D. Lambert's Blog

Coming soon! 
I'm excited to say I'll be at the Fairy and Fantasy Faire March 28-29th (note: it's TWO DAYS this year!) in Sidney, BC. I'm also giving a talk (which I need to go practice!) as one of their seminars and hopefully have a chance to see lots of people! Costumes are mandatory for vendors, which I think is a great idea! Last year, I practiced at the Island FanCon (which moved to June this year) with a travelling Shimmer costume, and then finished with a dancing Shimmer costume.
(For anyone who doesn't know, Shimmer Weaver is a character in Son of No Man Series book 2 onwards and the main female lead in His Last Name, and she's awesome!)
This year, because there are two days at Fairy and Fantasy Faire, I'm going to use dancing Shimmer again (once I repair the beadwork that was destroyed by my well-meaning husband putting it THROUGH THE WASHING MACHINE) but I'm working on something new for day 2; Lania. So stay tuned!
I've got the edits for Beyond the Southern Dune in the hands of the Editors, and work has begun on Under the Jungle Canopy. I'm a little waylaid by a short story project through the Sooke Writer's Collective. The anthology is up... and I put in a snippet of the submission below for you! 
This month I am highlighting Astra Crompton as author and illustrator and there are some freebies at the bottom as usual. 
Stay warm out there!

It's been a year the likes of which I doubt I will see again! So let's see what happened...
Jan 2025:  (Tales of Espar) released. Finally, we got the ending to Shimmer and Kitable's back and forth! I admit, even I wasn't sure how it was going to sort out. Pretty happy it did though!
March 2025: The Faerie & Fantasy Faire in Sidney was a blast! Tons of costumes (got me out in the shinning Shimmer Weaver dancing costume) and vendors with interactive displays and fun! So much so, I'm doing it next year!
March 2025: Island FanCon was an amazing array of vendors, including reconnecting with some local authors from the year before and seeing friends on the big stage! 
Summer 2025 Terrier books started carrying my books! Great local shop in general. Did most of my Christmas shopping there!
The Whirlwind Fall! 
Sept 2025: To Walk into the Sands (Book 1 Sands of Nanterac) released! New desert world, darker, older characters. Grit, sand, monsters... and love conquering all.
Oct 2025: Lione (Book 1 of the Falling City) released! Lots of history there, so much that I wrote a blog about where it came from! It's more of the older style and has several of my favourite characters, plus a kick-a$$ female lead. 
Nov 2025: Corelands (Book 2 of the Falling City) released! Wraps up Aurion and Lania's adventure and finally ends the Weapons of Espar too due to overlapping timelines. 


What's in store for 2026?Sands of Nanterac Book 2 (Beyond the Southern Dunes) is coming soon! Maybe February? Maybe later? You'll be the first to know! 
Sands of Nanterac Book 3 (Under the Jungle Canopy) is in the works. If I'm lucky, it'll make it by the end of 2026 but maybe not... 
New project? Yep... Where the Wind Stands Still is just about done final edits on my end. We'll see if the publisher is interested when it's finished. Might have a new standalone in a new dark-fairy Celtic fantasy world heading your way.
All in all, I'm wishing you and yours a fun and not-too-exciting 2026! Thanks for being part of my journey!
Let's start the year with some free ebooks! Check below for the month's selection from me and other other authors!

Yep! Corelands is out! Now you can get BOTH books (there are only 2) of the Falling City. Bonus, it wraps up some of the Weapons of Espar series too! Did you miss your copy? Find it Here: books2read.com/Corelands

Meantime, in other news... ever wonder what it's like to be a writer? I did an interview with Michael Pearkes and he asks great questions! Check it out HERE. Or check out his page for more interviews to get insights into many other authors' processes too! The important thing is to realize that we write differently!

Also, a quick reminder (especially if you're shopping local to me...) that many of the books are now available at Terrier Books. They have an online presence as well, so if you want to support local in Sooke, BC, AND get a SIGNED copy, check them out terrierbooks.com. They ship... just saying!
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I'm also fully confirmed for the Fairy and Fantasy Faire March 28-29th as a speaker AND vendor. It's a great opportunity to catch up and snap up the latest releases. The duology Lione and Corelands are available there too!
Don't forget to follow online for more updates!

​And for fun... here are random things I did not expect to be writing during a rough idea fest for Book 3 of Sands of Nanterac.. Deals below but first...

