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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
Irish life: The things you don’t discuss, Halloween...
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From the Baking-While-You-Write Department: Spicy Apple Pie
Peter Morwood on Moroccan preserved lemons
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Changes coming at YoungWizards.com: your opinion(s) solicited
Outlining: one writer’s approach
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Pulling The Lever
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Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

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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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Carmela and Sunspark: it probably had to happen
Creative processCrossing the streamsDigital artEbooks DirectMiddle Kingdoms metaYoung Wizards meta

At the Ebooks Direct “office”: A chance meeting

by Diane Duane February 9, 2020

(“…as we say in Middle-Earth.”)

So I was setting up some promo art for an ebook sale that’s going to be offered on Tumblr only. Nothing fancy. The Ebooks Direct “office”. Various characters. Paused the render in the middle to handle some minor lighting and design issues.

And realized abruptly that I have way, way more serious things to worry about than lighting.

I have put Carmela Rodriguez (in however meta a sense) in the same space as Sunspark.

…This could get dangerous very quickly. In fact, both these universes may have already been significantly destabilized, and we may all already be doomed.

Consider it. One of these two beings is the young woman who, having just barely discovered that alien species exist, more or less immediately both ruthlessly snubbed a visiting alien prince and (you could make a case) started dating a shrub. This is the same young woman who derailed a potentially galactically destabilizing invasion of a vital infrastructural transport facility with only her wits, a sidearm and a half-kilo bar of Valrhona chocolate. The young woman who quietly incorporated the planet Earth to entitle it to Galactic safe-haven legislation that would protect it from interstellar aggressors. This is the young woman who shot the Lone Power point-blank and then snickered and said “Oops.” …A bold person. Decisive. Increasingly addicted to thinking outside the box, at least partly for the delights of continuing to freak out her wizardly little brother.

The other of them is a shape-changing, gender-fluid, nearly-immortal creature of potentially-devastating destructive power (their mental shorthand for their name is a fucking CME, for Goddess’s sake) whose major characteristics are an insatiable curiosity about human beings and their doings — particularly the ones associated with relationships — and a rather flexible sense of the permanence (or otherwise) of death. A dangerous person. Fun-loving. Always open to something new. And routinely hot to (ahem) trot.

…And their two universes both have viable worldgating systems.

It’s therefore a fair guess that it would be only a matter of time before they met, as both universes in question seem to have a tendency to solve for (shall we say) maximum drama. All it takes is an afternoon in the office when one of them has turned up to inquire where the hell is the shiny new space armor she was promised, and for the other lot to be passing through to discuss, I don’t know, the theoretically upcoming Middle Kingdoms cookbook or some damn thing. And they run into one another and introductions are made.

My only point of certainty on this is that, knowing her past history, Carmela would instantly rev up her flirting engine and get busy. Once they got over the initial shock, Sunspark would be completely charmed. The whole initial interaction would most likely look a lot like Rapunzel’s rapprochement with Maximus in Tangled. And Thoth only knows what would happen after that.

And the joke is that I didn’t even see this happening. I started setting up the scene and rendered it once and moved the two of them closer together, strictly to get them more toward the center of the shot… and it was already too late. A little closer. Yeah. Closer than that. Friendly, direct look. Head up. Keep the mane out of the way, they wouldn’t want to set her hair on fire…

…And then when I was looking at this rough render I started wondering why Freelorn’s eyes weren’t pointing quite where they should have been. He was meant to be looking at Nita as she explains something about Carmela’s sidearm to him. But he’s not: he’s sort of halfway looking at Herewiss, and the expression is the kind of, “What? What is it?” look you give someone close who’s reacting to something in an unexpected way, and you’re trying to find out why. But Herewiss’s attention is entirely elsewhere than on any discussion of sidearms, because he’s watching that happen across the table. (And finding it amusing. Damn the perceptive s.o.b.! Dusty’s always seeing these things before I do.)

Herewiss’s pose is imperfect in angle and lighting, as it wasn’t originally meant to be shared.
Aaah, who cares.

…Whatever that is. They look like they’ve already reached at least the “Do you want to go out for coffee?” stage. What the next stage looks like, don’t ask me. I just work here.

(headclutch) Now I’m wondering if this galaxy’s going to wind up with a new Empress or something. And in which universe. (Or if in both…)

February 9, 2020
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The Transcendent Pig rocks it
Young Wizards meta

The Transcendent Pig on Air Guitar

by Diane Duane July 2, 2019

(This comes to you via the as yet incomplete Young Wizards 30-Day OTP collection. The song in question came up in our local pub’s playlist just now, and I couldn’t not reproduce this for the pleasure of those who prefer not to go over to Tumblr these days due to their data policy. And frankly, who could blame you? …If you’re not previously acquainted with the Transcendent Pig: here he is. http://www.youngwizards.com/ErrantryWikiOld/index.php/Transcendent_Pig)


Once upon a time (or indeed once upon another time, if that suits you better: there’s always more time lying around), in the lounge bar of a pub in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland, a redheaded woman is kissing a pig.

Not just any woman, granted. And definitely not just any Pig.

In any case, none of this is as difficult as it might sound on first hearing, as the Pig is both graceful and light on his feet, and good at displacing his  own mass in such a way as not to wreck the barstool on which he’s perched. Nor (from the redhead’s side of things) is this particularly an unpleasant experience, as the Pig’s facial bristles are on the soft side, and due to being fairly silvery to start with, almost invisible anyway — as if he’s wearing a very subtle and discreet version of designer stubble, with a slight glitter about it.

“Chao, bello.” It is of course a pun, a terrible one. “Mwah. Mwah.”

The redhead gets a third “Mwah” from the pig, then straightens up and looks at him quizzically. “Three? What, are we in Switzerland all of a sudden? Or no, of course you are. By definition.”

“And why not? Besides, a three for one deal, I’d think you’d be in favor. Value for money. Very Swiss. Anyway, I hear you’re planning to be crying on the bar up there shortly…” He grins.

“Oh, don’t you start tormenting me now! I can get that at home.” She rolls her eyes. “Yet another way for the BBC to break my heart, who needed that…? Come on, get yourself settled.”

