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Toj and Jerry (Jerry has thte hammer)
Absent friendsAnimationHome lifeIrelandWritingWriting process

The Lament of the Cartoon Cats

by Diane Duane March 24, 2019

I was cleaning out my Gmail account a bit earlier today (because stuff does get piled up in there over time) and came across something… unusual.

Long long ago, before Google developed Google Drive, various people got clever and found ways to store larger-than-officially-permitted files inside Gmail by attaching them to mails using a specific tagging/uploading method. (Forgive me for being vague here but I no longer remember exactly how this particular hack worked; the brain cells once harboring that data are probably now full of Scrivener strategies or Sherlock fanfic.)

I found a bunch of such mails today and proceeded to delete them or empty them out into more modern forms of storage. But one of them brought me up short. It held a text file containing several fragments of a poem.

What really got my attention were the first couple of lines, because as I read them something went twang inside me like a plucked string, and an image sprang out to accompany the twang. If you write at all, you may know this drill. You reread a line, sometimes many years after it was set down, and some sensory cue, visual or auditory or taste- or touch- or smell-based, pops up to accompany it. For example: there are parts of Spock’s World I can’t now read without hearing the sounds pfttt, as of the firing of a pellet-firing air gun, and squawk, which was the sound of one of the pheasants Peter was targeting out the window of the castle-wall cottage we were renting in Scotland. (BTW, “no pheasants were harmed…”, as the saying goes: they could have cared less about the pellets — they just shook their feathers and rolled their eyes at Peter.)

Anyway. I read these two lines at the top of the file —

O, Hell is deep an’ Hell is dark
And Hell is full o’ mice…

…and immediately I was standing in the kitchen of our little cottage, about twenty years ago, and John M. Ford was there. Maybe not in the room: but somewhere in the neighborhood. He and his partner Elise Matthesen (who, as many of you know, goes by @LionessElise on Twitter) were visiting us. And somehow these verses had resulted — either during the visit or right after — and had been tucked away to be completed.

I date them as having been written between 2002 and 2005. It’s hard to be sure, due to the unusual way the file was stored. As for the subject matter? Ghu knows what brought it on. Outside of Mike’s normal superpower — which seemed to involve raising the “talent bar” in local space so that the people packed into that space with him got smarter/more creative than they usually were —  the local influences remain obscure. There’s no denying that I’ve written my share of animation, and like other animation writers working during the 1980s, my relationship with what would eventually become the Animators’ Guild was ambivalent. (This is secondary to its originally being an artists’ organization, not a writers’ one. But that’s all a long time ago now.)

All I can be sure of is that something during that visit, something mediated by Mike’s and Elise’s presence, got me thinking about the indignities inflicted on cartoon cats. All that was missing from the poem as it stood were a few lines. I finished them a couple of hours ago.

So now, here’s this. Just doggerel, to be sure. But won’t somebody think of the kitties?…

The Lament of the Cartoon Cats

O, Hell is deep an’ Hell is dark
And Hell is full o’ mice:
They ha’ wee horns and wee barbed tails
An’ eyes o’ cockatrice;
The kitties bad who made them mad
While they were still on life
Now sairly pay by night and day
For contramuscine strife.

Wi’ wee barbed tridents poke they us,
The mousies o’ the damned:
Wi’ mickle anvils dropped on us
Our days and nights are crammed.
Wi’ mallets all they mousies come
An’ bang us i’ the head:
Wi’ ropes an’ rods an’ cattleprods
A sorry chase we’re led.

O, ilka morn and evenin’ too
We wail fra’ mousies’ whacksies,
And aye their sticks o’ dynamite
stuck up our wee poor jacksies.
An’ wha’ sad justice is there here
For a’ the meowin’ dead,
When we poor puss-cats only did
Wha’ some screenwriter said?

O curst be Local 839
o’ the MPSCG*,
Since we must writhe in pain condign
For their naughty sadistry:
May they run whinin’ through some Hell
Where kitties scratch and bite,
And so be paid i’ their own coin
For our own piteous plight.

*The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, Hollywood CA, formerly known as the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists’ Guild.

March 24, 2019
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Two glasses of a pink wine
Absent friendsYoung WizardsYoung Wizards meta

Young Wizards meta: Wizardry and zombies

by Diane Duane September 24, 2018

(ETA: This material is reposted here from its original location at Tumblr, for those who don’t care for the platform’s new T&C as regards data handling.)

A question came in at my Tumblr ask box:

My roommate just finished Young Wizards, so now she’s in musing mode. So, the latest wondering is how would the wizards react to zombies. If you go by the virus mode of zombie, changing them would violate the Oath, and using wizardry to kill them is just feeding the Lone One. (unless directly threatened, we suppose)

Wow, that’s a fabulous question. And not something I’ve thought about much.

Let’s go ask Tom.


It’s such a nice house, especially in the good weather. The patio doors are open: I wander in through the living room, then into the kitchen. And of course there he is, staring into the fridge with the look of a man contemplating a potential sandwich.

“Why are you always in the kitchen when I show up here?”

“Would you rather I was in the bedroom?”

“No, no, let’s not go there. Literally or figuratively.”

“Just as well. Carl would give me one of those plaintive looks and say ‘Are you trying to confuse me again?’”

Snickering. “God forbid. Where is himself, by the way?”

“Saturn at the moment. There’s some kind of issue, he had to go confer with the Planetary: something secondary to the War. Nothing serious, though, I’m told. What’s your pleasure? Tea? Coffee? Something stronger?”

