Just so that people know: Chris Meadows of TeleRead has kindly asked me to come be a guest on his podcast on July 25th, at 12 noon (US) Eastern time. We’ll chat about ebooks in general and the EU’s digital VAT craziness in particular, and of course about some other things having to do with ebook publication in my own universes (specifically at the Young Wizards end of things). And there’ll be prizes (you phone in with questions to qualify for these), and some discussion of other topics including (finally!) Young Wizards: Lifeboats. So be there or be square. (Or perhaps faintly rhomboidal if you prefer.) Chris’s post about the podcast at Telereads has the details.
ebooks
ETA: Young Wizards: Lifeboats is out! Click here for its page at the Ebooks Direct store.

When the renowned saurian Species Archivist to the Powers that Be summons young wizard Kit Rodriguez to participate in an urgent off-planet intervention intended to save many millions of lives, Kit’s hardly going to say “no.”
He soon discovers that not only he, but his wizardly partner Nita Callahan and her sister Dairine, his friend Ronan Nolan, and tens of thousands of other wizards from Earth have also been drafted in to intervene on the distant world called Tevaral. There the planet’s single huge moon Thesba has become tectonically unstable and will very soon tear itself apart, its massive fragments smashing down onto the surface of Tevaral and utterly destroying it. The wizards’ mission: to extract Tevaral’s hominid population and “raft” them off-planet to new homeworlds before the apocalyptic disaster begins.
There’s only one problem: millions of the people of Tevaral don’t want to go.
Kit, Nita and their thousands of fellow Earth wizards must now race against time to find a way to save all the Tevaralti despite their near-symbiotic relationship with their beloved world and its unique life forms. As doomsday inexorably draws nearer, hope is fading fast, and it seems like it’s going to take a miracle to keep the people of Tevaral from being wiped out. True, wizardry is all about miracles. But will one turn up in time?…
Young Wizards: Lifeboats is a 90,000+ word canonical work in the Young Wizards universe, and is set in February 2011, shortly after the events of the two preceding YW novellas, Not On My Patch and How Lovely Are Thy Branches. These three works together constitute a “transitional trilogy” preceding the events of the forthcoming Games Wizards Play.
The standalone ebook edition of YW: Lifeboats will be available only at Ebooks Direct. A compendium volume, including Lifeboats and its two companion novellas, will be published in both print and ebook formats at Amazon.com in mid-September 2015.
At last we can reveal the cover of Games Wizards Play, which will be released on February 2, 2016, and is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. (The cover artist is our old friend Cliff Nielsen.)
Need to get caught up with the series while you’re waiting for the hardcover? For a limited time, we’re having a 50% off sale on the 9-book box set of the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions. (GWP slots neatly into the new NME timeline, taking place in the spring of 2011.) So grab your copy now!
From over at the Tumblr:
o.o tuebl has all of Young Wizards in the library.
BEST NEWS EVER
It would be if (a) I’d given them permission to have the books, (b) I was getting paid anything for their presence there.
However, (a) I never have, and (b) I’m not.
ETA: To the person who commented on the Tumblr post saying, “writers get paid for libraries carrying their books?” Why, yes, we do. The libraries buy our books to lend out. And we’re glad to have the libraries lend them out as many times as they can after that, because that’s our mutual understanding of what libraries do. Public library sales are traditionally a significant part of any YA writer’s income. Sometimes as much as 10 to 20% of a smallish print run will go to libraries — sometimes more!* — and this can be a significant reason why early print runs of a book “earn out”, thus encouraging your publisher to buy your next book. So libraries, and librarians, are very much our friends. (They would be anyway. But this is an additional reason.)
Also: in some markets, like the UK and Ireland, the author earns additional royalties from the book being lent out by libraries — the more libraries buy and lend your book, the more money you get. This is never a huge sum, but it can be helpful even for the midlist writer. Peter and I just got a payment of this kind from one of our UK agents. It’s hardly a lottery win, but it means that we can replace our suddenly-dying clothes dryer this month instead of sometime in the spring.
Tuebl, however, is not a library in the commonly-understood sense (and certainly not in the public-library sense that Ben Franklin intended when he started the first one in Philly). Tuebl does not pay any writer up front for their books, or for the right to make them available for download. People upload books to Tuebl at will, frequently without any real concern about who owns the copyright. Tuebl then dodges this particular legal bullet by making the assertion that they assume only people who have the rights to upload material are doing so. (It would be really interesting to see how this “assumption” holds up in court when someone eventually gets around to challenging them on it.) Additionally, they offer authors some nebulous possibility of “earn(ing) money by giving your books away for free” — which may or may not work out in the long run: right now my preference is to let other writers do that and tell me how it worked out for them.