It's winter market season! I'll be at the Sooke Community Centre Nov 29th and 30th with allll the new books. Want to reserve your copy? Drop me a line on the contact form found HERE!! 
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Did you miss Lione? It's out and the universal link is HERE

Book 2 is still on pre-order, so if you want to reserve your copy of Corelands before it launches Nov 25th, get it HERE 

Enough of the links! In other news, I'm sorry to say that 4 horsemen publications will no longer be doing audiobooks. Unfortunately, the way the subscription system works for things like Audible, there is a huge expense and no return on it for even very successful authors. And for a publisher trying to bring out as many great books as they can, it's not paying off. I'm sad as we'll lose some readers, but I'm looking into options. 

As a promo thing, the authors have done a bunch of recordings of chapter 1's (read by the authors) so look for Rydan and Lione to be featured on the 4 horsemen publications social media coming up. Having done them, I appreciate how much work goes into them! Don't know if I'll read my own any time soon fully. What do you think? Do you love author-read books or do you prefer professional narrators? Does the narrator make or break the audiobook for you? It does for me!

You'll find free books (find a new author to love!) at the bottom, plus a bit about the series and some recommended listening! Have a great November!

Well, it's been a rough month with every sickness under the sun hitting the family, one after another. For the first time, I have time to do a post as everyone is healthy! 

And it happens to be on the day LIONE GOES LIVE!!

If you don't know, Lione is book 1 of the Falling City and it's available NOW! I'm including the monthly deals here too but there is little time left on them because I didn't get this up until now! 

If you want to know more about Lione, check out the BLOG at https://www.dlambertauthor.com/blog/june-22nd-2025

This post is mostly about covers. It may not seem that way at first, because I’m going to start talking about AI first...​

Before all that, quick notice that I have a BOOK LAUNCH coming up on October 4th, 2025, at the Vancouver Island Regional Library in Sooke from 1-2:30 pm. Come see me and share with a friend!!

Now, to business! It would be hard NOT to know about Artificial Intelligence in this day and age in Canada. Among writers, it has certainly spurred a lot of debate, although I can safely say that I’m on the side that writers should do writing. It may have its uses for information and research purposes, but I’m not convinced that its consequences actually outweigh even those benefits, so I don’t tend to use it. I am the person who is probably putting the "-AI" in my search so I can look at the proper sources, but that’s the science of me coming through. I don't really trust the AI summaries at this point anyway!

That said, I have used AI, at least a very rudimentary form of it: I use Grammarly fairly commonly. I use the basic version right now, although I learned a bit from the pro version. I have since dropped the pro version because, honestly, it isn't as smart as it was made out to be. I use the basic program to help me with my grammar and punctuation, ensuring that I catch mistakes that might otherwise slip through the cracks.

What I don’t do is use generative AI for my writing at all, which is when AI generates the words for you. In fact, I found the generative AI overall to be pretty useless, and in some cases, even worse than that. Wrong! I admit; I did try it for social media posts briefly. I decided it wasn't worth it.

People who have been following for long enough might remember a post I did around 2021 about "Words a knowledgeable reader might not know." Grammarly flags words that it thinks a knowledgeable audience would not know and suggests alternatives. This was completely fraught with issues because, as anyone with experience in theEnglish language knows, most synonyms are not actually full synonyms. Words are loaded with nuance,  so even if you choose a word that seems on the surface to be the same, you can alter the meaning of the sentence notably! "Red" is not quite the same as "crimson". Yes, crimson is red, but it’s not the same. So the suggestions it gave (and still does!) are often wrong!  The other reason I never took Grammarly up on those recommendations (unless I was wrong with my choice of word) was because I didn’t think that we should cater to what a "Knowledgable audience" knew or didn’tknow. I feel that we should cater to what they should or might want to know. In other words, I think people should grow by reading and not accept their current limitations.

Even ignoring all those recommendations from Grammarly (which I do), it's only about one in four corrections that I actually accept. To be fair, I write fantasy, so there are lots of terms, names, etc. that are correct the way I have written them, but Grammarly just can’t get its head around them.  So it's increasingly losing its usefulness for me. 

It's worth noting at this point that people edited all my books. Two I did myself. Professional editors have done the rest. 
Back to the point of this post: Book covers.

The covers for my next three books are not typical. I’m still enjoying the art and how this uniqueness makes them stand out, but I’m not entirely sure how they’ll fare in the mass market. And that is because they are different, very different. While it's not been said to me, I think what the publisher is trying to do is ensure it's very, very clear that this is not AI art.

