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Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

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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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Cool wordsFeaturedWords and usageWriting

The Green-Eyed Verb

by Diane Duane May 31, 2013

A week or so ago I was reading the Richard Burton translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night (or the Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, as some more modern translators would have it.) This is always fun for a whole slew of reasons — the language of its rendering, alternately graceful and robust; the vocabulary (as a translator Burton was often enough imperfect, but at least he was eruditely imperfect), and for the complexities of the story itself, never dumbed down or infantilized. (I was trying to avoid the word unexpurgated, but never mind, there it is. The Nights are full of sex and [yes, illegal] booze and general moral and ethical chicanery that never make it into the kids’ versions of the stories.)

I had dug in near the beginning to keep things simple. Well, relatively simple… since the composer of the Nights loves nesting you six levels deep in interlocking stories before you know what’s happened to you. This is exactly what happens when you come in at the famous-from-Disney’s-atomic-energy-metaphor “Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinn”. You know the one — fisherman casts his net and draws up a brazen vessel, a bottle stoppered with lead;  opens bottle and releases genie seriously pissed off at his thousand years of incarceration who is now intent on killing fisherman: panicked but still-wily fisherman tricks genie back into bottle and makes him change his tune. That one.

Anyway, before you know it the fisherman has tricked the genie back into the bottle and the genie’s trying to sweet-talk his way out of it again. “No way,” the fisherman says, “you’re just trying to pull the same crap on me that the Vizier of King Yunan tried to pull with the Sage of Duban.” “Oh really? What was that?” the genie says (rather desperately, as you might imagine). And the Fisherman then begins to tell the Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Duban. (And shortly the Sage will tell a story about King Sindabad and his Falcon, and King Sindabad in turn will start telling someone a story about the Husband and the Parrot, and you can see where this is going, I’m sure.)

Anyway. The King Yunan whose story the Fisherman now tells is proof of the old saying that Money Isn’t Everything and that it’s important to At Least Have Your Health. He has “a leprosy” (or at least a serious skin condition) for which his physicians have been treating him unsuccessfully for a good long while, making him drink noxious potions and rubbing him down with nasty unguents and sticking endless pills and powders down his throat, but nothing’s helped. At length, however, the Sage Duban comes through town. And he is

…a mighty healer of men and one well stricken in years… This man was a reader of books, Greek, Persian, Roman, Arabian, and Syrian; and he was skilled in astronomy and in leechcraft, the theorick as well as the practick; he was experienced in all that healeth and that hurteth the body; conversant with the virtues of every plant, grass and herb, and their benefit and bane; and he understood philosophy and had compassed the whole range of medical science and other branches of the knowledge tree.

So this guy is plainly the real deal. He visits the king, checks out his symptoms, and tells the King that he can cure him without pills or potions or lotions or other topical fuss. Needless to say, King Yunan is delighted and tells the Sage that if he can pull this off, he will be showered with gifts and rewards and will be made “a cup-companion and a friend” to the King. (Serious business, that, of being the one who gets to sit up late with a ruler and drink [illegal] mind-loosening booze and — theoretically — hear his secrets.)

So the Sage goes off and that night does mysterious medical and pharmaceutical things with, get this, a polo mallet. The next morning he says to the King, “Take this mallet and go out and play hard with your team today, and work up a serious sweat. The medication with which this mallet is impregnated will be imbibed by your skin and do its work. When you’re done, go off to the hammam and do your ablutions, and then go to sleep. And in the morning you’ll be cured.”

And as unlikely as all this sounds, that’s exactly how it goes down, and the King wakes up to find his skin “all clean as fair silver”. Needless to say, he is very pleased. And the predicted showering-with-gifts of the Sage begins.

But not everybody is pleased. Here Burton says —

Now the King had a Wazir among his Wazirs, unsightly to look upon, an ill-omened spectacle; sordid, ungenerous, full of envy and evil will. When this Minister saw the King place the physician near him and give him all these gifts, he jealoused him and planned to do him a harm, as in the saying on such subject, “Envy lurks in every body;” and the saying, “Oppression hideth in every heart: power revealeth it and weakness concealeth it…”

— but actually I’d lost the plot about half a sentence previously.

He jealoused him?!

What a fabulous word! How vigorous and straightforward and personal and nasty! You can just hear distant echoes of someone spitefully tweeting U R JUST JELUS.

Question was, though: was this some coining of Burton’s (as he does that kind of thing when he feels the need) or something genuine and/or genuinely period, and simply misplaced? Because, for example, you can say that you envy someone and (in past tense) that you envied them. Why not this? Maybe it just fell out of usage?

I went straight for the Oxford English Dictionary for more data. And to my great delight, the usage is legit. The OED confirms it — under both “jaloused” and “jealoused” spellings, adding that it also meant “was suspicious of, suspected” — and cites examples dating back to the late 1600’s. One 1780 citation says, “The brethren did very much fear and jealouse… Mr. Sharpe”.

So this is a cool thing to know. My only regret is that I can’t think of a way to use it in something modern.

Yet.

