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2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series
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Owl Be Home For Christmas
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From the Young Wizards universe: an update
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The newest character in the Young Wizards universe: "Rocky" the Owl
Hugo award eligibilityWritingYoung Wizards

2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series

by Diane Duane January 26, 2021

So it’s once more that time of year when nominations open up for the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Awards (for Discon III later this year), and it turns out that this year, once again, work of mine is eligible to be nominated. (I don’t mind saying it’s delightful to have this happening again, with the addition that this time it kind of took me by surprise. In fact I’ve only rarely had a work jump my bones as quickly as this one did… and it took someone else reminding me about it to realize that it was a qualifying work. Well, it’s been an interesting year…)

The award in question is the one for Best Series (scroll down, it’s there…), and the series in question is the Young Wizards series. The work bringing this series into play for award consideration in 2021 is Owl Be Home For Christmas, a novella-length work published in late December of 2020.

The WSFS rules say:

To be eligible for nomination for a Hugo award for Best Series in a given year, a series must comprise at least three works totalling at least 240,000 words, and one work in the series must have been released during the previous year.

Just for reference purposes: the first three novels in the Young Wizards series total approximately 270,000 words. Those were followed by another seven traditionally-published novels, totaling in the neighborhood of 900,000 words, as well as several independently-published works totaling another 250,000 words or thereabouts.

2020’s relatively unexpected addition to the series takes us into previously unexplored territory: the present day.

JD 2459186.50000 / December 2nd, 2020…

Tonight’s the night when the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is about to be lit in an elaborate ceremony in midtown Manhattan. Like everything else in the COVID-stricken world of 2020, this tree lighting has been forced to differ from all the others that have preceded it.

But there’s another reason this particular tree lighting will be unique. This tree is the one in which the tiny saw-whet owl the media christened “Rocky” was discovered, trapped, when the tree was set up two weeks ago.

The humans who helped “Rocky” and released her back into the wild had no idea of the forces about to be unleashed on New York City. For the one thing they couldn’t give the owl was the one thing she wanted most: her tree.

As a result, she’s been forced to take matters into her own claws. And it’s going to take a crack team of New York’s best and smartest wizards to keep the ensuing events from destabilizing the whole planet…

This 25,000 word novella is a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe and is set in the revised New Millennium Editions YW timeline.

…To make it easier for people to decide whether they’re interested in nominating the Young Wizards works for the 2021 Best Series Hugo award, all the nominatable (…’nominable?’ whatever…) works are available at a deep discount (a total of 75% off) at our store at Ebooks Direct. Please use this link so you’ll see the info on how to get the discount.

The main works in the series are also available from its current traditional publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via Amazon.com and other online retailers (if you prefer to acquire it from those retailers), but not discounted.

The discount will last until Discon III’s Hugo nominations close on March 19th at 11:59 (US) PDT.

…So there you go. Many thanks in advance for your interest and/or award consideration!

(Looking for more information about the series in general? Check out YoungWizards.com.)

January 26, 2021
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WritingYoung Wizards

Owl Be Home For Christmas

by Diane Duane November 27, 2020

ETA: Owl Be Home For Christmas is now complete! You can purchase it here:

Owl Be Home For Christmas at Ebooks Direct


…Sometimes work and life come at you fast, in tandem.

I was taking a break from work on Tales of the Five 3: The Librarian last week, and (as I do frequently during the day) having a look at Twitter, when something unusual came across my dashboard: this.

They found a small owl inside of this year’s Rockefeller Christmas tree, he hitched a ride all the way to NYC and is now being treated and cared for at a wildlife rehab facility. pic.twitter.com/f4PkBm6MGo

— Allison Esposito Medina (@techladyallison) November 18, 2020


…There are writers who routinely get images before words. I would (often) be one of those. And the image I got—very much sparked by the expression of the small creature in the box—was straightforward and immediate.

Hmm, I see a (forget-the-heartwarming) children’s book in this. (Because that expression says “WTF?? YOU CHOPPED DOWN MY F*CKING TREE!”) So on Christmas Eve, a MILLION OWLS mount a rescue mission from the North, pick up the tree, and take it (and their buddy) home. The End. ❤️ https://t.co/bRy2rshIin

— Diane Duane (@dduane) November 18, 2020

The response to those tweets was pretty enthusiastic, and I realized that I was in the position of the fisherman wandering up the beach after work who finds a pretty stoppered bottle washed up at the tideline, picks it up, wonders what he could get for it, uncorks it to have a look inside… and finds that the situation has abruptly changed. Because (a) the image wouldn’t let me be: and (b) …well, just look at the responses. The saying in the PR-handling business used to be: “For every person who writes to you saying that they want a thing, there are ten more who want it who haven’t bothered writing.” And leaving that issue to one side… here were all these people who do want it, and said so.

And possibly the coup de grace was being delivered the title on a silver platter by the fabulous Airawyn—

Owl Be Home For Christmas

— Emily 🐙 (@airawyn) November 18, 2020

So: nothing to do but rev up the storytelling engine and get busy.

It took me a day or so to sit with the concept and decide how it was going to be handled. Normally I keep my storytelling away from the here-and-now, but dealing with this situation was going to make that impossible. I then spent another day or two in data-gathering—not necessarily stuff that was going to show in the story, but stuff that was nonetheless vital: there’s no putting flesh on the bones until the skeleton’s assembled.

But I was also waiting for a specific event to occur, as it was going to have to be part of the story: that event being this.

Rocky’s release was a success! She’s a tough little bird and we’re happy to see her back in the wild. She will feel your love & support through her journey south.#RockefellerOwl Please help us continue our mission to help birds like Rocky for years to come https://t.co/Wg4S9kJZbb pic.twitter.com/AJZ5xPrVQt

— Ravensbeard Wildlife Center (@Ravensbeardorg) November 25, 2020


Once that had happened, I was ready to go, and started work in earnest.

So: a status report. I’m well into the body of the story now. My estimate at the moment is that it will run about 20.000 words. (If I need more, I’ll take more: but I refuse to push a story into being longer than it needs to for mere length’s sake.)

My intention is to drop the story on both Amazon and at Ebooks.Direct in the early evening (7PM-ish US/EST) of December 2, 2020, to coincide with the lighting of the tree in Rockefeller Center. (ETA: This didn’t happen: the story dropped at Christmas 2020.) I’ll tweet the Amazon and EBD links then, and I’ll add purchase links / widgets on this blog post/page: so you might want to bookmark it. If you’re a Twitter user, you can also keep an eye on the #OwlBeHomeForChristmas hashtag there—I’ll use it to post the occasional update between now and Wednesday.

Please note that this will be an ebook-only release. The technical challenges of a paperback or hardcover release for so short a work are too significant to attempt to deal with between now and next Wednesday. Other formats for the book will be something I’ll consider after the ebook comes out. (In particular, I might do an author-reads-it audiobook. We’ll see.)

The Ebooks.Direct version of Owl Be Home For Christmas—available in Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple Books/iBooks, and generic .epub formats—will be less expensive than the Amazon version, by (ideally) about 15%. By getting it from EBD, you support the author directly and make sure that she gets a larger slice of the price “pie”. (Meaning “all of it” instead of “70% or thereabouts.”) Getting the ebook into your e-reader or system (especially Kindle) is simpler than it used to be, and store staff will assist you if you need it. Please consider this option: and thank you!

For those of you who’re curious: This story will be told in the Young Wizards universe. That said, there are a couple of situational differences from previous works set there. (a) The emphasis—as it should be—is on the owl as primary POV character. (b) The timeline means that we’re talking about the 2020 Young Wizards universe (as a natural outgrowth of the “reset” timeline in the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions). So while you’ll be seeing familiar faces… some of them won’t be kids any more. Be prepared. (Note please, also, that this work is hereby declared a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe. So if you see things you weren’t expecting… they’ll be real things.)

Also: please note that we’ll be making a 25% donation from all our sales of Owl Be Home For Christmas to the Ravensbeard Wildlife Center, which took care of “Rocky” in the aftermath of her discovery in the soon-to-be-Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. If you feel like offsetting that contribution by dropping something extra in the author’s kitty, you can use the PayPal.me link or the “Buy A Cuppa” option at this Ebooks.Direct product page to do that. (And those of you who feel inclined to encourage the author right now can do that, too. It’s gonna be a loooong weekend and a lot of caffeine’s going to be involved on this end…)

That’s all I have to tell you at the moment. December 2 is coming, and I’ve got a lot to do.

For your interest, and your continued support: thanks, all!

(And here’s the cover…)

Cover for OWL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

November 27, 2020
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On the desk...
Fantasy and SFWritingYoung Wizards

From the Young Wizards universe: an update

by Diane Duane November 6, 2020

Let me start by thanking everybody who saw the previous posting  discussing the changes to come to the YoungWizards.com domain, and who took the time to get back to me with their thoughts. Some response to those (and action on them) will turn up in this post.

So first of all, let me answer what are likely to be some of the most immediate questions, and then get into some detail on present forward planning.

Is there another Young Wizards novel in the offing? Yes, there is! YW #11 (as yet untitled) is plotted, and is in the process of being written.

How soon will we see it? The simplest answer to this right now is “Not in 2021.” The book is not presently under contract to any publisher, and I’m not inclined to go much further forward with it until that situation is sorted out. Also, I’ve set aside the 2019-2020 period to deal primarily with other fictional universes of mine — specifically the Middle Kingdoms LGBTQ universe — and that work will be going on through the end of this year and into early 2021.