I have seen the sketches and provided feedback throughout the process, so I can promise you it's not AI. Am I perfectly happy with them?  Not necessarily. But I accepted long ago that the publisher is allowed to make certain calls, including things like cover choices. I’m curious now about how they will perform and how they compare to a market that has been inundated with, to be fair, exceptionally well put together AI-generated covers.

The inside content hasn’t changed—it is the same "Me" on the page—but my covers here vary markedly from what I have ever seen before, coming out published.  I don’t think they detract from the story. I think they look a little more classic, but they are different, and I’m not sure how that will affect people's interest in the book.

What do you think?  Let me know below or send me a message from the contact page!

As always, a few freebies are coming up, and I’m going to include the links below. Get them quickly, though, because they end at the end of the month.

And if you are interested in any of these upcoming books, despite or because of their covers, take a look at the website launch pages or follow me online. To walk to the sands releases on September 25, Lione on October 25, and Corelands on November 25. Otherwise, see me out at the Christmas market, which I understand is November 29 and 30th this year! This one is for pre-order sales! And lastly, Review copies! Free books in exchange for a review. No sign up required!

​Well, it’s a surprise. But it’s like a big old surprise birthday party! It’s a good surprise! 
 
A bit of background first. I was told in early 2025 that readers these days like series released close together. So, although we were planning to release To Walk into the Sands next (Book 1 in a new desert-based fantasy, the Sands of Nanterac), 4HorsemenPublishing wanted a different series to go first so they could do get the whole lot out quickly because Book 2 of Sands of Nanterac wasn’t finished. They asked what else I had. I showed them Lione and Corelands. 
 
But then I got word that To Walk into the Sands was coming out September 25th, 2025! Great! I’m super excited about this new series, as it was what caught the attention of the publisher in the first place. It’s an adult otherworld fantasy with a mature near-retirement character and strong female leads that is very dear to me! 
 
At that point, I was told Lione and Corelands (which the editor had) were slated for February and March 2026, which made sense to me. I can only promote one thing at a time. 
 
But last week I got Lione’s release date. October 25th, 2025. Which is neither February, nor 2026. 
 
So since it’s now imminent, let’s talk about the Falling City for a second. This is such an old story for me, I don’t know where to start! 
 
The first thing to realize is that the order in which I published my books is not the order in which I wrote them. In fact, the first book released (Dragon’s Voice) was the LATEST book I had written at the time of its release. I followed it with Dragon’s Talon and SoulBurner, which were actually some of the oldest books. 
 
(Fun fact; the more recent the writing of the book, the less editing it required and the sooner I have been able to release them! Makes sense when you think about all I learned on my earlier works!)
 
Now the first book I finished is the Story that refuses to be written (not its real name). After that, came Dragon’s Voice. Then I was writing SoulBurner and, believe it or not, I got stuck. It wasn’t the story it is now (neither was Dragon’s Voice!) but I was writing and learning, and the characters were engaging and the story was fun! But I got stuck, even though I knew where the story needed to go. 
 
That is when my muse hit me with a (sigh… I know….) dream about a set of twins. They seemed much like my sister and I (we aren’t twins but are close). One is physically strong and tough, the other emotional and intuitive. But they were tied together by a single soul, and they were meant to change the world. 
 
I sketched them. And so I met Lania and Akara. 
 
Trouble was, it came together as a single novel at first, and whoo boy was it a doozy! I had to figure out how to split it, but for years, it just wouldn’t work. I had four uneven Acts in it, a large cast, and an immense world! I loved it for the flawed characters! It had so much more depth than anything I had written at that time. 
 
It also taught me a few important lessons that went on to influence my later writing. One was to try to write from another character’s POV. I’d gotten stuck on SoulBurner, but when I came to the part where Cairon and Gensiana meet Lania in the new book, it flowed. I learned so much more about the dynamic between the other characters, I was able to go back and finish SoulBurner! 
 
However, it was a good number of years later when I finally figured out how to adjust the enormous book that was then just called Lione. I was working through a new edit with the feedback sessions of the Sooke Writers’ Collective when it hit me. Cancel one Sovereign, fuse the character to another, and so simplify the flow between acts 2 and 3… and boom: Lione and Corelands (Book 1 and 2 of the Falling City) were finally done.
 
How long did it take? From 2001 to 2025. 
 
