Regreetings!

From Alesia:

Hello, everyone! I'm sitting in a vacation rental with my bestie of 23 years, who is also a fantasy fiction writer and a role playing gamer. We're in southern Oregon, on the Rogue River, enjoying our yearly retreat from our usual lives, wherein we stitch (avid counted cross-stitchers, both of us), talk, consume vast quantities of coffee, wine, and chocolate, and basically just spend time reconnecting. We've more reconnecting to do than usual, this year - Michael and I had to "go deep" to finish Dead Man's Trigger, and even my best friend fell off my personal radar for a few weeks as we pushed hard to get that manuscript to the beta readers. My goal was to have it off my agenda by the time I left, and I managed it with three days to spare! Woohoo!

That's the most awesome thing about best friends, isn't it? They just "get it," they understand, and they're are there for you with a cold drink and a hot meal when you crawl out of your cave wondering who turned the daylight up while you were gone.

Alas, for all the beauty surrounding me just now, this is and has to be a working vacation. I've got some ideas to share, now, about the writing process and the personal significance of producing any creative work, what it's like to yoke yourself to another writer to collaborate on fiction, the importance of what goes into writers when so much is coming out of them, some thoughts on those who are marketing services to indie writers (probably going to get in trouble over some of that), and more. It's a relief to have these ideas popping up again - for a long time there, when the burden of finishing the book seemed crushing and endless, I couldn't have thought up a blog post to save my life - or yours.

This week, I am available to our beta readers for any and all their questions regarding the manuscript, and arranging the pre-launch promotional stuff, but I'm resisting the urge to work on any of the future stories set in the World of Menelon. This is supposed to be a time of rest and preparation for the work on DMT that's still to come, so I'm trying to be good. I really, truly am!

If I'm doing some of that work from a hot tub? It's for the good of my soul. 😀

P.S. If you've read Raven's Tears and would like to beta read the DMT manuscript too, there's still time - but not much. You can reach out to me on Twitter (@Zenstitcher), or send an aether-mail to aematson )at( metaphorpublications )dot( com to let me know. Previous beta reading experience would be helpful at this stage, but not necessary, so don't let that hold you back if you want in on this phase of the book's production.