(Oh, by the way, the Sage Duban comes out of this okay. When the envious Wazir badmouths the Sage to the King, the King immediately realizes what he’s trying to pull, and says, “Ridiculous! You’re speaking this way from mere envy and jealousy, the way they say King Sindabad did.” And he would have started in right then and dumped us another level deep in story, except that

Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day
and ceased to say her permitted say.

…Which seems like a good idea at the moment. )

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May 31, 2013
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EuropeFeaturedHome life

Year 26: Status: unchanged

by Diane Duane February 8, 2013

On this day twenty-six years ago, I got married (for the first time*) to the coolest man on Earth.

There he is in a pic I took of him some months previously, by the boathouse on Central Park Lake. That afternoon seems like about ten minutes ago, some ways. And even after two and a half decades spent being with this man and learning his complexities, the experience never gets old. My life and my work would be utterly empty without him: his presence and his gifts inform everything I do.

He contains multitudes. Hotshot novelist, gourmet cook, indefatigable researcher (“Are you still on TV Tropes??”), crazed modeller, retrotech geek, artist, sound effects specialist, raconteur, friend of all cats (especially big ones) and softie about all cute things, eagle-eyed pilot, militaria expert, swordsman and screenwriter, connoisseur of fountain pens and typewriters, sex god, ever-understanding confidant, protector and defender, best friend, kindly and incisive critic, Calvin to my Susie: he is all of these and more… way more.

Peter, I love you.

Bring on the next twenty-six years.

*There were two weddings: one in LA to get the paperwork handled, and the second on in Boston so that the maximum number of friends could be there.

February 8, 2013
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FeaturedHome life

Twenty-five years

by Diane Duane February 8, 2012

On this day twenty-five years ago, I got married (for the first time*) to the coolest man on Earth.

There he is in a pic I took of him some months previously, by the boathouse on Central Park Lake. That afternoon seems like about ten minutes ago, some ways. And even after two and a half decades spent being with this man and learning his complexities, the experience never gets old. My life and my work would be utterly empty without him: his presence and his gifts inform everything I do.

He contains multitudes. Hotshot novelist, gourmet cook, indefatigable researcher (“Are you still on TV Tropes??”), crazed modeller, retrotech geek, artist, sound effects specialist, raconteur, friend of all cats (especially big ones) and softie about all cute things, eagle-eyed pilot, militaria expert, swordsman and screenwriter, connoisseur of fountain pens and typewriters, sex god, ever-understanding confidant, protector and defender, best friend, kindly and incisive critic, Calvin to my Susie: he is all of these and more… way more.

Peter, I love you.

Bring on the next twenty-five years.

*There were two weddings: one in LA to get the paperwork handled, and the second on in Boston so that the maximum number of friends could be there.

February 8, 2012
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ebooksFeaturedKindleYoung Wizards

New: the complete 9-volume Young Wizards International Editions ebook package

by Diane Duane August 10, 2011

We’ve just added complete single-download sets of the nine Young Wizards International Editions to the Ebooks Direct store.

Each of these download packages contains all the Young Wizards novels in their international editions, from So You Want to Be a Wizard through A Wizard of Mars. You can download the package as .ePub / Nook files, as Kindle / .mobi files, and also as a bundled download containing all the novels in both formats.

Buying the International Editions this way will save you more than 20% off the price of buying all the books separately.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 10, 2011
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The Tale of the Five, and a gauntlet
ebooksFeaturedWriting

Since you were asking: The Door into Starlight

by Diane Duane July 15, 2011
eries

ETA, 6 November 2016: The social-media initiative originally mentioned in the body of this post is long over. However, the STARLIGHTGUILT discount at Ebooks Direct has been reinstated for those desiring to continue inflicting guilt: read the post for more details. Thank you for your interest!

First thing this morning, as usual, I fumbled around on the bedside table and grabbed for the smartphone to see what interesting things had happened while I was asleep. And there in the shiny new Google+ app (thank you Colm!) what do I see, in reaction to the notification about the upload of the new edition of the Middle Kingdoms omnibus yesterday, but:

“Were there any more books in the series planned? I remember reading these three several years ago and thinking the last one felt a little incomplete.”

“Now that someone else started it (cough) A Door into Starlight please?(cough)”

And on Twitter:

“Speaking of which, is The Door into Starlight still under construction or did it get abandoned?”

“The Door Into Starlight is the book I’ve been anticipating most for the longest. Every time you mention Middle Kingdoms I get giddy!”

…And I lay there in bed for a while (assisted by the excellent Cat Goodman, who came to help with my cogitations by lying on my chest and digging his claws in just above my collarbones… I swear, I think sometimes that cat distrusts gravity…) and started composing possible responses, each one of which I immediately virtually tore up on the grounds that I hadn’t yet had any caffeine.

I’ve had the caffeine now (and am also considering some Malt-O-Meal, as it’s a July morning afternoon in Ireland and the local temperature’s about what it would be in the Alps in April).  So I’m in a better place to deal with the question. It is, after all, one I get occasionally at US conventions (and in the past, at some of the UK ones). Somebody will corner me in the bar, or after a panel, and say:

“What about The Door into Starlight? It’s been more than twenty years since the series started.”

