Tag: ulla thynell

And also, Neurodiversiverse, Paranatellonta

Award for The Neurodiversiverse

Minerva Cerridwen

Hi!

I’ll continue the quick flash update style of my previous post, since I have a lot of short messages.

1) Great news about The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters, the anthology which includes my short story “The Space Between Stitches”: it has won the Silver IBPA Book Award in the category Neurodivergent Communities!

2) In the first week of June, I’ve participated in Workshop Week for the third year in a row. It’s always so much fun to learn new techniques that I will no doubt apply to postcards soon. Here’s a tiny glance at the pieces I learned to make with teachers Type Affiliated, Mabz Brisson, Shayda Campbell, Aurelia Thomson, Lindsey Bugbee, Julie Marriott, and Terry Runyan. You can still follow my artsy explorations on my Instagram.

This image shows small versions of the results of 7 Workshop Week projects: a handlettering piece saying "wishing you a very happy father's day", 2 floral pieces, a grandmotherly character, a hummingbird with flowers, a floral cat, and a swallow filled with calligraphy.

3) Yesterday was the 15th day of the month, so of course Fie and I also posted a new edition of Paranatellonta – number 404!

4) In May, I had my Storytelling exam, allowing me to mark my third year at Knst academy as successful. I’m continuing the Storytelling course next year with great enthusiasm! If you’re in the area of Hasselt, you can start your first year in September with the same brilliant teacher, on Mondays from 19:00 until 21:00. (Mind that this course is taught in Dutch.) Info via this link, scroll down to “Storytelling 18+”.

5) Ulla Thynell, the artist who created the cover of my novella The Dragon of Ynys, will have a book out with Atthis Arts soon! Faraway Dreaming is an art book and story of forest, peace, and a calming night journey. Dragons, hills, and magic to soothe your soul. I know I’m ordering several, both to keep and as gifts. The Kickstarter is already successful, so the book is definitely happening! Rewards start from $1. Go take a look!

6) Speaking of cool artists affiliated with Atthis Arts, Dhiyanah Hassan made this amazing handdrawn dragon fairy portrait of me! I’m still so delighted with how it turned out; I really feel seen. You can commission your own portrait from Dhiyanah via this link.

Handdrawn portrait of a smiling white person with horns in the colours of the ace flag, glasses with purple tentacle details, long brown braided hair, a green t-shirt, rainbow scaled dragon wings, a couple of purple tentacles, and lots of purple flowers all around. Stars are scattered over the atmospheric green background.

7) I’m looking forward to a week in Denmark in July! I’m sure it will bring lots of inspiration and relaxation. And I’m going to see the H.C. Andersen House, which feels extra special as my first published story ever, Match Sticks, was inspired by one of his fairy tales. 

That’s all for today!

Have a wonderful summer!

Minerva

 

the dragon of ynys

Dragon Biscuits!

Minerva Cerridwen

Hello!

I have a feeling Snap will approve of this post’s title… Happy Publishiversary, Snap & co.!

That’s right – it’s already been a whole year since The Dragon of Ynys came out with Atthis Arts. If you’re new to my blog: welcome! You can read all about my queer fairy tale novella via this link!

Buy links: Publisher’s website – Smashwords – Amazon.com – Amazon.de – iBooks – Barnes & Noble – Kobo – Bookshop – Vrolijk.nu (NL) – Kartonnen Dozen (Belgium)

Add the book to your shelves: The StoryGraph – Goodreads

To celebrate the anniversary, I made real The Dragon of Ynys biscuits! I used a gingerbread recipe and Rainbow Crate’s rolling pin (which you can still find here). As it was the first time I made patterned biscuits, I still have some experimenting to do before every single sword, cupcake, and little dragon will be visible on the dough, but I already learned a lot as I went!

Dragon biscuit - unbaked.
An unbaked biscuit with the Dragon of Ynys-pattern rolled into it.

Baked biscuits, the rolling pin, and a copy of "The Dragon of Ynys".
Baked biscuits, the rolling pin, and a copy of “The Dragon of Ynys”.

As you can see, my biscuits even include the spiders’ forest! (Yes, that is Minerva-speak for: “Look, there is a little tree!”)

And while you’re enjoying a biscuit, remember that the Dragoniversary story Lost in Ynys, by Ava Kelly and me, is still out there for the party.

Cheers, and thank you for being here!