“Is the Sun over the yardarm here?”

“It’s your yardarm. You tell me. Got a nice Spätburgunder weissherbst in here somewhere.”

“Oh God. Please and thank you.”

He goes back to rooting in the fridge. “So what brings you out all this way?”

“Got a question for you.”

“So what else is new.” He comes back with two glasses. “Here.” He pours them each a third full, hands me one. It’s that perfect eye-of-the-pheasant color, caught between rosé and gold: if it were a US wine it would be thought of as similar to a white Zinfandel, the skins removed early from the must of a big-bodied grape to keep it from going all the way to red.

We touch glasses. “Ne’gakh emeirsith,” Tom says, which is one of many local variants in the Speech for the sentiment “Your health”. Probably it would render closer to the Swiss-German usage “En guete”, “may it do you good”.

“Back at you,” I say, “thank you,” and have a sip. It tastes like summer in a glass, and way down among the tangled flavors of peach leather and vanilla and faint sunwarmed brass there is just a hint of something extra going on. “Of course there are wizards who’re vintners,” I mutter. “Silly me. Kaiserstuhl?”

“Somewhere on the Rhine, anyway. Anyway: what can I do you for?”

“Zombies.”

He rolls his eyes quite hard. “Oh dear God, do not tell me you’re planning on inflicting that on us.”

“By no means. Consider it a hypothetical.”

“Only too pleased.” He tilts his head at me with an expression way too similar to the one John Watson saves to use on Sherlock when his colleague is about to suggest that they do something improbable and most likely illegal (or likely shortly to be declared so) “for science.” “Because we’ve got enough on our plates right now, as you know. But what is it with everybody suddenly seemingly feeling life isn’t worth living unless there’s an impending zombie apocalypse?”

“A question I’ve been asking myself increasingly often of late.”

“Some cultural thing,” Tom says, looking down into his wine and swirling it a little to assess the hang, or because he sees something there I don’t. “An expression of people’s increasing sense of helplessness against an increasingly unmanageable and incomprehensible world: that was one explanation I heard recently.”

“Like the millennialist stuff that keeps coming up more and more of late.”

“Well, that’s always been around,” Tom says. “But the two phenomena express different sets of reactions to the same problem, maybe. The millennialism business might appeal most to people who just want to escape, but not be seen as cowards. None of it’s their fault: it was the bad people who made the world end! And in a side branch of the trope, not their fault at all that God was going to yank them off the planet and leave the bad people to cope with all the floods and earthquakes and whatnot.”

“Berne does say that the basic existential position of all human beings is ‘I am blameless,’” I murmur. The wine really does hang nicely. “But the zombie thing, well, if that’s the far side of the same psychological phenomenon, maybe it’s the ‘We can too make a difference, damned if we’re going down without a fight’ side. Not wholly incompatible with the wizardly ground-of-being.”

“With the added benefit of being able to machine-gun the neighbors without guilt,” Tom remarks, “once they’ve turned.” He gives me a very dry look. “Seriously, you’re not contemplating this, are you?”

“Not in the slightest. I got any urges in that direction out of my system writing Lost Future, believe me. Never said the Z word, but it was in the background all the time. While I wasn’t contemplating the delights of making Sean Bean run around the landscape dressed only in leather. Anyway, you mean you can’t tell, after how I dealt with the vampire thing?”

“Well, that did rather come down by fiat,” Tom says. “Caught me by surprise at first: thought maybe I’d missed a memo. But ‘no vampires after 1652?’”

“It was an interesting year. A story that’ll get told eventually, I’m sure.”

“A reaction to something else, perhaps?”

“I’m sure I can’t say.”

Tom grins at me. “I note the phrasing. Well, never mind.” He shrugs. “If we’re being spared zombies it doubtless means I won’t ever get to machine-gun the neighbors for mowing their lawn and running their leaf blower at six in the morning, but we all have to suffer a little in this life, I guess.”

I snort into the wine. “Um, okay. Sorry.” Because the image of ActionHero!Tom spraying zombies with a machine gun somehow has its points. “Where were we?”

“Zombies,” he says. “You’re asking me how we would react? From the wizardly point of view.”

“Wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts.”

“Well.” He leans back in the chair. “What sort of propagation are we talking? Not the vodoun-style one-zombie-at-a-time, old-fashioned craftsmanship type, I assume.”

“No, the viral model.”

“Covers a lot of ground. How viral? Direct transmission? Do they have to run up and chew on you as in Shaun of the Dead? Or passive transmission via body fluids, so you can catch it from a doorknob? Or airborne?”

I shudder a bit. “Let’s not and say we did.”

“I agree. The main questions for a wizard attacking the problem are: how widespread is this thing going to become, and how quickly? Because the Oath does not require us to allow our species to be massacred because we want to avoid killing the poor zombie viruses.” He gives me a dry half-smile. “Smallpox, for example—we helped with that. It’s killed more human beings on this planet than every war there’s ever been, all rolled together, and now it’s almost gone—assuming some idiot doesn’t go rogue and try to weaponize something from the two remaining cultures in Moscow or at the CDC, or some natural cache presently unknown.”

