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Greetings from Green Island.
I am Dave (David Leslie, to give me a couple degrees separation
from the long list of 'Dave Patterson's google fetches up)
Patterson, Canadian musician, songwriter (60s folk-rock roots),
book writer, and constant fighter to make things better for all
of us.
Herein I will tell you a bit more about all that. Briefly.
It's all way too long for a
soundbite, but long story short, as they say, I am Canadian,
born in 1950 in Toronto, did a lot of things with my life which
you can read about more
here - and am currently retired in Thailand where there's
no snow to shovel and I can ride my little Honda motorcycle
around the beautiful countryside most days (some days the rain
is a bit too heavy, but the 'rainy season' is not that serious
where I live in northern-central Thailand).
So
first in order of time regarding my writing and thus presence on
Amazon would be the music book - I won't get into the history of
my music, as I have done a web 
page
with all the history and a bunch of pictures and recordings of
the best of my songs going back to the mid-60s, which you can
find here
Dave's Songs if interested in that bit of my writing (I
still play and sing pretty much daily, very good for the soul
and some help clearing crap out of my lungs and vocal cords as a
(well-controlled but still) asthmatic. And the book of my songs
I put together finally a few months ago is now on Amazon
here -
Continuing chronologically,
which seems most logical and easiest, my next forays into
writing were during the 1980s after I moved to Prince Edward
Island in Canada to go to university, where I eventually
graduated with a biology degree, which fleshed out a lot of my
lifelong interest in the natural world, and following graduation
I got a Canada Council grant and wrote a book on the Natural
History and Ecosystems of PEI, which was a very enjoyable year
but the book never got published. But also during my early 1980s
years on PEI I had gotten a good basic education in social
issues (poverty, government corruption, the 'legal' system, the
'national debt'), and was working up a good interest in such
issues, leading to my first, I guess, (self-)published chapbook
or pamphlet,
Prince Edward Island Revival Plan a few years later, and
ideas started germinating for later books we shall hear more of
anon.
But
also in the early 1990s, after a 'hey look at this ad/idea' from
my brother Michael, I tried my hand at writing a 'young
readers' book, sent it to the publishing company in Halifax
looking for new writers, and it got accepted, and eventually
published as Kelly Mows the Lawn. However, I had written a book
called Ernie Mows the Lawn, which they wanted to change to Kelly
and I said ok rather than having the book sit in a drawer
somewhere, but it was always on my mind to resurrect Ernie, and
now I have finally done that for this new Amazon-Kindle venture,
along with a bunch of new (and better, IMO) illustrations from
ChatGPT, which renders my 'written pictures' into actual
illustrations (not as easy as it sounds, the Chat illustrator
can be very obtuse and stubborn and come up with a lot of well
done but stupid stuff (bolted iron windows in a whale), but does
now and then come up with some real nice gems, as the books
show).
And after Kelly/Ernie the same publishing company accepted a second book which I called Changel, Orion and Sirius but they changed to Adventure in the Night Sky, which I fixed up again to the original ideas with a bunch more nice illustrations from Chat. And 3rd was Aquila, which I mostly wrote while still in Canada, and then published on my own in 2007 a few years after moving to Thailand, and which is here reissued with, again, some very nice pictures via Chat. I have two more Pine Valley PEI books planned.You can click on the covers below to get to the Amazon pages for the books. (as soon as the books get onto Amazon, that is to say - at the moment only Ernie and Aquila are on Amazon, Changel and the others coming soon!!)
You can find these Young
Readers books, and other books I have done in epub form at: my
Smashwords page.
- and for a
book on the real Green Island, what I consider to be my real
magnum opus, the story is here -
Green Island - a story about how a true 'social democracy'
might be managed by a citizenry comprised of democracy-enabled
citizens. I hardly behooves me to brag, but since nobody else
will, I have to say this is probably the best book written so
far at least in the 2000s. A book that is widely needed, a book
that no Canadian publisher or agent was interested in, or dozens
of others in the western world. With that kind of 'we are NOT
going there!!!!' attitude - well, read it and see. The .epub on
Smashwords above is free to download, only send some money if
you think it worth the read. Inside the boxers waiting for
approval from their (inside the box) 'influencers' won't be
recommending it - but if you are one of we 'outside the boxers'
who likes a good read - I think you'll agree with my assessment.
Beautiful inside artwork too - I am a serious creator. 
And just for the sake of being complete (the above
bio stops around Green Island) - for the 2010s I was an English
Editor and teacher at the Faculty of Medicine of Prince of
Songkla University in Hat Yai in southern Thailand - pretty good
job for me (no office hours!!), which left me quite a bit of
free time to work on researching what was going on in the world,
doing various websites, and writing a lot of essays, some of the
best of which can be found a bit down this page, the Democracy
Study Guide - good years that went by very quickly - I wrote a
teaching book and many associated books that got updated every
year as I learned about teaching, but none that would merit the
time to put on Amazon, esp now with the advent of high-quality
AI, which can do both generally better than humans (in Thailand,
I find my ChatGPT very useful with studying the Thai language -
I don't use it for editing myself, very particular about anyone
messing with my words, but I think as an editor of English
language medical papers it would probably be very useful).
And
- one of the great things about living and working in southern
Thailand, as I did for almost 30 years, is the closeness of
the Andaman Sea and the many beautiful 
islands there -
almost all of which have beautiful coral reefs either directly
offshore or easily accessible by longtail boat. And after
looking for years for a guide to these islands, with no luck,
I decided to do one myself - and published it last year after
my retirement gave me time to finish it - which you can read
about here,
and there should be a picture of the cover somewhere nearby
here. It gives details about all of the main southern Thailand
Andaman islands, and the reefs around them - and you can have
a look on
Amazon for more details if this kind of thing interests
you. (but a small warning - the last couple of years has seen
some serious longterm ocean warming, and my most recent visits
to many of these places has seen between some dead coral and
almost total devastation of the coral and thus the associated
ecosystems - I very much fear I am going to have to redo this
book as a retrospective on what it used to be like - but not
just now when there is still some hope for recovery)
AND
- one more I guess - I did not really start doing web pages, or
books for that matter, lo those many years ago, to begin a career
as an author - I started the web pages because I thought -
actually had been for many years before the idea and do-ability of
web pages were even thought of - that our society was heading in
some very bad directions, and I thought I had some ideas it would
be useful to get into the public discussion - I wanted to be part
of that discussion actually. My first foray into 'protest writing'
was, I guess, back around 1969, when I was still in high school
(good ol Norwood District Highschool, 
near where I grew
up in Hastings on the Trent, near Rice Lake, beautiful town and
countryside), and I have no idea what the essay was about now, but
there was something going on in the school I thought needed
fixing, and wrote this essay called 'Situation Requiring
Propitiation' (I was a big reader since I was 4-5 years old, and
by high school had a big vocabulary). I suppose I was somewhat
influenced by Dylan and Lennon, and the war protests of the later
60s and all like that as well. Anyway - not the place for a long
history of that - but my most recent update of my general 'this is
how things work now and how to improve them' books is here, Democracy
Study Guide, for those so interested. And then that is about all, at least for now, June 2026, as I get a bunch of books put on to Amazon to try to make a bit of supplementary income for my retirement - I've always believed that both my music and my books, esp Green Island, and several of the songs, could be good sellers if they were just given a chance - and now I am spending some more time doing that. (the Young Readers books are good stories too, not of the Harry Potter level at all, much more modest, but still worth a readership if given the chance)
If you want to get in touch - my email is corals@rudemacedon.ca . And if you read this far - thanks for doing that.