Author

Diane Duane

FilmMedia

Setting Out on the Journey

by Diane Duane

Bilbo Baggins at Rivendell

The second I saw it, the image above turned into a kind of mental “money shot” for me. I’d been awaiting this particular movie with interest for a long time, but not until I saw this image from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey did the hair stand up on the back of my neck and the little voice whisper in my ear, “Start marking off days on the calendar.” Yesterday The Big Day finally came, and I went up to Dublin to see the film in the best possible company. What follows are some very broad and non-spoiler-y notes on the experience.

Just so you know what previous affiliations may color this review: I first read Tolkien’s work in my mid-teens, loved it instantly, and have returned to it repeatedly, for pleasure and sometimes comfort, all my adult life. So am I a fan? Yes. (So was my seatmate at the film, my collaborator / spouse Peter Morwood, though he came at Middle-Earth from the opposite direction: The Hobbit first, then the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) That said, I think I can set aside fondness and fandom for long enough to review what I’ve seen with a relatively clear eye.

Having seen the original LotR film trilogy and loved it—with only the most minor niggles about creative choices—I was still a bit concerned; for in terms of adaptation, it seemed to me that The Hobbit was always going to be a hard road to walk in terms of getting the tone right. The Hobbit is extremely different from the Lord of the Rings books, plainly intended (as we too-coyly put it these days) “for younger readers”. It was always going to be a challenging work to bring to the screen when a lot of the prospective audience would be adults who’d seen the LotR film trilogy, and were used to something in a more starkly grown-up mode. I was a bit nervous that, with creative imperatives simultaneously dragging it in such different directions, the movie might not work.

Well, I needn’t have worried. That leads to my initial answer to the question: should you go see this film? Yes. Will you be satisfied with this film if you’re a Tolkien fan of the I-read-the-books-now-convince-me-you-haven’t-ruined-them school? I think so.

Let me set aside a couple of meta- or marginal issues first: first of all, the fact that Jackson chose to shoot the film in the higher-definition 48 frames-per-second format, untried until now in a major release. I didn’t find myself bothered by it in the least. Peter and I saw the film in its 3D version, and found the 48fps format not at all distracting or strange—in fact, I’m not sure I would have noticed it if I hadn’t been prewarned. Everything just seemed very clear. And the 3D seemed well-handled and not overdone. Obviously your mileage may vary: but I mention this because it’s been a big issue for some people.

Also: in regard to those reviewers who’re wandering around muttering “I don’t know how you can get three movies out of this one small book…” Sorry, but I don’t have much patience with this attitude. It seems to come chiefly from those who haven’t done their homework, ignoring the interviews with Jackson that clearly detail how the film’s writers went back to the Appendices attached to the LotR books for extensive backstory / background material. These reviewers’ position strikes me as similar to one that might be taken by someone who—having seen, for example, a series of Le Carre-based “cold war”-period films—then tries to claim that you couldn’t possibly get three big films out of the whole of World War II. The Appendices at the end of The Return of the King sketch out, in the briefest detail, centuries of uneasy history between the time when Sauron was first dispatched and the time when he becomes a serious problem in LotR: centuries in which the dark power that once rose in Mordor begins its slow and stealthy reconsolidation further afield. I looked over Tolkien’s bare-bones timeline last night, to make sure my memory of it was correct, and with my screenwriter hat on I could easily see three movies implicit in one page of that material. (I’m half tempted to do a Nothing-But-Spoilers review leading into a tentative breakdown, with an eye to what we’ve seen in the first film, of what the structures of the next two films could be like. Another time maybe.) It’s a pity that some reviewers can’t take the time to inform their opinions before trotting them out the door, but such is life. From where I sit, the advice is: Ignore them and go enjoy the show.


“Incineration…?!” …Martin Freeman and Refusing The Call as
an art form

…So back to the film at hand. About the acting there’s not much to say except that it’s always at the very least workmanlike, and sometimes terrific. When you have a big ensemble cast, with so much going on, getting all the introductions made is always going to be problematic: a lot of us can’t even name all the Seven Dwarves, after all these years, and suddenly here we are with twelve… Suffice it to say, this crowd of characters gets handled as well as it might be. Richard Armitage stands out in the crowd, but he in particular has a hard row to hoe; he has to carry the weight of the character work that will turn Thorin Oakenshield into a hero worth following, without leaving you thinking of him as nothing more but a sort of height-challenged bargain-basement Aragorn. The problem is increased by Thorin’s (canonical) distrust of Bilbo, which has to be established strongly enough to register as a problem, yet not so much so as to make him unsympathetic. (And for me this was a close one: I do remember myself thinking, “If this doesn’t get sorted out pretty soon, he’s going to come off as a real dick.” But it gets sorted, as it must.)

Martin Freeman, standing at the core of the story, does as Bilbo Baggins what he usually does, seemingly effortlessly: he makes the part his own until you find it hard to imagine anyone else in it. He starts out (apparently) a little hesitantly, but it’s my opinion that this was both an acting choice and a directorial one. To make Bilbo too proactive too soon would be a misstep, as he’s standing in for all of us in regard to how we’d behave if the house suddenly filled up with dwarves, and how most people would handle the ensuing physical and emotional turmoil that Thorin’s business proposition will provoke.

You’ll hear complaints from some quarters about these early sequences being painted in too-broad strokes, or overplayed for comic effect. But where it counts, the real business is if anything underplayed. In particular, in the crucial moments when the adventurous and much-suppressed Took side of Bilbo’s emotional heredity starts slipping out of the shadows and asserting itself, the temptation to go for any Meaningful Close-up has been wisely resisted. We get nothing but a medium angle, and kind of a remote one at that, of Bilbo sitting leaned up against a wall and listening, just listening with all of him to what’s going on in his sitting room. The way his body’s held, and the still hunger in the character’s face, between them say everything that needs to be said about Bilbo’s secret longing for adventure… and remind us that Martin Freeman can do more with his face while holding it still than many actors can while twisting theirs around every which way. (One word here, also, to my fellow Sherlock fans: toward the end of the film there’s a spot—no, two—where I think you will see, on Freeman’s face, a kind of shadow or presentment of an expression we’ll sooner or later see Dr. John Watson turn on his long-missing partner in the Work. In its present context, though, the expressions and the acting go straight to the core of the character’s interior business, in a flash completely changing the way you see him.)

At any rate, in short order Bilbo gets himself together and things get going. I for one didn’t begrudge the leisurely induction: it’s like the slow climb of the roller coaster up to the first big drop. And like a rollercoaster ride, everything after that starts to happen very fast indeed. Sometimes almost too fast: I could have occasionally wished for a touch more breathing space between sequences… but that’s personal preference. Soon enough we get to the point where Bilbo is walking into Rivendell, and what had originally seemed simply hectically real starts (for me at least) to acquire additional depth.