“Yes indeed, it has. In fact, it’s been more than thirty, but who’s counting?”

“So where is it already?”

“It’s in progress, and I work on it now and then.  I have a lot of scattered bits and pieces of it, with a lot of huge empty gaps between them that need to be filled in so that the whole thing works. As I’ve said before: I know how it starts, and I know how it ends – I have done since I finished The Door into Fire. But oy, the middle! …In the meantime, since my family would not appreciate starving for my art, I do other work as well. Other books, the occasional movie. Starlight I’ll get around to again when I have the inclination and the leisure.” And there has been an additional reason for the non-completion lurking in the background, but mostly I don’t introduce that into these conversations.

Most of the time the questioning stops here, and people change the subject and go off to do something else, like abuse George R.R. Martin about A Dance with Dragons.  (And here I pause to wave at George, who I’ve known for a long time, and grin. How satisfying this week must be for him [setting aside the way Amazon.de did a whoopsie with the book’s shipment embargo]. Yet at the same time,  the fans will be screaming at George for the next one within hours, if not minutes. Such is the writer’s life.)

Yet as regards Starlight, the questions have been getting a little more persistent lately. Could it possibly be because I’ll be turning 60 shortly?  🙂   (And to the person who Tweeted me a month or so back in the wake of the European  E. coli outbreak, telling me to please write Starlight before I died, and then hastily erased the message? Whoops, I saw it first! And no, you weren’t just kidding: I know the signs. You think I didn’t have such thoughts about George McDonald Fraser and the specific Flashman books I wished to God he would get on with before he expired? But under no circumstances whatsoever would I ever had said as much to the man. Tsk, tsk! Anyway,  I forgive you.)

Let me assure everybody that it is my intention to write The Door into Starlight before I die. Mostly for the good and sufficient reason that I said I would. But I’ve been in no particular hurry about it, as there has been a dirty secret in the way, one that’s kept me from making more of an effort to find the time to finish the last book in this series. And it’s this:

These books have never sold all that well, suggesting that not that many people are interested in reading the last one.

If there’s a more painful admission for a professional writer to make, I’m not sure what it would be. Deep down I suspect most of us wish that everything we write could be a vast worldwide hit and that people would climb over one another’s bodies to get at them. But it doesn’t usually work out that way. And although the Middle Kingdoms universe was my first one, and a place I love dearly, the numbers suggest that those who share the love are (in the publishing sense) relatively few. This truth doesn’t cripple me. A series set in a quasi-medieval alternate Earth with a kinda-pansexual culture was always going to be aimed at a rather niche market.

And another aspect of this truth is that the series has never done all that well in sales in any of its editions.  Fire earned out, but paid royalties (in its various US editions) for only a couple/few years, then went out of print when Dell SF went under.  Shadow came into print, earned out and paid maybe a couple of years’ worth of royalties, then went OOP as well. And if I remember correctly,  Sunset never earned out on either side of the Atlantic. (All the books came into print at one time in the UK as part of a deal with Transworld/Corgi in the 90’s, but they didn’t fare well there either. All went OOP in short order, though there were complicating factors in that the books lost their Corgi editors early on — said editors leaving the publisher to go freelance. A book without an in-house editor to shepherd it through the pre-sales process tends not to do well, and these, unfortunately, were no exception.)

…Anyway, you see how this is going? If this trend was to continue, then if I did write Starlight, I’d probably have to pay people to read it.

🙂  …Okay, maybe that was facetious. But the sales record cannot be ignored.  The last publisher to be interested in the series was Meisha Merlin: we did indeed have an agreement to publish Starlight, for a very small advance, and I restarted work on it. But then MM sadly went under.  And when I next discussed the question of Starlight with my agent, a year or so after the fact, he told me gently that after inquiries, no other publisher had any interest whatsoever in the fourth book (because publishing the last book of an OOP series is almost never done). So I should set the idea aside and turn my attention to other things.

So the only other way for this book to see the light of day is through self-publication. Yes, certainly the self-pub model has changed very significantly in the last couple years. (And to this I say HURRAY for the new options it offers both the beginning writer and the established one.) But it nonetheless brings with it a new set of unknowns. And though those who contact me about The Door into Starlight without a shadow of a doubt really want to see it, I have to consider the situation with a cold eye, because it’s possible that their message, however heartfelt, nonetheless translates at this end as,  “We want you to sit down and spend hundreds of hours of your (theoretically) paying writing time on something that will make us very happy but may never pay you even minimum wage.”

Am I wrong about this?

If I am, give me a sign.

(ETA 6 Nov 2016: As mentioned above, the social-media-sourced interest-gauging effort that previously followed the above request is long over, and has been removed.  However: Part of it involved a 15%-off discount at Ebooks Direct, using the discount code STARLIGHTGUILT, which those interested could use to (a) get a price break on ebooks and (b) while doing so, send the author a fairly concrete message conveying their interest in TDIStarlight.  This code has been reinstated and can now again be used by those interested for all purchases in the store, even in conjunction with other sale offers ([as long as those don’t also involve codes: the store can’t handle two codes in a transaction.] So knock yourselves out.) 🙂

…So let’s see what happens. Meanwhile, I’m going to go off and see about that Malt-O-Meal.