If I’d decided to try this experiment for myself, the results, for good or ill, would be my problem to deal with. However, when people take it upon themselves to give away my work for free without my permission — while implying as hard as they can that it is happening with my permission — that gets up my nose enough for me to make an issue of it in public. In particular, I note that somebody or other (having perhaps mistaken me for a vast multinational publishing conglomerate) bought one of my books from my own store and uploaded it at Tuebl for people to download for free.
I sincerely hope people can understand how the above might make me cranky.
(sigh) Anyway. Onward to the next problem…
As an addeddum: someone else (anonymously) asks:
Regarding authors getting paid when a library houses their book(s), what happens when someone donates the book to them? do they still have to pay you?
In countries where “lending rights” laws obtain, yes they do. (In such countries, the money to pay the writers comes from the government. See, for example, this page at the UK site for this program.)
The basic idea behind these laws is that the book wouldn’t be there in the first place if a writer hadn’t spent the time and effort to write it (and also the money necessary to keep themselves alive while writing it), so the writer therefore deserves some return from the lending process, even if it’s just a small one. (The law establishes this as an intellectual property right: see this page for much more background info about how the Public Lending Right is handled across the 53 countries where it’s been implemented.)
Whether books are purchased by the libraries themselves or donated to them, they report their lending figures to the government body that acts as a clearing-house for the data, and this body sees to it that the legally-determined amount of money comes to the authors directly or through their chosen representatives.
*Indications are, from my early royalty statements, that something like 40% of the print run for the original (and now very hard to find) hardcover edition of So You Want To Be A Wizard went to US libraries. This enthusiastic uptake would have been instrumental in Dell agreeing to buy Deep Wizardry.
JD 2455550.52 / December 20th, 2010:
It’s five days till Christmas, and the day before the Winter Solstice. The biggest pre-Christmas blizzard seen for decades is heading straight for the New York metropolitan area. But in one small corner of the Town of Hempstead, everyone’s attention is on other business. That’s because there’s a party tonight at Juan and Marina Rodriguez’s house… and the guest of honor is a being from four hundred lightyears away who looks a whole lot like a Christmas tree.
As so often happens, the motive force behind the festivities is the redoubtable Carmela Rodriguez, intent on fulfilling her longtime intention to fulfill one of the great wishes of the wizard known as Filif — specifically, to finally get him into a full set of Christmas decorations. The two-day party that ensues (with an epic sleepover in the middle) brings together a cast of old and new friends to eat, drink, exchange presents, and see a few things the likes of which this world has never seen before…
This 30,000+ word novelette is a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe and takes place between the events of A Wizard of Mars and the forthcoming Games Wizards Play.
Purchase it for USD $4.99 here in all the major ebook formats:
(*Battle fleet not included)
Tomorrow’s one of the big days in the marketing year for anybody who (like us) sells ebooks. But this year, for many of us, there’s a nervous feeling about the event that hasn’t been there before: because this Cyber Monday could very well be our last.
Here’s the deal, in very broad strokes (because it’s really complicated). Beginning on January 1, 2015, small business people in the European Union who produce and sell digital products directly — downloads of ebooks, music, courses, and so forth — are going to find themselves dealing with a profound change in the way they do business. Once upon a time, if someone in Great Britain bought an ebook from a provider, say, in Germany, they paid the German rate of VAT (that’s Value Added Tax for those of you not familiar with the term: think of it as sales tax) to the seller, and the seller passed that tax payment to their own national revenue service when tax-return time rolled around, and that was it.
Numerous companies, usually large ones, turned this situation to their advantage by setting up shop in countries like Luxembourg (where the VAT was lower than elsewhere in the EU) and selling to other EU countries from there. The law now coming into effect was meant to eliminate that advantage. From January 1st, within the EU, if a UK person buys an ebook from a German ebook producer, the purchaser pays UK-level VAT on it. And the German ebook producer must now remit that collected VAT to the UK tax authorities. The legislation sets up a body in each EU country called MOSS (sometimes VAT MOSS or VATMOSS), short for Mini One Stop Shop. (The link is to the Irish version.)
