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Volume 1, Issue 5
September 2024
Welcome to the Fifth Issue of Our Newsletter
We hope to keep you posted on local events, inspire you to read emerging authors, review your next great read and share tips and opportunities to help you keep your finger on the pulse of the Canadian literary community.
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
Friendly Authors Networking Socials (FANS)
Author Bio of the Month
Excerpt of the Month
Victoria Festival of Authors
Points to Ponder
Filidh Publishing Corp
Friendly Authors Networking Socials (F.A.N.S.)
In response to requests, we will be hosting gatherings for authors who are published and interested in networking with other authors. To learn and share insights on sales, networking, branding and other things that may facilitate income and possibly collaboration on future writing projects and events. It is not a writers' group but more a writers' 2.0 group. What is next, and how do I get these boxes of books into the hands of readers? Let's chat, share tips and learn from and with each other.
The next F.A.N.S. Gathering:
Saturday October 12, 2024, from 10:30 AM until 12:30 PM
Quality Foods- Upstairs Café,
Eagle Creek Village Shopping Centre, View Royal
Bring your elevator speech and copies of the books you’d like reviewed.
Author Bio This Month:
RP Mickelson
RP Mickelson is a natural-born storyteller whose tales take many forms: short stories, novels, children’s books, and lively oral encounters. Rick is keenly interested in stories about his extended family members, especially those involving his Norwegian ancestors, who homesteaded on the Canadian prairies in the early part of the twentieth century. His first novel, Stone House (2021), was an engaging fictionalized discovery of those ancestors and their lives. Before writing Stone House, he collaborated with his sister and cousins to write a comprehensive, non-fictional family history, The Mickelson Clan (2016)
Healing modalities are also a theme in his writing. Permanent Weight Release: A Healing Journey (2010), aimed at transforming people’s relationships with food, was followed more recently with his collection, Inspirational Short Stories (2023). Rick is currently writing the third volume of The Mystical Healing Trilogy, having published Lalita’s Power (Volume One) and Roxanne’s Salvation (Volume Two) in 2024. Novels that take us along with the main characters on a spiritual journey. They fall from grace and experience many challenges and tragedies, but they manage to find complete redemption and inner healing. The phenomenon of inner healing is Rick’s favourite theme.
Rick also writes and illustrates children’s books to read to the youngest members of his family. The first of many children’s books, Big Elly and Little Elly, in collaboration with illustrator Penny E. Ross will be published shortly. .
Rick lives with his wife in Victoria, BC and has three adult children and seven grandchildren. While his current athletic passion is the game of table tennis, he loves all racquet sports. Rick’s more recent books can be found at https://filidhbooks.com
Excerpt of the Month
Roxanne’s Salvation, from Chapter 1—An Engagement
by RP Mickelson
If you looked at Roxanne Wilson’s life from the outside you’d assume she lived an ordinary middle-class Canadian existence. But if you were ever fortunate enough to probe a little deeper, you’d learn she was extraordinarily complex. Her character was like a maze.
She was twenty-four years old, lived in one half of a two-bedroom duplex on Belmont Street in the Fernwood District of Victoria, BC, and worked part-time as a primary school teacher at Oaklands Elementary School. Actually, she shared a job with her friend and colleague Donalda Simpson, working from Monday morning until lunch on Wednesday.
She stood six feet tall, had long brown hair often tied in a tight bun just above her neck, dressed very professionally and was considered quite attractive by men. Her eyes were a deep green, like the color of a manicured golf course.
Roxanne was an Anglican and occasionally attended St. Paul’s Church in Saanich. That was the church of her parents, and she’d been a congregant since she was baptized just after birth. At one point, she even taught Sunday school there for two years. Although she could never be considered extremely pious, she was moved, touched and inspired by the life of Christ and read a few verses of the New Testament on a daily basis. She was definitely a Christian in good standing despite the fact that she felt the official Anglican doctrine was dated, like an ancient bible.
“Jesus is my idea of a perfect human being; that’s why I study His word daily,” she told Donalda one day when they were having coffee in a dark corner of the Quadra Street Starbucks. “His life truly inspires me.”
She was a very private person. Although she had many acquaintances, none knew her very well. Not even her fiancé, Brian Williams, understood her inner life, and there were many aspects of her that no one knew anything about.
For example, no one knew she owned the duplex where she lived or that she was heavily addicted to any form of cannabis that had a high THC content. No one knew she suffered from depression on a regular basis or that she wrote violent murder mysteries.
What people did know about her was that she was a law-abiding adult who held progressive political views and loved Taylor Swift’s music.
Also, anyone who had even minimal contact with her knew she was very compassionate. How else could you explain her habit of rising at 3 am twice a week to drive downtown and meet up with Reverend James Allen to distribute coffee and doughnuts to the hundreds of homeless folk who lived on the streets of Victoria? Paperback and eBook (filidhbooks.com)
Victoria Festival of Authors
The ninth annual Victoria Festival of Authors (VFA) weekend will be held from October 16-20, 2024. As with last year, the festival will be a hybrid, offering in-person programming of regional authors, most offered by Livestream for those viewing from home, as well as virtual programming of authors from around Canada. And make sure not to miss their pre-fest weekend on September 21st and 22nd, with workshops offered by four of the region's most exciting authors and a festival launch reading the night of the 22nd.
Since 2016, the Victoria Festival of Authors has invited writers from Vancouver Island and beyond to share their works with the community. From politics to poetry, science to music, history to thrillers, it is a celebration of the richness of Canada’s literary community, and they are passionate about providing a welcoming, respectful and comfortable environment for all.
The organizational values are respect for their authors, their audience, their partners and each other as they conduct their operations with professionalism and sensitivity, accessibility, the removal of participation barriers for authors and audience, and openness. The VFA welcomes diverse voices in authors and in their audiences and embraces different perspectives and opinions.
To find out more about the Victoria Festival of Authors, please refer to their website - https://victoriafestivalofauthors.ca
Points To Ponder
SAVE THE DATES…
Look for the Filidh Publishing Craft Fair Booth
Meet our Authors!
Book Fair sponsored by Filidh.
Vendor tables are available.
Meet more Authors!
FILIDH PUBLISHING CORP
A Victoria, BC-based small independent press that has been producing quality literature of adult and children’s genres from poetry to fiction to non-fiction for over 20 years. See us on Facebook, X, Instagram and at filidhbooks.com
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