JK Dunne

I was born in Kilkenny Ireland and served a full apprenticeship to the jewelry trade and having worked as a qualified goldsmith for a couple of years I set out to see the world.

Arriving in Australia in 1972 I found myself enamored with the rough outback way of life and soon I was abandoning the air conditioned comforts of the jewelry shops to working at the opposite end of the spectrum and mining for gold.

Thirty years later I was married to Patricia, (also from Ireland) and settled down in New Jersey having sampled a wide and diverse range of careers including, trucker, taxi driver, miner, construction worker etc.

It was at an Irish festival in New Jersey that I got the idea to get back into making jewelry. There were several jewelry vendors there and I was pretty much convinced that I could manufacture a better quality and much more reasonably priced range of jewelry.

I was also particularly intrigued to find that there were hundreds of Irish and Scottish festivals throughout the country every weekend from February to November.

The thoughts of having a jewelry workshop in the comfort of my home and traveling to festivals every weekend gave me that, "Why didn't I think of this before" thought.

So I started making Irish jewelry and did my first few festivals.

"Is this made in Ireland?" they would ask. "No, but it's made by an Irishman," I'd reply. A year later I was almost out of business because they were buying the Irish made jewelry from my competitors.

I wasn't about to lie just to make a sale, so I decided to create my own line of original pieces. I made it solid with quality chains and I soon found that I was not only making money but had a following of sorts. Life was great and I was living the good life.

That is, until the bubble burst and people were now buying food instead of jewelry. The greed driven bankers had brought the world to its knees worrying about where their next trillion dollars was going to come from.

Well, when good things come to an end you just have to pursue the next good thing. I had done it a hundred times throughout my life.

"I'll write a book," I thought. The idea had always been there ever since I had visited Ellis Island. It fascinated me to think that whole families would take up roots and sail across the Atlantic ocean in a rickety old ship to start a new life in a country they knew very little about, without as much as a knife and fork and often not knowing a word of English. I figured, there must be millions of untold stories depicting unspeakable hardships, loss, sadness, fear and regrets.

These people would have been vulnerable right from the time they got to the end of the gangplank. No one to greet then, no job skills, no accommodation lined up and not even knowing what direction to go. The friends that they had made on the ship and with whom they had drawn a mutual comfort from would soon be scattered to the four winds. The ship's crew may or may not have warned these pour souls to be extra vigil about looking after their children as abductions were rampant for the child labor industry. It only took a second of confusion or distraction on the docks and you lost a child forever.

The story started. The ideas were flooding. It would have to begin in my home town of Kilkenny. It would have to be light hearted, maybe a bit of magic, a fantasy but most of all interesting. I knew enough to realize that a reader has to be impressed with the story and not the author's writing ability.

But, no one's life is without sadness, loss regrets and heartbreak; I would have to write about some very real hardships. How would I do this in a fantasy novel and make the magic element believable? Well... My original jewelry had been successful so, just use that imagination again.

697 pages and five years later and I have a book that, 'as a perfectionist,' I'm actually pleased with and I'm also pleased with the attention it's getting.

Every author has an "FR" (first reader) and Patricia was mine. "Where did you get that stuff?" she asked.

"Why? Did you like it?" She nodded, "It's as good as anything out there by the best selling authors and I'm surprised."

Great..! But she did ask me to change a few things and I was even more pleased with the results.

Thank you for reading to the end. If you buy my book I hope you will be enchanted. Please feel free to leave a review whether you liked it or not. Feel free to visit my website and read some chapter samples www.fadreen.com

JK Dunne.