No one in the bar shows the slightest sign of having noticed a redhead kissing the Pig hello a la Suisse, or the two of them settling in their respective seats. This is partly because all this is happening in the woman’s head, but also partly because this is one of her locals. And even if they could see what was going on, the neighbors (who’re by now well used to seeing this particular redhead with a red wine and a mineral water and a netbook and an iPad and a notebook on the bar in front of her, working on them all at once) would never be caught actually remarking on whatever she’s up to this time. At least not until she’s left.

“You comfortable?”

“Entirely.”

“What’s your pleasure? They’ve got Ballygowan if you’re on the clock.”

“You kidding? I’ve been on the clock since the local Big Bang, and no one cares when I punch out. Or is qualified to judge what I’m doing, whether I have or not. If you’re buying I’ll have a Remy, thankyouverymuch.”

The dark-haired assistant manager, Louise, comes around and takes their orders without batting an eye. (And why would this be a surprise when you think how many jokes start with “A(n) [x] walks into a bar…”? They get all kinds around here; any place that routinely deals with Wicklow bachelor farmers has no problems with the occasional Yank-Irish woman or silvery-pink Pig.) Shortly the redhead has a fresh glass of a Spanish-bred Cabernet Sauvignon, and the Pig has an oversized snifter of XO, and they are clinking glasses.

“Mud in your eye.”

“Like there’s any on you. Ne’gakh emeirsith.”

They sip and settle back into the calm atmosphere. Halloween isn’t for another two weeks and change, but the decorations are up already: people here like Halloween, and in any case there’s not the inevitable groaning that comes with the appurtenances of Christmas (especially the TV ads) starting too fecking soon. The place is calmly busy, half-full with a subset of the place’s normal afternoon clientele — in the recently-redone front bar, guys who have bets on races or the football are escaping home life till teatime; here in the lounge to the rear, ladies and gents are cozied away in the U-shaped banquette booths, having tea or drinks and taking a break from the shopping with the kids in tow. Some of the smallest of the tinies are thundering up and down past the far wall in the enclosed play area.

The most important thing the pub has, besides a comfortable atmosphere and genial staff who know the redhead and her husband of old, and a good restaurant and lunch buffet, is working wi-fi—which the redhead has been exploiting for some time now to turn this general area into one of several Away Offices. Now, though, she shuts down the laptop and the Pad and silences the phone and takes a few other precautions against being interrupted. “Thought we’d have been having this conversation a bit earlier,” the Pig remarks, gazing around.

“Nope, we’re right on time.” She finishes putting the last of the various devices to sleep. “You know the guidelines. If you’re going to self-insert, don’t be shy about it, don’t let yourself off easy, and pay attention to the symmetry. Right at the beginning, right at the end, or smack dab in the middle.”

“Or all three.”

“Can’t have a resonance with just one thing, can you? You need two, minimum. But three’s a chord.”

“So tell me something I don’t know.”

She chuckles. “Bit of a stretch, that…”

“Well, I may be omnipresent, but that doesn’t necessarily make me omniscient.”

On the face of it, this is true, but the redhead suspects that the Transcendent Pig—due to his unique uncreated status—has certain positional advantages he doesn’t routinely reveal or discuss. Fine: so does she. “Let’s not play semantics games just now,” she said. “Got other business.”

“I assumed so. What’s on your mind?”

“Well… You know what I’ve been up to.”

“It’s more or less unavoidable. You mean the OTP thing.”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“Well… The spooning.”

“Yes?”

“It’s a bit intimate.”

“Mmm?”

“I didn’t touch anybody like that till I was twenty. In fact, probably twenty-one.”

“You thought you were a bit late off the blocks, as I recall.”

“Yeah, well. Problem is, how to put them there. Believably. Without deranging either the printed canon or the OTP end of things.”

“So what’s the problem? They’ve been snogging.”

“Not the same. This is, well, full-body, isn’t it. And things can, you know, happen.”

The Pig looks at her sidelong. “Somehow I suspect your audience may know about this. Even the ones that some deeply buried part of you sometimes thinks may be too young for it.”

“Mmph.”

“The world is as it is. You’re always adjuring them to deal with it so. Well, guess what.”

“I hate it when you’re so reasonable.”

“You give me grief when I’m unreasonable, too. Why not make life easier for both of us and just get off the damn pot.”

“Unusually robust language from you… It just seems a little soon.”

“Some would say otherwise. Some would say it’s been way too long.”

“Mmph.”

“Some say you’re way too conservative.”

“Yeah, well, some haven’t had a gun pulled on them once or twice. Sometimes caution gets mistaken for conservatism. …Anyway, if we’re playing in this idiom, the last thing you want with a loaded gun is a misfire.”

“Hmm,” says the Pig, and spends a few moments in communion with the Remy while listening to the pub’s piped music, which is presently featuring something by Starship. “Right, let’s get to grips. How were you going to set it up?”

“Not at home,” she says immediately.

“Granted. Parents. Siblings.”

“Dairine,” they say more or less in unison: then laugh together.

“Yeah, well,” says the Pig. “She has enough issues on her plate at the moment to keep her offside. Still: Carmela.”

“Not too worried about her.”

“The other one, then.”

“The other one” is how the Pig routinely refers to Helena. Plainly there’s something going on here that warrants investigation, but the redhead puts it aside for another time. “Better keep her from any chance of getting involved with this,” the redhead says. “She has a gift for getting the wrong end of these things. In fact, most things.”

“Some have based whole novels on such.”

“’Some’ would not be me. Life’s too short.” She sighs. “Anyway, I was thinking the Moon.”

“Always good for when you don’t want to get too far from home but still want some privacy. So go on then; what have you got?”

The redhead raises her eyebrows. “You want the prose version or the primary material?”

“Why filter it? Primary, always. Roll it.”

“Uh, okay—”

No lowering long shadows blocking out the sun, no huge lazy shapes cruising overhead. The situation is desperately unfilmic, as apparently spacecraft moving at bizarre sudden angles and wildly variable speeds test poorly with terrestrial audiences. What the black sky is full of is darting shapes with unpredictably shifting outlines, leaping around at irrational angles and shooting not just out their fronts or back but from every available surface.

“We may be here a while. Better merge the shields—”

—there are other wizards scattered all over the lunar surface and her mind’s more on them at the moment. Nonetheless, the two of them are not in a good place at the moment, and she’s considering how they can get out of this and then situated somewhere they can do some good.

“Our O2 balance isn’t real great,” Kit mutters from where he’s hunkered down next to her.