Five years later, in 2016: Time to make a choice, I’d say. 

Having had a good many months to consider the (fairly positive) response to the above post, and (finally) being at a point in my general work schedule where it’s become realistic to start moving forward, I’ve moved The Door Into Starlight onto my work schedule for 2017-18. Please note that I will from this point on be making only general statements about progress — don’t expect word counts or bar graphs. I will not discuss any dates until I have a completed first draft in hand and have had time to talk to my agent about where to go next. So wish me luck… if there is any such thing. 🙂

Meanwhile, this is the page at MiddleKingdoms.com to watch for further news on this subject. (It also contains links for various mailing lists you can sign up to if you’re interested in receiving periodic newsletters on progress,)

The Door Into Starlight

…Thanks, all.

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July 15, 2011
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ComicsFeaturedHome lifeWriting

In brightest day, in blackest night…

by Diane June 18, 2011

ETA:  Now with a better image of Mogo!! … I originally posted this piece of writing some years back when there was a Green Lantern-drawing meme going around. But this weekend I had reason to think of it again, what with all the GL-oriented stuff going on.

Many, many moons ago I did some writing for Bob Greenberger when he was editing Tales of the Green Lantern Corps. I’ve always been very fond of the Corps, as might possibly be understandable for someone who came to comics more or less hot from E. E. “Doc” Smith’s “Lensman” novels. The fondness continues: certainly the Young Wizards owe something to them, and to the general Band-of-Brothers trope that underlies the Corps’ ethos.

Anyway, this (with a short preamble) is a copy of the comic script I wrote for Bob.

And here also is an image of Mogo, that member of the Corps best known for “not socializing”.  (See also here and here for additional info.) I’ve always really liked Mogo. There’s a wallpaper too: click here or on the image to download it from Box.net. The dimensions are 1920×1200. (This is yet another piece of digital art produced using Terragen 2.0. The cloud cover isn’t perfect yet, but this doesn’t look too bad. Also: please note that the sun-on-ocean effect in the thumbnail image isn’t as pronounced in the wallpaper. I’m trying to work out why.)

June 18, 2011
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FeaturedHome lifeMediaRaetian TalesWriting

Today's cool thing: "A Wind from the South" coming to an audiobook near you!

by Diane Duane June 9, 2011
 

I had an email from my NY agent about this late yesterday, and all the principals are agreed on the main details, so I don’t see any particular point in waiting for the paperwork before telling the world.

Apparently the good folks at Audible have been seeking out books to adapt to the audiobook format — whether they’re conventionally published or not. And they’re signing on to make an audiobook out of Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South. (With an option to also do the next volume in the series when written.)

This is super! I’m so buzzed.

For those of you who want to pick up a copy so you’ll be in a position to judge the results when the audiobook comes out, you can get the ebook from the DD.com Ebooks Direct store here (cheapest, no DRM, both ePub and Kindle / .mobi available); from Amazon (Kindle / .mobi only, a little more expensive but more convenient if you’ve already got your details stored there: btw, thanks for the nice reviews, folks…); or if you prefer, acquire a print “trade paperback” copy of the book from Lulu.com.

Whee! Thanks, Audible!

June 9, 2011
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Current eventsEuropeFeaturedHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeMedicine, nursing, healthPsychology / psychiatry

The Eyes in the Peacock’s Tail

by Diane Duane June 7, 2011

Once upon a time, the King of the Greek gods, Zeus, was getting ready to cheat on his wife again. His latest target was a beautiful mortal girl named Io, whose resistance he’d been wearing down by sending her a series of racy dreams of which he was the star. Having finally arrived on her doorstep to make his case in person, Zeus wrapped the two of them and that whole region of the world in a thick black cloud to hide the incipient goings-on.

This was a serious tactical error. Zeus’s wife Queen Hera noticed the peculiar change in the weather, checked Olympus to see if her husband the Cloudgatherer was on site, and – not finding him there – immediately put two and two together and headed for the area of sudden overcast. She dispersed the clouds and found herself looking at her husband and an extremely lovely (and one must assume, confused-looking) white cow, which Zeus explained had sprung from Mother Earth just that minute.  Not even slightly fooled, Hera promptly confiscated the cow, and assigned to guard her – or rather, to make sure her husband didn’t get anywhere near her – one of her security staff, a creature by the name of Argus. Argus was completely covered with eyes that stared in every direction and saw everything for miles around. The eyes even slept in shifts, so that the watcher’s pitiless regard was inescapable by night or day. Hera went off confident that her husband’s case was well handled.

