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The Young Wizards series turns 40!

...And yes, we're having a sale to celebrate. But that can wait. :)

I'm sitting here looking at the date and considering how amazing it is that, despite the changes in the publishing world, anything can stay in print nonstop for forty years.

But this book has. Here's how it started:

...Well, not how it started. It started with three things:

A newbie YA writer being deeply annoyed with a non-newbie one for (as she thought) stripping their teenage characters of their agency without good reason.

A suddenly-appearing joke involving two terms or concepts that wouldn't normally appear together: the 1950s young-readers' series of careers books with titles that always began So You Want To Be A..., and the word "wizard."

And the idea immediately springing from that juxtaposition. What if there was such a book? Not a careers book, but a book that told you how to be a wizard—maybe some kind of manual? One that would tell you the truth about the magic underlying the universe, and how to get your hands on it... assuming you felt you could promise the things that power would demand of you, and survive the Ordeal that would follow?

Six or seven months after that confluence of events, there was a novel with that joke-line as its title. A month or so after that, the novel was bought. So You Want To Be A Wizard came out as a Fall 1983 book, as you can see from the Locus Magazine ad above (from back when Locus was only a paper zine). The first reviews were encouraging.

And by the middle of 1984, the publishers were asking, "So, what's next?" A question I'm still busy answering.

There's been a lot of water under the wizardly bridge since. In SYWTBAW's case, this involved a couple/few publishers, a surprising number of covers, a fair number of awards here and there; and lots more books. (I always knew there'd be more, but how many more continues to surprise me. Which is a bit funny, considering how much stuff that universe has going on in it.)

So here we are at forty, and looking ahead to The Big Five-Oh with some interest. More books? Absolutely. Young Wizards #11 is in progress at the moment, and YW #12 is in the late concept stages. More covers for So You Want To Be A Wizard? Seems inevitable. A TV series, perhaps? (shrug) Stranger things have happened: we'll keep our fingers (or other manipulatory instrumentalities) crossed. The New Millennium Editions in translation? and in international paperback? Working on that right now. The sky's the limit.*

And meanwhile, to celebrate, just for today we'll have a sale. (Except in the UK. To our British friends, the usual sad apology: the expensive bureaucracy of Brexit has made it impossible for us to sell directly to you any more. Details here, with our apologies.)

As has been mentioned before, changes are afoot at Ebooks Direct, so this kind of sale won't be happening again for the foreseeable future. (In fact I thought we were all done with them already. But the number 40 suggested one last opportunity that wouldn't be recurring, so I thought, "Aah, what the heck? Let's.")

New things first! Today, to mark this occasion, we're introducing the "All The Wizardry" Bundle. This is Ebook Direct's entire inventory of Young Wizards works; the contents of the bundle are listed on its product page. The $29.99 price listed there is for today only, to celebrate SYWTBAW's birthday, and will go up as of 23:59 Hawai'ian time tonight. As always, should you ever lose your ebooks or need to change reading platforms, we'll change your formats as necessary, or replace the books, for free.

Just click here, or on the image below, for the "All The Wizardry" Bundle. (Please ignore the category listings under the "Pay Using..." icons on the product page: they plainly think they're in a different universe. Kind of an occupational hazard around here...)

The other, older kind of sale folks will have seen here is on the "I Want Everything You've Got" Bundle, which is the whole Ebooks Direct store—obviously including all the Young Wizards books as well: more than 2.5 million words in 36 DRM-free ebooks. Just for today, in honor of the birthday book, we're dropping the whole-store price to USD $40.00. This, too, will go away just before midnight Hawai'ian time tonight... and it will never be lower. So if you want everything we've got at that price, don't wait around.

Make sure you use this link or the one associated with the image to get the baked-in discount at checkout. (If it fails to display correctly, use the discount code "40FOR40" in the checkout's "discount code or gift code" field.)