“Yeah, respiration’s been up,” is all Nita can say right now, because no question, she’d been left gasping after those last couple of wizardries, the ones they’d cobbled together to crash those two ships that got too close. The trouble was getting a fix on these things: they dodged in and out of normal space the way they flickered along their quirky abnormal flight paths, and no sooner had you managed to describe their movement and other physical parameters in a spell than they’d shifted out of phase and slipped through your wizardry’s grasp. We got lucky those last two times, Nita thought. Don’t think it’ll happen again. Especially since several of the ships had noticed where their two associates had gone down, and were busily slagging down all the surface in the area. There was going to be a small shiny marium here that would bemuse the astronomers, assuming any were left alive on Earth with the leisure to be bemused.

“You’d think word would’ve gotten around by now that that this planet’s protected,” Nita mutters. “Like 1959 wasn’t enough for that last bunch?”

“Before my time,” Kit growls. “And we’re the protection at the moment. Where the hell’s the cavalry? We’re  just supposed to be a holding action—”

The next shot comes a lot closer, impacts just past them. The ground shakes and the boulder behind them fractures and slides down onto their shielding, which crackles with the kind of fizzing light that telegraphs imminent failure.

“Uh oh bad,” Kit says all on one breath, and the next moment Nita’s eyes go wide with shock as he wraps himself around her and flattens them both. Her ears ache with a sudden increase of the air pressure around them, but the shield holds, holds—

“That spell’s really going to need a hardening protocol added,” she says more or less into her tank top, because moving any part of her is kind of problematic right now. She is also  inevitably aware of Kit pressed all up and down the length of her, on top of her. ‘Hardening.’ Did I actually say that just now? Am I or am I not the least conscious human being on this side of the Moon? Oh please God let both of us die before he has time to deconstruct that sentence. —No no I didn’t mean that, of course I didn’t, that was such a stupid thing to say… Yet isn’t it interesting what that writer said, that when people are shooting at you you’re more likely to— 

“Neets?”

“Uh. Yeah?”

“You stopped breathing.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Can you?”

“Yeah. Now you mention it — “

“No, no, cut.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t happy with it either. I told you, it was a first thought.”

“Well, good, think again, because they’d never do it this way! Anyway, Nita’s way too careful about her math, she always brings extra air and doubles up on the energy. And besides, does this even fulfill the basic requirements for spooning?”

“There are requirements?”

“Well, yeah, like not being in protect-the-other-party-with-your-body-from-imminent-death mode! What possible enjoyment is there going to be in that?” The Pig sips at his brandy. “Probably scar them both for life. No one’s gonna be pleased about that.” A slight grin. “Except the people who wouldn’t mind seeing this pairing sabotaged.”

The redhead’s eyebrows go up and for just a second she sees what he means, she can’t help it—

“Uh oh bad,” Nita says all on one breath, and the next moment she feels the shape under her go stiff with shock; she wraps herself around him and flattens them both. Her ears ache with a sudden increase of the air pressure around them, but the shield holds, holds—

But it’s all so peculiar all of a sudden, and the shape she’s expecting underneath her is differently built, longer, rangier, and absolutely rigid with surprise. “Okay,” she says under her breath, “this is weird…”

“What? What the fecking— what the, where the, where the hell are we?”

Nita looks shocked, then annoyed. “It’s the Moon, where did you— Wait.” She glanced around her. Kit was here. He was here. Where’d he go?

“Me wait? Wait for what? And what the feck am I doing here?”

“I was going to ask you that! Never mind—” She shakes her head, or tries to, and then stops, because her face keeps banging into Ronan’s hair. And bouncing off it again.

“How much product did you put on today?” she says. “It’s that wax stuff, too, am I misremembering or didn’t I tell you that it makes you look like a caveman? Are you even listening?”

“Possibly I have better things to listen to than you giving me antiquated hair tips from your style-challenged continent. Like my date, for example! Who is going to go spare when I don’t show up on time, not that life wasn’t difficult enough already what with the—”

“Oh boy, here come the complaints. And what is it with you and these stressful situations you get yourself into with people, can you not find some way to enjoy yourself without being completely surrounded by drama?”

“Believe me, having you whinging at me is stressful enough. You think it was my idea to add being shot at to it? And also, why am I the little spoon?”

Nita laughs in sheer disbelief. “Somebody’s gender roles not being catered to?”

“No, it’s that I’ve got a foot and a half on you at the moment!”

She snickers. “Not even if our positions were reversed. So much wishful thinking, Ronan, seriously….”

“Right, right, that’s it, I am out of here, if you’re not going to snark me to death you’ll do it with innuendo—” Ronan pulls back and tilts his head back toward the sky. “Excuse me! I have tickets for the 3Arena tonight and a date still waiting to be picked up, I’m going to miss the Dart and there won’t be time for a pint before showtime, do you think you can please let me get on with my previously scheduled pull and—”

He vanishes.

Nita blinks.

“Oh no,” she mutters, “it’s going to be one of those days.”

She grits her teeth and waits to see what’ll happen next.

The Pig looks at the redhead and sips his Remy meditatively. “You know, you want something a lot more relaxed. Throwing them into what these inane film warnings call a ‘situation of moderate peril’ is not going to be conducive—”

“That was moderate?”

“For wizards, yeah. Wouldn’t you say they’ve had worse?”

“Uh, well. Yeah, when you put it that way I guess so.”

“Good. Sheesh. Try something a little less fraught.”

“Something a bit pastoral, maybe.”

“Wouldn’t overdo that. In their shoes I’d think of Alaalu right off and start looking under rocks to see where the Lone One’s hiding this time.”

“Hmm…”

A green field in the sunshine.

Somewhere, very high up, a skylark is singing. The song is full of data — if you slow it down and listen to it in the Speech you’ll hear everything from the weather report to gossip about that other lark a half a mile away, yeah, him, you wouldn’t believe the stuff the lark you’re listening to knows about him — but then, look, there are a couple of the two leggers running at each other through the wheat —

“Ow.”

“Ow.”

“This stuff would cut the flesh right off you.”

“Ow!”

— in the sunshine, in slow motion —

The brunette girl’s hair is bouncing behind her. Shining in the sun as she runs.

This is a commercial. How are we in a commercial?

— toward the tall handsome dark young guy who’s running along toward her through the wheat.