Rosie Slosek over at One Man Band Accounting has the closest I’ve been able to find to a “master post” on the MOSS / VATMOSS legislation: I recommend you have a look at it, as she lays more of the details of this situation out unusually clearly.
I’m not going to say anything here about whether this change in how things are handled really makes any sense or not (partly because I haven’t had enough time to look into the history of the legislation as yet). Especially since big companies have the money and resources to get around this new situation as they got around the old one. That said, in the meantime, MOSS is the law: right now it simply has to be dealt with. But here are the major problems that come with it:
Many small businesses — the very businesses that European national governments have been touting as the solution to recent economic woes, the way to drive recovering economies back into growth from the bottom up — will be driven to the wall by this change, especially in countries like the UK where there has been a “VAT registration threshold” for income under which one did not have to register unless one made the choice to do so. Many people already working hard to run little digital businesses out of their dining rooms or garages or sheds won’t be able to handle either the expense of the mandatory VAT registration that ensues the very moment you sell something of even €1.00’s value outside your own country, or the burden of keeping (for ten years) the definitive documentation — “two pieces of non-contradictory commercial evidence” for every single sale — to prove that you haven’t sold anything into a region you shouldn’t (with all the craziness that always attends a negative proof), or the increased costs of bookkeeping that are going to accompany compliance with this law.
Additionally, the law as presently framed is insanely unclear in many important areas — possibly because it was framed before many of the present day’s commonplaces regarding internet sales became widespread. Here’s an example for you to start with, from an article in City AM:
“On board transport travelling between different countries in the EU (for example, by boat or train), the consumer location will be the place of departure for the consumer’s journey.”
This means a French person travelling from London to Paris by train, having passed through the Channel Tunnel, could purchase an online subscription, connecting to the French mobile network, with a French IP address, and using a French credit card, but it would be correct for VAT purposes to show this as a UK customer. Getting this wrong risks an unlimited fine, [Boldface mine. DD] even though the VAT rate in both countries is 20 per cent.
Change this just a little — make the purchaser German, with a German smartphone instead of a French one — and add to this the fact that the German SIM in the smartphone is liable to be used as evidence that Germany was the country of sale. Now imagine the joys of explaining this — not just to your local tax authority — but to the two other tax authorities involved, each of whom is empowered by the new regulations to come after you demanding their bite of the cherry. You’re supposed to have “two pieces of non-contradictory commercial evidence”. What happens when all the ones you do have contradict one another?
There are numerous other problems. Who holds the confirming data? How? Where, and in what form? How will problems concerning its authentication be resolved? As matters stand, it’s a nightmare. (ETA: see also Rachel Andrews’ blog post on the merry hell that VATMOSS in its prent state is going to play with the customer experience.)
Soozi Baggs’ Huffington Post article sums things up nicely:
1. This only applies to digital products, so it won’t affect businesses delivering physical products or live services. Which means digital businesses get penalised while other types of small businesses are completely unaffected.
2. This will make building a business incredibly difficult. The current UK threshold allows businesses to grow to a point where they can make an income and afford to take on specialist financial staff before dealing with things like VAT. Many digital entrepreneurs will tell you that they only made a few quid in the first few months. It takes time and traction to build an audience and get your products out there. If you’re liable for VAT and the administrative activities that go with it from day 1, you’re never going to be able to get past those low earning few months – to be able to smash through that VAT threshold and deal with your taxes accordingly.
3. Many low earning digital entrepreneurs are mums who are trying to contribute to the family pot by earning money from sales of digital items, whilst caring full time for their pre-school age children. Or they’re fully intending to build a bigger business, but are doing it slowly – over years rather than months, because they have the childcare responsibility and can only work a few hours a week. Because of this, I firmly feel that this Directive will negatively impact on women who are mothers more than any other type of entrepreneur out there.
In short, this new ruling will be devastating for many people already in business who are not yet making the kind of money to be able to afford to register for VAT. And worse still, it sets the barrier to entry to business very high, which is likely to put off a lot of potential entrepreneurs – especially women who want to start a business on maternity leave and grow it slowly while their kids are young.
So. What to do (besides contacting one’s TDs or MPs or MEPs and trying to get them to bring what pressure to bear on this situation that they can, and signing petitions to help get this issue up onto the mainstream radar)?
