January

Action needed:) Here comes the exciting part!

Inside:

• January greeting

• Cover contest - vote and help us win!

• Publishing - inside look

• Arty things

• Reading Recs

January

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing all kinds of memes about how bad 2025 was (and even a few about getting a terrible start to 2026) and I just can’t relate! I’m not saying last year was perfect (nor the past several of fighting with my health) but it wasn’t a universal train wreck by any means. Maybe ever since 2020, humanity decided complaining is just too much fun to let go of.

I guess I can relate a little. I’m the type of person who handles uncomfortable situations with humor, and often that humor is self-deprecating or critical. But I love it best when the jokes help us bounce back from the tough things rather than causing us to to our misery as part of our identity.

I know there are many difficult things happening in the world and in our individual lives. I’m not suggesting we pretend otherwise. Acknowledging grief doesn’t require us to stagnate; grief (empathy, sympathy) and joy are not mutually exclusive.

Cheers (Sláinte!) to laughter, gratitude and being resilient humans. We’ve got this.

This January email will be the first several newsletters full of exciting things! My book is coming out in a few short months (what?!) so you may see a small uptick in emails. With the months I miss due to lambing, farm things and mom-life, we’ll hardly exceed our once a month average though. So fear not.

The fun thing is, this is when you get to start being a part of the process! I’ll need ARC readers/reviews (people who get an Advance Reader Copy and leave a book review), preorders (with goodies of course!), votes, shares and people to just cheer me on. (I’m a size small latte/breve, no flavor or medium black tea with cream…or a shot of good whiskey, neat.)

In reality, I’ll need an entire team of people to make this book a success. So if you’re into stories with deeper currents (Think L’Engle, Lewis and Ted Dekker, though I don’t even pretend to measure up to these greats.) consider answering the call to be on my launch team in my next email.

Your turn!

The first exciting thing I’d love for you to be a part of is a cover contest. I’ve entered the Endling cover, created by Andy Payne Designs in the Clean Fiction cover contest. This man took my beautiful mind scribbles and made a masterpiece. He deserves accolades!

This link will take you to a page with all the covers. In order to vote, scroll to the bottom and tap the words in white about voting. That will open the official Google form where you can select the nicest cover (hopefully #44!) and submit your answer. You can vote every day through February fourth! So set a reminder on your phone real quick to help you remember.

It would be amazing to launch a book with an award winning cover.

Publishing Journey -spilling the tea.

“Don’t go traditional.”

“If you sign over rights to your book, you’ll regret it.”

“They have the final say. You’ll feel powerless over your own work.”

In the author world, there are warnings regarding all avenues of publishing. These are just a few of the warnings against traditional publishing. In my case, which is just barely on the hybrid side of traditional, none of those have been founded.

I can’t vouch for the Big 5 or other, larger publishers, but my experience with Descendent has been amazing. Last night, I turned in my second round of completed edits. 🥵😅 We’ve waded through the muck, folks. At this point, the manuscript should be near pret-near-perfect and my editor should only need to go through it to hunt down those few obstinate errors that have hidden from us thus far.

If you don’t know me in person, I’m loud, opinionated and stubborn. I generally don’t follow rules that I don’t see a good reason for. With all the horror stories I’d heard, I was terrified that I’d be terrible to work with. I’m not very good at letting things lie when I don’t like or understand them.

And in fact, before the editor even sent me the first round of edits, I had a rebuttal to her early comments through email. 🫣 Here I go, being a huge pain in the ass already! I thought.

But in that first instance and all along the way (I’ve try very hard only to argue where I felt it was vital to the story) I have been heard and respected, even if the result required me to compromise or meet part way. My copy editor, Dawn, and the good folks at Descendent have said more than once, “It’s your story. We’ll find a solution that respects your vision and aligns with ours.”

Why do I tell you this? Because I know some of you are creatives in your own right, many fellow authors and illustrators. I want to encourage you not to give up and not to write off any one avenue of getting your work into the world.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I couldn’t care less if people know my name, but it matters to me that these words go into the world and moves human hearts. I believe this publishing path has made Endling into a more beautiful story than I ever could have self-publishing. So for you fellow creatives, here’s a Madeleine L’Engle (author of the Wrinkle in Time series and many more) quote I read this week on a similar note that resonated with me.