Myths being what they are, of course, such a situation can’t last. Zeus quickly has words with Olympus’s resident thief, trickster and inside-job man, Hermes, who disguises himself as a handsome shepherd boy and  shows up in the flowery meadow where Argus is guarding Io. There he proceeds to bore all Argus’s eyes to sleep by telling him serial tales of mortal romance.* Then, when the last of Argus’s eyes fall asleep, Hermes pulls out his sword and kills him, signaling, if not the end of Io’s troubles, at least the beginning of the end. Later on the frustrated Hera winds up putting all of Argus’s eyes in the tail of her favorite bird, the peacock — probably as a reminder to Zeus that at least this once she caught him in near-flagrante — and over the subsequent centuries Argus’s name becomes a metaphor for unsleeping watchfulness.

The world is full of people who appoint themselves to roles like Argus’s, as would-be watchers and guardians. Sometimes they’re even useful in those roles. Their motives aren’t always suspect: sometimes they genuinely mean well. But good intentions aren’t always enough. And sometimes these can lead the would-be guardians into serious mistakes, especially when their intelligence (in the informational sense) is incomplete or poor.

It looks like we’ve just seen an example of this in a recent Wall Street Journal article, which spends a while purporting to analyze the “fitness for purpose” of some modern-day young adult fiction, the kind that deals openly with difficult topics like self-harm. The reactions to the article’s assertions have been widespread and passionate. Readers and writers alike have responded at length, and lots more opinions and links to them, short and long, are to be found on Twitter filed under the #YASaves hashtag.

Having read the article, though, I found myself reacting most strongly to two specific passages that jumped out at me: and the reactions came on two different levels.

The first passage really annoys me as a former psychiatric professional:

“Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.”

“Indeed, likely –”? I’m ready to be shown the clinical study that underlies and supports this statement. So sweeping a generalization has no business being made in a public forum without a solid underpinning of fact. What fact  I can bring to this issue is that in my time as a psychiatric nurse who worked with adolescent / young teenage patients, I never came across a single case that supports any aspect of the columnist’s opinion. If she can produce any evidence to reinforce her claim besides what I strongly suspect is wishful thinking, I’ll be glad to examine it and draw my own conclusions as to its validity.

But I really doubt there is any such data. And if (as I suspect) that conclusion just came out of the columnist’s head as a feeling or a theory, or was a vague summation of even vaguer third-person anecdotal material, I have one word for it: CODSWALLOP.

What I found while doing one-to-one therapy with adolescent patients is that to successfully start working through their problems, what they initially needed more than anything else was confirmation and acknowledgement from those around them that the problems existed in the first place – that they weren’t unique or alone in their situation, that other people knew about it and that it was real. Books dealing with the problem in question were and are often a useful tool to help that acknowledgement get started, and even (in some cases) in getting a patient past their own denial that they had any such difficulty at all.

When I was practicing, such books were often painfully dry and didactic, and I wish there’d been more young adult fiction available on such subjects… for fiction (especially when done well) tends to lecture less than nonfiction and is more likely to be successfully internalized because you’re hearing, not a dry recitation of fact, but someone’s voice. Young adult novels that deal honestly with such issues unquestionably have value for teens groping their way toward understanding of how to tackle their problems. They invite them into the dialogue: they make the troubled teen part of the solution. And at the very least, they let their readers know that they’re not alone. There are times when that knowledge is enough to mean the difference between life and death. Here, without any doubt whatever, YA really does save.

A side issue here: there are probably some who think I have no dog in this particular race, since my YA books are not known for dealing with edgy teen issues, and also have no explicit sex, not a lot of violence, and language not much stronger than the “crap” level. This is personal preference for me, a matter of style. But I support my colleagues who are working the grittier and more uncomfortable part of the young adult coalface, and I strongly dislike the casual, if not outright mischievous, mischaracterization of their works in the columnist’s article. She has done them a disservice, and owes them an apology… which unfortunately I doubt will be forthcoming.

So much for that. Now for the other statement, the one that got up my nose in my role as a former teenager:

It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person’s life between more and less desirable options.

…Oh really, now. Every other aspect? And not just distinctions, I bet, but decisions. So there are no areas in which the child or young adult can be considered competent to have his or her own opinions, and make his or her own choices, without having them vetted and pre-ratified by the ever-watchful parent? (Because from the WSJ article, you get a strong feeling that when Mommy Says No about, for example, a book — well, the poor young adult just gets to pull on his or her PJs and go to bed early: there’s no mechanism for appeal.)

I really hope that’s not what the columnist is suggesting, because I don’t know about the rest of you, but it sounds like Hell on earth to me. And that would not just be because I’m one of a generation who would have laughed out loud at the very idea of my parents organizing, for example, when (or if) I went out to play, or who or what I played with. In my spare time I went where I pleased, lay out in green fields for prolonged periods staring at the sky and doing nothing remotely “useful” or educational, adventured widely through my neighborhood unsupervised, climbed trees and fell out of them, stayed out after dark (having informed my mom that I’d be doing so), and had a secret place to go and read where I spent hours on end, with no need to account for my movements to anybody. To have somebody ruling yes/no on every aspect of my life until I was eighteen? There’s a word for that kind of life. It’s jail. (And some of you will probably recall J.R.R. Tolkien coming up with something similar in a discussion of the value of the literature of escape. “Who are the people most concerned with the possibility of escape?” he asked. “The jailers.”)