“Now it is a strange thing,” Tolkien says in The Hobbit, “but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to: while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.” Tolkien gives Thorin’s company a couple of weeks in Rivendell, and it would have made me happier (from the fix-this-problem-in-the-typewriter side of the brain) if even just a few more days there had been implied in the theatrical release. This would have put right a whiff of the (canonically) too-coincidental that occurs here, and also would have allowed time to set up a signpost to Bilbo’s personal sense of wonder, longing, and the depth of his regret at leaving. A few shots of montage would be all it would have taken to deepen and fully establish this sense, so that later when (at a bad moment) Bilbo says that he wants to go back to Rivendell, it doesn’t sound quite so much as if he’s simply chickening out. (Out of context, I’ve seen some images that suggest this material may well appear in the Extended Edition that’s almost certain to come out on DVD in the fullness of time.)

In terms of other character business that might possibly have been augmented a bit—there is muttering from some quarters also about Gandalf being a little too wizard-ex-machina in this film. I can only shrug and say that the beats are canonical, and too much foreshadowing of Gandalf’s assets and abilities here strikes me as counterproductive: the dwarves are plainly as much in the dark about exactly what he can do as Bilbo is. One thing I do like in this: we get to see Gandalf be a bit of the swashbuckling swordsman with Glamdring (and that too is canonical).

In any case, as the film moves toward its climax, Bilbo’s character spends his time doing what served the book perfectly, and serves the film so too: endlessly Refusing The Call (as Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” structure would have it) and then hastily accepting it and Refusing The Next One… the refusals becoming briefer and briefer as Bilbo starts the process of growing into his greater place as the hero of this story as well as its heart. This is an arc that in my opinion needs three films for maximum believability: no one would have bought it in one film, and even two (to my way of thinking) would seem rushed. The main story arc, also — the return to the Lonely Mountain and the issue of dealing, both with the very intractable problem lying within it, and the other difficulties that will follow on that problem’s solution — also need time and space to stretch.  So I think the three-film decision is the right one, and that things are proceeding as they should; and I’m intensely happy for the opportunity to sit back and watch Jackson & Co. get on with it.

Here are some scattered highlights that stood out for me:

Really big things happening. One of the great delights of film for me has always been its ability to show you something bigger than you could have imagined until you saw it unfolding in front of you right that moment. Probably what initially whetted my appetite for this kind of thing would have been the look down into the heart of the ancient Krell machine in Forbidden Planet. I’m always alert now for scenes in film that do this well, and there are a couple of scenes like this in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. One in particular involves a part of The Hobbit that I had completely forgotten about. Peter Jackson imbues this sequence with such a sense of sheer size and elemental threat that I got completely lost in it for some moments, torn between “Where the hell did this come from, I don’t remember this?!” and “Wow!”

Ian McKellen, doing what Ian McKellen does. In particular his scenes with Galadriel have something about them that’s unusually sweet without being cloying. There are other moments when some expressions of McKellen’s are given particularly close attention by the camera, with very good reason. It’s impossible to tire of watching such effortless mastery.

Smaug…what we see of him. Not very much, which doesn’t surprise me: I no more expected any significant view of him in the How-Erebor-Fell sequence up top than I would have expected seeing much of the shark, early on, in Jaws. But I have been waiting a long time for a dragon attack that properly shows the dreadful power and violence that such an onslaught should entail, and boyoboy do we get a taste of that here.

…Finally: surely I must have a few niggles? Yeah, a few, but they come very much from the fannish end of things. Chief among these: I’m not entirely sure about the characterization of Radagast. He smacks to me more of a T. H. White-ish Merlin than anything else, and knowing what we know about the Istari, I’m not sure that the affect of dotty absent-mindedness (with its overtones of “what-in-Middle-Earth-have-you-been-smoking-old-boy”) really works. Not to mention his, uh, mode of transport, which struck me as a bit on the Pythonesque side. …Well, maybe—if we see more of him—he’ll grow on me. (After all, enough things seem to be growing on him…)

But by and large, I had very, very few other problems with this film, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again sometime over the next couple/few weeks. This is, to sum up, as good an adaptation of The Hobbit as we could have hoped for: or rather, the beginning of as good a one. And we’re not done yet.

Because now, of course, the wait begins for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. For some people (myself included) it won’t come soon enough: next Christmas already seems far away. But I think the wait—and the wait for Christmas 2014—will prove to have been worth it. Looking forward, a time will come, I think, when these three films and the three LotR films that preceded it will be seen as a double trilogy, inextricably interwoven. We’ll see.

 

…One last note. Before seeing the film I almost entirely avoided looking at the early reviews from the trades and so forth: not for fear of spoilers, but because reviewers too focused on the bottom line can often affect one’s impressions in ways that don’t count—specifically, assessment of how the visual and verbal storytelling holds up. I allowed myself only one exception. I went and had a look at the review written by our old friend and colleague, Munich-based screenwriter and media maven Torsten Dewi (aka Wortvogel). I trust Torsten’s judgment, and was curious to see what he had to say. Now, having seen the film, I’m not surprised to see that he and I are on the same page as regards a lot of issues; and I commend his review to your attention (in rough Google translation if you’re not German-speaking).

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FoodFood, restaurants and cookingHome lifeObscure interests

Chocolate again: "Chocolata Inda"

by Diane Duane
A page from Chocolata Inda

The following material is posted here purely for research purposes. (Yeah, everybody’s going to believe that.)

So I really like my chocolate. Well, this would hardly be news to anybody who reads my work, since it keeps popping up. (And believe it or not, no, the constant recurrences of Switzerland in my work have nothing to do with this. That’s a separate kink, a geographical and historical one. A coincidence, seriously.)

Anyway, the history of this unique substance has always interested me. but it wasn’t until very recently that I found out about the document reproduced below: a happy 17th-century combination of alchemical/pharmaceutical tract and shameless advertisement for a hot new fad food.  (Those familiar with the food-as-medicine school of thought will find this interesting reading, though maybe this comes at the theme backwards and is more medicine-as-food.)

Chocolata Inda (or sometimes the title comes up as Inda Chocolata, depending on which edition you’vegot) was written first in Spanish by one Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, a physician to the Spanish court. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of information available about the man or his career, except that he was Andalusian and had previously published several works of materia medica (notably a work called Apologia chirurgica) before turning his hand to the chocolate end of things.

There seems also to be no indication of what made him do it, or what his affiliation might have been to the explorers or merchants who first brought chocolate to Spain from the New World. In any case, he was the first to write about the new wonder food. And he doesn’t mince his words. To hear Dr. Colmener tell it, the chocolate bean will cure just about everything that ails you. Particularly, though, he recommends it for male and female genitourinary health… with the emphasis on the “genito-“. And especially on the female end of things. Apparently it’ll put right about anything wrong with a woman’s nethers that can go wrong.

The title page of the English-language translation will give you a hint.

CHOCOLATE:
OR,
An Indian Drinke.

By the wise and Moderate use whereof,
Health is preserved, Sicknesse
Diverted, and Cured, especially the
Plague of the Guts; vulgarly called
The New Disease; Fluxes, Consumptions,
& Coughs of the Lungs, with sundry
other desperate Diseases. By it
also, Conception is Caused,
the Birth Hastened and
facilitated, Beauty
Gain’d and continued.

Written Originally in Spanish, by Antonio Colmenero
of Ledesma, Doctor in Physicke,
and faithfully rendred in the English,

By Capt. James Wadsworth.