He sighed. “Sometimes you have to make a judgment call. Let’s assume we tried to talk the viruses out of it: we failed. When that happens, we get to defend ourselves. Will some of us wind up in Timeheart having to take responsibility for action against a certain kind of life, and have to explain our actions to those affected by them? Almost certainly. But that doesn’t mean those actions were the wrong ones to take. Especially since it’s nowhere written that wizardry or the Oath forbid us to kill, particularly in self-defense. We’re just required to be utterly judicious about it, because in death as in life, what goes around comes around. Sometimes in unexpected forms. And increasing entropy is to be avoided whenever humanly possible.”

“Well,” I say, leaning back after another sip of the Spätburgunder, “I think change might have been the issue. You’ve got a human. They’ve been turned into a zombie—”

“If killing the virus will allow them to recover, you do so, and change them back,” Tom says immediately.

“So that doesn’t violate Clause Three.”

“The Troptic Stipulation? No. The clause is meant to deal with initiating change. Let’s say I get annoyed at something you say and am about to turn you into a frog.”

“As one does,” I say to the wine.

“That the Oath enjoins against,” Tom says. “Inflicting batrachotropsy on you like that would be changing your normal mode of operation just because I felt like it, to satisfy some agenda of my own. It wouldn’t be because you needed it to happen. The Stipulation serves as a specific, simple example or reminder of the more general enjoinder against inflicting your power on others for your own purposes… and also a reminder that as a wizard you are required to think your changes through and determine how they’ll affect the whole system involved. Anyway, let’s step back to the original problem. Reversing a zombie change: fine, you go for it—assuming you’re fairly sure the host will revert to their previous state – because the change you’re making is a reversal to a previously disrupted status quo inflicted on one of the principals without consent. Particularly, sanction obtains because you’re reversing a change that was threatening, indeed rendering impossible, the host’s normal way of being.”

“But it’s the virus’s normal way of being.”

“Tough,” Tom says.

I blink a bit at that: such no-wiggle-room language is unusual from a Senior. “Yet you’re not suggesting this is anything hierarchical: no suggestion that humans are more important than viruses.”

“Not at all. Least of all, for the moment, because from the macro point of view, such assessments are alternately impossible for us to understand—since we do not stand, psychologically, philosophically, or eschatologically, at sufficiently central a point to see widely enough—and unfruitful. Here’s how it would look to me. First, who initiated the attack? The virus. From the wizardly point of view, whether all parties are sentients of equivalent complexity or not, ‘who started it’ is an issue, and my attention will always be on which is most benefited by the action and which is most harmed. Naturally the virus stands to benefit: all viruses that affect humans use us to reproduce. Is mere reproduction enough of an excuse to kill a member of another species? Not from where I’m standing.”

“But you’re one of the two species in question.”

“Yes, which means of course I have a dog in this fight, but no, it doesn’t mean I have to try to be so even-handed about all this that I wind up dropping dead before figuring out what action to take. Or then getting up again to go staggering around and nomming on other passing people. The goal is to have as few life-forms die as possible while solving the main problem. The viruses are going to get into their hosts, reproduce, and kill them, and then die themselves. Importance as such doesn’t enter into this, but a human being is potentially going to do a lot more things in its lifetime, and of a much higher level of complexity, than a virus will: and in that lifetime, some of those things will slow down entropy locally. Which is where our main loyalty lies.”

Tom sighs and has another drink of wine. “Also,” he says, “think it forward to the theoretical end state. Without wizardly interference, pretty soon all susceptible mammalian life on Earth is dead, or wandering around zombie-nomming on each other until they all fall apart and rot. And somewhere along the line, the virus dies out too – because that’s routinely what happens with organisms that kill their hosts in such a wholesale manner. What’s been the benefit of all this in the long term? And consider the huge, huge waste. Especially of a species which, though annoying and problematic in oh so damn many ways, nonetheless would have had before it, over millennia, so many ways to slow down entropy locally. Whereas viruses only have one… of very limited effectiveness or value at best. And one which leaves no one alive to judge whether the price was worth paying. Which fact by itself tells you the price is too damn high.”

“And what would the Powers say?”

“That,” Tom says, “is every wizard’s business to inquire for him-, her- or themself. Themselves. Whatever—”

At which point his phone begins jumping and buzzing against the table.

“Oh crap, excuse me,” Tom says, picks it up, punches the button, puts it to his ear. “Tom Swale. —Oh, hi. —Yes, she is.” His face twists itself into an expression of good-natured mischief. “One moment, I’ll ask.” He looks over at me. “I’ve got a couple of people on the other end with a message for you. That being, ‘Are you scared of the spooning?’”

I come up blank for a moment and then realize what he’s on about. “Oh!” And I start laughing. “No, it’s okay, the spooning’s sorted. Tell them I’m just stuck on ‘the morning routines’ one. Nearly finished with that, though.”

He nods, puts the phone back to his ear. “Did you hear that? Fine. Anything else? Good. Because I’m still waiting for those notes on the volcano thing. —I don’t care that you told me how you fixed it. You still have to tell everybody else how. —Well, so you should have left the contextual recorder running, then. It’s not my fault the controls are so granular. Maybe you should ask Dairine for some help.”

His eyes widen a little and he holds the phone a little way from his ear. I can just make out the sound of Nita saying something about “a horrible death”. Tom rolls his eyes and puts the phone back to his ear. “RTFM, Nita. I’ll just keep saying it until you start paying attention. Read the—“

His eyebrows go up: he puts the phone down on the table again, rolls his eyes. “Did she just hang up on you?”

“No, I think Kit took the phone away from her and he hung up on me. Not quite the same dynamic.”