Minerva

The Dragon of Ynys
the dragon of ynys

Interviewed by Jennifer Lee Rossman!

Minerva Cerridwen

Hello!

I hope you’re all well. The world is once again looking a little scarier, but at least stories are always there to give us a relaxing means of escape.

It’s been a month and a week since my story The Dragon of Ynys came out, so of course I’ll be talking a little more about it in this blog post. I was interviewed about it by the one and only Jennifer Lee Rossman, who’s an awesome author herself and the co-editor of anthologies Love & Bubbles and Space Opera Libretti. You can read the interview here (and see a cute photo of The Dragon of Ynys with some dragon friends!).

I also saw a wonderful review accompanied by a beautiful photo on theboyandhisbookshelf’s Instagram yesterday, which I’d love to share: you can see it here. And while you’re wandering around on Instagram, you can also check out some of my baking, inspired by Ynys’ baker Juniper: for example the cinnamon rolls Sir Violet is so fond of. (They make a great breakfast indeed!)

If that made you hungry for more but you’re not able to buy the book right now, I’d like to inform you that I’m currently doing a giveaway, to celebrate one month since the release as well as the upcoming Ace Week.

Ace Week, formerly Asexual Awareness Week, is an event that will take place from October 25 until October 31, all over the world. It celebrates the asexual community and the progress we see in the awareness that asexuality exists, both in society and in media representation. You can read more about it on the Ace Week website and the organisation is also present on social media.

Sir Violet, like myself, is asexual as well as aromantic, so I felt that starting giveaways on three platforms and announcing the winners on the last day of Ace Week (October 31) would be a good way of participating in the celebrations. If you’d like to enter the contest, these are the links: Twitter – Tumblr – Pillowfort.

You simply retweet or reblog the post until October 30, 2020 at 23:59 EST. The winner will be chosen randomly on October 31; one winner per platform. That means you have one chance per platform; 3 chances if you reblog all three! (On every platform, only your first reblog will count as an entry, so while you are most welcome to keep spreading the word afterwards, this will not increase your chances.) You can also share the posts without entering the competition; simply leave a line like “not entering the giveaway but signal boosting”.

If you’re interested in the book but would rather bypass the competition altogether, these are the buy links:

Publisher’s website – Smashwords – Amazon.com – Amazon.de – iBooks – Barnes & Noble – Kobo – Bookshop – Vrolijk.nu (NL)

Add the book to your shelves: Goodreads – The StoryGraph

And one more thing I’d like to call attention to: my publisher, Atthis Arts, is currently doing a Kickstarter for a project called In This Moment. I am not directly involved with this, but they have put together a mindblowing team of people who’ll be working on this collection of short works, both fiction and non-fiction, documenting this moment that will be described in history books as the time of the Black Lives Matter movement and the global pandemic. As they focus on important marginalised voices, I think it’s incredibly important that this book can be made – but the Kickstarter still has quite a way to go before the funding will be complete. Take a look at it here if you can find the time, and please consider contributing.

That’s all for now!

I hope you’ll have a great Ace Week, and please stay safe!

Love,

Minerva

The Dragon of Ynys
the dragon of ynys

Guest Post on LGBTQ Reads

Minerva Cerridwen

Hello!

Tomorrow it’s been three weeks since the release of The Dragon of Ynys. A joyful three weeks indeed! It’s been amazing to see people pick up the book, post pictures of it, and write reviews. Please keep them coming (and remember how helpful it is to post about the book on different platforms)!

To give you an idea of the beautiful photos I’ve seen around on Instagram, here’s a selection: check out The Urban Reader’s review, Paddy_Pikala’s photo, the cute origami in the background of Owlsbooksandtea’s picture, and the cosiness that Howtobeabooknerd_ has set up around the book! For more, check my Instagram highlight.

A big thank you to everyone who has made posts and will do so in the future – you’re making this book release into a wonderful online party.

For my part, I celebrated release day with a video and baking Juniper’s delicious cinnamon rolls.

And last week something happened that feels like a real milestone: I saw the first fanart of my characters!!! *heart eyes*

Today, I have the honour of getting a guest post published on LGBTQ Reads. I’m talking about why the label “all ages” is so important to me when I’m talking about a fairy tale with a clear message of acceptance and aromantic, asexual, trans, and lesbian representation. You can read it here – feel free to leave a comment!