LONDON,
Printed by J. G. for Iohn Dakins, dwelling
neare the Vine Taverne in Holborne,
where this Tract, together with the
Chocolate it selfe, may be had at
reasonable rates. 1652

…So now you know where you can get the stuff as well.  Isn’t that convenient?  … And now a word from our sponsor.  Sorry, sorry, our doctor.

The Confection it selfe, consists of severall Ingredients according to the different Constitutions of those that use it: the Principall of which is called Cacao, [a kind of Nut, or kernell, bigger then a great Almond, which growes upon a tree called the Tree of Cacao] containing in it the Quality of the Foure Elements, as will appeare in the following Discourse.

The vertues thereof are no lesse various, then Admirable. For, besides that it preserves Health, and makes such as drink it often, Fat, and Corpulent, faire and Amiable, it vehemently Incites to Venus, and causeth Conception in women, hastens and facilitates their Delivery: It is an excellent help to Digestion, it cures Consumptions, and the Cough of the Lungs, the New Disease, or Plague of the Guts, and other Fluxes, the Green Sicknesse, Jaundise, and all manner of Inflamations, Opilations, and Obstructions. It quite takes away the Morphew, Cleanseth the Teeth, and sweetneth the Breath, Provokes Urine, Cures the Stone, and strangury, Expells Poison, and preserves from all infectious Diseases.

But I shall not assume to enumerate all the vertues of this Confection: for that were Impossible, every day producing New and Admirable effects in such as drinke it: I shall rather referre to the Testimony of those Noble Personages who are known constantly to use and receive constant and manifold benefits by it, having hereby no other Aime then the Generall good of this Common-wealth (whereof I am a Faithfull Member)

Then we get a preface from our British translator. He’s a hoot. He is very, very convinced, is Captain Wadsworth (or he’s on commission). He even writes a Poem in Praise of Divine Chocolate. He spends a little while dissing other schools of medical thought, and then gets down to business.

THE TRANSLATOR,
To every Individuall Man,
and Woman, Learn’d, or unlearn’d,
Honest, or Dishonest: In the
due Praise of Divine
CHOCOLATE.

Doctors lay by your Irksome Books
And all ye Petty-Fogging Rookes
Leave Quacking; and Enucleate
The vertues of our Chocolate.

Let th’ Universall Medicine
(Made up of Dead-mens Bones and Skin,)
Be henceforth Illegitimate,
And yeild to Soveraigne-Chocolate.

Let Bawdy-Baths be us’d no more;
Nor Smoaky-Stoves but by the whore
Of Babilon: since Happy-Fate
Hath Blessed us with Chocolate.

Let old Punctæus Greaze his shooes
With his Mock-Balsome: and Abuse
No more the World: But Meditate
The Excellence of Chocolate.

Let Doctor Trigg (who so Excells)
No longer Trudge to Westwood-Wells:
For though that water Expurgate,
’Tis but the Dreggs of Chocolate.

Let all the Paracelsian Crew
Who can Extract Christian from Jew;
Or out of Monarchy, A State,
Breake àll their Stills for Chocolate.

Tell us no more of Weapon-Salve,
But rather Doome us to a Grave:
For sure our wounds will Ulcerate,
Unlesse they’re wash’d with Chocolate.

The Thriving Saint, who will not come
Within a Sack-Shop’s Bowzing-Roome
(His Spirit to Exhilerate)
Drinkes Bowles (at home) of Chocolate.

His Spouse when she (Brimfull of Sense)
Doth want her due Benevolence,
And Babes of Grace would Propagate,
Is alwayes Sipping Chocolate…

…It goes on like that for a while. But ah yes, the babes (and not just in the older sense of the word): let’s not forget what this magic stuff does for them.

The Nut-Browne-Lasses of the Land
Whom Nature vayl’d in Face and Hand,
Are quickly Beauties of High-Rate,
By one small Draught of Chocolate.

…

’Twill make Old women Young and Fresh;
Create New-Motions of the Flesh,
And cause them long for you know what,
If they but Tast of Chocolate.

Leaving aside for the moment the fascinating way this poem handles the various ongoing 17th-century vowel shifts: Shut up and take my money.

Then come the testimonials. They sound about the way you expect they would:  famous person says “Yes, I tried this, very impressive” in such a way as to not get in trouble later when something goes wrong.

After that we get a prolonged and doubtless very educational discussion of the qualities and virtues (oh, all right, “vertues” ) of the warm spices as compared to this new entry into the medico-culinary arsenal: all very Culpeperish. Nick would have eaten it up.

It may Philosophically be objected, in this manner: Two contrary Qualities, and Disagreeing, cannot be in gradu intenso, in one and the same Subject: Cacao is cold and drie, in predominency: Therefore, it cannot have the qualities contrary to those; which are Heat, and Moysture. The first Proposition is most certaine, and grounded upon good Philosophy: The second is consented unto, by all: The third, which is the Conclusion, is regular.

It cannot be denyed, but that the Argument is very strong, and these reasons being considered by him of Marchena, have made him affirme, that Chocolate is Obstructive; it seeming to be contrary to Philosophy, that in it there should be found Heat and Moysture, in gradu intenso; and to be so likewise in Cold and Dry.

To this, there are two things to be answered: One, that he never saw the experience of drawing out the Butter, which I have done; and that when the Chocolate is made without adding any thing to the dryed Powder, which is incorporated, onely by beating it well together, and is united, and made into a Paste, which is a signe, that there is a moist, and glutinous part, which, of necessity, must correspond with the Element of Aire.

No question whatsoever. Moving right along: we then are treated to several ways to compound chocolate as a drug, with a lot more about the Humours and so forth tucked in here and there. And then, finally, comes the layman’s recipe: which isn’t bad at all.

The manner of making Chocolate.

Set a Pot of Conduit Water over the fire untill it boiles, then to every person that is to drink, put an ounce of Chocolate, with as much Sugar into another Pot; wherein you must poure a pint of the said boiling Water, and therein mingle the Chocolate and the Sugar, with the instrument called El Molinillo, untill it be thoroughly incorporated: which done, poure in as many halfe pints of the said Water as there be ounces of Chocolate, and if you please, you may put in one or two yelks of fresh Eggs, which must be beaten untill they froth very much; the hotter it is drunke, the better it is, being cold it may doe harme. You may likewise put in a slice of white bred or Bisquet, and eate that with the Chocolate. The newer and fresher made it is, the more benefit you shall finde by it; that which comes from forreigne parts, and is stale, is not so good as that which is made here.

…So there you have it.

The whole document is at Project Gutenberg:  it’s worth a read.

Meanwhile, here’s  the lovely title page from the Nuremberg edition, in which the original Spanish has been translated into Latin. (I really think the Latin version of the title gains something absent from “Chocolate: or, an Indian Drinke,” though that has its own charms.) There are copies at the University Library of Eichstaett- Ingolstadt and at the City and State Library of Augsburg. Master listing at Gateway-Bayern here.) And just think, you an buy a copy in its original vellum wrapper, here. For  €7500.

(Also, just as a reminder-to-self: the link to Thomas Gloning’s excellent master list, “Bibliographical Notes on the history of cookery, food, wine, etc, mostly 13th century to 1800”.

