Obituary: Crim Mip, A Dreamweaver of the Dreaming Twilight.

 I wanted to give the SL Newser time to publish Crim's official Obituary but with how things are going I need to upload it before I am further carried away with preparations for his private and his public memorial service. The SL Newser, run by our friend Bixyl Shuftan, has at least already published preliminary reports.

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 Crim Mip, known in the real world as Karl Meyer, was a person whose ripples extended to many ponds. From the Memphis Furmeet, the MLP community (Trotsdale, Nisa, Ibex Empire, etc), the spiritual and Pagan community (Arashiryuu Yashiro, Practicing Magic for a time, and others), the SL boating and aeronautics communities… and others I probably don’t know of as he was very active.


I first met him in Nisa while exploring, seeking my home in the Second Life’s MLP community. There I met many others in a heavily mythologically influenced sim. The Nisean sim grouping, with Crim Mip as one of the several co-owners, grew to a landmass of Nisa, Thessalia, Exmoor, The Ibex Empire (aka Ibexia), Los Qwhilla, Qwhildrasil, and many other locations of the rp world. For a time this landmass resided north of – and joined to – Trotsdale. Later, Trotsdale eventually moved to join Neighberry’s landmass, before Nisa finally became Dreaming Twilight and moved instead to reside in a plot in Ontario due to funding.


Crim is/was the second of the strongest pillars of the Dreaming Twilight. Now another of the trees of the sacred grove has lost its leaves, reminding us of how tightly Life and Death are interwoven.


Crim leaves behind a loving girlfriend, Karla Voilpa (KariaKae Karu), the remaining members of the Dreaming Twilight and Arashiryuu Yashiro groups, his real life friends and relatives… and countless members of the many communities he was part of. He was a chosen brother of myself and Oscelot Halaan. He joins his former partner Lacy Musketeer.


He will be missed. He is loved. He is gone… Yet he now blows in the wind, creeps in the vines, falls from the sky in raindrops, dances in the tides of the sea, and warms us in our hearths.


Our thoughts are with all his loved ones. The Dreaming Twilight will continue. The memories will be maintained.


Please contact Amehana Arashi (Amehana Ishtari), Oscelot Halaan, and KariaKae Karu for more info.


You can also join the Dreaming Twilight [ secondlife:///app/group/c20ee681-8a58-6d0b-4f84-03c7aeece461/about ] and Arashiryuu Yashiro [ secondlife:///app/group/b6fef2dc-b13f-6da5-3561-7b3bc92efd07/about ] groups to be notified of any upcoming planned events and sporadic gatherings.


There will be an in-world memorial at the Dreaming Twilight plot

Date: To Be Announced

Time: To Be Announced

Pool of Life Url: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Ontario/179/158/56 With the graves of our other departed 

The Other Workers of Santa Claus

The Other Workers of Santa Claus

By Alexander Saunders

 

Coming to the catalog in the Winter Holiday Season of 2025.
Look for it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and Gumroad, and many more. Watch for preorders to open up! Don't forget to ask your local library and book store to carry it once pre-orders have opened. Direct orders through email can also be placed for invoicing.
Ebook, Print, audiobook editions pending.

Santa has had many helpers over his long years, and many friends. Elves and reindeer are not the only denizens of the North Pole. Join Santa, Mrs. Claus, and some of their newest workers, Roger, Becky, and Macy, along with his old friends. Old enemies, old loves, and more clash to create a prickly situation that only Santa's Other Workers and some unexpected volunteers hold the keys to help diffuse. This time it isn't Santa or Rudolph saving Christmas, but three very special young people and some unlikely friends. Join Alexander Saunders by the fireside with a cup of hot cocoa and hear his tale.

Humble Bundle submission made and Spotify news

Knock on wood and keep your fingers crossed for Alexander Saunders. I just finished sending off a query about getting Treasure of the Ancient Wizards into one of Humble Bundle's upcoming bundles.

Did you know some of our audiobooks are on Spotify? For now it is some of Teresa Garcia and Elizabeth Buckley's books. Once others are available you'll be able to look there in addition to Amazon, Gumroad, and the publishing website's direct sales. I can also be asked to run up physical cd copies.

So far things are still on track to have his book "The Other Workers of Santa Claus" ready for the 2025 holiday season. I'll post an update when preorders will be able to open.

Dragon Hearts RPG 2.0 has launched

The minions have been hard at work behind the scenes to rewrite the game from the ground up. There are numerous changes more than can be listed, some stuff is probably broken or has been forgotten, if you find anything raise a help ticket by clicking "Help" in the menu, or messaging me here! Dragon fangs are on a two for one sale to celebrate the relaunch.

www.DragonHeartsRPG.com

Redoing the game from the bottom up for Dragon Hearts 2.0 has been a years-long project. We've relaunched the gamesite. It looks very different than 1.0 did. For older players it may be a bit confusing. For new players it is hopefully easier to navigate.