Okay, how soon will YW #11 happen after 2021? Right now there’s no telling. I’m sorry not to have anything more definite for you at this point. I think, though, that I can safely promise you that the book will turn out to have been worth waiting for, when it does finally go to press… as issues are being resolved in this work that have been hanging fire since So You Want To Be A Wizard. As regards this one, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night…” seems like the right note to strike.

Are we going to see anything new in the Young Wizards universe in the shorter term? That’s the plan, yes! Also in the writing process right now is Interim Errantry 3: A Day At The Crossings. This book will contain (as UK/Irish people might say) “what it says on the tin”:  a detailed look at a 27-hour day at the Crossings intercontinual worldgating facility—an 80K-100K-word “braided novel” with several main storylines. The plan at the moment (assuming that other presently-running projects don’t interfere) is for IE3:ADATC to be published (in print and ebook form) in Q3 of 2021. (If you don’t know about the previous works in this group, they are Interim Errantry and Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal.)

…About those other ongoing projects, BTW: besides Tales of the Five #3: The Librarian, which is (finally!) nearing completion, I do have other work on my desk that’s either too early in its development to be discussed, or that I can’t talk about for contractual or similar reasons. Sometimes stuff under contract unavoidably interferes with stuff I’m doing on my own nickel… so please bear that in mind.

…Now on to less “new”, but still interesting issues. Some of you will have seen the post that went up at Ebooks Direct a couple/few weeks back regarding the effects of Brexit on our ebook sales business. The Young Wizards books went into their first non-North American English language editions via the UK’s Transworld/Corgi all the way back in 1991… and the thought that the UK YW fans (a steadfast, patient and faithful bunch) were going to be shut out of access to the YW-verse by the irrationality of their government has been bothering me.

That said, there’s no avoiding the likelihood that the UK government is having too much fun painting itself into an increasingly Europhobic corner to see sense before the end of the year and cooperate in establishing something like a Brexit-with-deal, as opposed to the catastrophic no-deal option yawning before them. So this has become an opportunity to advance some plans that have been bubbling around here for a while.

Therefore: as of January 1, 2021, we’ll be launching the revised-and-updated Young Wizards New Millennium edition novels in both paperback and ebook formats worldwide*, via Amazon. (And yes, I know: I share a lot of people’s ambivalence regarding using this particular distribution entity. But right now it’s the best way to go forward with this effort and still maintain control over which countries and territories are in play—as I must do to be in compliance with my existing contracts.)

A bit more detail on this. I can’t independently release the NMEs in print format in North America and the Philippines, because those rights are held by the present US/Canadian traditional publisher, Harcourt. Nor can I “go wide” on the NME ebook rights in the North American market: similar (if a bit more complex) reasons. But, that said… both print and ebook rights in the rest of the world are another matter.

So starting January 1, 2021, if you’re in any country that is not the USA, Canada or the Philippines—barring any unexpected difficulties at the big-river end of things—you will be able to buy print versions of the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions via Amazon. (Hardcovers remain an exercise for some time in mid-2021.) Amazon is presently putting in place ways to deal with the UK’s Brexit madness, which will relieve me of the effort of handling the paperwork-and-VAT complications at my end.

An additional bonus: this tranche of books and ebooks will also include Games Wizards Play, which until now has not been available through sales channels anywhere outside of North America. …In countries which have previously had English- or other-language versions of the Young Wizards texts (France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Russia, China…) the books will be branded as New Millennium editions. In other countries, the NMEs will be the default editions and will not need to wear any additional branding.

We are also looking at doing outside-of-North-America audiobooks of the NMEs… but since there’s no publisher to finance them (or more accurately, I’m the publisher), I must bear the cost. And if we’re going to match the quality of the US-based Recorded Books audiobooks, it’s not going to be cheap. (In particular, I would really like to retain the fabulous Christina Moore, who has done all the YW books so far. We’ll have to see if that’s possible.) This side of the project, therefore, is one that is unlikely to start up before 2022, and will depend on the success of the NMEs’ world publication to finance them. So we’ll discuss this aspect of things further in a year or so.

Anyway: news about the progress of this project as a whole (which involves creating new print versions of the ten main-sequence books and new cover art, etc., for all of them) will be posted on YoungWizards.com and the soon-to-open YoungWizardsSeries.com as it becomes available. So watch those spaces for more details! This is going to be a ton of work, but it’s been waiting in the wings for a long time and I’m excited to be able to get it going at last.

Other somewhat less-fraught YW news: After some consideration, I’ve decided that the Young Wizards discussion forums should indeed be retained, updated, and polished-up preparatory for a relaunch. This work will take place over the next couple/few months as events permit, as it’s going to be (technically speaking) a bit challenging and will also require a moderately significant cash input for new software and augmented server space.

…So, to finish up: Some of you will be wanting to know how you can assist or speed one or more of these efforts. Right now the best thing you can do is go to Ebooks Direct and buy stuff. (In particular, the YW NME box set, which remains on sale at 50% off.) Or, if you’re all stocked up, you can always use the buy-the-writer-a-coffee option over here. (Among other things, now I have to run off and buy a couple of blocks-of-10-ISBNs for the new YW paperbacks/ebooks, yay…) If those aren’t methods of assistance that suit you at the moment, I’d ask that you’d pass the link to this post on to others who might be interested. Retweet it if you saw it on Twitter: reblog it, if you saw it on Tumblr: share it, if you saw it on Facebook. Please and thank you!

And thanks for being interested, everybody! It’s a pleasure to be doing this work for you. 🙂

*Except for North America and the Philippines. Weird, but that’s how it is.

(meanwhile: early noodling with YW NME International cover design and concept art is already under way…)

Nita, Kit and the Lotus

November 6, 2020
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Alma-Tadema, Sappho and Alcaeus
Hobbyhorses and General RantingMythologyPoetrythings that piss you offWritersWriting

Greek mythology, feminist reclamation of lost/ancient tradition, and an interface issue: or, The Thing I Got So Cranky About The Other Day

by Diane Duane September 13, 2020

(The other day being April 2, 2014. This post is ported in from Tumblr — I’m in the process of moving some longer posts from there to here, where they belong.)

The passage below, when I ran across it last week, initially caused my mouth to drop open in sheer disbelief. And since then the thought that it is even now wandering blithely about unchallenged has been sort of gnawing at me. So some ranting is about to ensue. If you’re not in the mood for that, best turn your eyes away now and look at some nice pics of kittens drinking beer or something.

…I can’t now even remember what brought me to this particular page, and I want to emphasize that this isn’t in any way about the OP, who doubtless thought the source (or at least the quote) was reliable.

However…

…it’s not. And since this (as some around here like to say) is relevant to my interests, I just want to drop a few notes about this one quote, and leave further considerations to those who feel like going into them.

So here’s the material that got up my nose.

Greek myths mention several Islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men, only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies. The Greeks apparently feared them. They said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores; and the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once. The Greek writers seemed to have no doubt that women could destroy whole populations of adult males, and there was no effective defense against them.
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker (p. 26)

(rolls up her sleeves) It’s hard to even know where to begin shredding this like wet kleenex analyzing this…

In order, I guess:

“Greek myths mention several islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men…”

Okay. Even though the Amazons were specifically known1 for living on the Anatolian coast of what is now Turkey — this being the location of their main city, Thermyskira or Themyskira, depending on whose orthography / spelling you prefer: Wonder Woman fans will of course recognize the name — well, who knows? Maybe the Amazons had some all-female island colonies as well. (They are reported by a historian or two as having founded Paphos, but that city [on the island of Cyprus]  was co-ed, and all the other colonies mentioned in connection with Amazons were in mainland Turkey.) So let’s run with that possibility for the moment.

“…only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies.”

…WHOOPSIE!

Let’s look at the islands in question.

Taurus / Tauros: Or as the more recent ancients came to call it, Taurica. Only an island by courtesy. It’s a peninsula (though one sort of hanging by a thread): in fact, the southernmost peninsula of the Crimean region, which has been somewhat in the news of late. Nonetheless, whether it’s an island or a peninsula, that didn’t stop the near-classical-era ancient (male) Greeks from planting trading towns all over it.

image

Lemnos:

A genuine island, maybe two thirds of the way between mainland Greece and Turkey. Myrina is its main town.

Lesbos:

Right there southeast of Lemnos, off the present-day Turkish coast. Mitylene / Mitilini is the major city.

…These places’ mythological associations are no less valid just because they’re real than are those of places like Circe’s island of Aeaea or the Isles of the Blest. But because these places do exist, that means we’re kind of forced to apply physical laws and common sense to them.

Two out of three of these places, with good weather and the right wind, are within two to four days’ sail (if not less) of the home harbors of some of the greatest sailors of antiquity. The third one is a slightly longer trip, maybe a week to ten days of coasting depending on the weather. But even if we knew nothing else about these places, their generally exposed nature and their propinquity to a significant group of the time’s major interlocking patriarchal cultures force us to set the odds very, very low against any of these places being woman-only islands… whether the women are Amazons or not.

And as it happens, we know a lot more about all of them. We can handle that issue one island at a time as we move through the quotation.

But first a warning about something specific: the phrase “were said to be…”. Anyone who’s spent enough time on the Discovery Channel to find themselves watching some of the dodgier documentaries — the ones where the bar for telling where you got your facts is set fairly low — will recognize this phrase and its friends “It is said that…”, “Legend has it…”,  “Some say…”. This formulation is a sign of someone who either can’t be bothered to provide you with a solid citation or doesn’t have one and just wants to get on with selling you their own merchandise without being bothered too much about the sordid details (i.e., “verifiable data”). Any use of these phrases, especially in a scholarly work, should make the reader slow down and look carefully at the details.