 

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Home lifeIrelandthe Universe and Everything

Being thankful

by Diane Duane

It’s not a bad thing to take a moment, an hour: a day? …to think about this: regardless of the presence or absence of turkeys.

So today I’m being grateful for relative stability in this crazy business. For all the friends and acquaintances in the field who give me something to look up to and strive toward. For my NY agent, who is a longtime BAMF and near-superhero. For all the Tumblr buddies and fans, all the @’s at Twitter, all the faces at Facebook: all the folks who wander across the screen or through the phone each day and keep turning my mind so usefully outward (for getting stuck inside the writer-head and spinning the wheels with too much introversion is a constant danger): for the folks who take me seriously and the folks who refuse to.  🙂

I’m thankful for the world’s most astonishing husband, a BAMF in his own right and and someone about which not enough good can possibly be said. (Not that I don’t try sometimes.) For neighbors who think what I do is weird but will nonetheless defend it vigorously to passing strangers. For time to learn to do that weird stuff better. For people who’re interested in seeing the results, and who keep thanking me for things I did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. For being forgiven for screwing up. For support from my colleagues when I’ve needed it. From a chance to pay the favors forward, occasionally.

I’m thankful for not being in a war zone. For not having been shot in the head by terrorists because I wanted an education. For not being about to lose my job (or constantly in fear of it). For knowing that the ones I love are alive and well, or at least Maintaining an Even Strain. For (at the moment anyway) inhabiting a locality of relative peace and freedom (for such things are always relative, no matter on which continent one resides). For my health. For always having enough to eat that I can actually need to diet a wee bit. For the incentive to do so, and to pay attention to maintaining my health properly, that’s provided by the occasional email that says “WIll you hurry up and write [fill in name of book here] before you die??!”

I’m thankful for a roof over our heads. For enough of everything to get by and keep the Work coming out (and yes, thank you, Sherlock, for the reminder that it does deserve a capital letter). For a life, in general, that is better than anything I could have imagined when I was a kid, and which pretty much displays a tendency toward getting better all the time, in ways I never could have reasonably expected.

Thankful: that’s me for the moment. For a thousand other things, too, but I have no intention of boring you with the whole list.

And now I’m going to go start up the roast beef. (Because believe me, there is no escape from turkey around here at Christmas time, and I’m damned if I’m going to have it twice in one season.)

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ebooksKindleWritingYoung Wizards

Coming Cyber Monday (November 26, 2012): "Deep Wizardry" New Millennium Edition

by Diane Duane

Next Monday is Cyber Monday, and starting at 0800 UK/Irish time that day, our Ebooks Direct store will be launching the New Millennium Edition of Book 2 of the Young Wizards series,  Deep Wizardry.

Like the NME of So You Want to Be a Wizard. this is a revised and updated version of Deep Wizardry, brought up to date for its new generation of 21st-century readers. Besides undergoing some general polishing and tidying, the novel has been revised to include modern technology more appropriate to the here and now than the original 1980s edition, and also continues the process of establishing a new, corrected timeline for the characters and events to carry the Young Wizards series forward into its new century.

There will also be a new cover for this edition by the magnificent Niko Geyer (who did the new cover for So You Want to Be a Wizard). Please note, however, that due to some temporary logistical problems at our Irish production end, that cover will not be available for the Cyber Monday launch. As soon as it is ready, purchasers will be notified so they can download copies of the book with the new cover.

The other two of the first four NMEs (High Wizardry and A Wizard Abroad) will be ready before Christmas: subscribers to the Ebooks Direct general notifications mailing list will be notified as soon as they’re ready. If you’d like to be notified when they’ll be available, please feel free to use the form below to sign up. All nine books in the Young Wizards series will be available in the New Millennium Editions by the end of the first quarter of 2013.

Also:  before Cyber Monday comes Black Friday, and the Ebooks Direct store will be celebrating that weekend as well. Subscribers to our store’s general notification mailing list will be offered special discounts for the Black Friday weekend. If you’re interested in availing yourself of these, you can use the form below to sign up: a mailing with the pertinent information will be going out within the next 48 hours.  (Just a general note about our list, by the way: we normally only send out a mailing once a month or so unless there’s a significant release. Naturally you can opt out of the list at any time. And equally naturally, we’ll never share your email address with anyone else. The very thought.)

Thanks in advance for your interest!

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eBay stuffEuropeHome lifeIreland

Too Many Linens (And We're Going To Have A Sale)

by Diane Duane

Before Peter’s Mum died some years back — before she went into the hospital — she and I were sitting around together in her little back-of-the-house sitting room, and she was complaining to me about the state of her attic. “It’s full of linen,” she said.

It took some explanation of Morwood family history to discover exactly what this meant. Peter’s Dad worked for Lindustries, the biggest of the Northern Irish linen companies, as their chief accountant: and when he married Peter’s Mum, a lot of people chose to give them Irish linen as wedding gifts. (This strikes me as a little Coals-To-Newcastle-ish, but doubtless they had their reasons.)

What I didn’t have at the time was any real sense of how much linen this implied. They were given such heaps of the stuff, in every possible permutation, that P’s Mum had not only never gotten around to using it all, but in many cases the stuff had never even been removed from its original gift packaging. There it all sat piled up in the attic — having been up there for the guts of fifty years — and Peter’s Mum just kind of shrugged at me and said, “Do you want some?”

Do I want some? I remember thinking. Are you off your head, woman? Do I want vintage Irish linen better than anything in the shops these days? (For I’d long since got used to Peter’s muttering under his breath as we visited quite high-end department stores in Dublin and he saw what was on sale there as Best Quality Irish Linen, at truly hysterical prices. “My Dad would never have let this crap out of the factory,” was the kindest of the things he’d usually say, and then there would be endless discussion of thread counts and … well, never mind, this is You Get Used To This When You’re Married territory.)

At any rate, I agreed, oh with a modest (and probably completely unconvincing) show of reluctance, to take some of it off Peter’s Mum’s hands. And what she gave us was the cream of what was stored up in the Attic of Wonders. Tablecloths with a weave so tight you could use them to carry water in. Wonderful bed linens. Much other similar stuff.

Then, alas, Mum left us, and the house was emptied preparatory to being sold: and Peter’s sister said, “Here…” and gave us all the rest of the linen.

She wasn’t kidding about the state of the attic… really. Because for the last four years, all that linen has been in our house… and it’s just too much.  We don’t have enough places in our little cottage to even start using it all. And even storing the stuff is a chore. Among other things,  I want my closet back.

So I’ve opened up a linen store on Ebay, so I can make at least an attempt to get it all out of here. This is just a heads-up for those who might be interested.

A definition: when I say “linens” I mostly don’t mean bed linens (though there are some of those, and believe me, they’re choice: I’d keep them if we had beds of the right size, but we don’t — the linens are all standard doubles or singles, and our bed’s a king). The majority of  what we’re looking to pass on to those who want them are solid-linen and linen/lace runners, bureau covers, table linens, placemats, tablecloths, napkins, handkerchieves… that kind of thing. There are also bolster covers, doilies, and some pieces that might have been samplers — because I genuinely can’t figure out what else they might have been. All of these are of the best quality vintage Irish linen, heavy and solid (where it’s not meant to be delicate), much of it beautifully hand-embroidered, any lace all hand-tatted, everything dating back to circa 1950, all never used, and all in excellent shape.

