Happy Holidays From The Edge Of The Map

If you are reading this, it means you chose to spend a few minutes of your holiday season inside my strange little corner of the universe. That alone means more than I can easily put into words.

This year has been a wild one. The Shepherd finished her first descent. Station 13 woke up and quietly started wrecking people’s sleep schedules. Spores began to fall. The Veiled Core opened a little wider and the Rememberer kept scribbling his warnings in the margins. Somewhere along the way, you picked up one of these stories, or told a friend about them, or left a review that helped a complete stranger decide to take the same ride.

Thank you for that. Truly.

Writing is solitary work, but stories are not. A book does not really exist until it is in someone else’s hands. You brought these worlds to life this year. Every time you sent an email, dropped a message on social, recommended a book to a friend, or left a star rating anywhere on the internet, you were helping these characters find their people.

So as the year draws to a close, here is what I wish for you.

I hope you get quiet time. The good kind. The kind where the endless noise of the year finally drops a few decibels and you can hear your own thoughts again. Maybe that is a long car ride, maybe it is a late night with a blanket and a book, maybe it is ten stolen minutes with coffee while everyone else is still asleep. However it shows up, I hope you get some.

I hope you get people. Whatever “family” looks like for you, I hope you get to spend time with the ones who make you feel more like yourself, not less. The ones you could trust on a failing station. The ones you would call if an impossible ship appeared in the sky and everything familiar started to tilt.

I hope you get wonder. A clear night sky. A quiet snowfall. The weird peace of walking outside when the world is muffled and strange. The holidays are wrapped in tradition, but they are also full of liminal moments where everything feels slightly out of phase. That feeling is where a lot of my stories come from. I hope you get to stand in that doorway for a minute and feel small in the best possible way.

And finally, I hope you get good stories. They do not have to be mine. They can be anything that pulls you out of the churn and reminds you why humans keep telling tales in the first place. We build worlds on paper in order to survive the one we are actually standing in. If this year has been heavy for you, I hope the right story finds you at the right time.

Looking ahead to the new year, there is a lot brewing. More from the Veiled Core. More from the spores that started falling. More from the Builders and their terrible experiment. The map is about to get bigger, and a little stranger, and I cannot wait to share it with you.

For now, I am going to take a breath, look up at the winter sky, and be grateful. Grateful that I get to write these books. Grateful that you choose to read them. Grateful that, in a world full of noise, you made space for quiet pages and impossible ships and broken stations and stubborn humans who keep trying anyway.

From my desk to wherever you are, happy holidays. May your days be peaceful, your nights full of stars, and your to-be-read pile exactly as tall as you want it to be.

See you on the other side of the year.

J. A. Raithe