Meanwhile? Onward into the next decade. The new A Day at the Crossings novel unfortunately won't make it out before the end of 2023; other work in-house currently has taken priority. But as for early 2024... stay tuned.

And for those of you who're Young Wizards readers, and have kept this book, and its sequels, alive for pushing half a century?

Thank you, again and always!

*Though actually, it's not, is it? As the proverb has it, "Wizardry doesn't stop at atmosphere's edge..."

im re-reading. long time no see! :)

PART TWO AT LAST

okay y’all, you can click through the image on a blog, or click here to find my powerpoint on google drive. feel free to look through it, talk to me about it, talk to each other about it, whatever.

i have not edited this in the slightest, so take it all with a grain of salt. do have a look at the “notes” field for most of the slides; that’s where i wrote out (in varying degrees of detail/clarity) my thoughts on the subject at hand, but YMMV with that.

all that said please do credit me if you use this stuff for anything. and if you find any of my sources in the presentation lacking in citations, let me know!

feel free to join in the conversations over on slack (link is for signup, then find the #linguistics channel), or on tumblr! do also keep this post and other posts that involve speculation with respect to the Speech tagged with #not you DD, so that everybody’s butts are covered on that front.

thanks, cousins!

Available now for free download: "Herself"

Since tomorrow's the start of the Irish national holiday weekend with what many Irish people will refer to as The Day That's In It, this urban fantasy novella is for the next few days free for download from the Ebooks Direct store!

Set mostly in the Dublin of 2004, it contains Irish mythology, abused civic statuary, famous cemeteries, celebrated dead people, the much-mourned sushi place behind the Brown Thomas department store, seriously cranky deities, and the mysterious serial murders of numerous Fair Folk.

…By the way, though this isn't a Young Wizards work, it's set in the same universe. One scene unfolds in a space that'll be familiar to YW readers as "[the pub] where the wizards drink".

Interested?

Just head over here, shove a copy in the cart, and go through the checkout process. You won't be charged.

...And one other thing! Some of you will have seen our "Get Our Whole Store For $44!" offers, and for one reason or another haven't been able to avail yourself of them. Well, starting right now, our Tumblr folk have got another chance! (Ahead of everybody else, as the sale's not being announced to the general public on other platforms until midnight US/EST.) ...And you can even see the animated promo before everybody else! (Go on, try not to jig. I dare you.)

Details about how to get the "I Want Everything You've Got" package are over here:

Please note that if you get the Whole Store package, you won't need to download Herself separately: it's part of the package.

The usual frustrated note for our British friends: unfortunately we can't sell to you. It's a Brexit thing. Info about that is here. As always, our apologies.

And now for the jiggy bit!

Round 1, Poll 13: Young Wizards vs Ella Enchanted

Now, I'll always be a Gail Carson Levine stan, but I have to admit that So You Want to Be a Wizard occupied a unique space in my brain for many years; thank god I'm not voting

Remember to reblog for a bigger sample size!

Regarding Blank Check Wizardries

So I’ve been rereading SYWTBAW and I stumbled across something that I’d forgotten – it is Kit, not Nita, who suggests using the blank check wizardry. Nita actually worries about the ramifications of the spell, but Kit shrugs it off and says, “I don’t think the price’ll be too high.” Cue the Song of Twelve. Imagine how Kit must have felt when he realized that Nita’s looming death was payback for a gamble that he had made. Imagine the guilt crushing in, harsher and deeper than any ocean, as he clung to his fierce denial out of sheer desperation. Imagine how painfully he must have wished that he’d insisted on casting the blank check spell alone – which was his original intent – instead of letting Nita stubbornly join in. Imagine the extra agony wrapped up in the words read the fine print before you sign. I didn’t think that Deep Wizardry could wreck me any more, but here we are.

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

- Mark Twain

This is honestly my favorite quote. It’s changed how I look at life and religion.

(via the-bitchextraordinaire)

So this quote seemed very familiar when I saw it earlier, and I just realized why. 