I chuckle. “How do you cope sometimes?”

“Good question.” He has a little more wine, then puts the glass down. “Anyway, I think we left a loose end untied.”

“Yes. What if such a viral-based change in the zombified humans is irreversible? Even by wizardry?”

“Then with endless regret,” Tom says, “you put the zombies out of their misery with the absolute minimum of pain, to keep them from infecting others and spreading the anguish any further… that being the quickest way to limit the Lone One’s local victory. Of course more elegant solutions might be preferable, but you’re not always offered such opportunities. In fact, you’re usually not. The decisions worth making are routinely the most difficult.”

I nod and have a bit more wine myself.

“Does it seem tangled? So it should,” Tom says. “But then the Oath’s not a be-all and end-all. I would never think to demean it by describing it as a set of guidelines. But every one of the embedded strictures and stipulations has certainly been broken, and doubtless may yet be again, without the person doing that being any less of a wizard, because situation is everything. Your purpose as a wizard is to keep things running as well as they can for the maximum good of as many beings as possible… and ‘good’ itself is so situational. You know as well as I do that on the High Road you run into wizards of species far different from ours whose recensions of the Oath make no sense in terms of the way our minds hold Life and its exigencies. Yet they serve Life as emphatically as we do, they’re our cousins, and we’re all on the same side.”

And then he chuckles a little. “Why would this ever realistically be an easy call, anyway?” Tom says. “After all, this is how you set it up. Who wants a world where all the choices are easy ones? If these stories are meant to be of some use besides entertainment—which is honorable enough by itself, granted—if there’s meant to be a little more meat than usual on these books’ bones, then the choices must be difficult. Like they are in real life. Because what’s the point, if you send your readership out into what we laughably refer to as the Real World with the idea that wizardry and life are black and white? Or even just gray? No matter how many shades of it you’re talking.”

“Oh please, don’t go there.”

He just gives me another of those slightly wicked looks. “Wizardry is not a multiple choice test, or a menu with only a few choices,” Tom says. “Wizardry is a set of multiple interpenetrating strata of intent, event and solution. Or if you want to stay 2-D, think of it as a set of many, many overlapping Venn diagrams. Sometimes the overlap of requirement, intervention and resolution simply cannot be made to work in a way that leaves you or the people working with you, or for that matter the microorganisms you’re interacting with or acting on, entirely happy. Yet will you eventually have to account for your actions? Yes. So you have a responsibility to be prepared to do so. Do you have an understanding that your goal is to get things to work for as many of the parties to a problem as possible? If you’re a wizard, yes, always. Will it sometimes not work out for one party because of a judgment call you made? Almost inevitably.” He stretches again in the chair. “But that’s the reason ours differs from other wizardly systems, I’m told. Because somebody or other, thirty years ago, thought it was a horrible oversimplification to ‘just wave a wand and have stuff happen.’ Somebody started thinking things through. And look where it got you.”

“Like I can ever stop.” I finish the wine, put the glass down.

“Nope, nope, nope. Sit down and tell me about that Sooper Sekrit Thing you ran off to do in London.”

Far be it from me to argue with a man who’s pouring me another glass of that…


Author’s note: Tom Swale, on whom was based a senior wizard in the Young Wizards series, moved on to a larger catchment area (as the cousins say) in 2018, joining his beloved Carl in the Great Wherever. Neither this world nor the YW universe will be the same without you, old friend.

September 24, 2018
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Dave Gemmell's Brownies
Absent friendsBakingFood

Dave Gemmell’s Brownies

by Diane Duane November 14, 2017

The recipe isn’t his, but I think of him whenever I make it (which is way too often. Not in terms of thinking about David Gemmell, but in terms of eating the brownies…).

This recipe closely parallels one I always used when Dave would come to visit us in the house on the hill that we were then renting (from Harry Harrison) in Avoca, further east in County Wicklow. Along with the memory of the visits (always delightful: long walks, late nights, a lot of laughing) and the brownies (the record for baking them was four times during one visit) comes the memory of how we “lost” Dave in the bathroom for an hour on one visit, because the household’s complete collection of Calvin & Hobbes books was in there and he’d never come across the characters before. Only the cry of “There are brownies, Dave!” was able to cut the session short.

The recipe is easy and quick to make — the phrase “thrown together” would suit it: just mix everything together, pour into pan, bake —  and produces a result very much like the much-loved “brownies from the box” that the Betty Crocker people used to make in the US. (Maybe they still do? But [assuming they do] I haven’t had more modern ones and don’t know what they’re like these days.)

This recipe is similar to one from AllRecipes.com, but mine is heavier on the cocoa (which is as it should be, if you ask me) and a bit lighter on the flour, producing a brownie a bit on the “squidgy” side. (That’s my preference, and Peter’s. Like yours more cake-y? Add another 1/4 cup of flour to start with and see how that behaves.)  Also: I add conversions to metric  measurements-by-weight for those who like more predictably even results. 

The ingredients:

  • 3 eggs
  • 3/4 cup / 180 ml vegetable oil
  • 1 1/2 cups / 150g sugar
  • 1 tablespoon / 15ml vanilla extract
  • 3/4 cups / 120g flour
  • 1 cup / 60g cocoa
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp salt

First butter a 9-inch square baking pan and preheat the oven to 350F / 175 C.

Sift or stir together well the flour and salt…

Measure out the cocoa and baking powder and stir together.

