Rachel Starr Thomson

… is here :).

If you’d like to help get the ball rolling, feel free to copy the below announcement and post it on your blog, email it to all your friends, skywrite it from an aeroplane…

Worlds Unseen

Click to Download the Free eBook Now!

The Council for Exploration Into Worlds Unseen believed there was more to the world and its history than the empire had taught them. Treating ancient legends as history, they came a little too close to the truth. Betrayed by one of their own, the Council was torn apart before they could finish their work.

Forty years later, Maggie Sheffield just wants to leave the past behind. Memories of the Orphan House where she grew up are fading; memories of her guardians’ murder are harder to shake. When a dying friend shows up on her doorstep bearing the truth about the Seventh World–in the form of a written covenant with evil–Maggie is sent on a journey that will change her forever. Along with the Gifted gypsy Nicolas Fisher, who hears things no one else can, Maggie joins with the last surviving members of the Council and a group of eastern rebels led by a ploughman and a princess to discover the truth.

It won’t be easy. The Seventh World has long been controlled by the Blackness, and its monstrous forces are already on Maggie’s trail.

Readers Weigh In

“Wow, Rachel, oh my goodness…. wow. I fell in love with Worlds Unseen. I finished it a few moments ago, with tears in my eyes. It was really touching…and brilliant, and beautiful. The whole thing reminded me of a mix between C.S. Lewis, Ted Dekker, and Diana Wynne Jones, while being wholly different.”

“Your story is wonderful! You are such an artist and you paint such beautiful metaphors. I am in awe.”

“You have a gorgeous poetic way of putting things that’s incredible and enviable. I love the huge grand scale of things that your world runs on, yet your characters make it personal in such an amazing way.”

“I thought all of your characters were great! They were real, which is what I’ve always loved about your writing.”

Coming Soon: Worlds Unseen in hard copy!

It’s still in production, but Worlds will be available as a “real” book in the next few months, with beautiful cover artwork by Deborah Thomson and availability on Amazon.com and special order from bookstores across the continent. Watch for it!

Chapter Twenty of Taerith has been posted. I’m going to start making a note here everytime a new chapter goes up–since Inklings is turning into my writing hub, I might as well.

This is one of those chapters that ran off with itself in terms of atmosphere. I had a big scene to do and wasn’t sure how to do it, but I knew that atmosphere would be the key to the whole thing. So I threw in a lot of stars, and standing stones, and allusions to wolves–I think it worked.

Why, you may wonder, has Rachel posted a picture of four pots of dirt on her blog?

Ah, but you just think those are four pots of dirt. The truth is something much greater. Those four pots are an herb garden. They are glorious and green. They are healing for headaches and upset stomachs; they are salve to sore throats and aching lungs.

I forget that at times, and then I feel silly for lugging those four pots out into the sun so my herb garden can thrive, and for watering them every night and sometimes praying that my unproven thumb will prove green. But I’m right. There’s magic in that dirt.

Have you ever heard a song that melted you or carried you away to some verdant, misty paradise? The song “Perfect Day” does that to me. Every note, every instrument, every word reaches deep into my heart and calls forth a response.

The other day I was typing and I heard my little sisters playing outside my bedroom door. In their story, Keturah was a fairy who sang instead of talking. She sang her whole story: where she had come from, why she had come, what she was searching for. It was rambling and warbly and a little off-key. But there was a seed in it. A storytelling seed, a musical seed, a calling-f0rth-response seed. Someday she’s going to reach people with music.

Recently I sat down and faced a blank page. Pushing aside thoughts that I was wasting my time and couldn’t possibly pull it off this time, I typed some letters. But they wouldn’t stay letters, no, as letters will, they turned themselves into sentences and formed a paragraph. This is what they said:

It was raining in the fields. Cold rain. Taerith stretched out his arms and raised his head, letting the rain hit his face and run down the bridge of his nose. He opened his mouth and gulped convulsively as the liquid trickled into his throat. It was good of the sky, he thought, to give him water. He had been at work with the other men, harvesting late corn, but the rain had put an end to the work for now. The fields were nearly bare anyway. Water puddled around his boots–held together now with string and patches–and turned the trampled furrows to mud.

There’s magic in those little ink blots. They’re not just letters now, they’re a story–a story of a man who is sent away from his family and forms a new one by laying down his freedom to serve a slave girl and a persecuted queen, to befriend an imprisoned priest and fight next to a half-blood warrior. (You can read what there is of that story here.)

Beginnings. Rarely do they resemble what we know, by faith and a sort of passionate instinct, they will become. Off-key ditties don’t sound like symphonies. Jumbles of a’s and b’s and h’s don’t look like literature. Children don’t look like mothers and fathers, prophets and servants, yet there’s magic in them. God put something in them that will grow if it’s tended, into something green and tall and beautiful.

Keep hauling your pots into the sun, watering the dirt, writing those words, playing that piano. Keep investing in the lives of your children and grandchildren and brothers and sisters and friends. What you sow, you shall reap.

My eyes feel like they’ve been staring at a computer screen all day. Likely because they have been :).

The official release date for Letters to Samuel Generation: The Collection is tomorrow. It’s not going to happen. The usual unaccountable delays have stacked themselves up against me and my deadlines. However, I should be able to release it within the next two weeks. I shall not complain. In the meantime, you can read all the chapters here.

Coaching is going very well and I’m actually ahead in marking papers. As a result, I had an extra forty-five minutes to work on Taerith. I finished a chapter and posted it.

Other excellent news is that I’ve begun work as a copy editor for Home School Enrichment Magazine. I’m very excited about it and greatly enjoying the work thus far.

Taerith was last through the door, with Kardas only a few paces behind him, but just before the tavern’s noisy dim closed in over him, he saw a hand clap down on Kardas’s shoulder and heard a voice intone, “Greetings, my lord Half-Blood.”

Taerith drew his hunting knife and was back on the street in an instant. Three men stood around Kardas. They held no weapons that Taerith could see, yet their expressions were unmistakably threatening. The chief of them, a tall, stocky man with a half-shaven head and a dull wine-coloured cloak, drew his hand back from Kardas’s shoulder. He glowered at Taerith with such displeasure that he almost expected him to hiss.

“Who is he?” he asked.

* * *

The Eight Chapter of my novel-in-progress,Taerith, hath been posted! Comment, all ye who enter here.

While waiting for Libby to finish her obsessive alterations on Lilia, I received the newest (and pretty much final) version of Taerith by another one of our author/artists, Rachel Brewer. I like it very much so I thought I’d share:

I sent out another pre-release email for Letters to a Samuel Generation today. Got the introduction written last week. This week it’s final editing/proofreading, then I’ll pass it along to my whiz kid sister for formatting, get all of the information registered in official places, and gear up for honest-to-goodness publication in March. Who says publishing has to be slow? ;)

In all honesty, most books cannot be published anything close to this quickly, especially if they’re going to be successful. It doesn’t matter much for this book for a few unique reasons.

On another plain, my fellow Romany author Libby Russell just finished a freehand sketch of Lilia, one of the main characters in Taerith. She’s beautiful and I’ll make sure you all get to see her as soon as Libby’s finished making artistically obsessive alterations. Libby’s also doing sketches for me to illustrate the eBook version of Worlds Unseen (sorry, no link yet) which I plan to come out with (FREE!) this summer. I’m very grateful for all the work she’s putting into it, because she’s got a lot of talent and she’s not charging me anything. Yet.