So, island by island:

[The Greeks] said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores…

Bzzt! Sorry, wrong answer. No women of Tauris. In fact, no women. Just one.

The writer is here referring to the myth that is the source for Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Agamemnon’s daughter, theoretically sacrificed by the King for good winds on the way to the war in Troy, is instead actually caught away in the act by Artemis (who as protector of maidenhood and young innocence wants no such crap done in her name, thank you very much). Artemis proceeds to dump a deer with its throat cut onto the ground by the altar as a substitute sacrifice, and then deposits the doubtless very confused maiden in Tauris to be priestess of her temple there.2 Iphigenia is understandably shocked and horrified to find that her duty as priestess is to sacrifice to the Goddess all strangers3 who come to Tauris. Not just the men: all woman strangers too, should any turn up.

And there are definitely men living in Tauris, before, during and after the unfortunate princess’s arrival. When Iphigenia’s brother Orestes and his best friend show up to rescue her, the messenger who brings the news that she’s going to have to sacrifice these strangers is male. Additionally, Iphigenia at one point, doubting whether Artemis is actually behind this barbarous rule at all, says to herself, “Would a Goddess command such things? Would she take pleasure in sacrificial murder? I do not believe it. …It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the Gods.”4 And finally there’s the King of the Taurians, whom Iphigenia refuses to be allowed to be killed as part of her rescue because “he was kind to her”. You would think all-female cultures who only send out for guys when they want to have babies would generally be kind of short on kings. Also: you will look in vain for any evidence of the women of Tauris being Amazons.

…So we have a bit of misrepresentation here about the population of the island, and about who they were killing, and (granted, the motives being unclear by the principals’ own admission, but we’re plainly meant to think it was a let’s-all-us-women-kill-all-the-men thing) about why. …Well, maybe the writer got confused, or it was an error: these things do creep in. Let’s move on.

…[the Greeks said] the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once.

In myth, this did happen once. But it was (a) “a long time ago”, and (b) extremely situational and something that the participants seemed willing, if not glad, to get over and done with.

The tl;dr version of this story comes in a number of versions spread across five or six centuries. Basically it breaks down like this:

  • Women of Lemnos fail to perform proper rites honoring Aphrodite for (apparently) several years. No one seems to know why.
  • Aphrodite gets pissed off at the women and “afflicts them with a foul odor” which causes their husbands to avoid them and instead run over to Thrace and raid the place for female sex slaves. These they bring home and screw instead of their wives.
  • The Lemnian women, very very annoyed by this turn of events, all kill their husbands (some writers say their fathers, too). The only woman in on the plot who fails to do likewise is the Lemnian princess, Hypsipyle, who manages to smuggle her father the King offshore before the mass murder goes down, and then becomes Queen of an all-female island.
  • Jason and the Argonauts arrive. They apparently have no problem with any foul odors and during a visit of at least several months quickly bed down with various Lemnian women (this turn of events being from all available data quite consensual). Numerous children are conceived. Most if not all of these children are boys, as they’re given Argonauts’ names when they’re born. Regardless of their maleness, they are not killed or sent away.
  • Jason himself hooks up with Hypsipyle during this period, and she later bears twin boys as a result, one of whom when grown becomes King of Lemnos and turns up in the Iliad. (There are ancient writers who claim that this was the cause of the odor problem: Medea, they say, inflicted it on the Lemnian women in revenge on Hypsipyle for Jason’s infidelity. In any case, you wonder what the heck he was thinking; you’d think he’d have worked out by then that you seriously did not screw around with / on Medea. But it’s also true that evidence suggests Jason was not exactly the sharpest knife in the block.)

Anyway, the ancient writers go out of their way to make it plain that this long-ago event, distant even in mythological terms, had been a temporary situation (cf. Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 114: “Lemnos happened to have no males at the time [when the Argonauts visited the island]”) and had nothing to do with the way things normally went on Lemnos.

So… a wee bit more of the truth being bent, there? Or not being completely told, in order to buttress a point the writer’s trying to make? Also: these women are not Amazons, either. Somewhere along the line, with all this other stuff going on, someone surely would have mentioned.

Anyway. Last of all comes Lesbos, “said to be…” one of three “all-female societies.”

Well, not in any myth I can find a record of. And, historically, never. Certainly the mother-goddess Cybele was worshipped there in deep antiquity, to judge by the pottery, but there is no sign of the island ever having been an all-female reserve. As one can judge from the Lemnian situation, when such things existed or occurred, notice was taken in the literature.

Sappho in particular would probably have been amused to hear about this allegation. She lived in the island’s main town of Mitylene for most of her life, as far as we can tell, and had two (maybe three) adult brothers who to present best knowledge show no signs of having been murdered or exiled for their maleness. Yes, she sponsored a thiasos where the possibility or benefits of an all-female society were discussed with the participants. But Lesbos was co-ed — cf. famous male Lesbians5 like Alcaeus, Phaenias and Terpander. (And still no sign of Amazons.)

(sigh) So.

The multiple errors in the paragraph above could have a number of causes: (a) A confused writer. (b) A lazy writer. (c) A writer who’s pushing a specific thesis or agenda and doesn’t mind the reader being accidentally misled into it. I am not a mindreader and can’t be certain of which of the above might be accurate. But the impression I’m left with is that of someone trying to bend a complex set of facts to her own purposes.

Now, in fiction, as fiction, that kind of thing has its place. But in what purports to be a genuine history of the suppression of truths about female roles in religion, mysticism and spiritual life in the ancient world? Engaging in jiggery-pokery with the facts as they are known is not a good thing, no matter how good one considers one’s own intentions to be. One does not combat lies or suppressions of the truth with misrepresentations and other truths themselves bent out of shape.

All I can say further about Walker’s book (as I don’t have it and have never read it in detail) is that I have dipped into numerous quotes from it here and found a significant number of them to be at best kind of factually suspect and at worst as potentially error-ridden and misleading as the single paragraph discussed above.

I’m not saying that the book will not have been useful in forming (or opening up) potential feminist thought in many ways for its readers as  regards the ancient world and what has happened to the Goddesses of old, and as regards women’s interior/mystical/mythological lives and how they may be enhanced and enriched by thoughtful reclamation of the lost, strayed or stolen. But I do want to suggest that content in this book should be taken with a grain of salt, and checked before internalizing. Because if the above is broadly representative… then it needs checking.

…That’s all.

1Appolonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 370 ff (trans. Seaton): “[regarding the Black Sea coast of Anatolia :] Onward from thence the bend of a huge and towering cape reaches out from the land, next Thermodon at its mouth flows into a quiet bay at the Themiskyreian headland, after wandering through a broad continent. And here is the plain of Doias, and near are the three cities of the Amazones, and after them the Khalybes…” Plainly not some vague description of Someplace Far, Far Away In The Story, but a landscape the writer thought might possibly have been familiar to some of the people reading or hearing this. It’s like something out of a Michelin Green Guide.

2One has to wonder whether this particular misfortune of Iphigenia’s is meant to be thought of as a near-final operation of the curse of the House of Atreus, a godawful karmic trainwreck that had already gone on for generations. Certainly the ancient writers return again and again to the family’s alternately horrible and tragic doings with a near tabloid-like fascination.

3Edith Hamilton‘s great classic Mythology (liberally studded with Hamilton’s beautifully clean translations from original sources) narrows this specification down to “all Greeks”. Whatever: gender isn’t the issue here.

4Hamilton, ibid., pp. 366ff.

5How often does one get to use that phrase legitimately? I couldn’t resist.

September 13, 2020
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Figuring it out
Young WizardsYoung Wizards meta

Changes coming at YoungWizards.com: your opinion(s) solicited

by Diane Duane August 18, 2020

(waving at the online Young Wizards fandom) Folks, it’s time to look at some changes that are coming to the YW online presence, and discuss at least one of them with you in detail.

The YoungWizards.com domain has been around for a goodish while now — since June of 2002 — and has gone through a fair amount of growth and change over that period. It’s been home to the series’s main website, a number of smaller/younger ones, a wiki-cum-mini-encyclopedia, and a discussion forum of great complexity and looniness. it’s been hacked a couple of times, and is attacked every day without fail by email-spammers and scammers and people who want to attach it to their troll farms… you name it. The usual stuff; and around here we deal with these vicissitudes on a daily basis and move on.

That said, the world (and its search engines and software languages/platforms…) move(s) on too. So it’s time for us to be doing the same. And as I discuss this process I’m going to have a question or two for those of you interested in responding, so please read on if you’re interested in having some input into this sordid enterprise. 🙂

First things first: YoungWizards.com is not going anywhere, but it’s going to be gradually repurposed as a gateway site for the other YW installations, old and new. Right now the crowd of stuff lodged at that domain is overtaxing the present server–not to mention making it difficult to enact some kinds of change in one part of the setup without making that change to all the others as well. (Right now PHP updating is a bit of an issue, for an example… but let’s leave the technical stuff to one side for the moment.) Having all the YW eggs in the same basket also makes everything more vulnerable to DDoS attacks, hacking, crashes, overload downtime, etc etc.