If I’d have known this was going to happen I would never have worn the Hawaiian shirt.

The air is bright with floating sparks of light.

It’s that director, isn’t it. The bread guy. The one who did the unicorns later on.

The wind stirs the wheat, the summer air, as they run toward each other in slow motion.

Hair color?  Am I in a Clairol ad? I refuse to do this.

The sun shines warm on everything, the two of them each out to each other as they get closer —

Never in a million years.

Do we have a union? How do we not have a union that keeps us from having to do this stuff?

They come closer, smiling, laughing in the sunshine —

If she makes us do this I will kick her in the shins. That bit in book 11 where she needs me to do, you know, that, I will not. I will not! Do you hear me??

They get closer —

You know, says the female voice, astonishingly calmly, I have Jim Kirk’s commcode. He likes you but not that much. If we ask him to, he and Spock will have such a moment in the middle of the next book—  They’ll have to pulp the whole printing. Are you listening??

The two beautiful teenage figures in the cornfield slow to near motionlessness, freeze…

“Um.”

“Yeah.”

“You might have overstepped the bounds a bit there.”

“Uh, maybe.”

“You put them in a commercial.”

“Um.”

“So have another think.”

And elswehere…

“Uh, okay… it’s the Moon again.”

“Yeah. Preferable, I think.”

“Yeah. It’s not a Clairol commercial. One question though: why’ve they stopped shooting?”

“What, are you complaining?”

“Not me. Just, if something worse is about to happen, I’d like to know!”

“I’m going to look.”

“Look, the shields are — “

“I think they’re okay for just a second or so, Bobo’s not making any fuss —”

“Just be careful —”

Nita sticks her head up from behind the rock, very slowly, very carefully: peers around. Then cranes her neck up—

“Huh. Something you don’t see every day,” she mutters.

“What?”

“Take a look.”

Kit comes up beside her, leaning on the rock, and stares at the wave of incoming spacecraft. They’re just hanging there, frozen, the pulses from their energy weapons caught still in midstrike, halfway to the surface.

“And another thing,” Nita mutters. “Are your ears burning?”

“What?” Kit stares at her. “…Well, you know, now that you mention it…”

“Yeah,” Nita mutters, “just what I thought. It’s going to be another of those interesting days. For certain values of ‘day.’”

She shoulders up a little against the shield. It moves with her. “Good, that’s working anyway.” Nita sighs. “And you’re back, at least.”

Kit frowns in bemusement. “I was gone?”

“Yes you were.”

“Okay, that’s weird. What the hell happened?”

“I have no idea. Stuff just blinked. Then Ronan was here.”

“Oh great. Trouble at his end?”

“Yeah. That hair wax.”

A pause. “You have completely lost me.”

“Never mind. Now we just have to figure out where we go from here…”

“Look, all you have to do is get them pressed up together.”

“In a nice way.”

“How hard can that be? No violence, no ersatz Ridley Scott backgrounds, come on!”

“Okay, how about this?”

“Whatever it is, just roll it.”

A cave. Darkness. The far, cold, wrong end of time.

Two young figures wrapped in bearskins. Or something similar.

One of them moves closer to the other, drapes his bearskin around her.

“This is so stereotypical,” mutters the smaller of the two forms.

“Um. You’re shivering.”

“Yeah, well, so are you! Does anybody seriously think shivering is gender-linked? Look at you, your mouth is blue.”

“It is not.”

“It is so, and it’s not even about blue food for a change. You look like you did after you ate that blue popsicle at the beach last year.”

“Um.”

“And that is the fakest bearskin I ever saw. You know her, you know she’d have trouble killing a bear even if she was freezing.”

“Got a point there…”

Then…a sigh.

“Oh, go on. To make her happy.”

“What?”

“Plainly this is not one of her best days. She’s struggling. Go on, let’s get her off the hook! Put it around me and then get under here.”

“Uh. You sure?”

A long breath. “When are we going to get any peace? Come on.”

“…Okay.”

Some rustling ensues. Snow blows past the opening of the cave. There is a consolidation of bearskins. Two forms snuggle together.

“…It works better the long way.”

A pause, and then terrible snickering breaks out. “She did not just make you say that!”

“What?”

“It’s really kind of… you know…”

An eyeroll as a stone-age dimness settles in around. “Only if you’re like sixty.”

“Well, if somebody would talk to her…”

“Not sure that’s my table. She gets so psychological.”

“Well, okay. But seriously! Isn’t this supposed to unfold naturally or something? I ask you.”

“Well, you know…”

“No, stop making excuses for her.” Annoyed, Kit stands up. “I could have just been getting comfortable!”

“What?”

“Well, not comfortable comfortable! You know what I mean.”

“Not sure I want to.”

He turns his head up to the dark sky. “Look,” he says, his voice raised and rather edged, “I know, all the usual stuff, you know what you’re doing, you have some kind of big plan, it’s all for the best, fine, but would you make up your fucking mind??!”

Nita stares at him. “Whoa,” she says under her breath.

The Pig looks at the redhead. “Whoa,” it says.

The redhead looks a little shocked. “Um. That was unusual.”

“What, the backtalk? Don’t tell me none of them have ever dropped an F-bomb on you while you were working.”

“Uh, no. I’ve had plenty of that. But not so much direction.”

“Fine. You know what? Let it go for today. Work doesn’t always go the way you want it to. Find another road that won’t give them, or you, so much grief.”

“Mmmm…”

They sip at their drinks.

“Wait. I know.”

“Well?”

“Sleepover!”

The Pig gives the redhead the side-eye. “Co-ed? In the New York suburbs? Word gets out, they’ll have social services banging on the door in a matter of hours.”

“Nope. There are other places.”

“Don’t tell me you’re putting them on the Moon again.”

“Beats Pluto this time of year. But no.”

The redhead sinks into a moment’s reverie. The pub’s soundtrack veers abruptly into the mid-1950s.

“My boy Lollipop—

You made my heart go giddyup,

You are as sweet as candyyyyy…”

“Oh, come on. You’re dating yourself now.”

“I have never dated myself.” A brief pause. “Well, maybe once. It was an accident.”

The redhead laughs hard and long. “I doubt that.”

“What?”

