Rachel Starr Thomson

Raven’s Ladder is the third book in the four-book Auralia Thread, a startlingly poetic, deeply spiritual fantasy series that begins with Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight.

The story dawns on a displaced people: The people of House Abascar, led by the young king Cal-Raven and his faithful guardsman Tabor Jan, have moved into a network of caves after the collapse of their house in a cataclysmic earthquake. Cal-Raven dreams of building New Abascar according to his childlike dreams, filling it with the beauty glimpsed in Auralia’s colors and following the footsteps of the Keeper, a strange forest creature he has come to revere almost as deity—but which remains mysterious and out of reach.

An unexpected encounter with the Keeper charges Cal-Raven’s faith and sends him on a journey to find the perfect settling place for his people. But even as he travels into the north, a menace from the ground threatens the caves, and Tabor Jan is forced to lead the people out. The refugees are discovered by Bel Amica’s beastman-hunting Captain Ryllion, and they have no choice but to accept the hospitality of House Bel Amica—a wealthy and exotic house which, under the influence of the follow-your-heart moon-spirit religion, has become a sort of Vanity Fair.

The Bel Amican heiress Cyndere and her faithful attendant Emeriene do what they can to care for the refugees, even as Tabor Jan and Cal-Raven fight to keep Abascar from losing its identity in Bel Amica’s seductive pleasures and the religion of the Seers. But theirs are not the only endeavours in the Expanse. The Seers are slowly spreading their power, and in the wastelands to the east, cursed Cent Regus beastmen are rising to new power.

There, in the ruins of House Cent Regus, Cal-Raven’s faith will sustain its greatest blow.

Raven’s Ladder is rich, powerful, and thought-provoking. Its prose is beautiful; its plot is riveting. This is not a stereotypical fantasy, wherein the good king and his beautiful followers battle the bad king and his beastly ones. In the world of the Expanse, beauty and beastliness mix, and it’s anyone’s guess which will rise to the top. Cal-Raven’s journey is one of faith that any believer will relate to, from the first flush of infatuation into discouragement as he is challenged to hold onto hope despite all odds. In the confusing tangle of emotions, exhaustion, and half-truths that is life, the beauty of art and the power of storytelling point the way back home.

I can still feel the atmosphere of this book weeks after reading it. House Bel Amica is stunningly rendered, exotic and exciting, with its hanging mirrors, ocean air, and rich food. It’s a beautifully seductive place. But the religion underlying it, a message of following your heart, is also seductive, and we watch as this frighteningly familiar mantra (seen any Disney movies lately?) leaves the best of men wide open to deception and turns heroes into monsters.

The characters are extraordinarily human, from the fiery idealist Cyndere, who rebels against the excesses of her house in her desire to help the lost and accursed, to the awakening beastman Jordam, who thinks in metaphors and is beginning to lose his fur, to Prince Cal-Raven, who combines youthful arrogance with burdened leadership and passionate hope. Tabor Jan and Emeriene, who both function as the loyal friends of difficult visionaries, remain two of my favourite characters.

I have loved this series from the start, and it continues to get better. I reread Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight before opening Raven’s Ladder, and I will probably read all three again next year when the final installment comes out. I look forward to the fourth book even as I dread it, because this is a complex story with characters I’m coming to love, and I want to see all their stories treated fully. Bother the demands of the publishing industry that a book be relatively short.

It’s been several weeks since I read my advance copy of Raven’s Ladder, and the story is still lingering with me. This is some of the best fantasy being written today.

A Note to Parents and Young Readers: Overstreet’s books are very moral, but not simplistically so, and some scenes are gory. These are books for discerning readers.

I have now been home from Vancouver for three days, but balk every time I think of blogging. Reason being: there is too much to blog about!

For example, Jeffrey Overstreet’s latest book in the Auralia Thread, Raven’s Ladder, was released on February 16, and it is amazing. He was good enough to send me a (signed!) advance copy, and I have written a review which will be posted here and at BlogCritics.org shortly. Best book I have read in quite some time. I’m very sorry I missed the release date, but I was really busy in Vancouver, which brings me to

another thing I need to blog about, which is the trip itself. I will go into more detail in the next few weeks, but for now, I will say it was an amazing experience. Carolyn and I performed several times a day along with many other Christian artists in a church, on street corners, at a women’s shelter in the poverty-stricken east side, and in a huge theatre. We were able to dive into this city where the world is currently meeting and use writing and dance to celebrate the glory of God and invite people into His peace and deliverance. What an incredible privilege.

While we were doing that, I had a couple of articles published that I didn’t have time to tell you about. So here are the links:

“Seven Values of a Heavenly Life” — Store up treasures in heaven by living a heavenly life here on earth with hospitality, generosity, self-discipline, love of truth, love of purity, love for sinners, and passion for daily living. Published on Boundless.org.

“Keeping the Heart in Your Writing” — My guest post on the fabulous blog of agent Rachelle Gardner. By identifying your passion, fasting and feasting, and practicing discipline, you can keep the heart in your writing even in the busiest of lives.

Aaaand in preparation for the Olympics, I published our first book under the Soli Deo Gloria Ballet imprint, Pieces of Grace (And What They Mean). This is a little book containing poetry we use in our short pieces and a short story, along with a few theological notes. We didn’t actually get to sell it in Vancouver due to a bizarrely late delivery, but it’s good to have it out anyway! I will eventually get it up on this site; in the meantime, check it out on Amazon.

I’ve been thinking about songwriting lately for two major reasons: annoyance and joy.

Annoyance with a trend in worship music these days to be formless and void (what do some of those words mean, anyway?) and joy in music that does worship and that does teach and exhort, as well as having musical excellence to it.