Then combine them with the flour and salt and stir together until the dry mixture has gone a uniform color.

Put the dry ingredients aside for the moment, and measure out the sugar and oil. Beat well together; then add the vanilla and beat that in.

Sugar, oil, vanilla

Add the eggs and beat them in too.

Then dump the dry ingredients into the egg / oil / sugar / vanilla business (or the other way around, if you prefer; it makes absolutely no difference as far as I can tell, I’ve done it both ways, both on purpose and by accident…) and mix mix mix mix mix…

…until it’s all gone pretty and glossy and shiny. It doesn’t have to be absolutely smooth; don’t beat it so much that the gluten in the flour starts to develop. You don’t want that.

Pour the whole business into the baking pan.

And that’s it! Shove it into the oven for 30 minutes and bake.

At the end of half an hour, test it for doneness if you believe in doing such things. (I’ve never bothered. If the brownies rise, they’re done enough for me.)

…And you can see what they look like in the picture at the top. Peter likes sour cream on them, so that’s what we’ve got a pic of. Me, I just cut them up and stuff them in my face.

So go thou and do likewise: and think of Dave Gemmell, perhaps, if you do so. A lovely, dry, funny, talented man. Lost to us too soon, dammit.

November 14, 2017
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Len Wein
Absent friendsComicsFeatured

Len Wein

by Diane Duane September 12, 2017

So it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m going through my Twitter feed and suddenly I see one of those Tweets you really, really don’t want to ever see… and it’s already too late to unsee it.

Len Wein has passed away. Len co-created Swamp Thing, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler. His was a gigantic contribution to comics. pic.twitter.com/6d9dXfVBNw

— Patch Zircher (@PatrickZircher) September 10, 2017

Everything goes away abruptly, replaced by a behind-the-eyes vision. A Manhattan street (Broadway, in fact). Crates full of fruit and veg stacked steeply out onto the sidewalk, glass and metal doors opening inward, and what seem like hundreds of small handwritten signs, everything slicked over on this side by yellow sodium-vapor streetlight glare. And next to me a tall dark shadow, like a cutout piece of night with curly hair, bends down and murmurs in my ear, “Now we will dare to enter the dread portal of a place whence only the luckiest few, be they man or woman, mortal or immortal, have escaped alive!!” Cue portentous music in the background: Dun dun dunnnnnnn.

Camera pans up to the sign: Fairway Market.

And now that I really want to cry, it’s too late, because the happily grinning SOB has me laughing already. He’d been mocking me for being such a hidebound East-Sider that I’d never food-shopped on the West Side of Manhattan. “Come on,” says one of the great writer/editors of the comics business as he pushes one of the doors open, “we’ll grab a snack and look for typos, it drives ‘em crazy.”

…It was the mid-1980s, and I was once again getting used to the pace of life on the East Coast, but from a different angle—not as a psychiatric nurse working at New York Hospital this time, but as a Philly-located freelance SF and fantasy writer, stretching her wings and trying to work out what she could do next and what (in the long term) she was good for. Early experience with SF fandom in the mid- and late 70s had laid the groundwork for the lifestyle change: six years in LA spent writing and learning, and many more fannish and pro-ish contacts and friendships made after that first sale, had broadened and solidified it. Once settled in Philly a lot of old connections were reforged and many new ones made… and one of the very best of these was when, I have to assume by happy accident, I got swept into the casual ambit of the artists and writers who frequented DC Comics’ old digs at 666 5th Avenue.

I was often in the city to see my agent or my book editors or friends from my nursing days, and downstairs in the 666 building there was a steakhouse-y restaurant where people got together once a week or so after work for drinks or whatever. It wasn’t just DC people: Marvel folks were there too (as there seemed to be a fair amount of “crossing the line” going on between what were then the two great houses). It might have been at one of these get-togethers that I first met Len, or at a convention in or near New York or Philly, but who cares? Even in those star-studded crowds, Len stood out. The sound of his laughter would catch your attention first. The things he said and did in between would keep it. And you would quickly learn that you were in the presence of a curly-haired force of nature: intensely visually and verbally creative, fearless, utterly committed… And goofy.

I wonder sometimes if the effortless ease and accessibility of his humor confused people—both pros and fans—who were more used to interacting with his written work, which was always serious, down deep (though only rarely somber, which is another deal entirely). In any case it took very little time after meeting Len to recognize the goofery as a kind of crema floating at the top of his personal espresso, a self-renewing byproduct of the richer darker strata below. Len was completely unafraid to be funny at the drop of a hat because he had gravity (or gravitas) enough to counterbalance the humor, and in exactly the needed amount, whenever he chose to call on it. More, he knew the difference between pathos and bathos, and exactly how deep to let the vorpal blade pierce. When he needed to draw blood, dramatically speaking, the accuracy was well-nigh surgical.

Len’s was the kind of emotional wisdom you normally look to see in people much older, and paid for (as wisdom usually is) in pain. You wouldn’t have known Len long without discovering that his physical constitution, possibly jealous of all the attention he lavished on the life of the visual mind, had been pulling a wide variety of nasty tricks on him from a young age. It was the last of these that took him away from us the other day. Len was one of those people the doctors predict can’t possibly live beyond their teens, but it was not his style to just roll over and let that happen. He made Entropy wait its damn turn for as long as humanly possible.