Amehana (Teresa Garcia) will be working on a tutorial video and intends to have it ready soon.

First Meet the Author classroom event for Alexander Saunders and "Treasure of the Ancient Wizards"

 I am so happy about how today's meet the author event went with the Transition Class. We had to roll with an unexpected change in schedule but I could tell how excited the kids were. Over Zoom isn't the smoothest way to get an author into a classroom, but the fact that an author on one end of the country can have a classroom event with a class on the other end of the country is amazing. AND to want him back later in the year! The best part is that these kids see that they, too, can do great things. It is a very important lesson for them. Thank you Alexander Saunders for meeting with the kids.

This class has one of the final proof copies to read, both so that they can read the book and also so that they can see for themselves the last stage of the printing process before everything goes live. This book is of course already published, but I wanted these kids to not only be able to read the story, but also to be able to learn a bit about the publishing process.

Book Review: Mystic Tea by Rea Nolan Martin

Mystic Tea by Rea Nolan Martin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I greatly enjoyed this book. To me this is a three main-pronged braided storyline. We follow a “Mother Superior” of a convent who is also the current caretaker of her mentor, the previous Mother Superior, who in turn had served directly under and was mentored by the founder of their Order. Then we also follow the growth stories of two young women who are of vastly different background being called (unknowingly by them) to fill the roles of those two women. One of these women had never before considered becoming a nun and only went to the convent because while she was in jail getting sober she received a divine angelic calling/revelation. This young woman also happened to be an unknowing seer, having chalked everything up to drug induced hallucinations her entire life. The other woman was a twin that had absorbed her sister in utero, but grew up with the spirit of her sister stuck to her. Then we come to a fourth plot, the growth of the order itself. There is also a fifth plot, the growth of the individual aged remaining handful of nuns.

As a person whose skeleton has shown evidence of having absorbed a twin, I can relate with that character, although I did not become the religious zealot of a nun she was at the point of meeting the character. I was granted a firm support network whereas she was not. I also found myself identifying with our current on-paper Mother Superior, being a biological mother and a matriarch for my tiny branch of my main family. With similar responsibilities it is an extremely easy thing to do. And yet I also found myself identifying with our untaught seer, since I also would speak to rivers, although it was more often trees where I grew up, and found myself experiencing an interest amount of luck.


I found this to be a liberating tale. I rode the highs and lows of the characters and grumbled at them when they dug their heels on things that they needed to come to grips with. I loved the amount of simple life magic, the angels being a real thing, the transcendence (literal) within the tale. I think this would actually be very deserving a tale to be taken into high school senior English classes for reading and discussion. The religious tone, despite being such an obvious part of the story, also clearly separates the religious from the spiritual… a discussion that needs to be had with young men and women at the point in time that they are figuring themselves out and getting ready to set off on their own foray into adulthood and what it means to be human.

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Book Review: Drowning Mermaids (Princess of Ice) by Nadia Scrieva

Princess of Ice by Nadia Scrieva
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Book One of the Sacred Breath Series, AKA Drowning Mermaids

Although I adore stories about sea creatures I was not as in the mood for a mermaid story as I originally thought I was when I picked up the book. I am glad that I stuck with it despite my quandaries about what sort of story I actually wanted to read because I found it fitting better and better. This is not your usual mermaid tale or tail. These mermaids are like you and me, they just have a second set of lungs meant for the water. There have been stories about suck folk before, able to breathe both water and air (see some of the selkie tales in folklore). Unlike most of the folklore, these seafolk are not shapeshifters.

Since they are like us, and as it is acknowledged that there is a common root in the story between the sea and land folk, they have the same sort of problems we do; abusive fathers, nation wars, espionage, people not believing the truth when they are first told the truth, and many others. You are given the sense of well-developed nations moving behind the scenes and the complex (and often unknown) interconnection of the land nations with the water nations.

I was thrilled to see such a wonderful explanation of the Bermuda, Dragon Sea, and Alaskan Triangles given. The author actually made me fist pump at such an EXCELLENT use of modern and ancient folklore. We even meet the Ningyo people, who are a favorite subject of story research of mine, with their connection to the undersea dragons. Sadly, no dragons are mentioned, but an extinct species makes a living cameo!

The characters are also well done. I could feel the layers of Trevain Murphy (I usually think of Trevain as a surname, so that got my attention) and empathized with him. In many ways, that character was far more like me than I was comfortable with. I also had not expected what his ancestry was revealed to be when first meeting him at the beginning of the book. I loved the complexity of the female lead (Aazuria) balancing secrecy, her regal role, her role as a sister, and her role as a lover. Both of these characters did a ton of growing in this first book. I also particularly loved the metaphor for life that was done with the bonsai scene. Fantastic work. I look forward to reading through the next book of the series.

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