Looking Forward
Happy New Year! At the close of 2023 I am grateful that my family is warm, safe, and in good health. I am grateful for a career that 16 years in I still feel incredibly fortunate to have. I am grateful for the support of my friends and readers. I am grateful to be touring starting in March for the launch of The Hidden Queen (details soon!). I am grateful I will see familiar faces again for the first time since the Core book tour back in 2017.
2017 feels like a lifetime ago, right? You know what I mean. I see you. It’s been a long haul, but we’re still truckin’. Hold steady at the wheel, my friends.
2024 promises to be… a lot, to each of us in our own unique ways. But rather than start the year imagining all the things that might go wrong, I want to start with something hopeful.
I want to tell you a secret.
A secret I’ve been excited about for a long time. Something I will talk about more in 2024. Who says resolutions can’t be fun?
Over the last few years, I’ve been going on writing retreat with some author besties, and working on a new new. A creative vacation from demon books, and a chance to stretch some worldbuilding muscles. A few thousand words at a time, and with wonderful conversations with amazing authors about my hopes and dreams for it, a kernel of an idea I had more than five years ago began to grow. Now, on the cusp of 2024, it’s ready to burst from its shell and take root.
This is a piece I commissioned many moons ago from Dominik Broniek. An ivory pendant in the shape of the ancient goddess Eldermother. Her last icon in a world that has all but erased her.
Can even a god exist, if none remember them?
When the Strife killed nearly all the Goddess Eldermother’s worshippers, she led the last of them to safe refuge in Secret Lake, a tiny village hidden in the bowl of a dormant volcano, far from civilized lands. For over three hundred years, they lived there in peace.
Still the Strife hunted them, for when the Goddess’s last worshippers are dead, their gods can take her ancient power for their own.
When the Strife finds Secret Lake, four young souls escape. Eldermother’s last worshippers, and the only thing tying the goddess to the material world. She will do anything to protect them, and they to ensure she is not forgotten.
That’s all you get, for now!
Be kind in 2024. Even when you don’t have to be. Even when, sometimes, you don’t want to be. Being kind is like going to the gym. Sometimes you gotta grit your teeth to do it, but you never regret it in hindsight.