Warning this material is of a young adult
nature.
If you're over 18 ~
Well…You’ve been warned.
Genres:
Middle Grade / Fantasy / Adventure
I
AM PLEASED TO WELCOME AUTHOR
Iain
Reading
About the
Author:
Iain Reading is passionate about Root Beer, music, and writing. He is Canadian, but currently resides in the Netherlands working for the United Nations. Iain writes middle grade and young adult books. His published works include the Kitty Hawk Flying Detective Agency Series, The Wizards of Waterfire Series, and the dragon of the month club.
To learn more, go to http://www.amazon.com/Iain-Reading/e/B00B0NGI6Q/
Connect with Iain on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
BANTER – STUFF ABOUT YOU
Q: Are you a morning person, or a midnight candle burner?
A: Definitely I am a midnight candle burner. Or... at least I used to be, back when I was still working at McDonalds and playing basketball at 1AM in city parks, followed by pinball at 7/11 until dawn. More recently I have somehow transitioned to a morning person. But only because my day job has the annoying habit of requiring me to be there from 9 to 5. When writing books, however, there's nothing better for me than dark, cold 4AM writing sessions, preferably with a blustery storm brewing outside.
Q: Tell me one thing about each of the four seasons you like. It can be anything.
A: Winter = Snow. Who doesn't love the crunchy bite of snow?
Spring = Thunderstorms. I love to see the power of nature flickering lightning at the horizon.
Summer = Snorkeling. When it's hot and humid there's no better cure than snorkeling around the lake or beach, on the hunt for fish and treasure.
Fall = A lot of people would say the colors of leaves, but my favorite thing about the Fall is that first day when it starts to be really cold and you know that winter is coming.
Q: Bedtime, relaxing so you can sleep sounds. Is your preference, white noise, TV, soft music, ocean waves, forest or meadow sounds, babbling brook, or something else?
A: If you ask me, white noise is the key to a good night's sleep. The best is in summer when it's hot outside and you have a fan humming low in the background that covers the outside noises just enough to isolate you from the world.
Q: Snack of choice – chips, pretzels, popcorn, or cookies, cake, candy? Or maybe you’re a healthy snacker - fruit, yogurt, nuts, raisins?
A: Popcorn. Definitely. I am a master popcorn maker. With a gentle flick of my wrists I can coax the most delicious and perfectly-popped kernels from the bottom of a pan. I am actually quite fond of popped wild rice as well, actually. But it's difficult to find good popping rice.
BOOKS – ABOUT THE CRAFT
Q: What do you think is the hardest part of writing a book?
A: I think the hardest part is finding the voice of the book. This is the tone and feeling and rhythm that form in the words on the page. Once you find that, it's easy. But sometimes finding that voice can be an elusive hunt.
Q: What is your favorite part of writing?
A: My favorite thing about writing is being able to escape into the fantastical worlds I've created. Even as I go through my normal life there's still a part of me waiting there, in the other world, and I can't wait to get back again. I love living vicariously through the characters in my own books.
Q: Do you always know how a story will end when you begin writing it?
A: On the first couple of books I wrote I had a fairly good idea where the book was heading but not entirely how it was going to end. I think this turned out fairly okay, but to be honest, the later books where I had the ending mapped out from the very start were far better because there was a bit less of a feeling of stumbling around in the dark.
Q: Have your characters ever taken the story in a different direction than you had originally planned? Do you have a for instance, for us?
A: This is actually something that I absolutely LOVE about the writing process. I love when you have something planned out in your head, and as you are writing and breathing life into the characters, they take on a life of their own and steer the story in a completely different direction. This is such a wonderful and surprising experience.
Q: What geographical locations are your favorite and why?
A: I have a lot of favorite geographical locations. I suppose this is why I chose to write a book series where the heroine (Kitty Hawk) visits many of those places and learns the cultures and beauty of them. This gives me and my readers a chance to travel the world without leaving our comfy reading chair.
BOOKS - NOW LETS PROMOTE – STRUT YOUR STUFF
Q: What are you working on now? Would you like to share anything about it?
A: Right now I am working on the 6th, 7th and 8th books of the Kitty Hawk Flying Detective Agency Series. I know that's not the best planning – to try and work on three at once – but my original plan for one book sort of fanned out into three. First Kitty Hawk travels to Venice and onward to Istanbul where she solves the mystery of a decades-old murder. Then she's off to Egypt and the Great Pyramids of Giza where she stumbles into the middle of some suspicious activity. After that it's off to East Africa where she experiences the secrets of the Dark Continent.
Q: Do you have a new book coming out soon? Tell us about it.
A: The next book out will be Kitty Hawk #6, entitled Kitty Hawk and the Murder on the Orient Express. As mentioned above, our heroine finds herself in Venice where she becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a decades-old murder, not to mention plenty of strange codes and other puzzles.