“You’re not above playing the Game. The Great Game, Kipling and Doyle and their successors notwithstanding. To go around the long way, and forget it all. And then meet yourself coming from the unexpected direction… and not recognize yourself, because you can’t be there, can’t be then, can you? And matters unfold…”

She has to laugh. “But as for the song… stop playing the age card. Of course you knew that.”

“Well… yes. But it’s not my fault. I was there. I am all songs. I am all places.”

“You are all pigs, anyway.”

“Of course. I’m why you like Miss Piggy. I’m why you liked Wilbur, and Hen Wen. I am experience, slung low to the ground. I am the ground. I am being grounded. I am what roots for sources, and source. I am the sources longing to be rooted for.”

“You are also an insufferable nugget of theatricality. You are, in fact, the very pituitary of the mischief at the core of universal Mind.”

“Oooh, I like that. Can I steal it?”

“Are you kidding? You probably wrote it.”

“Finally! Finally a writer who gets it.”

“But I am the engine of execution,” says the redhead to the Pig, “and even for you, it’s polite to ask.”

“Quite right, since courtesy costs you nothing,” says the Transcendent Pig. “That’s at the heart of the while business, isn’t it? The one thing that keeps the Lone One from becoming wholly alienated. We foil it, we frustrate it, we smack it around, but at the end of the day we do our damndest to be courteous to It. Because sooner or later, It’s coming home, and it’s bad to be rude to your relatives when they’re in that runaway stage.”

A long sigh as the redhead leans briefly on her elbows, glancing at the news channel, and rubs her eyes wearily. “O my most senior cousin,” she mutters. “How bloody much longer?”

“A long road yet,” says the Pig. “But worth staying on, if only to read the Burma Shave signs.”

She tips her head sideways, and chuckles after a moment, then holds still until she gets the scansion under control: this particular poetic medium is rigorous. Finally she says:

“While Evil runs
around amuck
Like some poor headless
Barnyard cluck—”

The Pig eyes her.

“Remember this,
The One’s best joke:
They’re both hid there ‘neath
Darkness’s cloak.”

And then they look at each other and bang their glasses together and chorus,

“Burma Shave!”

After a moment the Pig says, “Too Zen, you think?”

“Naah.”

The pub music’s playlist, which has been mostly doing more recent oldies, reverts from the 50s stuff to something more 20th-century, with its roots in the 80s and 90s mostly. The redhead has already half-registered a familiar 4/4 keyboard intro coming up in the background, and a more-than-familiar voice starting the first verse of a song she loved long before any TV show made a cover of it famous. With regret she’d already dismissed the music as not presently worth distracting her from ongoing business: the song’ll loop around again in an hour and a half or so.

However, the sudden crazed pizzicato flurry of the upscaling guitar riff that she’s never been able to ignore since she first heard this track now flings itself with a shriek against the next-bar double crash of the drums as if driving into a wall. And in perfect time with the slightly rough alto of Journey’s then-lead singer, from the Pig’s mouth—originally opened, the redhead had assumed, for some trenchant comment—there issues right on the beat a sweet yet smouldering tenor exactly in resonance with the pure hard-edged alto of the lead singer.

“A singer in a smoky room,

a smell of wine and cheap perfume:

for a smile they can share the night:

it goes on, and on, and on, and on—”

The Pig’s eyes are squinched shut with the pleasure of an artist lost in the momentary intensity of performance. The redhead’s mouth drops open a bit as the drums slug fully into the backbeat and the verse rolls forward. “Strangers / waiting / up and down the boulevard, their / shadows / searching / in the niiiight…” and fifteen seconds and a couple of lines later the Pig is matching Steve Perry one-for-one on the high note at verse’s end, a full register down but who in their right mind could possibly care?

The rest of Journey plunges into play, and the Fenders come growling in to prep for the main melodic line and the next verse. It’s a good thing no one else can see this, the redhead thinks, because they’d try to have me 2PC’d, but the moment being what it is she simply clears her throat and starts singing harmony a third down from Perry, as for the moment they’re both of them just backup to someone far more central in the Great Scheme Of Things. “Some’ll win, some will lose, some’re born to sing the blues—”

The chorus comes rolling in and the Pig leans against the back of his bar stool and belts his way through it.

“…Living just to find emotion,

hiding

somewhere

in the niiiiiiight—”

Then the song’s bridge hits and the Zildjians smash and guitars rip loose, wailing, and the Transcendent Pig throws its hooves in the air and begins doing air guitar, air guitar of an unselfconscious intensity surely not seen since the substructure of this universe coalesced out of the quantum foam.

Image Photos Text

The redhead is perhaps understandably stunned. From the Pig you normally expect calm sagacity, wry Zenlike utterance, the serious stuff. But what is is, as the Pig says. Apparently when the Pleroma sends you lemons, you make lemonade, and when Life sends you Journey, you do air guitar.

So there’s more air guitar through the chorus’s codas, and this time it’s both of them because when one of the Eternal Verities lets loose like this, what can one do?—and there they are, working the necks and bodies of instruments that are even less there than one or maybe one and a half of them, headbanging happily in time and in the general direction of the age-darkened ebony caryatids on either side of the bar mirror.  Eventually the song fades and they let it go, both with regret: there are some songs you really don’t want to end.

The redhead shakes her head, gulps wine, and grins. “You rock,” she says.

“Long and hard,” the Pig says, and they bang their glasses together again and get their breaths back.

They have a long sip, and finally the redhead sighs and says, “You know? They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. The Author is Dead, I hear.”

“Only for certain values of dead,” the Pig says, “and only for certain values of authorship. Creation never dies: the only things that shift unpredictably are personification and inhabition. Everything else is gravy.”

“Which leaves them where?”

“In their own place, as always. The created is immortal.”

”And the more immortal and alive it is, the more intractable.”

A long, low chuckle. “You said it, not me. Those who would untimely remove the power of creation from the author may find themselves holding a weapon they can’t master. But that’s their problem. Meanwhile, the characters so often know their way better than the author does at any given moment.”

“Not always.”

“Well, the moment has to be given, doesn’t it? Try to take it and you may be very sorry after the fact. Only the characters have it in their power to make the gift. But when they do… then so often everything comes right. Because at the end of the day, we’re all working this through together: and there is no gift so cooperative.”

“Like…”

“Well.”

***

“So let’s take stock. We are not on the Moon.”

“Nope.”

“We are not in some kind of commercial for deodorant or something.”