Fortunately he had a goodish run ahead of him, and many lives to change. When first meeting him all that while ago, it took no time to find out that Len saw himself as a resource, the sort of person who’d tell you the true deal about how things worked in the world surrounding them. The work itself, the art and craft of being creative, especially visually creative, and getting what you created out there, was his great passion. He was as eager to learn as he was to teach, and his generosity at the teaching end was surpassed only by his delight at finding out how to do something he hadn’t figured out for himself before. A lot of what I know about comics writing, I know from many long talks with Len—so that it was a pleasure to share with him as much as I could of what I’d gleaned about the art of animation writing in time for him to bring that data to bear on the Transformers episode “Webworld”, our only sharedWebworld credits screen credit. It was a pleasure to push him over that cliff and into what would prove a long and successful additional career stream as a TV writer.

The friendship that grew up between us was simply a source of great joy to me whenever our schedules allowed us to run into each other: usually at conventions on one side of the Atlantic or the other, but sometimes more frequent and more casual visits when we happened to be living on the same coast for a while. The man I was lucky enough to get to know over time was a thorough-going professional, hard-working and indeed merciless to himself when he was in full flow. A creative goal—image, story, series, whatever—would be identified, and then Len would simply start heading in that direction until he got there. There was no question of “if”. The “when” was a given. Add the power that his patience, persistence and determination could layer underneath his visual and verbal brilliance, and you got somebody whose talents sometimes seemed positively superhuman.

Yet at the same time there was nothing harsh about the way he employed this expertise. There was always a great gentleness perceptible in Len, with (as so often seems to be the case in the good guys) a truly steely toughness underneath. When Len got angry—and injustice in particular made him angry—there was no hiding it, and nothing soft about it. Loyalty mattered to him. Courage mattered to him. Kindness mattered to him a lot. I remembered thinking more than once, If this guy’s as good as he is at writing demigods and superheroes, maybe there’s a reason. What is it they keep telling us—that terrible advice, “Write what you know?” Maybe in this case it’s not so terrible. Len and his chosen material were a good fit for each other.

He was also a curious writer, and a thoughtful one, never willing to take things at face value, or leave them there. I think this ability to take his reader in unexpected directions was the source of another part of his appeal. Len never met an idea that (after a few moments of courteous examination) he wouldn’t pry up by one edge, like a manhole cover, and take a good long look underneath to see what else might be there that was interesting. I particularly recall one of those long walks around the upper West Side during which we spent a while chatting about a story called “Henchman” (Blue Beetle #8). Here the attention isn’t so much on the battle of superhero versus supervillain, but on one of the villain’s hires, who’s wrestling with the problems all of us wrestle with—home life, money, family problems, the job you had to take even though you weren’t wild about it because that’s what the family’s breadwinner has to do. This was not territory to which most writers would pay attention, but Len was never “most writers.” “The guy’s got a mortgage,” I can hear Len saying in tones of genuine concern as we pause somewhere on Broadway, waiting for a light. “He’s got a wife and kids, he’s gotta hang onto his job to make it all work, you know?”

I did know, because with him I shared a fondness for something else Len really knew how to exploit: that sweet (or not-so-sweet) spot where the fantastic element of a story crunches up against the real-life part, like two ends of a broken bone, always painful to a greater or lesser extent, never letting you forget there’s a price being paid. That pain Len knew in both the physical and emotional modes, but he made it serve his turn. Empathy and compassion were core themes in all his best work, and the stubborn determination and willingness to push through life’s challenges became natural parts of his storytelling arsenal. No surprise that some of Len’s best stories and arcs featured characters playing out the hand Life had dealt them, hanging on in seemingly intolerable situations, just doing the best they can.

Now, alas, the storyteller is no longer among us, having left us only the stories to speak his mind and his heart: the written and penciled and inked ones, and also (for us lucky people whose lives he touched) the personal ones. But then everybody who had the privilege of knowing him for even a few minutes has a Len Story. I’m lucky enough to have a fair number; even Peter has a batch secondary to various Worldcons and other get-togethers after we were married.

His favorite: at Worldcon in Atlanta, where Peter and I got engaged, he and I and Len and Marv Wolfman got together for dinner one night. As the restaurant was a steakhouse, out came Our Waiter with a tray containing variously sized pieces of meat and a plastic lobster. Then Our Waiter, in the midst of explaining the steaks, happened to put his hand on the plastic lobster, which moved. We all jumped, and Len jumped the highest. When asked what we wanted for dinner, we all instantly chose meat, or more accurately any damn kind of meat and not lobster thank you, and the tray was taken away. I think we made it as far as  dessert before Len gravely rose to his feet, reached for his hat and put it over his heart. “Larry the Lobster is walking the last mile,” Len said, more or less inevitably doing one of the things he did best: dramatically spotlighting the underdog in its moment of greatest crisis. We looked where he did—seeing the tray, denuded of everything but Larry, being taken to the kitchen—and rose to stand with him, heads bowed and causing all the people around us to go WUT. Especially when Peter toon-lobster-squeaked under his breath, “My mum told me I’d have a good career in catering, but I don’t think this is it…!” and Len sort of faceplanted, snorting, in the direction of his pie.

For my own part I’m thinking now of something a little further along the flight of Time’s arrow than the Fairway. Maybe…fifteen years ago? So long? But yeah: people slide around, sometimes to other continents, and time and space draw out inconveniently wide in between. Age slides in and we start complaining to one another (when we meet at this convention or that one, when we finish hugging and settle in…) about creaking joints and graying hair and the other symptoms of creeping mortality. I remember Len complaining goodnaturedly how a procedure he’d had, a liquid-ultrasound lithotripsy* performed in a ”magic Jacuzzi”, had somehow failed to give him a superpower. “Hate to say this, but I feel a little bit cheated,” Len said. He laughed, and so did I.