Q: How can we find you? Do you have a web page, FaceBook page or any buy links?
A: Each of my book series has its own website:
The Kitty Hawk Flying Detective Agency
The Dragon of the Month Club
The Guild of the Wizards of Waterfire
The Dragon of the Month Club
The Guild of the Wizards of Waterfire
The Dragon Of The Month Club, by Iain Reading, was published in February 2015 and is available for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Genres: Middle Grade / Fantasy / Adventure
Synopsis:
The Dragon Of The Month Club is the exciting first installment in a new book
series that tells the story of Ayana Fall and Tyler Travers, two best friends
who stumble across an extraordinarily magical book and soon find themselves
enrolled as members of a very special and exclusive club - The Dragon of the
Month Club.
On
the thirteenth of every month a new dragon conjuring spell is revealed and the
two friends attempt to summon the latest Dragon of the Month. The varieties are
almost endless: Air Dragons, Paper Dragons, Fog Dragons, Waterfall Dragons,
Rock Dragons, Tree Dragons - not to mention special bonus dragons for all the
major holidays, including a particularly prickly Holly Dragon for Christmas.
But
one day when a conjuring spell somehow goes wrong Ayana and Tyler find
themselves unexpectedly drawn into a fantastical world of adventure based on
the various books scattered all across Tyler's messy bedroom. Travelling from
one book-inspired world to the next with nothing to rely on but their wits and
a cast of strange and exotic dragons at their disposal they must try to somehow
find their way home again.
Drawing inspiration from some
of literature's most memorable stories - from 19th century German folktales to
the streets of Sherlock Holmes's London - the adventures of Ayana and Tyler
bring these classic stories to life in delightfully strange and unexpected
ways. Filled with fascinating detail and non-stop action these books will spark
the imaginations of readers of all ages to inspire a life-long love of reading
and seeking out books that are just a little bit off the beaten track.
Excerpt:
Chapter
2 – The Book
Following their most unlikely of beginnings, the friendship
of Ayana and Tyler grew quickly, and before they knew it, they were the best of
friends, meeting up with each other almost every day. Sometimes they met up
with Ayana’s mother after school at the downtown Dairy Queen for ice cream.
Other times they climbed the edges of the coulee behind Ayana’s school and went
to Tyler’s house where they did their homework together in his room. But most
of the time, they just agreed to meet up at the place where they’d both
accidentally bumped into each other on that very first day—amongst the dusty
old bookshelves of the old library at the row between the history of the
anatomy of earthworms and the illustrated guide to the indigenous mosses of
Iceland.
It was on just such a day that Ayana and Tyler first
discovered THE BOOK—a name that would be forever capitalized in their
minds whenever either of them dared to utter the phrase aloud.
It was a magical book. That much was clear almost from the
outset, so perhaps the manner in which these two unlikely friends happened to
come across it was magical as well.
It all started on a typical Friday afternoon. Ayana and
Tyler had agreed to meet at the library right after school. Tyler had a dentist
appointment and would either be a few minutes late or a few minutes early,
depending on how long that took. Not surprisingly Tyler was a few minutes late.
This could have been expected since Tyler took dentist appointments very seriously.
For weeks ahead of time he would be sure to brush his teeth five times every
single day—once when waking up, once after breakfast, once after lunch, once
after dinner, and once again before bed—which was two more times a day than he
usually did. (He normally deemed the wake-up and after dinner steps
unnecessary.) All of this was in addition to flossing, rinsing, and otherwise
generally trying to keep his teeth in the best possible shape for the check-up.
To Tyler, going to the dentist was like studying for a test
in school. Failure was not an option. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise
that once he was actually in the dental chair, he expected the dentist to be
every bit as thorough as he was, a process that required a bit more time than
it normally would with less fastidious patients.
So Tyler was late.
And so, when he finally arrived, he hurried down the stairs
and quickly navigated through the maze of shelves at the back of the library
and found Ayana sitting there, crouched on the floor, sobbing her eyes out.
Tyler sighed heavily. He could already guess what must have
happened: Heather van der Sloot... again.
He took off his backpack and set it on the floor. Folding
his legs under him, he lowered himself down until he was sitting next to Ayana,
not too close, of course, but as close as he dared to.
“What happened this time?” Tyler asked.
Ayana sobbed and buried her face even deeper in her hands.
After a moment her left arm shot out, pointing an accusing finger toward a
stack of soiled and disheveled papers lying in a heap on an empty space on the
shelf opposite them.
“That,” Ayana cried, her voice thin and cracking.
Tyler stared at the papers, and it took him a moment to
realise what they were.
“Your poems,” he gasped.
Tyler had to take a breath and swallow. Ayana’s poems were a
work of art, neatly written in careful flowing script, one to a page. Ayana
carried them with her sometimes in a stiff green cardboard folder with trees on
it that had little strings that you used to tie it shut.
