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ABOUT ME

Old Fashioned Library

You'll always find an element of the fantastical in my writing. My voice tends to the poetic, but I'm deeply attached to a good tight plot. If you browse through my short fiction, you'll find repeated themes of shapeshifting, the fae and otherness, of struggles with identity and desire. There are no dragons there yet, but they're on their way. Dragons are important.

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Alongside the short fiction, I am currently working on two longer projects, one of them an adult novel partly inspired by my persistent fascination with Archaeopteryx. It's a creature sufficiently unlikely and spectacular to deserve a place alongside the basilisk or unicorn, and I wasn't going to let it down.

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The other project, which I am in the early stages of drafting, is aimed at younger readers and has a setting more science fiction than fantasy, though, curiously, this is where I have found space for my beloved dragons.

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The two guide-stars of my work are J. R. R. Tolkien and Diana Wynne Jones. If I can manage to write half as well as one of them, I will be doing twice as well as I expected.

'Truth is like water - though it does not change
It takes the shape of every different moment
In which it's poured, of every different mind,
And to our partial eyes it shifts and flows.'

email me at alexdartnellauthor@gmail.com or find me on Instagram, @alexdartnellauthor

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