How small the world becomes

It's a small world out there.

When I lived in Alaska, once a week I'd get together with friends and we'd play a game. Sometimes it was just a board game, sometimes a long-running RPG campaign with paper and dice and creative rule interpretation, but mostly it was just getting together and having fun. We'd often talk about movies, books, shows, and musicians we'd found, and share the goodness. One of my friends mentioned his wife's college roommate, Jagi Lamplighter, was locked in a multi-year struggle with her publisher. The publisher had accepted the book, but was literally taking years to decide whether or not to give it a publication slot. (Later, I'd learn that being openly and proudly Catholic is an incredible detriment to getting published by NYC.)

When Jagi finally got published, we all bought the book to celebrate, and it was a pretty nifty read!

As years unwound, we started splitting separate ways - friends moving to Fairbanks, to the Lower 48, and then I went and fell in love and emigrated down to the Contiguous US myself. My husband started writing, and I started becoming friends with more writers, including the awesome Sarah Hoyt, who has not so much come out of the political closet as had a beautiful firework display of the entire structure with lots of C4. (She's now writing for Baen and independently publishing, neither of which require keeping quiet while others declaim the glorious socialist paradise to come in order to get published.)

And then Sarah mentioned she met this lovely writer at a conference, who was going small-press with her young-adult series, which is charming, delightful, and not only true to teens, but features the rare ability to be readable by adults without inducing the desire to slap the stupid (and the teenage angst) out of the main character.

Yep, Jagi has published The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin, and asked Sarah to blurb the cover for the sequel, The Raven, the Elf, and Rachel.

If you want a fun, light read, try it out. :-)