So. In a small, gradual way, the changes have already begun. The now-frozen Errantry Concordance, for example, is already in the process of being moved to its own site at ErrantryConcordance.com — WordPress, this time, not Mediawiki: we’re done with the wiki approach now. A full-blown encyclopedia makes more sense, and it can better be expanded in its new site, with plugins tailored to that purpose. (Fun fact: R*ssian hackers arrive every damn day to attack the new Concordance site, which amuses me while I repeatedly punch the Banning Your Whole IP Range Forever button. WHY are they attacking an encyclopedia? Or maybe the Lone Power’s just bored.) (eyeroll)

The structure of the YoungWizards.com website proper has been due for an update for a good while, and will shortly be getting one. With an eye to this (and to the terms people normally use on Google and elsewhere to look for information about the main series of books and the interstitial-works spinoffs), the pages having to do specifically with the core YW novels will shortly be moved to a new installation at YoungWizardsSeries.com. (Some time in Q1/2 of 2021.) When this is done, the YoungWizards.com gateway will send visitors there either by forwarding (i.e, 301 redirect, for those familiar with the concept) or very broad hints. 🙂

Other “cousin” sites that weren’t particularly well-visited are having their resources redistributed and their independent installations closed down. The Young Wizards: Manual Labor site, for example, has been shuttered for the moment and its contents will probably be restructured and moved — haven’t decided just where yet. (Some of the posts there might be folded into FicFoundry.com in the near future, assuming I can find a rationale for that.) The Feline Wizardry strand of the YW-verse will be rehoused at FelineWizards.com over the course of late August/early September. The fate of the Young Wizards: Interim Errantry site is still being considered. The site at GamesWizardsPlay.com will be closed down and will redirect to a page at YoungWizardsSeries.com. And so everything will be much tidier.

…But this leaves us with one last issue to be handled. Nearly as anciently-established at the YoungWizards.com domain as the main site is the vBulletin installation hosting the Young Wizards Discussion Forums. And I’m pondering what to do about these, for they’ve been migrated once already (from their initial home at the long-departed Groupee forum platform) and it was a serious nuisance and took (weeks? months?) off my life.

On one side of the argument: The Forums aren’t much visited these days (possibly because people don’t know about them? or have grown more used to meeting on bigger platforms). They consume a lot of server resources. They’re routinely attacked by hackers (once a week or so would be normal, though sometimes more often). Every update to their software costs me a lump of money that I can’t really tell if I get back.

And I’m up against this fact again at the moment. The server as a whole needs to move up to PHP 7.x if it’s to stay secure, but doing so will cost me a couple/few hundred euro…and for what? The present vBulletin install will not run on 7.x. The future vBulletin install, if I upgrade it, will not run on (the present) 5.4. Even if I do update it, the migration is going to be a pain in the butt at a time when, to put it gently, my butt already has enough pains. (There is also the possibility of migrating the Forums to a WordPress-based BBPress / BuddyPress or similar installation, but features would inevitably be lost, and as I said… Butt. Pains. Too Many.)

Yet the other side of the argument: In this time of increasingly badly-behaved Big Platforms, I kind of like the idea of reclaiming fan space from them and directing it back into hands that are more concerned about the people who use it: who’re able to see a fandom as having value besides mining for data and displaying ads to. I would also hate to lose the hundreds and thousands of ruminations, thoughts and squees, and the endless goofery and cheerful laughter of the many, many Young Wizards fans who have been our visitors there. Archiving the place, freezing it in amber (which would still require upgrading it to new and better software / facilities) would be sad. In particular, closing it all down and losing the voice of Peter Murray, our much-loved sysadmin who worked so valiantly for so long, before he died, on rationalizing the Young Wizards timeline, would be dreadful. And I say nothing of the Topic of Great Randomness: established 2003 (and its most recent post in April of this nutball year). Thirteen thousand pages of the Topic that Could Not Be Stopped: a whole fandom’s stream of consciousness in one place.

(sigh) Sentiment, yeah? Color me guilty.

…But still. I still need an answer to the question: Who would come to the Forums if they were moved and upgraded? Would you? The Forums were a vibrant, busy place once upon a time. They could be again. But not without y’all. Retaining them is going to cost me money that might have gone for groceries (and yes, of course this is an issue: do I look like a vast multinational corporation to anyone here? If so, you need your eyes checked), and time that might have been spent writing, and …You get the picture. I don’t want to be doing this for nothing.

So give me a sign. Let me know if you care about such a place, and visiting it. (Possibly by visiting it now!) Lacking data — lacking input — I don’t see that I have much choice but to consider closing the Forums down. …Otherwise: other YW work goes forward.

Responses in the comments here, if you’d be so kind: or over at the Tumblr, or at the Young Wizards page at Facebook.

Please and thank you!

August 18, 2020
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The outline tree can be bare at first...
booksWritingWriting adviceWriting process

Outlining: one writer’s approach

by Diane Duane July 25, 2020

A note as we begin: Mostly this blog (per its name) is a place I talk about just about everything but writing. Over time, though, people have started asking me questions about the business and practice of novel- and screenwriting, and I’ve been thinking about where to put the answers. Finally I figured something out. So this post—along with various others on writing that have wound up here or on my Tumblr over time—will be colocated at the new FicFoundry.com site when it goes live in November 2020. Eventually this post will be redirected from here to FF.com… just so people know.

First of all: The tweet from Rebecca F. Kuang that started off the thread is here.

wait can someone who isn’t a pantser actually explain themselves? how detailed does your outlines get? do you really know the sequence of and content of every scene ahead of time? how you figure out smaller plot threads before you’re ~in~ it?

— Rebecca F. Kuang (@kuangrf) July 24, 2020

Then adding:

haha well what i’m most curious about is how you can “feel” the story’s tone/heft/urgency and connect with the characters and their plight from an abstract outline? i’d like to plan more, but i have a hard time thinking from a birds eye view

— Rebecca F. Kuang (@kuangrf) July 24, 2020

…What followed was an off-the-cuff recreation of an ask-box answer on Tumblr that goes back a few years (so if you follow me over there and this seems familiar to you, you’ll know why).

…Let me say from the outset that from the beginning of my career as a professional writer I have always been a plotter. This started out, not as an instinctive preference or a random developmental thing, but as a mere fact of life—because after I sold my first book I went straight into screenwriting. And what’s important here is that, if you’re writing for series TV, there is no pantsing allowed. PERIOD. Your story editor (or producer, or showrunner, or head-of-story) needs to know immediately what the paying customers are going to be getting: needs to know exactly. Therefore the first thing you usually do (when not pitching verbally, or else having just done so) is submit a précis [very short description of characters and plot, 2-3 pp] or premise [same but longer: 8-10pp] for approval. Until this paperwork is turned in and approved, you’re not commissioned to do the work at all. So outlining—even if just a very simple sort—is at the very root of that entire creative process. Then you go on to a full outline (depending on the length of the script to come & how much money is riding on the work, this might be 20-30 pp…) before the screenplay stage. Every stage of the business of screenplay production has some kind of outline underpinning it.

So: multiply such a set of events by twenty or thirty scripts and you can see how with this kind of work history, if you’re not already an outliner, you’re likely to get hardwired that way in a big hurry. By the time I started my second and third novels in the mid-’80s, I was pretty much locked in as a plotter/outliner for life. And it’s worked quite well for me.

As regards the process of constructing an outline: C. J. Cherryh taught me a method which I now think of as “the Shopping List Technique” and which has served me well for the last three and a half decades or so.

Simply this: you sit down and make a list of the ten things that have to happen in your novel—the character actions or physical events without which your story simply cannot occur. Then, when you’re sure you’ve got pretty much the ten major “event beats” or character issues nailed down, you break each of those ten things into its own section and list the ten things that have to happen surrounding that event or supporting that character action. You take your time over this work, because this is the skeleton of the body of your work to come—the physical / emotional / action structure on which you’re going to build your novel.

And rather than being restrictive, being scene-by-scene detailed at this stage of the work is incredibly freeing. Having this solid scaffolding to build on lets you turn your full attention to character business and interaction… because you already know who’s got to go where and what they’ve got to do. You can now wallow in Drama and Spectacle and All The Feels, and not have to waste time sweating the workaday details of the who-goes-where-and-what-happens choreography.

You have, in essence, drawn your road map. Now you journey. If (along the way) you find that the road wiggles in ways that work better for your story than the original ones—then, fine, you redraw that part of the map. But the map preserves for you a sound basic representation of where you’re going; something you can fall back on in need, or if your focus shifts without warning.

Let me spend a little time here dealing with the actual process of outlining the way I do it. (And naturally I’m going to preface this with the caveat that just because this works for me is no reason for anyone to take this method as any kind of gospel. Finding your own way is a vital part of the Writer’s Journey. But if some part of this seems to work for you: steal, adapt, run off with the goodies! Others shared what worked for them with me: it’s a pleasure to pay that forward.)

Those lists of ten-things-broken-down-into-ten-more-things start out for me as incredibly messy scribblings on the fabled Magic Note Paper and then get typed into whatever outline processor I’m using at the moment. …Unfortunately I have none of those messy pages to show you, because as they’re transcribed, I destroy them to keep from confusing myself later as to whether that material’s been handled or not. …These days, anyway, the lists go into Scrivener …and the result is likely to look something like this.

Screenshot from the TALES OF THE FIVE #3: THE LIBRARIAN outline

…The formal breakdown-of-tens may or may not remain static or be visible in such a document at any given point due to sections or bits of business being combined or telescoped into one another, and the numbers of beats and sections may change without warning. This is perfectly normal for novel outlining. You discover as you start more closely investigating / filling in the Tree of Tens that some sections need different contents, lengths, or rhythms.

