Opening Ceremonies

"All Our Myriad Worlds Lie Whole"

I realize my blog is a bit scattered, and mostly fandom based, and probably no small amount of ridiculous, but I’m going to share a fandom-related story with you lovely followers. ^___^ What follows is a ramble-y account of my love affair with the Young Wizards Series.

I went to NYC for a choir trip during my senior year of high school (which was a lot longer ago than I feel like it should be…), and while we were there we visited a few museums…as one does on field trips, you know? Well, the highlight of our trip, for me, was definitely getting to weigh myself on all the planets, because of the scene in High Wizardry by Diane Duane. And, yes, I checked to make sure the ladies’ didn’t lead to Mars…I was disappointed to find just toilets, I’ll admit. (Just kidding! …well, mostly.)

It’s weird to realize the impact a book series can have on you, the ways in which the written word can influence you. But I’ve been reading the Young Wizards Series for so long now (and that’s a story in and of itself, which I’ll probably share at some point), that in many, many ways I feel as if the characters know me as well as I know them. I sometimes imagine that maybe, somewhere out there, there’s a universe where literary characters are all real, and are reading about our universe’s fantastical adventures. If the universe is infinite, and if there are an infinite number of universes, then who’s to say there isn’t a world like that, after all? Maybe in some place, Nita and Kit are reading about my Ordeal, or my little sister running off all over the universe (she does run off to Europe on occasion…the rest of the galaxy isn’t such a far stretch, at that…).

But back to my point. I stood there, my hand on the same asteroid that Kit and Nita discuss as having come such a long way, and for me the moment was beautifully surreal. I don’t think any of my classmates had such a profound experience as I did on that trip, because I finally had arrived at a place that I had been reading about since I first got into fantasy, and it was a real place, not something unattainable like The Leaky Cauldron, or a magical wardrobe to Narnia.

It was real, and I could touch it.

I think that’s the real power of words, right there; the real magic in our universe. That one person’s words can leave such a lasting impression on another human being isremarkableandpowerful, and has the same chance of being misused as the magic I so dearly love to read about. Because as surely as words can heal and inform and touch, they can just as surely be used to hurt and twist and maim.

And I think, maybe, much of my fascination with words and languages comes from Diane Duane’s books, too, as surely as my fascination with that asteroid came from her books.

I’ve been called childish and ridiculous—been told that no one can take me seriously. I’ve been bullied, and was pushed off swing sets when I was little, and I’ve been called all sorts of unpleasant names like “nerd” and “loser”, among others, and been told I read too much (as if there is such a thing!). Maybe these things are why I empathized so totally with Nita, that very first time I read So You Want to be a Wizard, but she kind of became something of a guiding light to me. At first it was just that Nita had a profound impact on me, as a character with whom I shared so much, but later, as I grew older and continued to reread the series, it became less Nita, and more the entire feel of the series. There is so much good in this series, so many “words to live by” and the characters are so unconsciously good that to the reader it becomes second nature, too. Kit and Nita are like two bright standard bearers in a world that seems progressively darker, that more and more places emphasis on characters who do bad things for the right reasons, instead of character who do good things because that is the right reason.

I don’t even know if I can still call the impact these books had on me “subtle” because I feel like I’ve embraced the philosophies of the characters with every fiber of my being.

I’m going into anthropology, probably with an emphasis on archaeology, which is all about understanding other peoples, and in some cases preserving those cultures which are rapidly losing themselves to “modernization”. Maybe this makes me silly, but whenever I think about what I’ll be doing later in my life, working to understand and write about cultures unlike my own, I can’t help but also hear the words of the Oath in the back of my mind. I live by those words. I think they are perfect, and important, and I still read them out loud every time I get to that page, because whether or not they can make me a wizard, they are still a promise that I made to myself when I was eleven, and I intend to keep that promise—magic or not.

ORBITAL MECHANICS

Complexity Graphics by Tatiana Plakhova

Question about the consequences of the events in Deep Wizardry. Will the Master Shark be replaced by another shark like the Silent Lord is replaced, or on a more permanent basis? Or was his power simply lost, and there will never be a Master Shark again?

This may sound odd, but this is a matter to which I think I’ve given absolutely no thought whatsoever. …Which is unusual for me.