Hard on the heels of the memory of his laughter, though, comes a sense that the world is distinctly gloomier and sadder today because Len’s not in it any more; and the cheated feeling is mine. Probably a lot of other people’s, too. It’ll take a while for the truth to sink in for us all, the unhappy realization that all the Len we have now, the stuff presently locked down in paper or electrons, is all the Len there’s ever going to be. The source of all that wonderful, wholehearted storytelling is gone. If you’re in pain because of this, I’m standing with you now. But there’s this to think about too: a significant portion of what the comics field is today, it is because Len was here. His creative DNA will remain a vital part of comics for decades to come, which is about as much immortality of the kind humans can get that’s capable of standing up under independent scrutiny.

Meanwhile, others’ belief systems may carry them in differing directions on this count. But right now as the best antidote to my own sorrows I prefer to consider the possibility of a renewed Len looking around him, somewhere, somewhen soonish, to find himself occupying a body (or what passes for one) in which things aren’t going to keep on breaking any more—a physical envelope that’s an absolutely perfect fit for whatever purpose he next chooses. It would be satisfying to think about an outcome in which an old friend is newly free to go off and do, in some larger sphere of influence, what he was always best at: create.

A pretty fantasy, you say? I’ll just shrug at you. I’m a fantasist. If I want to work overtime, surely that’s my business.

But at the very least I can go hunt down Blue Beetle #8 and read “Henchman” again.


Hear the NPR obit for Len, with a soundbyte of him talking about his work

Below: see Len on the PBS: Superheroes documentary

 

*Medical terminology for “smashing a stone up”; a preferred treatment for unusually large kidney stones.

September 12, 2017
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Kimmie's commissioning plate
Absent friends

Kimmie

by Diane Duane May 11, 2017

Kim KnightThis is our friend Kim Knight – Kimmie, or even Kimmiwinkles.

Kim and her band of usual suspects were the concoms for the UFP series of Star Trek conventions in the UK, some of the best organised, smoothest-running and most fun cons we’ve ever attended.

UFPCon 1986 was the one where Peter and I met up for the third time. Not happenstance, not coincidence, certainly not enemy action; it was third time pays for all, but even then we were so very quiet and subtle that when we finally revealed our secret engagement…

…Kimmie, Ros and Ali already had champagne waiting on ice!

Kim visited us in Ireland, travelled with us to see a solar eclipse in Germany, met up with us unexpectedly in LA, and introduced us to amazing people. She was one of the most extraordinary people you could hope to meet — warm-hearted yet businesslike, kindly yet efficient, humorous yet hard-nosed, all wrapped up in one loveable, huggable package. In particular I remember one trip she and I took to Bern together, where we went shopping, ate out, caused the staff at the hotel where we were staying to mistake us for “such a nice pair of gay ladies” (I overheard them…), and generally acted like crazed teenagers pretending to be grownups. It was the Best Girls Trip Out Ever.

Kimmie died on the 11th of May 2014, from complications of the diabetes she bore and fought so gallantly. It would have been her birthday on the 31st of May.

Miss you, Kimster…

May 11, 2017
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Madeline L'Engle
Absent friendsWritingYoung Wizards

Madeleine L’Engle is gone

by Diane Duane September 9, 2007

And so, to my great sorrow, passes one of the most senior, and certainly one of the most beloved, of YA fantasy writers: one of the first of us to break out, over the course of years, into worldwide fame, and to general agreement that she “wasn’t just writing kid stuff”.

She was a gifted and powerfully imaginative writer with a graceful style. Unquestionably she was an influence on me, though perhaps not in the way people might think. I read her first few books, and while in a general way I liked what she was doing, I had personal niggles about the way she was doing it. Certainly there were things about A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet that made me think, Hmmm… I’m not so sure about this. If I was going to do something of this sort, I’d do it this way  (…there you have it in a phrase, the eternal/internal certainty that they have it right of writers everywhere…) — and the result, somewhat later, was So You Want to Be a Wizard.

Plainly the general similarity in themes between SYWTBAW and L’Engle’s early work has been noticed, for our books do often enough get mentioned in the same breath. It’s a development that would have astounded me if I’d known about it when I first met her. That was twenty-some years ago, when my first editor at Delacorte (where SYW… debuted) took me to a party that was being thrown by the publisher in Madeleine’s honor.  We had a few moments to sit down and chat, after we were introduced, and I went into a strange sort of shock/horror after a few minutes when she said to me, “By the way, I read your new one.  I liked it very much. What’s the next one about? When are we going to see it?”

The shock/horror was, I now think (a) because no new writer really expects one of the greats to say something like that to them, no matter how you may daydream about it:  (b) because up until that point I had given the idea no consideration whatsoever.  Srsly.  If there are now eight-going-on-nine books in the Young Wizards series, I think we can all blame L’Engle, because I went home to Philly that night thinking “Hmmmm….”, and had a long, long look toward the Great South Bay and the Atlantic past the Jersey wetlands as the Metroliner headed south. Deep Wizardry, surely, has L’Engle’s shadow lying long over it. I will very much miss the sense that the woman who cast it is still just over the horizon, still working.