The only caveat: The vast majority of these pieces were unpackaged, and some have over fifty years of storage picked up wrinkles, and the occasional smudge or age spot. I emphasize the “occasional” — we wouldn’t let anything out of the house that was at all seriously damaged. The answer to these problems — at least the one Peter’s Mum gave me — was simply to wash the linen on the highest possible heat until the spot or smudge came out: which it always would. (Actually, her language was rather more robust. “Boil it,” she said.) In my experience this strategy has always worked. If anyone buying finds they don’t like the condition of a given item when they get their hands on it, naturally we’ll refund the purchase price. I just wanted to be clear about the condition of these pieces right up front. (ETA: There should also be another category here: Perfectly Grimy. These are pieces that are undamaged and in most places are so perfectly untouched that you can still see the sheen of the sizing on the fabric, and in other places are just spotty or grimed. I know they’ll be just fine after they’ve been put through a hot wash, but I can’t bring myself to put them up on Ebay: I suppose I’ll just offer those privately either here or on the Tumblr.)

Anyway, I expect we’ll have the store up around the end of the week or thereabouts, at which point I’ll amend this posting’s date so it comes up to the top of the RSS feed again, and point to it via Tweet and on Facebook and so forth. So consider this an early warning.  🙂 (ETA for the moment: the first of the pieces has just been Ebay-listed so we can start Peter’s seller account going: it’s over here — a centerpiece cloth.)

Thanks, all!

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For Thanksgiving: The OMG I Can't Get Any Pumpkin Pie

by Diane Duane

Normally I try to keep  food postings more or less over at EuropeanCuisines.com, the part of the household where most of the cooking craziness in the household manifests itself. But I thought I’d copy it over at this side of things to make it available for those who might not normally visit cooking sites.

Those of us who routinely spend Thanksgiving off the North American continent but still try to lay out a traditional Thanksgiving dinner probably all have our own stories about being unable to get some vital missing ingredient, and then being forced to make do with something less than optimal…

One item that sometimes turns out to be very hard to lay hands on is pumpkin.

The difficulty usually surrounds canned pumpkin rather than the fresh kind… but even that can be a problem when it’s out of season. Markets in France and Germany for example, routinely feature some of the best fresh pumpkin to be found anywhere on the planet — firm, meaty, relatively seedless, and (most important) flavorful. But then these are varieties that have been bred for the table for centuries — not the North American varieties that are mostly bred for size so that they’ll make good jack-o-lanterns at Halloween. Problem is, once they’re out of season, you won’t see them again until the next year… and when you go looking for canned pumpkin, the response is usually bemusement. You won’t find it in most parts of Europe. If you can track it down, it’s usually in some overpriced store that caters to foreigners and is going to make you pay five or ten times more for it than you would have in a supermarket in the States or Canada.

At such times — if you’re not willing to buckle under — you learn to improvise. This recipe is one of EuroCuisineLady’s takes on the theme. It’s an adaptation of the basic pumpkin pie recipe in The Joy of Cooking. This pie — using butternut squash and yams to replace the pumpkin — produces a rich, dense pie that compares very favorably with the traditional pumpkin version. It’s not going to taste exactly like it… but for the moment it’ll do.

(For a variant on this theme using only sweet potatoes, check out our Virtually Pumpkin Pie.)

Ingredients:

  • 1 recipe of pie dough for a single crust pie (see below)
  • 2 butternut squash or 1 butternut squash and 2 yams (about 10 ounces each), to make about 2 1/2 – 3 cups of cooked squash/yam mixture
  • 1 1/2 cups undiluted evaporated milk or rich cream (double cream is ideal, but standard whipping cream will do)
  • 1/4 cup molasses or 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon ginger
  • 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 5 slightly beaten eggs and 1 egg yolk
  • Optional flavorings /inclusions:
    • 1 teaspoon vanilla, or 2 tablespoons brandy or rum, or 1 teaspoon rum flavoring
    • 1 1-inch bud long pepper, ground fine (If you can get long pepper, this addition is strongly recommended: it really makes a difference to the finished pie. It’s terrific in real pumpkin pie, too.)
    • 3/4 cup black walnut meats, chopped/broken

Method:

Prepare the pie crust (see below for recipe).

Preheat oven to 325° F. Wash the butternut squash(es) and split the long way: remove the seeds and strings. If using yams, peel them. Place the squashes or squash and yams cut side down on a baking sheet with a little water in it, and bake for one hour.

When finished, scoop the baked pulp out of the butternut squash into a bowl: if using yams, split them and do the same. Beat, puree or whip the squash or squash-and-yam mixture until very smooth.

If using molasses, warm it slightly in the microwave or put its jar in warm water to make it a little easier to handle. In a bowl, beat the eggs and egg yolk. Then add the molasses or brown sugar, granulated sugar, salt, spices, and cream, beating very well until blended. Add the squash or squash/yam mixture and beat well again. Add the vanilla, rum or brandy, or rum flavoring, and (if you’re using them) the walnut meats.

Pour the mixture into the pie shell. Preheat the oven to 425° F. When the oven is ready, bake the pie at 425° F for fifteen minutes, then reduce to 350° F and bake for another 45-50 minutes. Test with a knife blade: the pie is ready when the knife comes out clean (or very nearly so).

Pie crust recipe:

Ingredients:

  • 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup pastry shortening or butter
  • 3 tablespoons water (slightly more if required)

Method:

Sift the flour before measuring it into a roomy bowl or food processor. Add the salt and mix well: then work in the shortening by cutting it in with two knives, using a pastry blender, or pulsing the mixture in a food processor with the plastic blade, until the grain in the mixture is pea-sized. Stir or pulse the water in one tablespoon at a time, until the mixture holds together when you gather it into a ball. (If using a food processor, pulse until the dough mixture just gathers to make a ball.)

Allow to rest for 15 minutes in the refrigerator: then roll out and use to line a 9-inch pie pan. Fill as described above and bake.

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Just out: MIDNIGHT SNACK AND OTHER FAIRY TALES

by Diane Duane

I did my first ebook collection of short fiction a bit more than a year ago, and Uptown Local and Other Interventions seems to have pleased a lot of people; so a little while ago I started thinking about doing another ebook that would gather together other short work I’d done and had fun with in recent years.

I wanted to wait a little while to find the common thread that bound all the stories together, though, before I put the collection out there. I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to notice that all the stories I’d pulled together had a strong fairy tale component: and those that didn’t were ghost stories.

In retrospect it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Fairy tales are probably the subfamily of fantasy that I love the best: the house is full of them, in collections and compendia from every culture you can imagine. And many of my books have had fairy tales at their roots (Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses and Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South being the most obvious of these). The timing for a collection of fairy-tale-based fiction isn’t bad, I suppose, with the genre suddenly so hot in popular culture. (Well, all right, not “suddenly”, really: this has been going on for a couple/few years now.)