I do not accept that life for kids is all that much more dangerous than it was when I grew up. I just don’t. The difference between now and fifty years ago is that we now openly discuss the dangers that were often only whispered about half a century ago. Yes, the new millennium has thrown up many new and different threats to the concept of the peaceful and safe childhood (itself something of a construct, but that’s a subject for another post). But those threats and challenges ought to be met in some other way than locking the kids up in a virtual tower until they’re eighteen. The fairy tales (always a treasury of useful archetype) tell us straightforwardly what happens to such children.

Under no circumstances am I questioning a parent’s right or responsibility to protect his or her children from danger. But I do think we’re building the protective fences way too high. Unfortunately, the sensationalistic focus of mass media on unusual events like the kidnapping, abuse and/or murder of children has successfully exploited the increasingly anxious love and cynically fanned the fears of a whole generation of parents, until they genuinely think it right that everything about their children’s lives must be rigidly controlled until they are no longer legally responsible for them.  People who advocate some kind of return to common sense in these matters are practically condemned as the Antichrist. Freedom? That’s something a child will be allowed to experience only after it turns eighteen. Or maybe after it exits college at age twenty-one or thereabouts, and starts trying to find employment sufficient to pay off those pesky student loans. Until then, many North American parents are trapped in their role as frazzled, Argus-eyed controllers of their children’s mobility, their after-school activities, their diet, their access to money, their online activity, and a whole lot of their entertainment.**

Books, though, are revealing an interesting chink in this theoretically all-encompassing defense. Some parents are apparently beginning to find books scary because they’re not like the ones they read when they were kids… and because they understand from firsthand experience that books interact directly with the imagination in an essentially noncontrollable way that movies and TV and computer games do not. After all, when you sit down to watch a TV show or a movie with your child, you can at least verify that you’re being presented with the same imagery and deriving generally the same meanings from it. But you can’t be sure of that with a book: the reader does so much of the work in his or her own head. As a result, the hypercontrolling parents whose attitudes are reflected in the WSJ article sometimes seem to act as if they consider books to be a potential delivery system for some dangerous drug that will overwhelm their child’s defenseless mind. (The concept that the child might be able to stand aside from the book’s content and evaluate it independently before accepting or rejecting it is of course rejected out of hand.)

But I think this attitude is a pointer toward the underlying problem responsible for the article’s tone of righteous (and frightened) indignation. The presence of all these awful books on the market suggests that there must be a lot of young adults reading them – kids who are obviously out of the absolute control of their parents! (Horrors.) And this undeniable fact will surely provoke, in the hypercontrolling parent, a fear that their own defenseless child might possibly listen, not to the parent, but some book-pushing friend, and read one of these deadly objects… and the parent won’t be able to stop them from internalizing the contents. This will be due to a terrible truth that no hypercontrolling parent wants to face, but which books force them to confront more clearly than usual: Though so many other aspects of your child’s life can be controlled by you, the inside of your child’s mind is simply not one of them. With this unbearable admission, the hypercontrolling parent’s only daily certainty in their relationship with their children – the illusion of control – suddenly fades away.

And those of you who may have been children at one point or another will possibly remember another aspect of this truth (if you actually remember your childhood, and haven’t idealized it into a few frozen images. So much of this whole situation flows from people not remembering…) You know that if a child is absolutely focused on a parent not finding out about something, odds are good the parent never will. Let the parent have eyes like an Argus, they still won’t be able to keep their child under those eyes for every minute of the day. And Hermes, in his aspect as the wily patron god of untrammeled communications, is always lurking just around the corner: for if a child really wants to read something without this parent knowing it, he will find a way.

One of my parents tried to exercise the columnist’s style of control with me, at one point, way back when – trying to keep me from reading material “too old for me” and calling the local library to say that I wasn’t to have access to it. I was outraged, for I considered what I put into my brain in my spare time to be my business – my personal area of greatest freedom, and one I wasn’t going to give up for anybody. (I probably didn’t phrase this exactly this way, being nine at the time. But the above sentiment renders exactly how I felt.) The joke, though, was that I needn’t have wasted the outrage, because I quickly discovered for myself that there were simple ways around the silly parental prohibition (which I knew was silly because I knew what I was after – general knowledge, nothing salacious or evil).

Don’t get me wrong here. I’d have been delighted to discuss the whys and wherefores with the parent in question, so that we could work it out, they wouldn’t worry, and I wouldn’t have to hide what was going on. But it was imposed on me as a diktat, and all such attempts on my side to get some negotiation on the issue failed. So I gave up on what was plainly a wasted effort and got on with business… though I was still sad that my parent, even after all those years spent raising me, plainly didn’t know me very well at all. For the reading I was interested in doing, I simply took a bus to the next town over and used their library instead. They didn’t know about the “guidelines” my parent had issued to the home library, and the local library could report (if asked) that I was obeying the prohibition. Problem solved. (Was I guilty about deceiving my parent? Yes. For about five minutes. [Five minutes is a surprisingly long time when you’re nine.] Did my parent ever find out? No. Did I suffer any harm from it? Not in the slightest.)