The power was burning in her tears, an odd hot feeling as she wept for Fred, for Kit’s Lotus, for everything horrible that had happened all that day- all the fair things skewed, all the beauty twisted by the dark Lone Power watching on his steed. If only there were some way he could be otherwise if he wanted to!

For here was his name, a long splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in its own way- and it said that he had not always been so hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never, forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates lives bound in the same way.

Kit was still reading. Nita turned her head in the nova moonlight and looked over her shoulder at the one who watched. His face was set, furious and bitter, but yes, weary too. He knew he was about to be cast out again, frustrated again, and he knew that because of what he had bound himself into being, he would never know fulfillment of any kind. Nita looked back down to the reading feeling sorry even for him, opened her mouth and along with Kit began to say his name-

Don’t be afraid to make corrections!

Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her space pen that Fred had saved and changed, and clicked it open.

The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly- the same glitter as the ink with which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the book and, with he pen, in lines of light, drew from that final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that change could happen- if, only if- and together they finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new last syllable, made it real.

- So You Want to Be a Wizard, Diane Duane

So, in the history of all of the universe, who prays for the one sinner that needs it the most? Her name is Juanita Callahan, and at age 13 she has more mercy in her soul than I could ever hope to strive for.

(via professorsparklepants)

ya meme // nine quotes

the wizard’s oath (young wizards by diane duane)

Good News Network

Humpback Whales Are Singing More: Number of Songs Has Doubled as Food Sources Became More Abundant

Eavesdropping on whale songs over 6 years shows the number of days humpbacks have been singing has nearly doubled–with their food source.

"Eavesdropping on whale songs over the last six years is providing new information vital to answering questions about these giants of the ocean.

The number of whale songs detected is associated with shifting food sources, according to the California scientists—and the number of days humpbacks have been singing has nearly doubled.

When monitoring baleen whale songs in the Pacific Ocean, researchers found year-to-year variations correlated with changes in the availability of the species they forage on.

In vast oceans, monitoring populations of large marine animals can be a “major challenge” for ecologists, explained Dr. John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California (MBARI).

Their team deployed underwater microphones called hydrophones to study and track baleen whales, which communicate over long distances through sound.

“Surprisingly, the acoustic behavior of baleen whales provides insights about which species can better adapt to changing ocean conditions,” said Dr. Ryan, a lead author of the study.

They also monitored songs from blue, fin, and humpback whales off the West Coast of the U.S. to see what the song data could reveal about the health of their ecosystem.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, showed “large” year-to-year variations in whale song detection.

“The amount of humpback whale song continually increased, with their songs being detected on 34% of days at the beginning of the study and rising to 76% of days after six years,” said Dr. Ryan.

“These increases consistently tracked improved foraging conditions for humpback whales across all study years—large increases in krill abundance, followed by large increases in anchovy abundance.

“In contrast, blue and fin whale song rose primarily during the years of increasing krill abundance.

“This distinction of humpback whales is consistent with their ability to switch between dominant prey. An analysis of skin biopsy samples confirmed that changes had occurred in the whales’ diets.”

He explained that other factors, including the local abundance of whales, may have contributed to patterns in song detections observed in some years, but changes in foraging conditions were the most consistent factor.

“Overall, the study indicates that seasonal and annual changes in the amount of baleen whale song detected may mirror shifts in the local food web.”

WHALES ON THE COMEBACK TRAIL: • Gray Whale, Extinct for Centuries in Atlantic, Is Spotted in Cape Cod • Sighting of Many Blue Whales Around Seychelles is First in Decades – ‘Phenomenal’ • Majestic Sei Whales Reappear in Argentine Waters After Nearly a Century

“The results suggest that an understanding of the relationship between whale song detection and food availability may help researchers to interpret future hydrophone data, both for scientific research and whale management efforts”, which could better protect endangered species."

-via Good News Network, March 1, 2025