As for the ghost stories, I’ve always had a bit of a yen for those; and of course as we come up on Hallowe’en this particular line of thought resonates more strongly than usual. Modern ghost stories in particular have an attraction for me, and when I realized that I already had one or two of those in this putative collection, I thought I’d round it out by adding the longest one I’d ever written — a screenplay, as it happens.

So here’s Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales, and here’s what it contains:


First Readthrough: How you do the casting for a fairy tale… and what can go wrong while you do.

The Dovrefell Cat: Your pet polar bear may sometimes be a problem… but there’s one night of the year when he shines.

…Under My Skin: Some first dates just don’t work out the way you think they will: not at all.

A Swiss Story: Lots of people from that part of the world have something from “during the War”. But not many have anything like this…

Blank Check: A most unusual client turns up at one of the world’s oldest banks with an impossible request… which nonetheless must be fulfilled.

Don’t Put That In Your Mouth, You Don’t Know Where It’s Been: A would-be worshipper of the Triple Goddess has her upcountry ritual disturbed by something very odd.

The House: A school science project examining gingerbread as a structural element turns into something way more personal.

Cold Case: A cop who won’t take no for an answer meets a murder victim who’s even more stubborn than he is.

The title work, Midnight Snack: “Dad came down with the flu that week, so I had to go down to the subway and feed the unicorns…” (Along with the story of how it got censored.)

And completing the collection, a full-length feature film screenplay, Dead & Breakfast: a ghost story with computers.

Like all our ebooks, this one is DRM-free and can be moved from device to device at your pleasure. Also, for the same flat price, we offer an all-format bundle containing various versions of the major ebook formats, so you can find out what works best for you. (And if you have multiple devices this is good too: we don't see any reason why you should buy the same book twice just because you have a Kindle and a Nook or whatever.) Just choose "All Format Bundle" in the book's dropdown menu.

Enjoy!

Save

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ebooksEbooks DirectWritingYoung Wizards

Ebook file update on "Not On My Patch"

by Diane Duane
Cover for 'Not On My Patch'

This is just a quick note to those who’ve in the past purchased an ebook copy of the Young Wizards Hallowe’en novelette “Not On My Patch” , to let you know that we’ve just posted up new versions of all the ebook files.

While going through the ebook over the course of the weekend I caught some formatting problems, and so this morning made corrections to the original .doc file, jumped it through the usual conversion hoops, and re-uploaded it. The system is now in the process of notifying everybody that there’s a new version of the file available for download, and will be emailing all purchasers new download links.

This process normally takes a while — the system only mails a few people at a time to prevent itself being mistaken for a spam server — so if you’re a past purchaser and don’t immediately see a notification, please don’t be alarmed: it’ll be along in a while.

If you’re not a purchaser, maybe you’d like to be? “Not On My Patch” , a 14,000 word novelette,  was written in 2011 for UNICEF’s 60th-anniversary Hallowe’en pledge drive.  Last year we managed to raise more than $1100 for UNICEF through purchases. It’d be great to beat that number this year, when we’re once again offering it as a standalone, with half the proceeds from all sales going to UNICEF.

It’s selling for $3.99. The available formats are .ePub (for Nooks and iPads), .mobi (for Kindles), .lit (for those using Microsoft Reader), and (unusually for us, but because this is partly a charity offering) .PDF for adobe Reader and general screen reading.

Enjoy!

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AppleComputer stuffebooksEuropeHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeNewsOnline lifeTechnogeekeryTravel

A rant: iOS6 and Maps

by Diane Duane

If you’ve already heard enough about this, or just don’t care to hear a couple pages’ worth of venting right now, please avert your eyes now. Thank you.

…I’ve had a soft spot for Apple products for a long time, to the point where versions of them have for years appeared in my Young Wizards series as “the preferred devices of the Powers that Be”. (So everything that follows this should be read as “more in sorrow than in anger”, though there’s certainly some anger, make no mistake.) I worked with Apple computers myself in the ancient day (while not owning them) and recommended them wholeheartedly to friends. So it sometimes surprises my readership to find that until recently I’d never myself owned anything Apple-ish but an iPod.

A couple/few months ago this changed when the first serious Apple computing device came into the household, in the form of an iPad. We haven’t had it for very long (I say “we”, but the hard truth is that Peter hasn’t had much of a chance to get his hands on it) but I’ve been enjoying gradually learning its ways, and it makes my work a lot easier. It is peerless for e-reading purposes (especially using BlueFire Reader) and there’s nothing like it for proofreading prose: errors just seem to jump out for the catching.

And one of the great satisfactions of using the iPad, quite early on, was hitting “Maps” and having the house come up instantly, for we’re out in the middle of nowhere. And the pleasure hasn’t just been about finding my own place, but other places, in close detail. For both the working writer and the busy traveler, the Maps icon was a gateway to the most functional of joys. You could find your way in a strange place: you could work out where the nearest post office or cab rank was: you could read a map in the streets of a foreign city without instantly making yourself look like a tourist ready to be relieved of his or her valuables. (Easiest on the iPhone, of course, but there are ways to use the Pad less obviously for this too. Deep purses have their uses, and you could be looking for anything in there.) You could sit in a restaurant over a meal and scout around for interesting places to check out afterwards. Or you could just sit home and do research about the things your characters needed to be doing and seeing in a place you’d never been, moving easily between map view and street view as required.

…But not any more. If you’re alert to computing issues at all, you’ll surely have heard the noise over the last couple of days as regards what’s happened to Maps in the iPhone and iPad. There are explanations all over the place (here, for example) as to why Apple chose to make the change and so forth.

I don’t think this is a minor issue. Accurate and dependable GPS-friendly mapping to handheld and portable devices has become one of the most important reasons to have such a device in the first place. Jeez, if even Sherlock bloody Holmes needs such a thing to save his bacon sometimes, it should be an indicator of how vital such usage is for the rest of us mere mortals.

And what does iOS6 for the iPad and iPhone do with so vital a commodity? It throws out the best online mapping available, that of Google, and goes with a homebrew mapping application.

Baby. Bathwater. Especially since the Apple Maps facility is so not ready for prime time yet.

Once upon a time I knew that if I had both amnesia and the iPad, then Maps on the iPad could get me home. (Best memory of this: using Maps on the iPad in conjunction with the wonderful DB (German Rail) app, (yes, there’s an Android version too, we both have it on our HTC phones) which was given a start point somewhere in the middle of Germany and told “Get me home!” All by itself it got us as far as Dun Laoghaire Ferry Port and then threw its figurative hands in the air and said “All right, not even we can do anything with Irish Rail if they won’t run a rail link to a main ferry port, and they’ve made their bus schedule inaccessible to us, so  you’re on your own now.” But the Google Maps implementation in the Pad did the rest and found the best route back to the right spot on Unnamed Road Number 876,543. And all praise to Deutsche Bahn for whoever they got to build that app for them.) Anyway, once upon a time, the imagery was all clear, right down to a very close zoom, so close you could see not just our driveway but our backyard clothesline.

No chance of any more such happy homecomings, however. I don’t have a comparison shot of the previous view – I never thought I’d need it – but this is what our area looks like now:

The road in front of our house is gone. So are other minor roads in the area (and this is exactly the kind of help a traveler in these parts would seriously need). So is the house, as half the image (as you see) now renders it impossible to find due to poor quality. And what happened over to the left there? And why is the definition sharp again just half a mile away??