And now that it comes up: Mere replacement of Ed’rashtekaresket – either qua Ed, or as regards his particular unique developmental, historical and spiritual positioning – seems impossible. I rather think that there will be (meaning “almost certainly already is”) a shark now holding the Master-Shark position in lieu of the original office-holder. Except that shark will be holding it, as it were, by vicariate. (And I’m invoking “vicar*” here not in the Home-Counties-C-of-E mode that means “your [cozy] local clergyman who invites you round for tea”, but rather in the sense in which Catholics use the word when they speak of the Pope as “the Vicar of God on Earth”: of someone acting as a stand-in or deputy for someone of much greater inherent power.)

I think that should there be need for the attriibutes we think of as the Master-Shark’s to be exercised, then this vicariate Master would do so, enabled by (and channeling) the power still embodied in the original… who, as we know, appears to be Not All That Dead, Not Really Dead Anyway. (But then that would be somewhat in his nature, and shark-nature generally, so no surprises there.)

That make sense? Hope so. :)

*In passing, I coudn’t not link to the dictionary.com definition of vicar because of the quotes about Obama and soccer riots. Tea, meet keyboard…

You know how there's like some mathematician or something, who like did some useful stuff but is primarily known for overshadowing that work by going to great lengths trying to convince people to blow up the moon or something?

I wanna be like that but the hill I'm dying on is that the moon should be considered a planet

Parallel universe theory

Iris Scott - Lunar Eclipse, 2020 - Oil on canvas

How much of YW was planned from the beginning? E.g. did you know about Bobo when you were still writing SYWTBAW?

Nope. Bobo happened along the way.

I did know from the very beginning that this was going to be a series (contrary to some people’s beliefs, especially the ones who consider the closure at the end of High Wizardry very complete). But initially I wasn’t sure where I was going with it except in very general terms. By the end of Deep Wizardry, though, I was starting to get some ideas of some things that were going to have to happen, and of how much further this could go if I got lucky and the sales were good enough to keep me at the same publisher. …But then the publisher (Dell) changed hands (managerially) and “changed directions”, as they like to say, and just after I turned in High Wizardry they started the process of offloading all their midlist authors and concentrating their attention and promotion on their bestselling writers. (In the process, for example, throwing Jane Yolen overboard. How stupid can you get?)

There has never been any overarching blueprint or master outline. But as I was working on HW I started to see the path ahead much more clearly. (Which got kind of frustrating when Dell dumped me; A Wizard Abroad wound up being published first in the UK, by Transworld / Corgi, and then by the SF Book Club, before Jane went on to wrangle the new YA imprint at Harcourt and bring me aboard). While I was working on Abroad I already knew that the events of The Wizard’s Dilemma would have to happen, and could see the difficulties that would come of them; and while I was working on Dilemma, the arc that kicks off in Holiday solidified a lot further. And so forth. This is the way it always seems to go in this series: things build and develop in three- or four-book stages, pulling in data from earlier books and making more sense of them in the overall picture.

Yet it would also be true to say that one specific issue-arc that launched in SYWTBAW has not yet paid off, has been more or less constantly on my mind since 1983, and will finally start its resolution in book 11. And whatever you’re thinking it is, I guarantee you that’s not what I have in mind. Seriously: this particular thing, no one will have seen coming. Promise.

There… that should make everybody crazy enough for one day.

(cont) Are these timeline issues fixed in the New Millennium Editions? And if you have a corrected timeline, could you post it here? Thank you!

Fixing the timeline issues was one of the main purposes of the NMEs. So I think it’s safe to say that yes, those issues have been fixed.

No, I don’t have a timeline as such. The general progression of the New Millennium editions, though, is given in the “time fix” at the start of each book. So it goes like this:

So You Want to Be a Wizard: May 2008

Deep Wizardry: July 2008

High Wizardry: August 2008

A Wizard Abroad: Mid-July through early August, 2009

The Wizard’s Dilemma: Late September, 2009

A Wizard Alone: January 2010

Wizard’s Holiday: April 2010

Wizards at War: Late April / early May 2010

A Wizard of Mars: Late June 2010

…Hope that helps. :)

why would someone think this is a good idea