Peter Staadecker's Blog

My newest novel, "Naarlen," is now available in paperback, Kindle format and epub (e.g. Kobo and Nook) format.

It's been three years in the making, and I'm delighted with it. It's so new that Goodreads doesn't yet have a cover image, but head on over to Amazon or Kobo and you'll find it.

It's a story of chaos and frustrated lust in the high arctic. It's raucous, rude and laugh-out-loud. If that's your cup of tea, I think you'll love it. Happy reading!

It never rains but it pours. And no, that's not, as a Terry Pratchett character once guessed, a tea pot.

In March the talented Camilla Downs blogged an author interview with me (see previous blog post). Now I'm the subject of a video interview. No further comment needed from me, since it's all here:

https://vimeo.com/403433732

Camilla Downs interviewed me for her lovely "Meeting The Authors" blog. See her interview with me here:

http://meetingtheauthors.com/2020/03/...

PS: there's a little nugget enclosed for any Leonard Cohen fans, and an additional nugget for the we-hate-vervet-monkeys fan club.

To celebrate the launch of Book 2 of "The Illyrian Voyages", Amazon has made Kindle downloads of Book 1 free worldwide (you'll need an Amazon account) until April 15 midnight PST, 2019.

If you're a fan of the series but have friends who aren't sure if they'd like it, please let them know. This is a way for them to test the waters free of charge.

You don't have to have a Kindle reader either. Kindle reader apps are available free for most devices including Apple, Android, Windows, phones, tablets etc.

While writing A Glimmer Of Light I had fun with famous – and not so famous – quotations for my chapter subheadings.

For the English literati, gurus, fans, readers, poets and writers out there, here are 25 of those quotations. The challenge is how many authors can you identify for the quotations?

Warning these are hard!

Quotations and details at

https://blog.staadecker.com/2019/03/0...

Good luck!

In February I wrote a goodreads blog promising to reveal details on how I built the cover for the new book "Dropping Into Darkness." And the route to that cover involved some very twisted paths and detours!

That blog is now available on

https://blog.staadecker.com/2018/03/0...

with lots of illustrations (which is why I couldn't post the blog here in the goodreads blog).

Happy reading.

Feb 2018:

The newest book is now available: "Dropping Into Darkness". Beyond the positive reviews of the book, I'm inordinately pleased by the reader reaction to the cover illustration.

Some time in the future I will write a blog post on https://blog.staadecker.com about the details of the making of this cover.

It was a labour of love over several weeks. During that time I experimented with various motifs before settling on the final design. Until I publish the detailed blog, I will say the vision I had for how to draw the fictional bridge (can't say more about why the bridge is important without spoiling the plot) was inspired by a real-life bridge. The real-life bridge is the Trift Bridge in the Swiss Alps. It is a giddily narrow, high, thin, spidery foot bridge. A thing of insubstantial ropes and cables and planks. 570 meters (1700 feet) long and 100 meters (300 foot or 10 storeys) up in the sky over a glacier.

The butterfly, which also has a role in the story, was based on a wonderful public domain monarch butterfly photo, which I further altered to suit my purposes using various photo editing tools. Credit and thanks to the US geological survey for the original public domain photo.

I will post an update here when I find time to write the full story of the cover creation and all the wonderful tools and detours that I had to bring to bear ...

June 2017: I've just returned from an invite to Montreal where I discussed The Twelve Man Bilbo Choir with a very lively book club. The members were bright, engaged, well-read, fun and full of questions/observations about the book. I took twenty minutes before the start of the open discussion/question and answer session to lay out the historical events that inspired the book, and the legal precedent those events gave rise to.

The legal precedent still affects much of the western world in a profound, profound way.

I noticed, as is usually the case when discussing this, that no-one in the book club had heard about the original case, the resulting precedent, or how important it is to everyday life for much of the world.

This launched the book club into a very lively discussion of ethics, morality, and how the judges might have varied their rulings if the circumstances of the original tragedy had changed by a hairs-breadth one way or another.

The evening ran on for close to three hours (with breaks for side topics) with never a dull or quiet moment.

What a wonderful, lively session and what a great book club to be invited by. Many thanks!