Now, yes, granted, this is rural Ireland, not exactly the most populated corner of the planet. But if you check the blog here, you’ll see that great cities have been affected the same way. The Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge has big problems. Freiburg in Breisgau, a vibrant and beautiful modern/medieval city in southwestern Germany, is now represented in places by postwar aerial imagery (take a look, you can see the bomb craters). Berlin has relocated itself to Antarctica.  Something really strange has happened to the Schuylkill Expressway in Philly near the Art Museum (which doesn’t look too well either) right next to it. Gothenburg, Sweden, is missing. Closer to home, Dublin Zoo has somehow relocated itself into the south city center, right on top of a hotel where we routinely stay: I’m half concerned that the next time we check in I should bring a whip and a chair in case of lions.  (Also, an area near Dundrum in County Dublin [now mostly famous for a high-end shopping center] has been labeled “Airfield” and the Irish Minister in Charge of Yelling at Apple has had to contact them to get it removed urgently before some iOS6-using pilot [of whom there are many] mistakes it for the military airport at Baldonnell and tries to land there. …Is it gone yet, BTW? I’m afraid to look.)

Apple. How did you let this application leave the house in such a state? What on Earth possessed you?!

Yes, I know about the bad blood between you and Google, about the Apple / Android divide, about your desire to put some distance between you. I understand that perfectly. But here, in this one spot, you should have just sucked it up and said All right, fine, we can cope with this until we have something not just better, but breathtakingly so.

…Too late now.

So many actions in life have unexpected results. Here’s my list of the local ones resulting from this whole business:

(a) I now bitterly regret ever having punched the Upgrade button. I will never regard an Apple OS upgrade the same way again. I should have been more suspicious to start with. Lesson learned.

(b)    The minute there’s a Google Maps app in the App Store? I’ll be all over that like a cheap suit and I will never touch the native Maps icon again. I won’t even look at it. (Probably I won’t be allowed to delete it, which is a shame, because for a long time, every time I see it, I’m going to growl.)

(c)    We will be buying a Samsung tablet at the earliest opportunity. Admittedly, we were already inclined this way for several reasons: (1) for ebook production, because nothing works to test an ebook version like the actual device it’s intended to run on: (b) Peter likes the Android OS better than he does Apple’s (“And now you see why,” says the annoyed voice from the next room):  and (3) the constant and sleazy-looking litigation over whether or not the Samsung looks too much like an iPad has put a bad taste in both our mouths. But this has pushed me right over the edge. Apple, your implementation of Google Maps may not work any more, but I know someone whose implementation will. If my experience is anything to go by, you are driving your customers straight into the arms of your competition. And the ripples from this are going to spread: the longer it goes on and the louder the ruckus gets, the more potential Apple customers are going to say “Nuh uh, don’t want one of those.”

(sigh) Okay, done ranting. But I wish I knew how they were going to fix this, because a function of the iPad that was important and useful to me (and apparently to a whole lot of other people) has been reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. It would be lovely if Apple would amend iOS6 to allow a user to opt in to Google Maps (or out of the Apple mapping application). But bearing in mind the rather controlling nature of Apple, this seems… at best unlikely.

Meanwhile… can anyone recommend a reliable way to roll back to iOS5? (Though I already have a horrible feeling about what the answer’s going to be.)

Thanks.

 

 

 

 

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Out now: the New Millennium Edition of "So You Want To Be A Wizard"

by Diane Duane

 

The New Millennium Edition of the first Young Wizards novel, So You Want to Be a Wizard, is now available in ebook format from the online Ebooks Direct store at DianeDuane.com.

This is not a rewrite of the book, but a polish and update intended to bring SYWTBAW into the new century by modernizing its setting and establishing it as the beginning of a new and much more consistent timeline, thus making it more accessible for its newest readers. It also contains exclusive new material that does not appear in the original 1983 edition. The beautiful new cover is by noted German graphic artist Niko Geyer.

For much more information about the update, read on. You can also access this new podcast interview with Ken Denmead at GeekDad, where the updating of the book is discussed in some detail toward the end of the podcast: and the “Wizards in a New Millennium” interview with Kelly Knox at GeekMom.

Some author notes:

So You Want to Be a Wizard has been in print pretty much constantly, on one or both sides of the Atlantic and in various non-English speaking countries here and there, for thirty years now. Over the last ten years or so — and particularly over the last five — I’ve become increasingly aware of how some aspects of the book have been dating…which is to say, not very well. And newer young readers have been telling me with increasing frequency that though they love the book, the early-1980’s feel of it put some of them off it to the point where it was a tossup whether they were ever going to read it at all.

To say that I felt their pain would be an understatement. While SYWTBAW suffers from this problem, other installments in the series suffer from it far more severely (High Wizardry probably the most). The difficulty isn’t just the difference between when they were written and now, but (in a way) the temporal distance or lack of it between the 80’s “then” of SYW and the now of 2012. If the difference were greater, or less, the books might be able to pass either as time capsules of a sort, or be able to slide in “under the wire” with the tech differences not being so glaring. But for the present key audience, the disconnect is really getting in the way. So updating the first four books in particular has been something I’ve been wanting to get handled for a while.

And now it’s getting handled.

I’ve taken a while about this (originally it was going to happen last year) because, especially as regarded the first book, I wanted to take care not to fix what wasn’t broken. These new editions are emphatically not rewrites. However, they do involve:

  • The most important bit: adjustment of technology and background in the book(s) to reflect what’s routinely been part of young readers’ lives, starting in 2008
  • Some minor editing of material that struck me while revising as clumsy or ineffective
  • Some additional material (not vast amounts)
  • Repair and reconstruction of what has for a long time been a very broken, inconsistent and frankly dysfunctional timeline

The third aspect is going to be most noticeable in So You Want to Be a Wizard. Some of you will have heard that the book has had several near-misses with film production over the last ten years. One of these resulted in a screenplay which, while not perfect, threw up some interesting additional scenes. A few of these were fun enough, or drove the plot in such a manner, that I decided to add them to the revision of the book. These are not massive passages or life-changing sequences: they’re just in there now along with the rest of the tidying and updating.

The fourth aspect, timeline repair and rationalization, will start becoming more obvious when Deep Wizardry and the books that follow come out later in the year. Because of the instability involved in the series starting at one publisher (Dell), being thrown overboard when the company was restructured, and then finding its way to a new home (Harcourt, now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the uncertainty involved with not being sure when or where the next book was coming out often resulted in editorial (not to mention auctiorial) uncertainty about how to handle character ages and the dating of events. The new editions, therefore, are starting with the events of SYW… being placed in 2008. The events in books that follow will be adjusted to fit as necessary, and new books in the series will follow the new timeline.


For clarity's sake, let me stress that the versions of the Young Wizards books presently in press at HMH will remain there for the foreseeable future. The publisher is at present not in a position to reissue the New Millennium editions as the definitive ones. Though that would be my preference, it won't be happening any time soon. Yet at the same time there's a persistent demand for something newer... so I'm putting it out there, for those who want it.