If a writer says he doesn’t care whether he is published or not, I don’t believe him. I care. Undoubtedly I care too much. But we do not write for ourselves alone. I write about what concerns me, and I want to share my concerns….I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not. It didn’t matter how small or inadequate my talent. If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing.

…If something deep within even the most tentative and minor of artists didn’t think his work was good, he would stop, forever.

-Madeleine L’Engle in A Circle of Quiet

Art Updates

Although writing is my passion, other creative hobbies definitely refresh my soul as well. Since I’ve been preaching about creating for creativity’s sake, here are a few things I’ve been making without the intention of selling. Sorry if you’ve already seen some of the Ireland/Scotland ones. It’s obvious by my nearly empty drawing page in my planner that most of my energy has been going toward book things:)

I’d love to see what you’ve been making! Maybe if enough of you reply with photos (or tag me on social media @plaineliciajane ) we can have a gallery of your creations!

Thanks to some of you kind souls, I’ve been able share some of my art with wider world. This migration season, I’m excited to have some new prints and products to offer! (If you’re not local to me, we’re near a migration/wetland hot-spot where thousands of birds of hundreds of species stop, either on their way north or to nest.)

In addition to my Freezout Lake map and stickers (perfect for young and old to track their sightings) I made a wrap-around water bottle sticker (or window sticker) of Freezout and the Rocky Mountain Front.

There will be extra sheets of bird stickers, so you could even make your own bird-filled scene. Hopefully, all of our bird people will enjoy them:) At the moment, the stickers are stuck at a shipping center in Washington, so pray they get moving without having to file a claim. 😫

If you’re local, all of these will be available at both Copper Creek locations or directly from me. When they arrive, the stickers will be in my shop here, and possibly prints of the compete painting too. As always, you can reply to this email, and I can help you find what you’re looking for or take custom commissions!

Recent Reads

These posts sometimes contain affiliate links. If you tap and shop, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you:)

Currently Reading:

I love the feeling of closing the last of an entire stack of books and marking them all as “Read” on Goodreads. It’s such a satisfying, restful feeling. Short-lived, however. Because I find a new stack and proceed to start several at once. Besides reading Pyle’s Robin Hood and A Comedy of Errors with my kids (free on kindle,iBooks or LibriVox!), I’m prioritizing A Circle of Quiet, the book I quoted earlier. Madeleine L’Engle is one of my favorite authors of the past century. Her way of handling big issues through story has encouraged me in my writing journey.

Recently Finished Book Reviews/Ratings:

Ann Cleeves’ Shetland Mysteries Just a couple newsletter ago, I was burning though the Shetland mysteries. I planned on picking up a signed copy of the newest book from the Author when we were Scotland, but ended up skipping the event at St Andrews in favor of a more relaxed schedule. I finally got my turn on the wait list from the library. Killing Stones isn’t the best of the books, but Cleeves is still a queen when it comes to mystery. I only gave it three stars because I thought she misled us a little too much, essentially not bringing the killer into the plot at all. I did appreciate her showing how (I’ll be vague to try and avoid spoilers) certain addictions, often ignored, increase the instances of violence. I’ve read interviews with prison inmates that affirm this.

A small mountain of vintage sci-fi. They’ve been on my list to read/reread for a while and I wanted to expand my non-space Sci-fi reads before I publish my own! I’ll give you the quick run down with star ratings and try (I really will) not to add much.

• That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (Revisited while Nic read. So good. Incredibly relevant even today. This is a slow, wordy read and the third in a trilogy. The ending is worth it! They all are.)

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne⭐️⭐️⭐️

• The Maracot Deep, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (For me, this was the perfect combination of ocean, science, and supernatural in a pleasure read.)

• The Poison Belt, (Challenger Series) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• The Land of Mist, (Challenger Series) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle⭐️⭐️⭐️ (might rate higher when I have more mental space to process the spiritualism central to the plot.)

• It’s been a while but I should also mention The Lost World, the first in the Challenger series by Doyle. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ It’s the OG Jurassic Park-absolutely fantastic!

This Ralph Steadman illustrated version of Animal Farm by George Orwell⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Hopefully a good teacher or parent has already had you read this. If not, add it to your list. People would be less shocked by the news if they read more Orwell, Bradbury, Huxley and Lewis.

The next email you see from me should include the official release date AND a call for ARC readers and link to sign up for my launch team. Until then…don’t forget to vote for my cover!

Happy adventuring (literary & otherwise)

Elicia Johnson