Obviously Ebooks Direct — which is based in Ireland — is going to be affected by this situation, and there are a number of things that have to happen before Peter and I come to a decision as to whether we can continue running an online business at all. We have to crunch some numbers from the last few years’ sales to determine exactly what percentage of our sales come from inside the EU, to determine whether it makes most sense to simply stop selling into the UK and other EU countries. We have to talk to our accountants to figure out which of the ways to register for MOSS would be most logical for us, should we decide to go that route. (You can either register with your own home country — who collects all the VAT you collect from EU sales and passes them to the other VAT authorities concerned — or register individually with each of the EU countries into which you’ve sold digital items.) We have to have a talk with the people who run our present shop platform, Shopify, to find out exactly what changes they’re getting ready to enable in the platform to help their EU sellers keep doing business. If they won’t have VATMOSS support in place in time, we’ll also have to start investigating other platforms to see if they’ll have measures in place, for time is getting short. And then finally — like many others in our position — we’re going to have to look at whether compliance is going to make sufficient inroads into our creative time, our actual work as writers, for us to be forced to decide it’s simply not worth it to try to keep running a digital business at all.
Meanwhile, like many other digital booksellers, and as in previous years, we’re having a Cyber Monday sale at Ebooks Direct. (In fact, it’s already on.) If you see something in our store that you like the look of, it seems only sensible to say that this would be a good time to buy it. First, well, it’s a sale, and everything’s 50% off. 🙂 But also — depending on the answers we get from our accountants and so forth — after January 1, you may not be able to buy ebooks directly from us any more. Our store’s continuation is not a “given.”
And this goes not just for us, but for our many other colleagues online, both in Europe and elsewhere in the world, who’re involved in digital startups of one kind or another: they too will suffer. So will our fellow authors who’ve been delighted to find a customer base online for books from their backlists — ebooks their publishers haven’t been interested in bringing out — but now may be forced to abandon that very welcome income stream due to an unclear and unnerving regulatory burden. (Unlimited fines? Really??)
I urge you, whether you’re in Europe or not, to find out how the VAT MOSS issue will affect you (because if you buy digital goods from anyone but the biggest European companies, it will) and to take action now to help — among many others — the authors whose work you enjoy. Follow the #VATMOSS or #VATMESS tags on Twitter, and help get the hashtags trending: sign the online petitions to uphold the present small-business-protecting VAT threshold in countries that have them (such as the UK): on platforms like Tumblr, reblog this post and others like it when they come up: and just plain talk to other people online and off about what’s happening.
And for your assistance in this, thanks in advance, from both of us.
For Black Friday 2013 at Ebooks Direct, everything in the store, everything in our catalog, is 50% off from now until 1 minute before midnight Hawaiian Standard Time on Friday night.
Just use the discount code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout.
“Everything” includes our newest offering, the complete 9-volume set of the revised and updated New Millennium Editions of the Young Wizards series. — an amazing bargain at the one-time sale price of $USD 27.50, just a shade over $3 per ebook!
There are all kinds of goodies on offer — from DD’s standalone fantasy novels like the urban fantasy / police procedural Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses and the historical fantasy Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South, to Peter Morwood’s “Clan Wars” prequels Greylady and Widowmaker (out of print for a time from their UK publisher, but now available exclusively here in updated versions) and his classic “Tales of Old Russia” series, both in individual volumes and the new 3-volume omnibus ebook.
Also on sale in our store for the first time this year are Gift Cards… and your 50% discount is good for those too. Spend $25 and give a friend $50.00’s worth of holiday reading to enjoy at their leisure!
All our books are available in the major ebook formats, all are DRM-free, and many are available in multi-format bundles at no extra cost (because why should you have to pay extra just because you have more than once device?) All you have to do is use the discount code / coupon code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout. (A walkthrough showing how to use our discount codes when checking out is here.)
So relax and explore what our store has to offer! You don’t even have to move from wherever your computer or mobile device is (that’s got to be a relief…). And you can also sign up for our general mailing list in the footer at the bottom of any bookstore page if you’d like to be kept informed of new releases across the store.
In any case, whatever you do, have a super Black Friday!
In the heart of Dublin, something is killing the People of the Hills — and it’s going to take Ireland’s only superhero to stop it…
Bloomsday is almost upon us, so here’s a little something to help celebrate the occasion.
“Herself” was originally written for the 2004 anthology of Irish fantasy, Emerald Magic, and differs from most other stories in that anthology in that it’s urban fantasy, set in pre-economic-crash Dublin. It was a very different time, now looked back on in Ireland as often with a kind of loathing as with longing: and the story tells of a danger that walked the streets of the Fair City in those days, and how some of the town’s more unusual residents dealt with it.