“Nope.”

“We are in fact walking down the middle of the Main Concourse at the Crossings with half the people we know.”

“Yup.”

“In sleepwear.”

“So it would seem.”

“This is like one of those nightmares about standing up to give a book report in class and realizing you’re naked.”

“Except with way since less embarrassment, because no one here gives a damn. For all the tourists know, this is some kind of formal procession. Also, less nakedness.”

“What’s Darryl got on up there? It’s eighteen sizes too big for him.”

“Green Bay Packers shirt, it looks like.”

“He should belt it up a little. He looks like some kind of really weird Roman senator.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t talk if I were you. You really need a new bathrobe.”

“Oh please, not you too.”

“That one’s starting to look like a miniskirt on you.”

“I give up. Really, really I give up.”

“Weren’t they going to buy you a new one when you came clothes-shopping?”

“Ronan! You said you were going to buy him a bathrobe!”

“Not talking to you right now!” the shout floats down the line. “You mocked my hair and made me late for my date!”

“What?” Kit says.

“Alternate timeline,” Nita mutters, “he’s just using it to try to guilt me out. Good luck with that. —Like you really care so long as you got a leg over!” she shouts.

“You know what?” the answer comes drifting back. “No one takes me seriously. No one.”

“Especially when you say you’re not talking to somebody and then you keep doing it!”

A silence heavily flavored with put-on sulk ensues. Kit grins, looking further up the line. “Hey, look at that, Sker’ret’s a different color.”

“It’s a onesie.”

“How does he get that on, I wonder.”

“It’s a spray.”

“Makes sense, I guess, with all those legs.”

“And did you?” Nita shouts up the line at Ronan. “Get a leg over?”

His shoulders are shaking with laughter, visible even from all the way back here. She decides not to press him… then laughs at yet another innuendo she’s been spared.

They wind up in one of the largest of the business suites at the Crossings that’s designed for species that don’t use furniture: the floor is some kind of programmable oobleck with a soft fuzzy coating, so the space is absolutely perfect for being repurposed as the location for a giant slumber party. Over a couple of hours, people dispose themselves across it, direct lights in specific areas or turn them off, spend time gaming or reading to one another, snack, chat, argue, laugh, drowse.

In the dimness, along toward the point where even on the Crossings’ easygoing timeline the evening is shading into the early hours, two voices can be heard murmuring off to one side.

“That was interesting, though. Where we were.”

“Huh. ‘Interesting.’”

“Yeah. Short of air… marooned on the Moon…”

“Yep.”

“Things might’ve got interesting if we’d been there for a while.”

“In the freezing cold. On the ground. With all that dust!” Nita shivers.

“You just hate that it makes you sneeze. But yeah! Dramatic. The air getting colder. And neither of us with a coat. We’d have had to conserve heat.”

“Please! Like something out of ‘White Fang.’ Cold is nature’s way of telling you to go somewhere warmer. Or bring a coat.”

“And with the air getting short…”

“Wouldn’t have been my fault. I always bring extra. And anyway, there are eighteen ways out of that problem. If things are bad, teleport us home. Want to stay here? Then teleport some air in, the Earth’s just over there!” Nita shakes her head.

“Well, in that scenario we were short. I was trying to find some creative way to blame you for it.”

“Have to be reeeeeeeal creative.”

“So that leads us to the next question.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh huh. Why exactly are you lying on top of me?”

“…Give me a moment and I’ll let you know.”

July 2, 2019
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Two glasses of a pink wine
Absent friendsYoung WizardsYoung Wizards meta

Young Wizards meta: Wizardry and zombies

by Diane Duane September 24, 2018

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

A question came in at my Tumblr ask box:

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

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

Let’s go ask Tom.


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

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

“Would you rather I was in the bedroom?”

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

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

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

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

“Is the Sun over the yardarm here?”

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

“Oh God. Please and thank you.”

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

“Got a question for you.”

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

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

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

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

“Zombies.”

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

“By no means. Consider it a hypothetical.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A reaction to something else, perhaps?”

“I’m sure I can’t say.”

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

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

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

“Wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts.”

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

“No, the viral model.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So that doesn’t violate Clause Three.”

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

“As one does,” I say to the wine.

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

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

“Tough,” Tom says.

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

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

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

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

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

“And what would the Powers say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I chuckle. “How do you cope sometimes?”

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

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

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

I nod and have a bit more wine myself.

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

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

“Oh please, don’t go there.”

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

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

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

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


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

September 24, 2018
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YOUNG WIZARDS: LIFEBOATS cover crop
BooksYoung WizardsYoung Wizards meta

“Young Wizards: Lifeboats”: files with new covers on their way

by Diane Duane August 8, 2017

For those of you who may have copies of this already, just a heads-up for you. We’re giving YW: Lifeboats a new cover so that it’ll no longer look identical to Interim Errantry. (That will also have a slightly spruced-up version of its cover applied to it later this month. Those of you who have IE will already have Lifeboats as part of it.)

The store will shortly start pushing out download links for the new, re-covered ebook to its previous purchasers. There’s nothing you need to do but click on the URL in the notification email when it arrives in your mailbox: it’ll take you to the page with the URL for downloading the file. Please note that these download links have the same five-day expiry time as regular purchases. If you miss the download window, naturally we’ll refresh your link if you email us with your order info. But try not to miss it if you can, yeah? Thanking You. 🙂

If you don’t have a copy of Lifeboats: as part of the Ebooks Direct Summer Reading Sale, we’re dropping its price by half for a few weeks. So now’s a good time to grab it if you feel so inclined. Want to know what happens between A Wizard of Mars and Games Wizards Play? This does. 110,000 words of it.

Thanks, all!

YOUNG WIZARDS: LIFEBOATS cover

August 8, 2017
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For your consideration for Best Series Hugo Award, 2017
Fantasy and SFYoung WizardsYoung Wizards meta

2017 Hugo Eligibility and the Young Wizards Series

by Diane Duane March 13, 2017

I’ve been busy handling work at home while recovering from a back injury, so I’ve left this posting a little late. That being the case, let me be brief.

The 75th World Science Fiction Convention is being held in Helsinki this year, and as per usual, the Hugo Awards will be given out there. The Helsinki convention committee has elected to trial a new category of Hugo: Best Series. The qualifications for this award are as follows:

An eligible work for this special award is a multi-volume science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, which has appeared in at least three volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2016, at least one volume of which was published in 2016.