This is the “filling in empty spaces on your map” department, where (for me anyway) the real exploration and revelation of the story happens. In the outliner, scraps of scenes, dialogue, and descriptions of business can now get slotted in. (Scrivener makes it a lot easier to organize and rearrange them than it used to be in a Word document: but it doesn’t matter in the slightest in what kind of word processor you’re doing this. Just break the ten “big sections” into divisions big enough for you to comfortably work in.) In these separate sections, action can be amplified or refined: motives and character interactions can be expanded and explored.

In my case, the outline sections and subsections start to contain long text passages that arise to be written while considering the subsection titles. (Considering them as prompts may be helpful.) Or they may just contain very linear notes about what has to happen. Or both. And this part of the outlining can go on for a good while, as it becomes clearer what material is needed in the story and what’s surplus to requirements.

This business of describing what has to happen—in the strictly linear sense—will normally be pretty much complete before I’m ready to submit anything to an editor. It may be helpful to think of what we’ve been discussing so far as a much expanded or differently-structured version of what a scriptwriter might consider a beat sheet / beat outline. But also for consideration here should be what kind of outline you’re going to send to your commissioning editor when you’re querying and they ask you for a specific kind of “partial”, the traditional “three-chapters-and-an-outline”.

Around here, this sort of outline gets handled in different ways. The editor may have worked with me before and may already be familiar with how my outlines reflect the finished novel, even though they may not be broken out into chapters. Those editors will tend to get an outlined description of events that’ll be heavier on the emotional context. Example: the premise-cum-outline I sent Harcourt for The Wizard’s Dilemma. This is on the short side because I knew my editor was perfectly familiar with the first four books in the series.

On the other hand, one may be pitching to an editor one hasn’t worked with before, in which case breaking the outline clearly into chapters may be smarter. This version of a novel outline was what went to my editors on what became The Book of Night with Moon. Since in this case the editors already had chapters 1 through 3 as part of the pitch package, what they then got was the outline for the book onward from chapter 4. (You’ll have to just imagine the first three chapters. Essentially, a trio of cat wizards pick up an unexpectedly punk-ish apprentice.)

Now, the linear-looking stuff that you saw in the Scrivener screenshot above, and the outlines that went to the editors and sold the books, are obviously very different. The latter sort of outline is synthesized from the former. But it’s important to do so with the emotions, and the emotional content, fully in place.

And this is where the problem that @kuangrf was mentioning in that earlier tweet can easily be handled. While the List-of-Ten-Tens method is extremely effective for handling the mere business of physical action (“A goes to B, kills C, flees the country”), it’s just as effective for structuring the flow of emotional events and interactions among characters. I routinely include the two “streams” in the same section, particularly because for me they need to be driving each other; it seems inevitable to me that what you have to do will drive how you feel about doing it. So no need for an outline to be dry or abstract! In fact it works better (I think) if it’s not. The more emotional juice you can pump into it, the more will ooze out when the reader bites.

For example: the very first of the ten-of-ten for Tales of the Five #3: The Librarian (which we’ve been looking at in the screengrabs) said “[King] Freelorn has an unnerving dream that tells him he’s got to go on a journey…”. And the first of that chapter’s ten subsections simply said “He wakes up too early and spends a while looking at [his husband] Herewiss in ‘missing you already’ mode: then gets up, does his morning stuff, and goes to work.” And the first time I sat down to work on that chapter, I got this right back from that section’s prompt:

Text from TALES OF THE FIVE #3, THE LIBRARIAN
(A concept-art image of the moment is here.)

…So bake the emotion into the outline along with the physical action / broader thematic structure, and it will do it nothing but good. And make your job easier.

…There the thread pretty much ended. There’s just one background / thematic thought I want to add.

I think there’s too broadly spread-about (and often unquestioningly accepted) a narrative that says that outlines are somehow creativity-deadening or -defeating, or will suck the life or spontaneity or whatever out of your prose writing. Let me qualify this assertion immediately by saying that I understand perfectly well that there are writers for whom this mode of novel management doesn’t work; that they’ve attempted it, and feel that valuable creative energy is lost to them in the structuring process. That experience must be respected. Whatever you do that works for you is valid.

But I do feel that outlining isn’t given a fair shake, a lot of the time, by people who’ve never tried it and just don’t like the sound of it because it doesn’t sound fun enough. And what troubles me most about this is that too much unexamined advocacy for the Yay Let Us Be Utterly Free And Unfettered In Our Creativity school of thought* is depriving a lot of new writers of a really terrific tool that can keep you from doing something that over weeks and months and years is truly terrible: wasting creative time.

For my money, possibly the single most poignant line in Avengers: Endgame was Tony Stark saying to his dad (in both bittersweet and quite ironic mode, considering) that “no amount of money ever bought a second of time”. When you’re early on in your creative career, and possibly have your best energy levels at your command, it’s easy to feel as if all eternity is before you… as if blowing a week or a month (or six months or a year) on the free-and-unstructured development of a project is no big deal. But later on, in both the short and long terms, you may find yourself revisiting that attitude with considerable regret. And the paradox attached to the resistance of outlining among new / just-getting-started writers is that this is the stage at which it’s most likely to be useful to you. From that earlier post on Tumblr:

At the very beginning of this process, outlining is the easiest and most straightforward way to go, and eliminates the chance of you wasting time by running down a lot of blind alleys and getting caught up in choices that you don’t need to be trying to make at this stage of the operation. Later on, as you get better at this setup process and more confident about it, you can dump outlining if you find yourself disliking it and are able to produce reliable similar-quality results without it. For now, though? Help yourself out by making yourself a shopping list until you can be more certain you won’t forget the stuff you went to the store for.

So let an older writer just say here to the younger ones, the newer ones: We want more of your work, and of your best work: not less. Outlining might work for you—might indeed save you surprisingly large amounts of time, uncertainty and frustration that would otherwise be wasted in waiting for the stars to align or the Muse to arrive or whatever. Just give it a shot, okay? Please and thank you.

…So that’s that. Thanks for reading. And believe it or not, I actually do have to go work on the outline for something at the moment. So if you’ll excuse me? …And enjoy your day.

*Please don’t mistake me here. I’ve written in that mode often enough, and it’s utterly fabulous when it’s working correctly. But over the long run, over a career, with deadlines and other people’s jobs riding on your output turning up in a timely manner, depending on it always to work is dangerous. C.S. Lewis says somewhere that the greatest illusion in which creative people indulge themselves is that what they’ve done once, they can do always…

Also, for those who’ll inevitably ask: yes, I’ve tried pantsing! In fact I’m doing a pantsing project right now. And it is LIKE BREAKING ROCKS WITH MY HEAD. Excruciatingly difficult and painful! But I committed to [REDACTED FAMOUS WRITER] that I’d do this to give the concept a fair shake… so I will be following that project through to the end. (It’s this one. It is entirely possible that I’ll fail at this in ways that have never been seen before, but for fairness’s sake it has to be done. Because I can’t fairly ask people to do something, i.e. attempt the Completely Different Method, that I’m not willing to do myself…)

July 25, 2020
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CrossingsCon 2021 splash page
ConventionsCrossingsCon 2021Young Wizards

CrossingsCon 2021: We’ve got dates!

by Diane Duane February 4, 2020

A lot of you will know that 2019 was kind of a busy year for me. Unquestionably one of the most fun things to happen during the year was CrossingsCon, the Young Wizards and adjacent-media convention in Canada — specifically, in Montréal, Québec. I had a fabulous time there (which frankly is only to be expected when people go out of their way to throw you a con…), and it left me immediately looking forward to the announcement of the next one.

It’s my great pleasure to tell you that we’ve reached that point in time. CrossingsCon 2021 will be held on August 6-8 of 2021, in Montréal! And the convention will take place in its previous (and extremely hospitable) venue, the DoubleTree by Hilton Montréal. (I have to say I’ve rarely been fonder of a convention hotel: perfectly located and surrounded by places to get good food in all kinds of price ranges.)

I am so looking forward to getting back over there and hanging out with one of the most affable and effective convention committees one could hope to meet… as well as all the other fabulous people, attendees and guests, who’ll be in attendance as well.

Convention registration is now open! All you need to do to get your badge is stop by the CC2021 website’s registration page.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as can make it to Montréal!

February 4, 2020
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Segnbora and an associate take five
Awards and award nominationsMiddle KingdomsMiddle Kingdoms metaWriting

2020 Hugo Nomination Eligibility: the Tale of the Five Series

by Diane Duane January 8, 2020

So it’s that time of year when nominations open up for the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Awards, and it turns out that this year, once again, work of mine is eligible to be nominated. (I confess to being pleased this is happening again, since some of my earliest work is involved—not to mention my very earliest award-nominated work—in a universe for which I have something of a soft spot.)

The award in question is the one for Best Series. And the series in question is the Tale of the Five series (also known as the Middle Kingdoms series or “the Door Into…” books): The Door Into Fire, The Door Into Shadow, and The Door Into Sunset. Also involved here is the second of a bridging series of five novella- or novel-length works dealing with events occurring between the original trilogy and the main series’ upcoming completion in The Door Into Starlight.

The WSFS rules say:

To be eligible for nomination for a Hugo award for Best Series in a given year, a series must comprise at least three works totalling at least 240,000 words, and one work in the series must have been released during the previous year.