..But if life, and life after, have gone the way she expected… she still is.  (sigh) Take care, cousin. See you later.

September 9, 2007
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Absent friendsChristmasrecipes

The divine Miss S. and the Eggnog Recipe

by Diane December 30, 2005

Nothing could induce me to reveal her name.

It was a long time ago, on the 6th floor (as it then was) of Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic (as it still is, though it’s no longer part of Cornell — or only glancingly so — as it was when I worked there).

As one of the most junior nurses working on the floor, I saw many unusual things, most of which the seal of practitioner-client confidentiality prevents me from discussing. But come holiday time, there was a recurring event which I now feel it safe to reveal.

It was Miss S.’s eggnog.

Miss S. was…frankly…a goddess. In a time when the term is thrown around with idiotic lassitude by razor manufacturers and those trying to make a fast buck, as well as those whose characters partake a whole heck of a lot less of the divine than they’d like to think they do, the term is desperately overused. But it would not have been misused of Miss S.

She was Jamaican. (And still is, as far as I know: the past tense here should be understood to imply my past and not her passing.) She was about six foot two. She was, straightforwardly, stacked like the brick ****house of your best imaginings. She wore her hair quite, quite short, and this helped her look more like a superbly carved ebony statue of some torrid-zone deity than you can possibly imagine. There was no room she merely entered: she was her own procession.

Miss S. was also a truly excellent psychiatric nurse. She had a liking for evening and night shifts, which is probably why I saw so much of her (being then the most junior member of staff and therefore routinely stuck on nights during much of the early part of my practice at PWC). Working with her was always a treat. Under that gorgeous slow-spoken smooth-as-treacle Jamaican accent lurked the intention and skill of a wily and thoroughgoing professional, a woman who could get anyone (mostly meaning our clients) to talk to her about anything (mostly meaning whatever was bothering them). She was formidable, indeed nearly fearless: I once saw her take a fire axe off a seriously out-of-control schizophrenic with no weapons but that voice (in basso-growl mode) and a scowl. Nobody messed with Miss S.

She also made the most outrageous eggnog.

She smuggled a discreet small amount of it into the clinic only on one night each year, New Year’s Eve, and only to those who deserved it (which is why nothing could get me to tell you her name, as of course what she did would have been construed by the clueless-but-superior as rather naughty).

And here’s how she did it (or so she told me). (Not the sneaking: the eggnog.)

You take a dozen eggs. You separate the yolks from the whites. You freeze the whites and do something else with them. (Probably meringue.)

You beat the eggs together extremely well with a pound of confectioners’ sugar / icing sugar. (UK icing sugar is actually superior for this, as unlike US confectioners’ sugar, it contains no cornstarch.) You then pour in half a bottle of Myers’ Planter’s Punch Rum (or other good smooth dark rum).

You mix it all well and put it in the fridge, tightly covered, to get friendly with itself overnight.

The next day you combine this mixture with about half a gallon of whole milk and at least a quart of cream — more, if you like. And the rest of the rum. Into this whole business you then grate fresh nutmeg (not more than a quarter teaspoon, as nutmeg is toxic in excess) and some cinnamon and allspice to taste. Check the flavor, and then add more milk/cream if you feel the eggnog’s too strong.

Refrigerate for a while more: then serve it forth.

Miss S. also told me about a stronger version of this — apparently called the “Pan Am Pilots’ Eggnog” — which involves the further addition of a dozen whipped egg whites and a bottle of apricot brandy. This is doubtless why Pan Am went under.

…I’ve been making this eggnog on and off for more than twenty years. It’s now traditional down at our local pub on New Year’s Eve: our thank-you to our neighbors for putting up with our constant search for Galactic Domination.

Try it…see what it does for you. If you try it, raise a glass to the Divine Miss S.

And Happy New Year!

December 30, 2005
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Squeak and Ryoh-Ohki
Absent friendsCatsWriting

Quick as a wink, the sly cat stole Diane’s taco

by Diane May 3, 2003

Well, it was a close thing, but I managed to eat it before he did.

The late and much-missed Lilith used to have this virtue: that she could unerringly find and lie on the most important piece of paperwork in the house. A check, a contract (as in the picture that gave the writer for the New York Times a minor conniption for some reason), a letter you were supposed to be answering, a newspaper that you wanted to cut something out of: Lilith would be on it. For a long time, when you couldn’t find some important piece of documentation, the answer was, “Look under the cat.”

These days Mr. Squeak seems to be holding that space or function, though in a more virtual manner. Here he is (after trying to take that taco out of my hand) not quite lying on the computer; but that’s only after I moved him several times, and was forced to move further down the table to keep him from doing Cat Rewrites on the Ring script. Since Squeak weighs nearly fourteen pounds and has the typically huge feet of the Norwegian Forest Cat, when he stands on the keys, it takes some cleaning up afterwards.

A side point: This really isn’t such a bad digital camera, though eventually we do want a better one. The camera is a Umax AstraPix 540 which cost us something like ninety pounds Sterling from Scan. The image below was taken at highest resolution, without flash, and the only thing I did to it in Corel PhotoPaint was tweak the gamma a little. For comparison, see the second image, taken during a period of interesting weather the other day. (See below.)

Meanwhile, busy busy busy on the script all last night and well into this morning for Peter: and ditto for me this afternoon, while I incorporate the last set of changes into this draft.

Probably the cat and I need another taco around now.

Save

Save

May 3, 2003
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40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

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