The Young Wizards series, containing elements of both science fiction and fantasy, has since the publication of So You Want To Be A Wizard in 1983 appeared in ten volumes totaling approximately a million words. The most recent volume, Games Wizards Play, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February of 2016.

So the Young Wizards series is eligible to be nominated for the 2017 Best Series Hugo Award. If you’re a Hugo nominator (and / or possibly a Young Wizards fan), I cordially invite you to consider nominating the series — long praised both by critics and by a cross-generational audience who’ve grown up with the Young Wizards, and are now introducing them to a new young readership as the series continues to grow in depth and complexity..

Per the Hugo Awards page at the Worldcon 75 website:

Members of Worldcon 75, and also of MidAmeriCon 2 (the 2016 Worldcon) and Worldcon 76 (the 2018 Worldcon), will have the right to nominate up to five candidates in each of the Hugo categories. Nominations will close on 2017-03-18 06:59 UTC (at 11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time on 17 March).

 

Those who joined one of the qualifying conventions before the start of January will have already received their unique personalised link to make nominations. (31 January was the cutoff date to join the qualifying conventions in order to nominate; Worldcon 75 members who join after that date will be able to vote on the Final Ballot when it is announced, but will not have nomination rights.) You can also vote by post using a paper ballot: please download and print the A4-size paper ballot (PDF, 160 kB) or the letter-size paper ballot (PDF, 160 kB). Postal ballots must also be received by the same deadline.

 

The final ballot will be announced in April, and voting for the Hugo Awards will continue until July. Only Worldcon 75 members can vote on the final ballot. Because Worldcon 75 is in the first half of August, it is likely that the deadline for Hugo votes will be in mid-July.

Whether or not you intend to nominate the Young Wizards series, thanks in advance for your support of one of SF’s oldest and most prestigious awards: and thanks for your time and consideration!

March 13, 2017
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Young Wizards advent calendar
Young WizardsYoung Wizards meta

The Young Wizards Advent Calendar is up again

by Diane Duane December 11, 2016

Each day from the first to the twenty-fifth of December 2015, the Advent calendar based at this page over at the Young Wizards: Interim Errantry site showed scraps of previously-unheard conversation from the memorable Christmas party in How Lovely Are Thy Branches.

Now that the holiday season has rolled around again, we’ve promoted the post to the front page of the YW:IE site once more, and extended the range of the calendar a little; every page at YW:IE now displays a Santa Tab on the right-hand side. Just click on it to get the Advent calendar to pop up. Please bear in mind that if you haven’t read HLATB, the amount of sense these calendar entries / chunks of dialogue make to you is likely to vary widely.

Also: as a sample for those who might be interested, under the cut on this page you’ll find the full text of day 3, “Ritual Practices”: a discussion between a wizard’s mom and the Master of the Crossings Intercontinual Gating Facility regarding the logistics and technology of cleaning up during and after parties.

Enjoy!

(FYI: How Lovely Are Thy Branches is one of the three texts included in Interim Errantry. If you have that already, no need to acquire HLATB.)

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December 11, 2016
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Haunted

by Diane Duane November 2, 2016

So it’s dark and the power’s been off for hours, and I’m sitting downstairs reading fanfic by candlelight, and the wind is howling whooo, whooo outside, blowing leaves and twigs and stuff around so that sometimes they whack into the windows, and it’s all very atmospheric, and I think It’s a good thing I’m not of a Nervous Disposition – as the commercials used to have it – because a night like this could seriously freak you out if you were.

(Especially since there’s haunted ground just up the road. Or ground that’s supposed to be haunted. I’ve never had any problems with it, and I’ve walked past it all alone in the dead of night lots of times, and never had so much as a peep out of it. But we have neighbors who wouldn’t walk past that particular area after dark for any money.)

Anyway. So it’s dark and the candleflames are fluttering a bit (the house is prone to drafts in this weather, more so than usual when the wind is going by at 80kph or thereabouts) and there’s no telling when the power will come on again, and in the midst of reading I look away from the iPad for a moment, a bit bored, and a few seconds later a voice speaks to me and says:

CHARACTER: I want to be in the next book.

And I kind of rub my face and go “Oh great.” Because of all nights when I don’t feel like having one of these conversations, tonight probably tops the list. I had about fifteen things that needed doing on the big computer, and they’re all impossible with the power out, and as a result I am cranky.

(You must understand that the dialogue that follow plays itself out in-head over the course of no more than about fifteen seconds. Also that I can’t discuss the identity of the character in question right now. Or indeed later.)

DD: What?

CHARACTER: I’m not wild about where you left me in this last one.

DD: I think you were in a pretty good place, actually.

CHARACTER: I don’t. I think you need to put me in the next one. I could be useful.

DD: I don’t really see how that’s the case, because [REDACTED] and it’s not exactly in your specialty area.

CHARACTER: But if you put me in there you’ll figure something out.

DD: See, that’s not how it works. There’s this outline, and in it are all the things that’re going to happen, and you’re not really part of that through line. Partly because your skillset wouldn’t particularly contribute to the dynamic, which in terms of the cast of characters is very tight in book 11 because [REDACTED]. And partly because I don’t just put characters into a story on the off chance that they’ll contribute something somehow!

CHARACTER: In my case you should anyway.

DD (rubs eyes, which are playing her up somewhat due to the crap lighting): This is just one of those goofball ideas that hits you late at night and turns out to have no merit in the light of day.

CHARACTER: You’ll never know, though, if you don’t make a note of it so that you can examine it in the light of day.

DD: (goes looking for pen and paper, tries to make a note, can barely see to write, sighs in annoyed acquiescence and turns on the laptop to make a note there. Rather like this.) You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?

CHARACTER: And whose fault is that? You created me.

DD: (annoyed, because to this argument there’s no easily available rejoinder: rubs forehead) Remind me again why I’m even in this business?

EXTREMELY LARGE CHORUS OF CHARACTERS, INCLUDING PEOPLE WITH FLAMING SWORDS AND SIMILAR WEAPONS, NUMEROUS DRAGONS, MANY ALIENS, VARIOUS WHALES, CATS AND TEENAGERS, ASSORTED FOLKS IN STARFLEET UNIFORM, A BUNCH OF CARTOON AND COMICS CHARACTERS, AND ENDLESS OTHERS: Because you’re too lazy to dig ditches and too chicken to rob banks.