The first three works in the Tale of the Five series total approximately 330,000 words. The first bridging work, the novella Tales of the Five: The Levin-Gad, was published in August 2018 (making the T5 series nomination-eligible last year). The work triggering nomination-eligibility this year is T5: Levin-Gad‘s sequel, Tales of the Five: The Landlady, published in May 2019—a novel set about three years in MK continuity after the events of Levin-Gad. (The remaining three works in the bridging sequence will be published during 2020 and 2021.)

In this 75,000-word novel set in the main character through-line of the Door Into… series, sorceress and swordswoman Segnbora tai-Enraesi—last scion of one of the Forty Noble Houses of Darthen and hero of the great War against the Shadow—is forced to come to grips with the one part of her life she’s successfully avoided for more than a decade: her day job.

 

With motherhood no longer enough of an excuse to get her off the hook, Segnbora’s liege lady Eftgan of Darthen sends her off to start restoring to working order the long-declined House of which Segnbora is now Head. Both of them know this will be hard work. But Segnbora doesn’t realize how hard until, while visiting her lands in Darthen’s rural north, one Holding of House tai-Enraesi turns out to be concealing a danger unexpected enough to challenge even a companion of Dragons and a wielder of the blue Fire of Power…

To make it easier for people to decide whether they’re interested in nominating the Tale of the Five for the 2020 Best Series award, all the nominatable (…’nominable?’ whatever…) works are available at a deep discount (75% off) at our store at Ebooks Direct. Please use this link so you’ll see the info on how to get the discount. If a sale is in progress at the store, this will render your discount even deeper.

The trilogy is also available at Amazon (if you prefer to acquire it there), but not discounted. The first two bridging works are available exclusively at Ebooks Direct, and will remain so until the next three works are complete.

The discount will last until Hugo nominations close on March 13th at 11:59 (US) PDT.

…So there you go. Many thanks in advance for your interest and/or award consideration!

(Looking for more information about the series in general? Check out MiddleKingdoms.com.)

January 8, 2020
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Tweo kinds of cracknel
BakingCuisines and Foods of the Middle KingdomsFood, restaurants and cookingMiddle KingdomsWriting

From the (theoretically forthcoming) CUISINES AND FOODS OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOMS: Cracknels

by Diane Duane December 30, 2019

Using the vestigial English term “cracknel” to define this common snack food format of the Middle Kingdoms may at first seem a strange choice, considering the weird peripatetic course the word has charted across this world’s linguistic landscape over the last century or so. Having started out as a 1400s-period descriptor for a twice-baked savory-or-sweet biscuit, it then became gradually attached to all kinds of sweet and savory crunchy things, from pretzels (hard and soft) to commercially-produced crackers to (in southern US usage) the little bits of pork crackling left over after rendering lard. Various wafers, candy bars and nut-brittle-type sweets also use the term. (Check out this aggregation of Instagram posts including the hashtag #cracknel. Your head will spin at some of the things that turn up.) There’s even a Biblical reference, where “cracknel” turns up to render a Hebrew term suggesting biscuits that have been pricked with a fork before baking.

The connection seems, logically enough, to be the concept of crunchy things, which makes sense considering the term’s English etymology. According to the OED, it comes to us from the French craquelin, which is derived from croquer/”to crunch”. These days craquelin can mean (in general usage) a cracker, or (in more specialized usage) a pastry dough used to produce a crackly finish.

The cracknels that turn up in the earliest-preserved Tudor cookbooks, though, most closely match the Middle Kingdoms approach — a twice-baked biscuit, the first baking being of a long thin roll of seasoned dough, and the second baking of thin bits sliced off that roll. By the late Tudor period on our Earth, the second bake had been dropped out of the process, and the dough was simply rolled out very thin and cut out into rounds (see the recipes here reflecting this technique). But during the period being covered by the present Middle Kingdoms works, the preferred cracknel style closely matches the Tudor one… and is easily recognizable to a modern this-Earth baker as the normal method for making biscotti.

The words best used to render “cracknel” in the major languages of the Middle Kingdoms are surprisingly close (Arlene and N. Arlene kechte, Darthene chekech, Steldene emekch, even Ladhain kchhe). This, along with the words’ age — all of them are archaic — tempts one to think that they jointly preserve a common root word in what we may as well call the “late Medioregnic” dialect: the little-known common language/lingua franca spoken by human beings during the long terrible period when the phenomenon known as the Dark overshadowed the world. During this time much knowledge, even of languages of discourse, was lost in the near-extinction of humanity. So there’s an odd satisfaction in thinking that so small, homely and enjoyable a thing somehow persisted through the long disaster and (along with humanity) made it out the far side, back into the light.

The technique for making Middle Kingdoms-style cracknels is simple, and very close to the modern this-Earth biscotti method. Make a fairly firm dough with flour, a leavening agent (though some regions forego this), enough eggs to hold it all together, some honey if you like, and whatever herbs and seasonings (or in some cases cheeses) you favor. Roll this dough into “logs” and bake these until they color and firm up. Remove from the oven and allow to cool enough to cut them into small thin slices. Then return the sliced pieces to the oven at a lower temperature and bake them again, turning once during the process. The this-universe-Italianate cutting method of slicing on a sharp diagonal is sensible (in that it exposes the maximum amount of surface area to the gentle heat of the second baking) and attractive, but not mandatory. …Though there are regions of the Kingdoms where, if you had no other clue, you could tell where you were within thirty leagues or so by how the locals cut their cracknels.

Flavorings for Kingdoms cracknels are a matter of seasonal availability and the whim and affluence of the baker or cook. Steldenes favor putting chopped fresh or dried whitefruit in them (because of course they do: Steldenes are well known to put whitefruit in everything) and numerous other fruits as well, ideally dried; also fruit pickles and syrups, nuts and nut creams, especially almond and chestnut, and metahnë or weeproot, a close analogue to Armoracia rusticana, our common horseradish. Mid-latitude Arlenes tend to favor mellower spicery (yellow berry-pepper, capsicums, green onions and garlic, the various wild and tame parsleys) and grated hard cheeses, from the very mild to the very sharp. Western and “upper” Darthenes lean toward warm-country flavors: sweetbark, yellow citron (identical to our Citrus medica) and green citron (a local analogue to Citrus ichangensis, the Ichang papeda); anise, ginger, caraway, honey-rush (a relative of Saccharum officinarum, our sugar cane), and mint-grass. People from cooler, wetter climates (“lower” Darthen and Arlen, upper Steldin) prefer hotter or “darker” spicery in their cracknels: whitefruit again, dark berry-pepper (similar to our Piper nigrum), poppyseed, various nuts (walnut, chestnut) and smoked honey. But even inside these general areas of preference there’s endless variation, influenced by whatever local ingredients are felt to suit cracknels particularly well.

(There are also regional differences in preparation. The most extreme of these would possibly be native to North Arlen, where, as a substitute for the second baking, some people deep-fry their cracknels. Up south in the more conservative parts of mountain country, mentioning this behavior will inevitably start a discussion about the naughtiness and perversity of the decadent North. Brawls have occasionally started over this issue. Let the tourist beware…)

In the towns and cities of the Kingdoms, every bakery of any note makes cracknels to their own recipe and seeks to lure customers away from other bakers by unique combinations of flavors or superior baking technique. Competition (both informal and formal) is intense. In both Prydon and Darthis there are annual contests for the best cracknel in the city, and it’s not unknown for judges in these competitions to be bribed. In Prydon, for some years since the enthronement of the new King—when people started having time or inclination to be thinking about this kind of thing again—there has been a push to require competitors to formally swear in one or another of the Goddess’s City temples that they will not accept gratuities or otherwise seek to influence the contest outcomes. But so far no formal action has been taken… King Freelorn perhaps having wisely decided to keep his (and the Lion’s) nose out of it.

Fortunately one doesn’t need to have a Middle Kingdoms commercial bakery in the neighborhood to experience cracknels. They’re easy to make at home. Here are two representative recipes. One is in the Steldene style, with Jalapeño and chipotle chilies standing in for the inevitable whitefruit (and adding not only smoked paprika but Cheddar cheese, which the more hidebound Steldenes might look a bit askance at… but ask me if I care. They won’t be eating them). The other is more northern Darthene in its flavoring, using caraway as an aromatic and substituting lemon for the ubiquitous green or golden citron of the warm North.

Savory Hot-Spiced Cracknels

  • 350g / 2 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 60g / 1/4 cup granulated sugar (or golden granulated/caster sugar if you can get it)
  • 3 large eggs, beaten
  • 70g / 1/4 cup pickled Jalapeno chilies, drained, patted dry, chopped
  • 2 small bottled or canned Chipotle chiles, split, drained, patted dry, chopped
  • 1 teaspoon smoked sweet paprika (or regular if you can’t find smoked; but smoked is better. The heat of the paprika in question is up to you. Hot paprikas are entirely in tune with the Steldene cuisine style.)
  • 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • i/2 teaspoon salt
  • 40g / 1/4 cup finely grated Cheddar cheese (or substitute Parmesan if you like)

Preheat the oven to 180C for a regular oven, 160C for a fan oven.

Because of the chilies in this dough, it makes sense to wear disposable gloves for this next stage of preparation. If you choose to work bare-handed, please be extra careful about washing your hands thoroughly before touching your eyes or any part of you that features mucous membrane. Jalapeños and chipotles may seem innocuous in your mouth, but getting capsaicin from them in your eye (or onto/into other sensitive area) is an experience better avoided. 