Sometimes when Bloomsday rolls around it’s available for reading here (under the cut). It’s gone right now, but if you’re interested in reading it you can pick up a copy of the collection in which it appears, “Uptown Local” and Other Interventions.
Teenage wizards Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez have been working the New York suburbs for nearly thirty years now, through nine novels’ worth of adventures. As the dawn of their fourth decade in print draws near, the long-planned updating of the Young Wizards series continues with the Ebooks Direct release of the fifth novel in the series: The Wizard’s Dilemma.
You can find out more about the update project as a whole here. All nine books will be updated by the end of 1Q of 2013, and all brought into alignment with the new (2008-2011-based) timeline.
ETA: Dilemma is also now available at Ebooks Direct as part of the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions 9-volume box set.
A little about the story:
Sometimes even wizardry isn’t enough…
For the first time ever, friends and wizardly partners Nita and Kit seem to be having trouble communicating. They argue over a spell to clean up the pollution in part of New York’s Great South Bay, and from that point on, they can’t seem to connect on anything. Is it adolescence that’s tearing them apart or something more profound?
Nita breaks away from Kit to work on her own for a while — and then is jolted by a terrible and unexpected blow as her mother falls ill and is rushed into the hospital.
What’s even more horrifying for Nita than the mere fact of her mother’s illness is the possibility that nothing — not surgery, not even wizardry — will be able to keep her mom alive.
But Nita refuses to let her mother go down without a fight. Soon she’s on a mission to seek her mom’s cure: a journey that takes her across universes, and out of them, to the only place where she can learn the skills that may help her save her mother’s life.
What she doesn’t foresee is the terrible way in which this journey will once again bring her face-to-face with the Lone Power, the source of all death in the universe. That Power has been Nita’s worst enemy since she first started her practice of wizardry. Now, though, the Lone One and the bargain It offers her may be her mother’s only hope….
Reviewers say:
“A harrowing but triumphant affirmation of the power of the human spirit. Powerful and satisfying on many levels.” (Kirkus Reviews: starred review)
“A gripping and dynamic fantasy.” (VOYA)
Writing projects sometimes get started in unusual ways.
Some time back in early 2007 I was chatting electronically with an old friend and former neighbor, the gifted Somtow Sucharitkul — a splendid writer and (at least) equally splendid musician and composer, now the artistic director of the Bangkok Opera. And somewhere along the line, Somtow said to me: “Want to write a children’s book?”
I couldn’t see why on Earth not.
Somtow put me in touch with a charming Geneva-based lady named Beth Krasna. She was working with UNESCO on a series of children’s / young adult short novels that were meant to illustrate what the experience of childhood was in various different countries. Beth and I discussed the project for a while, and after more than twenty years spent living in Ireland, I thought I had enough background on the subject — especially through watching nearly a generation of the neighbors’ children grow up,and spending a lot of time talking to them — to tackle the subject.
The concept was of even greater interest to me than than usual because of how different a place Ireland has become over the last twenty years. The apparent miracle of the “Celtic Tiger” brought people from all over the world to work in Ireland, and Irish society found itself faced with the need to become multicultural in a big hurry. This need (as you might guess) was never going to be perfectly met. When so small an island, far more used to periodic emigration, suddenly has to absorb large numbers of immigrating people from cultures and ethnicities that in many cases had never been seen here before, there were always going to be problems with retooling the national infrastructure to cope. And when the people who’ve always lived in such a place—long poor and isolated and used to thinking of itself as “hard done by”—suddenly find their home culture apparently under siege by an army of work-seeking foreigners who’ve brought their own cultures with them, the local atmosphere can become unusually challenging.
All of this was on my mind when I started planning the book. So when the protagoniste turned up on the creative doorstep one morning, it didn’t surprise me at all to find that she was the daughter of a Nigerian professional and her native Irish husband. Uchenna and her buddies—a single-parented American immigrant named Emer, and a youngster from the Irish Traveling community named Jimmy—shortly grabbed me and walked me into a tale of the changing Dublin suburbs — though one that developed a touch of mystery as it unfolded. As I worked, my younger neighbors were glad to fill me in on some of the fine points when I had questions about details. Other matters I didn’t have to query: anyone who’s lived here long enough can feel the tension of the Ireland that is as it strains against the memories and expectations of the Ireland that was.