DD: Yeah, thanks loads. And as for you – 

CHARACTER: Think about it.

DD: All right, all right, I’ll think about it.

(soft click as the lights come back on as if in reward for good behavior)

DD: (hides eyes) Oh, feck.

…and outside, the wind starts to die down…

DD: (EYEROLL)

(To the person who commented “They’ve got minds of their own sometimes, haven’t they?” …No, they’ve got minds of my own. Which is what makes it both so infuriating and so funny.) 🙂

(originally posted at Tumblr)

November 2, 2016
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For the “Mark Reads” crowd: the original working map for DEEP WIZARDRY

by Diane Duane May 21, 2016

Since the progress of things at Mark Reads has now taken us well past the point where this material is spoilery, I thought people might like to see a copy of my working map for Deep Wizardry, from which the map appearing in the original book was derived.

Information about this area was hard to come by in the early 1980s, and it was just as well that I was then often working on the book out of the Frederick Lewis Allen (writers’) room in the main branch of the New York Public Library, as its stacks were one of the few places where it was possible to lay hands on the research data from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute that was then laying bare the geography of the area around the Sohm Abyssal Plain. No existing map combined all the data I needed, so I wound up drawing this myself and then later adapting it in a slightly different format for the hardcover.

The full-sized map is here if you want to look at it in more detail.

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May 21, 2016
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Mark Reads Young Wizards
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Mark Reads… Young Wizards

by Diane Duane March 15, 2016

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time… and the time’s finally come.

Mark Oshiro, far-famed medianaut and proprietor of MarkReads.net, will on March 22 start a truly amazing project. He’s going to read the entire Young Wizards series in its New Millennium editions — including the interstitial book Interim Errantry and the newest YW novel, Games Wizards Play — and report back on what he finds, book by book, via online reviews and video, until he’s done.

That’s a lot of words and a lot of territory to cover, and it’s going to be a real treat to watch it unfold. I look forward to rediscovering things about the world I’ve been building for the last few decades that I’ve probably completely forgotten… as well as finding out some things I didn’t know.

It falls to me now to look for ways to help make the Mark Reads community feel welcome in my universe. One way we’ll be doing this is described in Mark’s introductory post here.

Another way is to invite interested Mark Reads readers and co-readers onto the YW universe’s own online turf and give them a place to discuss what’s going on as the reading process unfolds. Understanding that Mark’s own discussion areas are spoiler-free, we’ve set aside a space at the Young Wizards discussion forums that’s  specifically intended for Mark Reads community members. This is a spoiler-friendly space where discoveries can be discussed in as much detail as the community desires. (One note in advance: to keep the spammers at bay, our registration process asks new/prospective Forum members a challenge question. The answer to this question is the initials of the newest YW novel. Just check the first paragraph of this post for the answer.)

I’m really looking forward to the events of the coming months, and to sharing the discoveries that Mark and his community will make.

So welcome, cousins! Settle in and make yourselves comfortable. This is going to be a terrific ride. Thanks for your company!

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March 15, 2016
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Blue macarons
Fantasy and SFfictionYoung WizardsYoung Wizards meta

Kit Rodriguez, Percy Jackson, and the Blue Food

by Diane Duane December 8, 2015

Blue macarons

I’ve got a question, and I’m throwing it open to the general readership because answering it at the moment is beyond my competence.

The Young Wizards series often gets compared to other YA series, past and present — sometimes with good reason and sometimes not. The most frequent comparison is to Harry Potter, as some of you will guess, though it always makes me laugh when this happens, as it’s hard to imagine two series that are less alike except for the fact that they both contain young wizards.

Anyway, something new and different has come up for consideration lately. In the YW books, there’s a running joke that’s been going on for a while about blue food. Kit Rodriguez has something of a pig-out on it at the Crossings while on the way to his and Nita Callahan’s excursus / “exchange student” holiday on Alaalu in book 7 of the series, Wizard’s Holiday. In subsequent books the issue resurfaces a number of times, often as a joke, sometimes just in the form of another wizard teasing Kit about this repeatedly-indulged tendency.

Recently, though, somebody brought it to my attention that Percy Jackson in Rick Riordan’s books also has a blue-food thing going on. Apparently the reasons behind this haven’t been dealt with in canon, though it is apparently stated there that Percy’s mom will make blue cake, or other desserts, for him on occasion*.

Now I’m assuming it’s some kind of obscure parallel development. (I know that George Carlin had a riff he did on blue food: whether I internalized that and it then popped out to be played with, I have no idea. And even less idea in Riordan’s case.)

That said: Wizard’s Holiday was published in 2003. I have no idea when this trope started turning up in the Percy Jackson books. Does anybody who’s a fan of the Riordan books know when the blue-food thing first appears? I’d be glad to satisfy my curiosity about this.

Thanks in advance!

*Disclosure, if needed: To date I haven’t read any of Rick Riordan’s books. It’s not that I have anything against them: it’s just that this hasn’t been a priority. I have  seen the films, though, and enjoyed them.

December 8, 2015
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Advent Caledar screenshot
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The “How Lovely Are Thy Branches” Advent Calendar

by Diane Duane December 2, 2015

Advent Caledar screenshot

ETA: The Advent calendar is now shut… maybe until next year. But a compiled version of the whole Calendar is available below…

Every day, from now until Christmas, behind a door of the Advent calendar here there’ll be a small chunk of dialogue material that either didn’t make it into the final cut of How Lovely Are Thy Branches, or occurred to me after the work was finished. Snippets and snatches of conversation, half-heard (as it were) from across the room. Think of them, not so much as outtakes, but more like DVD extras.

All you need to do is click on the little red tab on the right side of the window to make the calendar pop out: then click on the door for the day. Obviously, today only the December 1  and 2 doors will open. One more door will be available each day until we hit Christmas.

Enjoy!

Now available:  The How Lovely Are Thy Branches Advent Calendar — 25 days of extra dialogue / outtakes from the work. Download the ebook or PDF formats free from our cloud storage at Box.com:

Advent Calendar generic .epub | Advent Calendar Kindle-friendly .mobi | Advent Calendar .PDF

December 2, 2015
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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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