The point is that now it would be way, way easier than that to game the parental system. You could make a case that books are the most easily concealed of all information technologies, and as technology continues to explode around us all, the situation just gets better for the clandestine reader. Besides libraries where your kid can read out of your sight, there are computers that don’t have NetNanny installed on them. There are other kids’ smartphones, left unlocked by parents not quite so controlling or paranoid. You think you’ve got your own kid’s phone locked down? What technology can limit, technology can defeat, and info on how to hack the protective apps on a phone, how to get around the parental-choice software on a laptop or a desktop PC, is common currency in every schoolyard, in newsgroups and online forums, on Facebook and in Tumblr and on Twitter and many other places. It passes in stealthily exchanged thumb drives, and jumps like lightning by text, in codes parents can’t understand, from phone to phone. Even that epitome of “safety” and supervision, the playdate, can be subverted if the kids know what they’re doing, and are careful about how they coordinate the manipulation of their parents. (It’s a choice irony that parents who have been manipulating every aspect of their kids’ lives for decades routinely have no idea where the kids have picked up the talent, and are horrified when it’s turned on them.)

It must be terrifying for the hypercontrolling parent to be jailer in so porous a prison. You have to feel for them.

…For about five minutes. If you’re a parent who’s become committed to such a role, you have only one hope of successfully discharging your “duty.” You must bribe or blandish or scare your prisoners into believing that your actions are either for their own good (that most horrifying of justifications, sometimes worst when genuine), or just too much trouble to fight. Otherwise you have no chance of maintaining any significant level of control. The minute the kids decide to stop cooperating, you’ve lost the game. But while you’re winning, you’re as much a prisoner of the regime as they are. And you’ll remain so until your children leave home – possibly ill-equipped, due to your actions, to be out on their own in this century – and you collapse, exhausted.

I think there is a way out of this trap. But it’s dangerous, and it flies in the face of too much of today’s unquestioned “wisdom” about childrearing. It involves building a genuine informed partnership with the resident child or young adult as regards reading material, with give and take on both sides; and a real attempt to put yourself into the other party’s head, instead of merely imposing sheer brute-force control (which will eventually fail).  It involves actually reading books that you’ve heard scary things about to find out if those things are true, before you start issuing reading fatwas.  And – scariest of all –  it involves standing up to other parents who will try to force you back into the role that they’ve succumbed to for the sake of being seen as a good parent, sometimes even when way down deep they’ve disagreed with it.

Of course it won’t be easy. As my mom used to say (I believe quoting the cookbook writer Peg Bracken), “For every pint of wine you drink in this life, you’ll drink a quart of vinegar.” While forging and implementing this agreement with your child, there will be screaming and yelling and carrying on, “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria,” and so forth ad infinitum. But if you stick it out and make the break, you and your child together will have a chance to experience a shared experience of literature that in retrospect will make both childhood and parenthood memorable.

And as the certainty sets in that your children are going to be all right – as they assert their ability to handle their own growing freedom, and you realize that you’ve clawed back at least one precious sector of yours — you will at last be able to sigh with relief and start shoving those sleepless eyes back into the peacock’s tail… right where they belong.


*Attn: romance-writing colleagues: I’m not taking a poke at you. It’s in Ovid. Apparently after a long warm thyme-scented Greek afternoon of sweet reed-piping and storytelling, the tale of Pan and Syrinx is what pushes Argus over the edge into Snore City.

**I have to add that most European parents I know from a quarter century’s life on this side of the water find the whole North American “helicopter parent” concept kind of bizarre: some use it as yet more evidence that a lot of my people need their heads felt. As a former head-feeler, I normally invoke possible conflict-of-interest issues and seek an excuse to either leave or order another pint.

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June 7, 2011
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Paper from the "Magic" Pad
EuropeFeaturedHome lifeMiscellaneaTravelWriting

In the Writer Superstitions Dep’t: The Magic Pad

by Diane Duane May 31, 2011

Almost all writers I know have work superstitions, though it’s not something we usually discuss except amongst ourselves. They’re like the superstitions some sportsmen have — the way, for example, that baseball players cross themselves when they’re coming up to bat. (Often provoking the response, Oh, come on now, you didn’t have to cross yourself so many times. And do you really have to touch yourself there right afterwards? How can your nethers need so much adjustment when you’ve hardly moved? And now you’re doing it again. I’m looking away now… )

For writers it can be any one of a number of things, or a combination of them. Which way the desk is oriented. How many cups of coffee you have to have before you can sit down and start work. A certain kind of pencil to scribble notes or doodles with. The right seat in the right cafe. Not starting work before a specific time. Not starting work after a specific time. Some of these habits just seem to begin themselves: some are a behavior or an accessory  that may have been sheerly accidental at the time, but which the writer has come to associate with work that just came out right.

This is mine: grid paper. Specifically, this grid paper from the Swiss supermarket/department store chain Migros. (Their online shopping partner LeShop.ch carries it as well.)

