After releasing Within This Darkness in February, I began to keep my eyes open for contests where the book might do well, and I entered Within in several contests throughout spring 2025.
And one date I marked on my calendar was June 3 - which was when the Whistler Independent Book Awards were to announce their shortlist. And I'm happy (ecstatic) to point out the following:

Yay!  :)
Honestly, I'm truly thrilled about this. Thank you so much to the folks at WIBA!
Whistler lumps young adult fiction in with general (adult) fiction  - so presumably it is a fairly big category with lots of entries, so I am sincerely thrilled to have made the fiction shortlist.
The book is doing fairly well on Goodreads, and one review that caught my eye recently was one which seemed to recognize the "Canadian landscape" feeling that I hoped would be a deep presence in Within This Darkness, with echoes of the old Farley Mowat young adult classics. 
This is part of Emily's review on May 2, 2025, on Goodreads:
And then there is the setting—a deeply Canadian novel that embraces its landscape, its isolation, its quiet, lingering histories. The forests aren’t just a backdrop; they breathe life into the story, shaping its tension and atmosphere with a raw, untamed energy. Tomasini writes with a reverence for the land, his prose infused with the spirit of old stories passed down through time. 

Thank you kindly, Emily :)

And to finish, here is a photo of my local lake at sunrise, on May 28, 2025:

Just before wildfire smoke became more prevalent in the sky, and morning sunrises, on theoretically "clear" mornings, began to look more like this one below (taken on June 3, 2025).  Good luck to everyone in Saskatchewan and Manitoba right now.  :(

I am very pleased to announce that Within This Darkness is out!

The cover artwork was done by Mark Resmer, and the front cover is a work by Mark titled "Waiting", which was done on wood board with oil paint and spray paint. I hope that readers get a "crafted by hand with love" feeling about both the cover and the book itself, because in both cases it is very true.
Within This Darkness is here on Goodreads, and if you're in Canada, there is a March 2025 giveaway contest for the book:

I'm still unsure how to describe this book to someone, which was also a problem with Close Your Eyes. In my own head though, this is how I think of Within This Darkness:
- young adult, with the sweet spot probably being within a 13 to 15 year old range.
- has magic, but it's not fantasy.
- has an "outdoor adventure" feeling to it, like one of the old Farley Mowat classics like Lost in the Barrens.
- Also has a thoughtful side, especially in Jeremy's feelings of grief and loss, that probably stem from my appreciation for books/stories like The Dead by James Joyce; The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, and Butcher's Crossing by John Edward Williams.
- Has a historical timeline that dates back to World War I and World War II, and this historical timeline becomes more important in books two and three of the trilogy.

Within This Darkness is book one of the Douro-Zamość trilogy.
Douro is the fictional town in Ontario, Canada, where most of the story happens, and Zamość is a town in south-eastern Poland where much of the historical action happens.
Book two of the trilogy will be out in 2025.

After being too cautious for too long (and also looking for a traditional publisher for too long perhaps), I have decided to release Within This Darkness, Book One of the Douro-Zamość trilogy, this month, February 2025.

I am still tinkering with the book blurb, but as of now, this is what I have:

Still shaken by the death of his older sister, 14-year-old Jeremy Gardela is sent on a mission by his panicked aunt, to find a family secret she believes is buried in the dark forests which surround their small rural town.When Jeremy returns, he is leading a mysterious stranger who represents a vein of magic which has run for decades within the Gardela family. Within This Darkness is a deeply felt story about loss, and friendship, and finding something, or someone, to hold onto, when you’re lost and drifting in the night.

Hmm. I have to fix that use of "loss" and then "lost" in the last line...

The pictures above are mine, from winter 2024/25 thus far.

If you have read one or both of Close Your Eyes and Festival, I think you’ll understand when I say that Within This Darkness will be a teen book unlike almost anything else in this genre… full of the emotion and loss that is felt by the characters in both of my previous books. I hope it works - and that people like it! 
But… as I’ve gotten closer to releasing the book, I’ve been thinking of that old J.D. Salinger line about writing, which was something close to this:
If you’re going to write, think about the book that YOU would most like to read, as a reader, and then go ahead and write that book yourself.
Within This Darkness is what  I would have read over and over, when I was a young reader.

More on this in a subsequent post, but I am beyond proud, and sincerely honoured, to say that my old friend Mark is doing the cover art for this trilogy. Mark’s website can be found here.

Thank you everyone, I will post again in the near future, and let everyone know when the book is ready.  Best wishes.

Chris

Orillia has been running Summer Saturday Nights this year, where downtown is closed to vehicle traffic, and the stores and restaurants set up out on the street.
Manticore Books invited local authors to do "meet and greet" sessions with visitors, as their part of these street festivals. And I'm happy to say that I was the local "meet and greet" author for Saturday July 6.

I had a great time hanging out with my 11 year old on Saturday night and meeting a few visitors to the street festival :)  I can't wait to do it again!

And here are a couple more photographs from my morning bicycle commutes to work. Best wishes everyone .

To begin, some recent photos from a life of waking up early and getting out to see the sunrise via a bicycle or a kayak. The old wooden piling photo below was from kayaking on Monday May 20; the photo of a fence with trees to the left was taken during a longer bike ride this past weekend, and the "geese" photo and the sunlight through the tree photo are from morning bicycle commutes to work over the last week and a half or so.

I have a tiny bit of summer news that I will post about later, once something fun arrives in the mail. But otherwise I'm still puttering away, trying to find a traditional publisher for the young adult "Within This Darkness" trilogy. I sent Book #1 to a Canadian publisher in western Canada in the winter, and received a fairly polite "no thanks" in reply. I was kind of charmed by that publisher actually, because they still requested an old school "paper" submission (as opposed to submitting your manuscript electronically via email etc). They also responded fairly promptly and actually seemed to have given the manuscript a good careful look, so I appreciated that as well.

Just late last week I sent Book #1 to ANOTHER Canadian publisher, and expect that with these folks I might be waiting up to a year to hear from them. Neither "young adult" or "fantasy" are really in their wheel-house, but they quite obviously look for quality and originality, so I have some hope that they will take their time with the manuscript. If these folks decline, I suspect I will be self-publishing again.

Best wishes everyone!