local area. >:-D
hS
Cosy mysteries are the best! I'll check this out when all the drama to do with my impending move in August has died down ;u;
As I get older, I seem to be turning more and more into a Hobbit, and I feel like hobbits would really enjoy a cozy mystery. (Probably not with murder, they're funny like that.)
Good luck with the move!
hS
I will tell you what I think once I've read it. It has to go through the mail first, alas.