I’d have to do a little digging to nail down the exact date when this started, but it goes back at least to the late 1990s — not long before the Transcendent Pig started turning up in the YW books. (I’m pretty sure that the writing episode featuring the Pig that’s described here was conducted on Migros grid paper: “the pad” is mentioned, and before the Pad came along, it would have been just plain white printer paper.) In any case I was in Switzerland a lot during the 90’s — doing research for A Wind from the South, among other things — and since everybody who stays in Switzerland for any length of time winds up in a Migros sooner or later, it was probably a given that I would run across these pads eventually and pick one up.

But they’ve turned out to be really nice to work on. Reasons:

  • The neutral gray is easy on the eye.
  • The grid spacing is just right for my handwriting (which is small): 4mm boxes.
  • The paper is 100% recycled.
  • It’s a nice weight: 100g/m2.
  • Ink doesn’t bleed through, no matter which side you’re writing on, even when you’re using a fountain pen.
  • It feels nice to work on — the surface finish is very pleasant.

But most important of all for me:

  • Work done on it comes out right.

Don’t ask me how or why. It just seems that way.

A YW note from 2004

So I don’t use it on just anything: no to-do lists, no shopping lists. (Those go on sticky notes, either real ones or the virtual ones in my smartphone. Though sometimes work notes do wind up on these due to accident or necessity, and those get stapled up over the desk so I don’t lose track of them. They are never removed until the line or issue mentioned on the note is dealt with in print. Some of these have been around for a while: see the image to the left.) The grid paper is saved for outlines, serious notes or edits (like the ones above, for the High Wizardry New Millennium Edition revision), hand-writing chapter excerpts (as detailed in that link above), and other such heavyweight stuff.

When somebody in the household goes over to CH (or these days, to Germany: there are some Migros outlets there now too), they’re always enjoined to bring a couple of pads back home with them. These go on the shelf by the desk where I can peel off a few sheets in a hurry if I need some at home, or else pack some in a bag with the red plastic writing clipboard if I’m going offsite.

So now everybody knows.

Whether this “magic” has the slightest chance of ever working for anyone else, I have no idea. These things are so subjective. The definition of superstitious behavior, after all, is that it assumes or attempts to create causal links where none really exist.

But who can tell. If it does someone else some good… cheers.

 

May 31, 2011
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Current eventsEuropeFeaturedHistoryIrelandMediaTV in general

An afternoon at Trinity

by Diane Duane May 17, 2011

Just another day in the great Long Room of Trinity’s famous library. Except for once it wasn’t being “borrowed” without credit by George Lucas.

Having earlier stopped in at Áras an Uachtaráin to be greeted by the President of Ireland, and having then laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, Queen Elizabeth II went to Trinity College. She had a look at a facsimile of the Book of Kells, and then met with various folks associated with Trinity — including one Professor Doctor Sir Terry Pratchett, his stalwart assistant Rob Wilkins, and the erudite Colin Smythe, writer-publisher extraordinaire.

Flash video is embedded below. For those of you who have trouble accessing it through the embed, use this link to access/download the .mpg file directly. We’ll also have an iPhone friendly .mp4 file up later.

We have a few stills as well, but when installed on this page they broke the page formatting, so we’ve moved them here.

 

[flv:https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/media/Terry_Rob_Colin_And_The_Queen.flv 640 480]

 

 

May 17, 2011
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EuropeFeaturedHome lifeHumorIrelandTV in general

Fact meets fiction

by Diane Duane May 17, 2011

Peter has been doing some genealogical research over the last couple of weeks, and has found out some unusual things about his family that none of us expected.

For one thing, he’s looking for a McGuffin. Specifically, Iris McGuffin, one of  many, many cousins on his mother’s side. For a writer… how appropriate that there should be all these McGuffins scattered around.

And something else a little unusual has turned up as well.

Peter has a female ancestor — a great-grandmother — who appears as an adult in public records of 1910/1911, though she does not appear as a child or young adult in earlier censuses. After her first appearance, she  vanishes without warning. But her name later reappears several times over the twentieth century, until finally she vanishes a few decades ago, not to be seen again.

Her name is Sara Jane Smyth.

I wonder when she changed the spelling…  🙂

…A touch of clarification here: the spottiness of the records is a local problem and not at all unique, as a huge number of birth/death/census records in Ireland were destroyed by fire during the Irish Civil War, when the Four Courts  and the Custom House were bombarded in the Battle of Dublin  (28 June -5 July 1922). As a result, those doing Irish genealogical research are very often forced to fall back on duplicate birth/death records (when they can be found) in local churches and other decentralized archives.  Unfortunately these are all too few, as record-keeping in Ireland before the Civil War was extremely centralized.  I’ve run into frustrations of this kind myself when attempting to trace the Irish ancestry on the Duane / paternal side of my heritage.

In any case, having an ancestor be present in one decade, then missing for the next few, then appearing again, is hardly unusual for the Irish-based ancestry-hunter. But the name brought me up short when Peter started showing me the records…

(BTW, greetings to our Reddit visitors!)

May 17, 2011
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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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From the Young Wizards universe: an update

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