Hi, It’s 2:45 p.m. so I’ll have to talk fast.

I’m Rachel, the keeper of the RATH HAVEN CHRONICLES. Most people don’t know that, probably because I look like a plain, regular, normal mom next door. I drive my four children around from place to place in a dusty, crumb-encrusted mini-van (that frequently smells as if someone thought it would be a great idea to hide their mostly nibbled apple-core in the back seat cubby rather than take all the trouble to carry it to a proper waste basket.) I also do quite a bit of laundry and vacuuming and dirty bathroom scrubbing and dishwashing. (There’s never a nice, little, inconspicuous brownie around when you need one. I sometimes wish brownieing--is that a word?--were a more prestigious line of work, but it’s not a terribly glamorous job, picking up dirty socks and washing dishes, is it?)

Speaking of washing dishes, I have long suspected that there’s some freaky, sci-fi, spontaneous generation thing going on in my kitchen. I don’t know where they’re coming from, the dirty cereal bowls, spoons and cups. They just keep appearing out of nowhere! I find them all over the house! If we’re not vigilant, I fear we will one day be ruled by hostile cheese-encrusted, alien silverware.

Besides, the dirty dishes, there’s those big bare walls screaming to be painted. And the curtains are not going to sew themselves, are they? And after that, there’s that whole ‘mom’ thing—dentist appointments, homework, lessons, volunteering with the PTA, “can you pick me up at 5:00 and drop me off on the other side of the planet at 5:15?” (This can actually be accomplished with some very clever manipulation of the space-time continuum and a rudimentary understanding of time zones.) Of course, I’m forgetting that I also teach high school French and English, but now I teach religious studies, too.

You can imagine then, that I was, not surprisingly, a bit skeptical when a small Averien boy interrupted a very pleasant dream I was indulging in during one of my few uninterrupted nights of sleep and asked if I would consider becoming the Keeper of the Rath Haven Chronicles. So, after agreeing tentatively, I managed to find a way to beat into submission all the other voices calling for my attention (with the exception of the ‘mommy’ ones, of course) and I was promptly sucked into the vortex of the Tuathan world from which I emerged with the story A SHADOW OF LIGHT. After that, my littlest went to school, and I found it easier and easier to sneak away and disappear for hours at a time into their realm. Of course the dust bunnies took advantage of my absence to set up numerous secret societies under the beds and in several corners. But we have come to a certain understanding and manage now to coexist peacefully in the same space. And it’s only very occasionally, that as I drive from place to place with my children, and they ask me a very detailed, in depth, question to which I respond with a blank stare and a surprisingly non-committal “uh-huh,” that they know their mother is not really in there, she’s lapsed away momentarily into the realm of the Tuathan.

OOPS! 3:00. The bus is here! Gotta run.