Now, as to formats:  The New Millennium Edition of SYWTBAW will be available in ebook format only for the foreseeable future. We are still (ETA: as of 2015) investigating the issues surrounding print editions, as to avoid conflicting with the Harcourt editions these must be published outside of North America. We hope to have results on this during Q1 of 2016. The ebook editions of the books remain available only from the Ebooks Direct store while we sort out various logistical issues with new distributors. As always with our own ebook releases, these editions are DRM-free and available in all the major formats.

Thanks for your interest!

 

 

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ebooksYoung Wizards

Happy Curiosity Landing Day! Download "A Wizard of Mars" for free

by Diane Duane

To celebrate the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars today, the ninth Young Wizards novel, A Wizard of Mars, will be available for FREE download until midnight Hawai’ian time. Use the discount code CURIOSITY for a 100% discount. (Info on how to use our discount codes is here.)

…Please note that as part of our runup to the launch of the New Millennium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard on August 7th, we also have a 15% diiscount offer running on the complete 9-book International Edition set of the Young Wizards novels. Use the discount code LAUNCH for this.)

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 


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Entrance of the Queen of the Night
Hobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeMusicObscure interests

A Day at the Opera (part 1): "Il Barbieri von Nuremburg" and other madness

by Diane Duane

(Image above: the entry of the Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute: via David Ronis)

I was bitten very early by the opera bug.

I think this happened in fifth grade or thereabouts. Our grade school music class got shoved into a bus and ferried into New York, where we spent a day with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and some people from the Metropolitan Opera, being shown the sights and talking to musicians and singers about what they did and how they did it. (Some of us got to actually conduct the Phil for twelve bars or so. Who cared that the orchestra was minus its second chairs? It was… quite something. …That’s another story.)

At the Met, anyway, we all got to sit down front in the expensive seats, and the chandeliers were retracted and lowered for us (which was seriously cool), and then the curtains parted and we found ourselves staring at a coloratura soprano with an afternoon to spare, standing near the top of a stepladder with a spotlight on her, wearing an amazing long glittery black dress and what appeared to be a crown of stars.

Then the conductor gave the downbeat, and the soprano opened her mouth and sang. And suddenly she was not just some singer on a stepladder but the local embodiment of Astrafiammante the Queen of the Night in all her pissed-off  glory, absolutely shaking the rafters with what I know know to be one of the more difficult pieces of music in the operatic repertoire, but then simply sounded to me like a very angry angel looking for someone to deck out.  I wasn’t entirely clear about the details of what she was singing then; I was way too blown away. I had never heard anything like this before. I… was… GONE.

So began what’s since become a lifelong fascination with this complex, sometimes crazy and almost always beautiful art form. I listen to opera when I’m happy or when I’m sad, and particularly when I need to force a mood shift for work’s sake. As a result, opera is rarely far from my writing: there are precious few of my books that I haven’t found a way to sneak opera into somehow (though mostly I try to be circumspect about it. You may only hear a little of the music in the background [as during Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses] or see it on stage in full view [as in Dark Mirror, with added Klingons].  But it’s usually lurking somewhere in the wings.)

The reason this comes up now is that the other day I was looking under the bed for something, and bumped into a big box of cassette tapes that Peter and I have been promising to strike to digital format for what seems like forever. There was the old tape deck, too, sitting there with that patiently aggrieved look that superannuated hardware visits upon you, having given you long and faithful service and still having been abandoned. I said “Oh, what the hell?”, pulled out the deck and the box of tapes, went through the usual frustrating search for cables with which to get the cassette deck talking to the big desktop machine’s sound card, found the cables in less than half an hour (which is in itself a small miracle around this place: other hardware geeks will know how cables both simultaneously pile up and still manage to hide themselves from you when urgently needed), did the hooking up, and started going through the box.

Oh, memories. There is nothing quite so evocative of Nostalgia For Your Lost Youth as going through old hand-made cassette mix tapes.

One tape, though, when I picked it up, jogged my memory unusually hard:  because I realized already had a dub of what was on it — albeit not a great one, done some years back. And thereby hangs a tale.

Those of you who live in Los Angeles, or have National Public Radio stations near you, may (or indeed should) know of the funny, erudite and utterly melliflous music commentator named Jim Svejda (it’s pronounced SHVAY-duh), who operates out of the venerable and much-loved classical music station KUSC. Jim has has been there seemingly since dinosaurs walked the earth, running their Evening Program and just getting better and better all the time. (This goes for his voice too, which is possibly one of the reasons  I like Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice so much:  in some modes it reminds me strongly of Svejda’s.) I have been this man’s fan since I first heard him: he is, for this reason, probably the only member of KUSC’s staff to appear in a Star Trek novel.

For years and years Jim hosted a syndicated show called The Opera Box in which every week he shared his passion and wisdom about all things operatic (not to mention his extraordinary audio collection). Now, since KUSC is a public-supported station, which once or twice a year slows things down to run pledge drives, Jim at such times would put together unusual “special features” which would be aired a little at a time until people had called in to pledge enough money to get that particular recording rolling again.

One of these was a hysterical farrago called “Il Barbieri von Nuremberg”, a totally crazed piece of business in which Svejda cobbled together a truly Frankenstein-monsterish fake opera out of bits and pieces of operatic works both famous and obscure, constructed a beyond-wacky plot for the thing, and then supplied it with his own commentary in that lovely dark voice of his. Somehow or other I failed to get that on tape, which still drives me crazy sometimes.

But I did manage to tape the sequel that Jim did the following year (1981, I think), “Il Barbieri von Nuremburg Strikes Back.” This purports to contain excerpts of the lost bel canto opera Lucia di Liverpool, as performed by the Omsk People’s Lyric Theatre, Tractor Sales and Service.

It’s madness.

And now at last I have an MP3 of it — or what I was able to get of it, back in the day when in the middle of a live recording you had to sit there hovering over the machine waiting for the tape to run out, then break out in a sweat as you cued the flip side and started recording again.  In particular — besides the numerous crazy symphonic and other musical interludes that Svejda has tucked into this thing —  I direct your attention to the 25:00 minute mark (or this separate 3-minute MP3), and Jim’s truly nutso version of the famous tenor aria Di quella pira, into which he inserts the voices of at least twenty-five different tenors*, flawlessly pitch- and tempo- matched (this was way before the software that now makes such things easy: Svejda would have most likely done this with a transcription table), and which is frankly the damndest display of virtuoso scissorwork I’ve ever heard.

…So here it all is, in MP3 format. The main file is just short of an hour long (about 60 megabytes): you may or may not be able to get it to stream for you — I’d guess that will depend on your software.

One caveat: please note that the sound quality on this dub is NOT great at the very beginning, though it improves considerably after the first ten minutes. (The tape was already pushing at least twenty-five years old when I initially struck it to CD, after all, and some stretch-distortion at the ends, and a little print-through, would have been unavoidable.)  The rest of the hour isn’t bad, despite the occasional hiss of FM signal drift; and now that I have better equipment, and way better audio tools, over the next couple of days I’m going to see if I can get an improved dub off the original tape.

Anyway: enjoy!

*Possibly more. I lost count.

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