I wrote the book between 2007 and 2008 and turned it in. To the general disappointment of Beth and myself, the economic madness that started in 2008 and got steadily worse thereafter meant that a print publisher couldn’t be found. The contract ran its course, and the rights for the book recently became unencumbered and returned to me.
So here it is now for you to read as an ebook, in all the major formats. (Print publication will follow later in the year.)
Enjoy!
Teenage wizards Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez have been working the New York suburbs for nearly thirty years now, through nine novels’ worth of adventures. As the dawn of their fourth decade in print draws near, the long-planned updating of the Young Wizards series continues with the Ebooks Direct release of the fourth novel in the series: A Wizard Abroad.
Abroad, like So You Want to Be a Wizard (book 1 of the Young Wizards series), Deep Wizardry (book 2), and High Wizardry (book 3), now appears in a New Millennium Edition that’s been extensively edited and updated for the present century.
You can find out more about the update project as a whole here. All nine books will be updated by the end of 1Q of 2013, and all brought into alignment with the new (2008-2011-based) timeline.
A little about the story:
There’s magic across the Atlantic…
NitaCallahan’s mom and dad are beginning to get the idea that she and her fellow wizard Kit are “spending a little too much time together”. So — explaining that they want to give their daughter a little vacation from wizardry — they pack Nita off for a month-long stay with her eccentric aunt at her farm in Ireland. But this turns out to have been a bad move on Nita’s parents’ part, since Ireland is even more steeped in magical doings than the United States.
Reviewers say:
“Duane seamlessly interweaves encounters with creatures from legend with glimpses of modern Irish life and teen culture… So clever and well reasoned that readers will have no trouble suspending disbelief.” (School Library Journal)
“An engaging fantastical tale… Definitely worth reading.” (Book Trust)
“Suitable for a wide range of readers. The colourful descriptions and imaginative characters create an exciting read… found it difficult to put the book down.” (Platform)
Teenage wizards Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez have been working the New York suburbs for nearly thirty years now, through nine novels’ worth of adventures. As the dawn of their fourth decade in print draws near, the long-planned updating of the Young Wizards series is at last underway.
Available now at Ebooks Direct is the third novel in the series, High Wizardry.
Like So You Want to Be a Wizard (book 1 of the Young Wizards series) and Deep Wizardry (book 2), High Wizardry now appears in a New Millennium Edition that has been extensively edited and updated for the present century.
You can find out more about the update project as a whole here. All nine books will be updated by the end of 1Q of 2013, and all brought into alignment with the new (2008-based) timeline.
(For those who’re interested: A Wizard Abroad, the fourth of the oldest group of Young Wizards novels, will be available next week. Please check the blog or the front page at Ebooks Direct for more news on the availability date.)
A little about the story:
Magic doesn’t stop where the atmosphere does…
Don’t take shrewd, eleven-year-old Dairine Callahan for just any bratty younger sibling. Impatient for adventure, knowledge, and recognition, maybe even a little jealous of her wizardly older sister, Dairine comes across Nita’s copy of the Wizard’s Manual and reads the Wizard’s Oath aloud….
Disappointingly, nothing seems to happen. But when her family’s new computer arrives, Dairine discovers that it’s come with a whole lot more than the usual bundled software. The computer contains a beta version of the new online edition of the Wizard’s Manual. Wrapped up inside it is a whole world’s worth of spells, secrets and magical knowledge…and it’s all hers to play with.
Never the kind to do anything by halves, Dairine launches herself into a reckless, cross-universe, high-voltage magical conflict with the implacable enemy of all wizards and wizardry, the Lone Power. It falls to Nita and Kit to track Dairine down before she gets into trouble so deep that not even her precocious brains can save her.
But by the time they catch up with her, it’s already too late. On a bleak and empty world, Dairine has already become the wizardly godmother to a brand new life-form. And the relentless Enemy of all new life is even now hot on her trail, intent on ending the threat Dairine poses… permanently.
Reviewers say:
“The sheer effrontery of the plot — coupled with the gritty charm of the characters and the sprightly dialogue of these credible siblings — makes for enormous fun.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Duane is tops in the high adventure business… This rollicking yarn will delight readers.” (Publishers Weekly)
“There’s a pacing that doesn’t let up from the very beginning. And even more than that, there’s a Heinleinesque affection for the characters. Duane writes about people you can really care about, with lots of quirks and endearing traits that feel real in a way most writers don’t manage. High Wizardry is… high entertainment.” (Locus)
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