Updates | Beautiful Music

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Greetings!  A happy spring to everyone.  

One again I regret the long intervals between posts, but I've not been idle.  During my silence I have written five chapters in Rise of Ralienah my (hopefully) next novel.  It's been a long time since my creative juices have been flowing, so I'm super happy that things are going so quickly now.  

Unfortunately, concentrating my efforts on books means I tend to think less of this poor blog, so it's been left in the dust for a little too long.

I come today with some updates on my life, as well as this month's Beautiful Music.  I'm saving that for last because it's a song that really deserves full attention.  ^_^

Updates:

-I'm not sure if I've talked about Rise of Ralienah in much detail here before, so I just want to do a quick summary.  This book is a prequel to my first book, Quest for the Ivory Sword.  In Quest, the readers were introduced to Talminia and its inhabitants, including  Nayram'e Arrowflight, the Heir of Ralienah and next in line to become the Warrior of Talminia.  In Talminia, the Heirs are a very important part of the culture and infrastructure, held on the same level as the royals, if not even higher to some.

Quest for the Ivory Sword told of Nayram'e's quest to retrieve an ancient heirloom belonging to her family- a sword forged for Ralienah at the beginning of their line, pure white and rumored to be magical.  

In Rise of Ralienah, we go backward in the timeline to explore the origins of Ralienah Mark, a young foreign woman who unexpectedly finds herself at the head of a nation-wide revolution, intent on freeing the slaves in Talminia and bringing peace to its turbulent lands.  This is the beginning of the Heirs of Ralienah, as well as the story of the search for freedom and healing, not just in body, but in heart.

I started writing this book years and years ago, but it's had to go through a massive re-write, in which I pretty much scrapped everything I had written in order to flesh it out and fix some very young-minded logic loops that were driving me nuts.  I'm on chapter five now of the re-write, which is going a whole lot faster than the first draft.  Pray that I can keep my momentum!

-Rise of Ralienah is not the only thing I've been working on lately.  I've also been working on the next installment of Ready to Fly, so hopefully that will be ready soon.  Those of you who read it, keep your eyes out!

-This summer, for the first time, I will be leaving my home for more than two weeks.  My sister Brethyn (Aarathyn for you Underground folks!) and I will be going to work at Trails End Ranch, a Christian summer camp we fell in love with when we were children.  Brethyn will be serving as a counselor and I.... I don't actually know what they want me to do yet. I applied for the position of an art teacher, but there's another girl possibly in line for that, so I could end up anywhere.  I'm kind of hoping for drama, which I should have thought of before I applied for the art position.  ;)  

This camp has limited internet connection, so there's a good chance that during the three months I work there I may not be able to post at all.  I'm hoping to find a moment or two, possibly on my one day off per week to go into town and find a place with WyFy every now and then.

-And finally, one of the reasons I've been silent on this blog lately is that Blogger, for some reason, won't let me include pictures in my posts anymore, and I don't know why.  It won't even let me upload them from my own computer, so that put the kibosh on at least three posts I was planning.  :(  Has anyone else encountered this problem lately?  Have you found a solution?   If so, let me know so I can pull those posts out of the files and publish them finally.  

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And, lastly, here is this month's Beautiful Music:  It's Not Enough, by Dustin Kensrue.

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-Emmarayn Redding