One of my favourite links these days is Nathan Partain’s music blog. He’s a worship leader at a Reformed church who writes folk-rock melodies for old hymns. The music is fairly rough and raw, which is how I like it, and you can download lots of it. My favourite songs are “Be Reconciled” and “Come, Jesus, Come.”

Nathan is involved with a group of worship leaders who post music, art, and liturgical thoughts under the name Cardiphonia. Check them out here.

So my question the other day about songwriting wasn’t entirely rhetorical; I was leading up to something . Does music — specifically music with words, songs — have a God-given purpose? Is there something we’re supposed to do with it? Obviously, song is an incredible form of expression. But is self-expression all there is to it? In my opinion, if you’re only about expressing yourself, you’re going to become self-indulgent very quickly, and self-indulgence is a sinkhole for artists of any kind.

Paul talks about song in his letters to the Ephesians and Colossians, with an interesting double emphasis:

… be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Eph 5:18-19)

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. (Col 3:16-17)

There are three purposes listed for Christian song here (and by “Christian song” here I mean songs that are specifically related to our faith). One is obvious: to sing to God and express gratitude to Him. The others are maybe not so obvious: we’re supposed to use songs to “speak to ourselves” and to “teach and admonish one another.” In other words, we should sing songs of worship and praise, but we should also sing songs of doctrine and truth and exhortation. At least, that’s how I take those verses.

Looking at most of the music in the church these days, what do you think? Are we fulfilling those purposes?

The Vancouver adventure has begun! As you read this, Carolyn and I will be in the air somewhere over the great Canadian prairies (or possibly lounging in the Calgary airport on layover — I haven’t checked our itinerary that closely). We will have been awake since 3:00 a.m. and flying since 7:15.  We have an evening and a morning of orientation, and we begin performance, I think, Friday evening.

We appreciate your prayers as we fight to stay awake, forge into into public territory with our hitherto private studio work, navigate Vancouver during this insanely busy time, and seek the Lord together.

For today, just pray that we make it to the end of orientation without going completely loopy, getting sick, or falling asleep in embarrassing places. With the time change, we’ll be “awake” almost 24 hours.

According to Google Maps, there’s a Starbucks in walking distance from our accommodations, so we hope to hop online and update now and again. In the meantime, I’ll be posting some previously written and scheduled posts.

I love this video, because it is pure joy to watch someone who was so obviously born to do what he does:

I have been very busy lately, and so blogging sparingly, but the recent posts about Andrew Peterson and my own encounters with a few born musicians have me thinking about a type of writing I don’t usually address: songwriting. Do any of you do it? What sorts of music do you write? If you’ve never written a song, why not?

Last week a blog reader who’s planning to strike into the world of Indie Authorship sent me an e-mail. Among other things, she said,

Sadly, I combine a strong streak of perfectionism with the ability to overlook glaring typos! I can’t afford to pay for a professional editor to work on my manuscripts and I know you’re a professional editor, so I’m definitely not asking you for free perks , but if you DO have any “fail-proof” tips for editing beautifully and professionally and catching ALL typos (!) to share with me and the rest of your blog readers, I’d be a happy writer … er … editor!

The fact that you’ve put “fail-proof” in quotation marks indicates you already know one thing:  you can’t do a fail-proof editing job on your own writing. In fact, book-length manuscripts are such complex things that it takes a whole staff of editors and proofreaders to catch everything, and as this article from Publetariat points out, recent cuts in editorial staffing and changes in job description affect even the books put out by major publishers.

But you can do a lot to improve your manuscript. Here are a few tips, mostly for the proofreading stage. Big-picture issues are not addressed here.

1. Read your work out loud. (And don’t speed read.) This will help you spot missing words and letters, wrong inflections, and confusing phrasing.

2. Run a spell check for homonyms and other easily muxed ip words. You know the ones: their/they’re/there, here/hear, were/where, you/your/you’re. Check your thens and thans to make sure you’re using the right one; ditto effects and affects. If you know you struggle with certain words, run spell checks for those too.

3. Check names, especially place names, to make sure you always spell and capitalize them consistently. For example, if you’ve been calling that mysterious firewalking child “the ale boy,” don’t suddenly start calling him “the Ale Boy.”

4. Ask your friends to help. Chances are you have some friends who are good at catching errors, and some of them might be happy to lend their eyes. You should offer to do them a favour in return, of course.

5. Tighten up. OK, this isn’t exactly a proofreading tip — but the number one problem I see in amateur writing is a need for tightening. Be concise. Be exact. Say things only once. Don’t say “He dropped down to his knees in the dirt on the ground.” Say “He dropped to his knees.”

Have fun editing! I hope these tips are helpful to you.

I have been up for two hours, but I’m only halfway awake. Some days it’s just really hard for me to stop sleeping, even after I’m vertical and have eaten and studied my Bible and gone through the whole morning routine. I suppose being up until nearly 2:00 a.m. doesn’t help.

This morning I hoped to get a lot of work done, but the challenging thing about doing intellectual work — that is, work that requires a mind fully engaged at all times — is that you can’t really do it while you’re half asleep. So thus far this morning, I’ve checked my e-mail and Facebook, stared blankly at the paper I’m supposed to be marking several times, and sorted a bunch of unmarked music in my iTunes.

I think I live much of life like this — good intentioned, but only half-awake. It’s that age-old “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” dilemma. I’ve often thought that I would have slept in Gethsemane too. The amazing thing is that Jesus stayed awake there, and He’s still awake, always, fully active in our lives. His fingers won’t ever slip from exhaustion. His vision doesn’t blur. “My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:2-4).