Tales of Ale and Chainmail - Book Tour and Giveaway

​Eight magical objects. Eight adventurers. Eight stories.

Tales of Ale and Chainmail
Volume 1
A Fantasy Anthology
with stories by
Dave Deickman, Kate Longstone, Jonathan Maloney, Alan Kent,
Thomas D Moore, Ashley Bravington, Crystal Roles, Lucina Nyx 
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The simplest of choices are often the most necessary.

Eight magical objects. Eight adventurers. Eight stories.

Across the world of the Western Shield, long hidden artefacts are found by those who adventure into the forgotten corners of history. From the boiling volcanoes of Holfursland, to the booming industrial port of Helvenica, to the dwarven city of Ironvale, the adventurers are drawn together to tell their stories, and how they came into possession of their particular item, in the Glass Dagger Corner Club.

Featuring stories from Dave Deickman, Kate Longstone, Jonathan Maloney, Alan Kent, Thomas D Moore, Ashley Bravington, Crystal Roles, and Lucina Nyx, Tales of Ale and Chainmail (Vol 1) explores the dungeons, temples, and societies of the Western Shield world in pursuit of knowledge, answers, and lost family members.


Skynation Publishing * Amazon * Google * Kobo * Bookbub * Goodreads


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Started in 2021, SkyNation Publishing is based in Brisbane, Australia. Specialising in fantasy fiction, SNP revels in bringing a change to traditional publishing, through different mediums, and partnering with other small businesses to add an extra spark to their title releases.

Under the sunny Queensland skies, the team works diligently to bring you not just good stories - but also, a new way of exploring the realms created by authors from around the world!

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Website * Facebook * Twitter * Instagram

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by Jonathan Maloney 

When I was about seven years old, I was tricked into reading a book I did not really understand by being told there was violence in it. That book was Lord of the Rings, and once I started, though it took nearly a year to struggle through it, I nevertheless persevered, until it was done. And from there, my fate was sealed – it became a framing moment of my existence, in that I take a long time to do anything, and I stubbornly refuse to give up once started – a little bit of Frodo, a little bit of Samwise. To them we can place the blame.
I grew up in a wasteland of rural Australia, with an Irish background that leant a complexion wholly unsuited to the bright, blazing sunlight that defines much of the year there, turning roads to molten tar and giving blistering sunburn if you so much as peer out a curtain. Coupled with a childhood fraught with such difficulties as can be shared across all common experiences of trauma and terrors, I turned inwards into my imagination, and that of others, to create stories. And I never really stopped.
I started in the low valleys of world building, descending to the deep crevasses of action and motion, crawled the cliffs of conversation and finally, arrived at the heady heights of character development where I realised a fact which coloured all my writing afterwards. My favourite thing to do now is to develop characters; create them, build them, make them real as can be. To give them emotional depth and motivation, and make them interesting – once you do that, the story creates itself around them. As time went on, I came to the second realisation – everyone is interesting. Everyone is compelling. You just need to find out how, and why, and then bring it to the page. I create characters first, and so long as I always hold true to what and who that character is, I can write not only a story that one can be invested in, but one where actions within it make sense.
I think in the end, that is one of the main driving forces of why I write and what – I get a character inside my head and in a desperate, futile effort to banish them, I write about them instead. When they are as alive as you can make them, they demand that life in turn in all the subtle ways of storytelling that you can put them into – what would they do, what would they say? How would they move, how would they stand? What would they feel, and what would that feeling evoke in others?
So many questions, and they all needed answering. Strangely, it felt if I did not I would be doing someone a disservice in some fashion. Perhaps the ghosts of these people I have made were watching. Regardless, I had to write about them, and I am very proud of what I have made out of them. Bandy Fitzgibbon, the little gnome watchmaker came into my mind as someone who never wished for excitement, never longed for disorder, a tidy little fellow in a tidy little shop, and I decided to throw a bomb into his life and see what happens. Quite literally as it turned out.
One should of course see the parallels between my original inspiration and this tale, I hope. If you are going to borrow a motif, it might as well be from the best.
I am quite fond of Bandy, though I freely admit I have thrown him into a veritable blender of character development, and not all of it was fully explored. What will happen to him? What will his choices create? What will he leave behind? His story is not yet done. And I still get a sense that he wants me to tell more about him, though for the time being he is in crowded company. We shall see – but I hope you like him as much as I do.

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Follow the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway!
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