Mix the flour and all the dry ingredients together. Beat the eggs well, add them to the dry ingredients, and mix and knead together until the ingredients start to come together into a dough. Add the chopped chilies and grated cheese and knead until well combined into the dough. (If you can do all the above in a mixer bowl using a dough hook, so much the better; it’ll be a lot less work for you.)

Prepare two cookie sheets by lining them with baking parchment. Lightly flour a work surface and tip the dough out onto it.  Divide the dough into four pieces and roll each one into a log of dough about 30cm long. Place the logs on the prepared cookie sheets, two per sheet, well separated. (They may spread a lot, or they may not, but it’s wise to give them room.)

Put in the oven and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the dough has risen and spread a little, and the outsides of the dough logs are slightly browned and firm. Remove them from their cookie sheets to a rack, and allow them to cool for a few minutes. Meanwhile, lower the heat in the oven to 140C for a regular oven, 120C for a fan oven.

With a sharp knife, slice the dough logs on a sharp diagonal in slices about 1cm thick. Lay the slices out flat on one or more of the prepared baking sheets (you may only need one) and put them back in the oven for twenty minutes. At the end of this time, pull the baking sheet out and turn all the slices over: then return to the baking sheet for another twenty minutes. 

Remove to a rack to cool completely. When cool, store them in a tin until ready to serve. They will keep well in the tin for up to a month… assuming you can stay away from them for that long. If you can, stay away from them the first day of baking as well: after a day or so the flavors intensify somewhat.

Lemon / Caraway Cracknels

  • 350g / 2 cups plain flour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • 240g / 1 cup sugar
  • 3 whole eggs, well beaten
  • 2 tablespoons caraway seeds, ground in a mortar
  • 2 tablespoons freshly grated lemon zest
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice if needed

Preheat the oven to 180C for a regular oven, 160C for a fan oven. Prepare two cookie sheets as above. 

In your mixer’s bowl (assuming you’re using a mixer), combine the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, ground caraway seeds and lemon zest and mix well. Add the beaten eggs and knead well, using the mixer’s dough hook if you can. If the dough is reluctant to come together, add lemon juice teaspoonful by teaspoonful until it does. 

This dough will be stickier than the previous one, and will probably have to be scraped out of the bowl onto your floured surface. Additionally, it may need some more flour added to it so that you’re able to work it into logs — once again, four of them, each about 30cm long. Place on the prepared baking sheets, well separated, and bake for 25 minutes. The top of each log should be firm and just slightly colored.

Remove the once-baked logs from the oven and place on a rack to cool for 15 minutes or so. Reduce the oven heat to 150C for a regular oven / 130C for a fan oven. Slice the logs up in 1cm-wide slices, on the diagonal, as previously. Lay the slices flat on one of the baking sheets and return to the oven for twenty minutes. Then as before, remove from the oven, turn all the slices over, and put back in the oven for a final twenty minutes. When finished remove to racks and cool completely. 

Store in a tin or other tightly-closed container when completely cool. Like their spicier variant, these too will keep for a month in a tin. 

A few process notes:

Make sure to have your knife very sharp before beginning work on the once-baked rolls.

When cutting, do not be tempted to press straight down with the knife: the cracknels will inevitably break in half (or smaller) and not be pretty. Slice each slice and take your time. Resharpen the knife if and when necessary.

As in most Earth-analogues inhabited by human beings, the broken or irregular ones are for the cook. Just which ones are irregular (and how many…) is the cook’s call.

Serving suggestion: With the cold drink, beer or wine of your choice. Disclosure: I haven’t yet tested these with beer. Results will be forthcoming on or around New Year’s.

One caution: Crunchy and delightful as these are, they can sometimes bake up very hard. If you have any concern about the strength of your teeth, please be careful about how you bite into these. 

Enjoy!

December 30, 2019
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metaStar Trek and other licensed propertiesWritingWriting adviceWriting process

Q&A: Getting into Star Trek, Managing IP work

by Diane Duane December 9, 2019
From the ask box at my Tumblr:
How did you get into writing Star Trek novels? Are there any considerations you have to keep in mind when working with someone else’s IP?

— marypsue

Let’s break this in two.

First: How did I get started?

I am a first-generation Star Trek fan. I fell in love with ST:TOS* as soon as it premiered, and immediately started writing fanfic in that universe. (It should be mentioned here that – so long before the days of widespread internet-connectedness – not only did I have no idea that other people were doing something very similar, but I had no idea it even had a name. I was writing all alone, in a vacuum, with no support whatsoever… but however accidentally, I’d discovered something invaluable: it made me happy. We’ll come back to this later.)

So. Time went by and I slid from that genre of fanfic-writing into writing fic that was much more Tolkienian in genre, and from there, into writing original fiction that Tolkien would have found, well, rather different. Cutting another longish story short, in 1978/9 I sold and had published my first novel, this one – the initial volume in the LGBTQ-and-poly-ish Tale of the Five / Middle Kingdoms series that would later get me nominated two years running for the Astounding Award for best new writer in the SF/fantasy field.

Now when something like this happens to you, it gets a lot easier to pitch new novels to people. I’m not just talking about the increased attention that awards nominations bring you. But just having a traditionally-published book out tells other potential publishers that you’ve mastered at least some important aspects of the novelist business: (a) being able to conceive of a plot that will sustain a novel-length work, (b) being able to go from concept to starting in on a novel, © being able to finish a novel, and (d) being able to cope with the editorial process – handling suggested edits, dealing with a copyedited manuscript, dealing with proofs, etc etc.

As it happens, while I was dealing with the sequelae to publishing The Door Into Fire – meaning the inevitable question “And what are you going to do next?” – I had also been doing some typing for an acquaintance who was typewriter-challenged. They were writing a Star Trek novel. And I have to say that what I was typing up for them was giving me hives. It was…not anything like what I thought a Star Trek novel should look like. I remember saying to a friend or two, on the quiet, “I could eat a ream of typing paper and barf a better Star Trek novel than this.” And finally one of them – I can’t remember who at the moment, but the odds are it was David Gerrold, who (God love him) has a history of daring me into doing things I want to do anyway – turned around and called my bluff and said, “All right, go on then, quit your kvetching and just go do it.”

Which left me staring at the problem with a lot more intent. Fine, you’re going to pitch a novel to Trek: what story are you going to tell? It’s not like you’re constrained by a TV budget here. Stretch out and tell the biggest Star Trek story you can find: one that can only be told, or best told, in this universe. (This being my working “prime criterion” for stories told in other people’s universes: for best effect the story should only be capable of being told within that set of characters and circumstances. The jewel must be cut to suit the setting, not – however counterintuitive it might seem – not the other way around.)

So I sat with that concept for a while, and eventually the right idea, or set of ideas, presented itself. I can vividly remember the moment. I was sitting on a bus bench near Victory and White Oak in the San Fernando Valley when the idea hit. It was a long time before cellphones, so I had to wait an hour or so to get home so I could call my agent and say “Don, guess what? I’m going to write a Star Trek novel!”

There was the briefest pause, after which he said, only half joking: “Do you have to?” Because both of us knew perfectly well that from Paramount’s point of view, Star Trek novels were merely another kind of merchandising, like plastic phasers and James T. Kirk action figures. (And strictly speaking, regardless of how we love them, they still are.) …But then Don said, “Okay, do an outline and we’ll see what they think.”

And so I wrote the outline, and my agent sent it along to the editor of the Trek books at Pocket – who was then Dave Hartwell (God rest him, a fabulous editor of any and all kinds of SF) – and Dave read it and liked it, and he sent it to Paramount for approval, and they read it and liked it, and gave Dave the go-ahead to buy it. And that turned into The Wounded Sky. (A nice overview is here. But I am also charmed to tell you that this book has its own entry at TV Tropes.) As a tied-for-second novel went – So You Want To Be A Wizard was written at very close to the same time – it doesn’t seem to have done too badly.

Anyway, after that got written and turned in and published, the people at Pocket said to me, “Okay, what have you got for us next?” …It was that simple… and I was that lucky. I liked working with them: they liked working with me: and they liked what I’d done enough to ask for more. So I was in for eight novels more, spread over a fair bit of time. (And I have one more plot lying around that I should really get in touch with present editorial about and see if there’s any interest. You never can tell…)

So that’s how I did it. Everybody else’s mileage will inevitably vary. But I don’t think there’s going to be much argument with the idea that before working with other IP-holders in their worlds, you might usefully do as much work as possible in your own. That way potential publishing partners will have something to look at to help them get a sense of what your voice sounds like outside someone else’s world.

…Now as for working with someone else’s IP – anyone’s – this is how I manage it.

(a) Remember it’s theirs. They were there before you arrived and will doubtless be there long after you’re gone. They own that property, are likely enough to have worked hard on it in their time, and – whether they originated it or are just its buyers – are almost certainly powerfully protective of it. You can press against the edges of their envelope – quite hard, if you’re careful and have permission – but break through the fabric of their corporate reality without warning and you are going to be in deep trouble.

Do your homework. Know your licensor: know their history with other creators. Find out where there have been problems in the past and keep your eyes open for warning signs that you may be discovering some new one. If you were lucky enough to be invited in, act like a considerate houseguest (creatively speaking); while working in that universe, don’t (for example) sneakily attempt to jettison parts of the property that annoy you or covertly subvert bits that seem to call for subversion. (Overt subversion is a different story. Be in communication with your IP owner about this, and you may be able to win them over.  [Though you should be prepared for them to take credit for this after the fact.]) If there’s a work-with-us guide or in-house bible, sleep with it under your pillow.

