Now that the restructure of YoungWizards.com is almost complete, I’m starting to install some rather different material here.
One of the problems of writing a long series of books (at least to my eye) is that all these little bits and pieces of info start piling up, and as often as not there’s no room for them in any given book: if you stuffed them in regardless, they’d bring the narrative flow to a screeching halt and your readers would rise up in revolt. (And rightly.) The other problem with a long series is that you start losing track of details. What’s Kit’s birthday? Where is the “Battle of the Trees” mentioned? What’s the whales’ name for Caryn Peak? (And who the heck was Caryn?)
About two years ago now I started trying to gather all the scraps together in one place, some of them just as annotations to other business, some as short essays in their own right. It struck me last year that online is as good a place to keep them as anywhere else: this way I can get at a much tidied-up version of my notes from wherever in the world I happen to be working. (And so can anybody else who’s interested. Which seems to be a lot of you. I can’t believe the web stats for Akagane at the moment: we should start her up a fanclub of her own.)
And sometimes, while polishing the notes, things happen that surprise me. I didn’t previously know anything about this, for instance:
He was also one of the wizards who collaborated in the TIME MANAGEMENT STUDIES of the 1930’s through the 1950’s. Much of this work was highly theoretical, and much more of it turned out to be useless for its intended purposes: but one very useful practical result of the Studies was Avery’s involvement in an extremely dangerous rescue mission. Avery and his colleagues were forced to use previously untested and as-yet unstabilized AMELOSTASIS routines to “patch” a badly deranged timeslide accidentally initiated by scientists working for the US Navy who had been attempting to invent INVISIBILITY. Though the patch worked, over long periods some fragmentary memory traces from “before” the patch have emerged in the minds of the rescued — resulting in some very garbled “conspiracy” websites and at least one truly terrible movie (THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT, q.v.).
Heh.