Thank you for reading my blog!

Remember you can pick up The Dragon of Ynys here:

Publisher’s website – Smashwords – Amazon.com – Amazon.de – iBooks – Barnes & Noble – Kobo – Bookshop

and add it to your shelves on Goodreads and The StoryGraph.

Lots of love,

Minerva

The Dragon of Ynys
the dragon of ynys

The Return of the Dragon

Minerva Cerridwen

In November 2011, I spent a weekend in a forest with my friends from a Dutch online forum. Those weekends, or camps, had been a tradition since 2005. These days, we no longer manage to organise them strictly every year, as having jobs and families has made it more difficult to find weekends in which a good number of us can get together, but we do still meet up (at least in pandemic-less times). The most recent camps mostly consisted of hanging out, taking walks, and playing boardgames, but the camp in 2011 still had some planned activities, organised by some of the other forum members. And the specific activity that I’m getting to here was an open mic night.

In the month before, someone posted a call to our forum for those of us who wanted to prepare an act. We’re a creative bunch in general; some wanted to sing or play an instrument, some wanted to re-enact a sketch, and I did what I thought I do best: write a fairy tale to read out loud. It had become (yet another) tradition that I would read to a group of people at those camps anyway, so now I might as well have everyone listen to it. I wrote about Knight Violet-blue, an introverted knight who was hired to slay a dragon, but who, upon finding the dragon, realised he liked the creature more than he liked his employer, and went after the princess instead.

The story was far from perfect. I’m not fond of the idea that “well, then the princess must be evil”, or of the way I’d presented her. But I did like the knight and the dragon and the interactions between them, and even though I forgot most of the story for a long time, these two characters stuck with me.

Fast-forward: I graduated from university, started writing more (and in English!), had my first story published in Unburied Fables in 2016, and with that (and the help of my friend Ether) finally figured out how to look for calls for submissions and get more stories published.

One of the first calls I discovered that way, at the end of 2016, was the “For the Hoard” call for a collection that would be published by Less Than Three Press. It asked for novella- and novel-length stories about dragons and LGBTQIA characters. I brainstormed, I plotted, and then I wrote the first draft of The Dragon of Ynys in January 2017, just before the deadline.

In May 2018, LT3 Press published The Dragon of Ynys.

In July 2019, LT3 Press went out of business, and The Dragon of Ynys was unpublished again.

From September 2019 until July 2020, I worked on revising the novella. First on my own, changing the parts that had started bugging me and those I had learned could be read differently than I had intended. Then I reached out to E.D.E. Bell, because I had had a great experience working with Atthis Arts when they included the short story I’d co-written with L.S. Reinholt in Five Minutes at Hotel Stormcove. The more I thought about it, the more Atthis Arts seemed to be the right publisher for the revised Dragon. Fortunately, the Atthis team agreed and we started on revision rounds, beta rounds, sensitivity rounds, final edit rounds… And finally we were happy with the result. With a new cover by Ulla Thynell, the 2020 edition of The Dragon of Ynys was ready to be out in the world.

Today is September 15, 2020. It’s release day. The Dragon is back!!!

The Dragon of Ynys

Every time something goes missing from the village, Sir Violet, the local knight, makes his way to the dragon’s cave and negotiates the item’s return. It’s annoying, but at least the dragon is polite.

But when the dragon hoards a person, that’s a step too far. Sir Violet storms off to the mountainside to escort the baker home, only to find a more complex mystery—a quest that leads him far beyond the cave. Accompanied by the missing baker’s wife and the dragon himself, the dutiful village knight embarks on his greatest adventure yet.

The Dragon of Ynys is an inclusive fairy tale for all ages.

Out now, both as paperback and ebook!

Buy links: Publisher’s website – Smashwords – Amazon.com – Amazon.de – iBooks – Barnes & Noble – Kobo – Bookshop

Add the book to your shelves: The StoryGraph – Goodreads

It’s been quite a journey. A quest of its own. I’m so happy that this story can once again make its way to readers who may need to hear just the messages that I wrote because I’d needed them myself.

A big thank you to everyone who encouraged me to write, who supported me, who helped this story grow into what it is now, and of course to everyone who bought or will buy it, who writes a review and/or tells their friends or followers about this. Thank you for giving the Dragon wings and making the spiders’ job a little easier.

Lots of love,

Minerva