(b) Know your subject / universe. KNOW it. It is an absolute certainty that no matter how well you think you know it, there are fans out there who know it better than you do – massively, obsessively, eat-drink-and-sleep-ively better – and if you put a foot wrong, they will come for you. Leaving aside the issue of not wanting to be left looking like an idiot on the Internet, you ought in any case to be deeply cognizant of your host-world’s internal verities before you can expect to write it flexibly and well.

– And add (b1) to this: Know your characters’ voices. Not just the way they phrase things, but the way they think about things and (possibly more importantly) feel about things. It’s not you the readers will have come for. It’s them. You must channel the core characters at the very least authentically, and (ideally) affectionately, or it’ll all end in tears.

For the duration of this work, you are in service to them. Treat them courteously and give them your best words to speak; but always in their own voices. Don’t be afraid to let them be more real than you are. For a lot of people, unquestionably, they are. If that’s a problem for you, you shouldn’t be doing this kind of work. (At least not more than once.)

© Don’t do it for money. Don’t do it for fame. Do it for love or not at all. Let’s be realistic: any licensing IP is likely to (in the great scheme of things) be far better and more widely known than you are. You may acquire some positive press for your work with it, but in many people’s minds the positivity will have to do far more with the property than with you, regardless of your gifts or how much you love that universe, or whether or not you “came up through the fandom.” As regards money, some licensed work will pay competitively with original work done in the same genre, but most will not. Not even being a Hot Name with a given IP will necessarily guarantee you any kind of serious money. (In particular, IP licensors have a historical tendency to pay lower-than-normally-accepted royalty rates, and in the past it has taken very energetic and insistent agents to break this habit.) It therefore stands to reason that, for the sake of your own best functioning as a writer, you need to be doing work of this kind because you really need to do it (or have done it) to make yourself happy: to scratch a creative itch, or to give something back to a property/universe that you love.

Now, “do it for love” can cover a lot of ground. You don’t have to be head over heels in luuuuuuuurrrrve with a property to write for it well. (In fact I suspect this state could conceivably hinder a writer’s ability to do their best work for a property: you need at least a little separation from it so that you can realistically evaluate how what you’re producing is stacking up.) You can just be in really strong like with a given property. But you ought to be in at least some kind of like. A personal commitment to the stylistic, rational or emotional core of a given property will get you through the times of challenge that will inevitably surround your involvement with it far better than any unrealized hope of a big payday or of more widespread recognition of your own talents.

This may sound heretical, but I don’t believe that licensed work is necessarily most fruitfully viewed as a natural stepping-stone to doing original work. (Or even to becoming a licensor yourself, though that does happen.) I think that, well and thoughtfully handled at both ends of things – the auctorial as well as the editorial – not-your-own-IP-work can be entirely worth doing wholly for its own sake. To write for the enjoyment of readers who’re using licensed work to scratch the same itch or feed the same passion that fanfic readers/writers know – of just wanting more good story in that universe? That’s entirely honorable employment, in my book. You’re an entertainer! Entertain, and fear nothing.

(And read your contracts closely.) 🙂

*A minor edit. These days you have to tell people which Star Trek series you fell in love with as soon as it premiered. What a time to be alive…

December 9, 2019
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booksFoodFood, restaurants and cookingrecipesWriting

Ludwig Bemelmans’ NY Oyster Bar Shellfish Pan Roast Recipe

by Diane Duane November 25, 2019

I love Ludwig Bemelmans for many reasons that usually have more to do with writing and his challenging career arc than with food (more details here). But this post’s about the food, and a specific favorite recipe.

In his collection of “slice-of-culinary-life” writings La Bonne Table,  Bemelmans passes on a bit of info that many New Yorkers, or visitors to the city, would be glad to have: the original recipe for one version of the famous shellfish pan roast served at Grand Central Terminal’s venerable Oyster Bar and Restaurant (a venue much appreciated by the cats in the Feline Wizardry series, as well as by the series’s author, who ate there as often as she could afford to while living and working in Manhattan).

So here’s the image of the page in La Bonne Table where the recipe/method appears, and a transcription of the method. He gives the version for the clam pan roast: for an oyster one like the one in the header image, I just substitute canned oysters and enough fish stock or consommé to equal the amount of clam broth Bemelmans quotes. All kinds of shellfish work brilliantly in this (and if you’re actually in the Oyster Bar some time and feel inclined toward this dish, you might like to order the combination one, which has a little bit of everything). I’ve broken up the original block of his text for readability’s sake: may his kindly shade forgive me.

 

We went to rake for cockles, which are like our clams, except for their globular structure, and they taste like Little Necks. I gave the hostess a recipe, which I found in Grand Central Station’s sea-food bar, where a Greek chef who makes it wrote it down for me and showed me how it’s made. It is one of the best things to eat, simple to make– in fact, nobody can go wrong. It’s a meal in itself, and it costs very little.

You need paprika, chili sauce, sherry wine; also celery salt, Worcestershire sauce, butter according to your taste, and clams. I use cherrystones, which are washed and brushed, and then placed in a deep pan with their own liquid. For each portion of eight, add one pat of butter, a tablespoon of chili sauce, 1/2 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, a few drops of lemon juice and 1/2 cup of clam broth. Add a dash of celery salt and paprika.

Stir all this over a low fire for three minutes. Then add four ounces of light cream or heavy cream, according to your taste, and one ounce of sherry wine, and keep stirring. When it comes to the boiling point, pour it over dry toast in individual bowls. Add a pat of butter and a dash of paprika and it is ready to serve.

If you have made too much of it, put the remainder in a container in your refrigerator. It will be as good, warmed up, a week or a month* later. It’s called Clam Pan Roast, if you ever want to order it at Grand Central Station’s Oyster Bar. I understand the recipe originally came from Maine.

(This post originally appeared at the author’s Tumblr, and is reproduced here so people who [correctly] aren’t wild about their ToS as regards data sharing don’t have to go over there.)

*I love his enthusiasm here, but frankly I wouldn’t leave this in the fridge for any month. A few days maybe. (Though it must be said, I couldn’t leave it alone that long anyway. It’s really good.)

November 25, 2019
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Whitefruit
Cuisines and Foods of the Middle KingdomsFood, restaurants and cookingMiddle KingdomsWriting

From the (theoretically) forthcoming CUISINES AND FOODS OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOMS: Whitefruit

by Diane Duane May 12, 2019

(Since in the wake of TOTF2: The Landlady people have already started noodging at me for a MK cookbook, I guess I’m going to have to start making notes. Might as well start here…)

The whitefruit (Darthene andénne, Arlene and N. Arlene onten, Steldene emdenet) is instantly recognizable as a member of genus Capsicum – part of the Solanaceae or nightshade family, in which the Earth-based chilies / chiles are all included.

If we stick to Terran-style taxonomy (and why not, for the time being), the main Middle Kingdoms-based whitefruit species (Capsicum albifructans medioregnis) would likely most closely correspond to Capsicum annuum x chinense – a naturally hybridized species sharing traits of the jalapeño and the Habanero. The heat of the main species can vary wildly between not too horrific (Scoville 2500-5000) and it’ll-fry-you-like-an-egg (Sco 500,000 and upwards).

The original wild whitefruit species come from the colder mountainous regions of the Middle Kingdoms’ south, and it’s generally agreed that the best ones are grown in southern Darthen and Steldin; the closer to the Highpeaks, the better. The plant prefers poor soil – glacial if possible – and a somewhat adversarial climate featuring bright sunshine (though not necessarily heat) and cold winters. They prefer a bit of altitude and tend not to grow well in the milder north, giving rise to the very old saying “No [white] fruit north of the Road” – suggesting that the Kings’ Road marks both the upper edge of the area for successful cultivation, and that southerners transplanted to the [politically and meteorologically] hotter climes of the North may not necessarily prosper.

The white color of these chiles – a bit unusual on our Earth – is the normal color in the Kingdoms, with light greens reminiscent of mild Hungarian chiles, and darker Jalapeño-ish greens, being not quite as common. Yellow, red, purple and black cultivars are rare, and prized as much as ornamentals as for culinary use; but generally they don’t match the heat of the white breeds.

Naturally, in the Kingdoms as here, there are people who prize the fruit more for its heat than its flavor… with the result that some whitefruit cultivars have almost no flavor left at all, but make their way in the markets by their names: “tonguefire,” “Dragonbreath,” et cetera and ad infinitum. The single flame-colored cultivar able to match the hottest of the whites (heading for the low Sco 1-millions) commands high prices at market. But unscrupulous stallholders are known to take advantage of careless buyers by substituting milder lookalike fruits, giving rise to another saying: “Don’t see red without tasting first”.

At the culinary end: Steldene cooking favors whitefruit so strongly that it’s hard to find any food east of the Stel and south of the Road that doesn’t contain it. (Pastries layered with whitefruit-laced honey are one of the national passions: think of a baklava that bites back.) They also routinely appear in many other sweet dishes, and every kind of meat preparation imaginable, both as cooking ingredient and independent condiment. The present King of Arlen picked up a serious taste for whitefruit during his outlaw days on the run in Steldin, and is constantly badgering his spouses to bring him some home when they’re out that way on business, or near the better market towns in southern Darthen. (TDISu, TOTF1, TOTF2)

May 12, 2019
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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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