Ayana nodded, still sobbing.
“She threw them all over the playground,” she said, her
voice raspy. “She grabbed my tree folder away from me and threw them
everywhere. I... I ....”
Ayana stuttered and couldn’t speak for a second.
“I don’t know if I got them all back,” she finally said,
finishing her thought. “I think I lost some.”
Tyler nodded and crawled over on one knee to pick up the
chaotic stack of papers. He sorted through them, one by one, trying to put them
back into some kind of order. They were smeared and scratched and crumpled. One
even had a dirty footprint stamped squarely on it.
Normally Ayana wouldn’t even let Tyler glance at one of her
poems, so he was surprised that she wasn’t bothered by his looking through all of
them now. She clearly wasn’t thinking straight, so he tried to make as neat a
stack out of them as possible and set it down on the carpet in the middle of
the row of shelves.
“There are a lot there,” he said, sitting close to her
again. “Maybe you did get them all.”
Ayana shrugged her shoulders hopelessly.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, staring blankly at the pile
of papers. “I don’t care.”
Tyler felt a sudden squeeze around his heart. He had no idea
what he was supposed to do to make Ayana feel better.
But as his mind was racing, trying to think of something,
the universe intervened.
“I hate her, Tyler,” Ayana said. “I HATE her!”
On this second last syllable, Ayana kicked at the opposite
shelves with the heel of her shoe, making the wooden frame shudder and some of
the books rattle around. One particular book—a small, thin one high up on the
very top shelf—tipped forward as if in slow motion until it was hanging
precariously at an impossible angle, almost as if it was levitating, before tumbling
end over end to the floor.
Tyler tried to catch it but he
was too slow, and instead it crashed into the stack of papers, scattering them
slightly, before it fell flat on its back, right side up right in front of
them.
how to conjure
your very own dragon
in six easy steps
...read the front cover of THE
BOOK in bright yellow letters against a wavy blue background.
Tyler frowned and Ayana
stopped crying for a moment. They both stared at THE BOOK with wide-open eyes,
neither of them quite able to believe what they were seeing.
“How to conjure a dragon?”
Ayana asked, kneeling forward to grab THE BOOK.
Tyler crawled next to her as
she opened the front cover.
THE BOOK was very thin—more
like a pamphlet, really— with no table of contents, no copyright page, no
dedication page. There wasn’t even an indication of who the author might be. It
just went straight into the first chapter, which was entitled:
the water dragon
“A water dragon?” Tyler read
over Ayana’s warm shoulder.
Underneath the chapter title
was a brief list of the various characteristics of the water dragon.
category: lesser dragon
difficulty: medium
classification: common
Below that was a basic
introduction and explanation of the dragon followed by some advice to those who
might want to conjure one:
this spell is a relatively simple one, but be
forewarned that the water dragon is a damp and clumsy creature, prone to making
messes and causing trouble. It is recommended to have plenty of towels at hand
when undertaking this conjuring.
Underneath this brief
introduction was a list of materials needed to actually conjure the dragon.
required material(s): water, towels (optional)
And last but not least came
the instructions, six simple steps to conjuring your very own dragon. Tyler
could hardly believe what he was reading. The steps were so simple. Just a
series of strangely specific hand gestures performed by two people
simultaneously. The instructions even had little helpful sketches to help you
understand what to do.
It reminded Tyler of IKEA
assembly instructions when his parents bought new furniture and let him put it
together for them. But that was furniture made of wood and fabric and those
little IKEA screws that needed a special tool to screw them in. This was
supposed to be a dragon, whatever that meant. How could such simplistic
instructions possibly result in assembling anything, much less an actual
dragon?
“We have to try this!” Ayana said excitedly.
Contest:
There
is an ongoing contest for readers to win a one-of-a-kind hardcover version of The Dragon of the Month Club with their
artwork as the cover.
“Draw
a picture! Write a story! Take a photograph! Bake some cookies! Mold a dragon
out of clay! Knit one out of yarn! Make one out of LEGO! Whatever you want!
Just let your imagination run wild because anything goes – the more creative
the better! Send your dragon in and then on the 13th day of every month one
entry will be chosen at random and featured on the official Dragon Of The Month
Club website. Each month’s lucky winner will also receive a free
one-of-a-kind personalized hard-cover edition of The Dragon Of The Month Club
book featuring their winning artwork (or other creative content) on the cover
or inside the book itself,” says Iain.
The
Dragon Of The Month Club, by Iain
Reading, was published in February 2015 and is available for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Genres:
Middle Grade / Fantasy / Adventure
A
reminder to the reader ~ before you leave be sure to take a look at the
Come
back and visit again.
Great questions! I loved reading this interview.
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