I write faster now. Dragon’s Voice only took 16 months from conception to completion (including professional edit) and then publication. But there is far less to fix. Lione and Corelands were the books that showed me what I wanted to do as a writer. They gave me the ‘voice’ of author-self. For that, they will always hold a special place in my heart.

​Freebies...

June means summer is here and with it fresh garden vegetables, farmers markets, and summer heat! 
Big in the news is that we have the official COVER in for the release of To Walk into the Sands, book 1 of a NEW series Sands of Nanterac. This was the book that the readers asked for in the poll last year, so here it is! The book is going to be released Sept 25th 2025!

This is a marked deviation from the World of the Tainted, with new characters, new magic, and new threats. It's definitely more mature as well. Follow the link HERE to your favourite website, or buy directly on this PREORDER option from the publisher for rocking discounts. They have 25% off this month for all LGBTQA+ books and are having a sale for pre-orders, which gives To Walk into the Sands a whopping 36% off if you get it now. 

In other news, I'll be at the Night Market in Sooke starting June 19th from 5-8pm at the Sooke Regional Museum grounds. We don't have the usual spot, so you'll just have to explore the market to find us (I know; shucks...all those great things to look at...)
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See you out there!

Promotions and sales from other authors; One of these actually starts June 4th, so be warned! I've tried to include a wider range of genres in this month's selection, so please take a look and share as much as you'd like with others! 

May is here and I sadly did a terrible job of planting this year so I don't know if we'll get any vegetables! But we've taken to growing sprouts on the windowsill, so that's fresh and fun! 

The littlest cat got his surgery, and it turns out he needed a tooth out too. The poor goof wasn't put together correctly at the manifacturer. But he's recovered well from most of it so far. He's happy to have no more cone on.

May is a lot quieter for events, but I'm being kept plenty busy. The typesets need to be reviewed for both Lione and Corelands and covers are in the works! I hope to have them by summer. Rumours have it I might see To Walk into the Sands coming out October 2025, but the official date is still TBA. 

In the meantime, I'm working on putting together a kids' book (which is a passion project in honour of my late cat Corsair) and have gotten the images back from the amazing Astra Crompton (link here). She's nailed the right mix of fun and colourful for the brown tabby who tamed my ginger scaredy cat with games. And it turned into a sweet story about making friends. I'm going to try and make it into a board book for kids age 3-7y.

I am also finishing the edits for Beyond the Southern Dunes (book 2 Sands of Nanterac) this month. It's due by the end of the month, so wish me luck!  Book 3 is percolating in my brain. Would it be cruel to drag poor Asakaran into another adventure? He's been trying to retire since book 1! 
Lastly, I've been updating the videos on YouTube, and now you can find all sorts of fun things, plus the occasional very random cat video! I'll be starting a series on where I got inspiration from over the years, too, so check me out at https://www.youtube.com/@shakatdamen

Busy, busy, busy...

March is shaping up to be busy! 

I'll be in Vancouver for some fun, but then, from March 28th through 30th, you'll find me at Island FanCon for the second year! I've got a bigger table, and I'm sharing! Meet my partner in crime below:  Richard Winder! 

I met Richard through the Sooke Writer's Collective, and I was blown away by how well he immediately fit in. He's a diligent member of the Long Prose Group and is throwing in great feedback for others while also working on an amazing new project involving realms and dragons! His current works are SciFi, although I'd be remiss not to mention his 4 seasons of non-fiction mushroom cookbooks. This man's knowledge is vast! Check out the links below to see more!
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Mid-April (specifically April 12th), I'm also at the Fantasy and Fairie Faire in Sidney at the Mary Winspear Centre. PLUS I'm in a writer's panel at the event!  It promises to be a day of great fun with costumes and magic. Yes, I have to dress up. I've decided to go as Shimmer. Pictures to follow! 
Promises to be a busy spring! Come out and see me! MEET RICHARD and his SciFi books!!

Richard Winder is an indie science and science fiction writer and retired forest biologist living in Sooke, B.C. He likes to paint and draw, and to speculate about the futures that might lie ahead for all of us. He has been writing and publishing sci-fi stories for over a decade, and his self-published fictional works include two well-received space operas set in his Stella universe.
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He has also  published a post-apocalyptic novel about North American isolation titled Merika, along with New World Endings—an anthology with over a dozen very diverse short sci-fi stories and novelettes. 
You can follow Richard at @scifiwriter.bsky.social or https://www.facebook.com/richardswinder and his works are highlighted at https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rswinder