Yw - Blog Posts
YA Lit Meme: 5 Protagonists: 1/5
NITA CALLAHAN
“My childhood? What about it?” Nita said, now becoming actively annoyed. Up until last year, her experience of her childhood was that it swung unpredictably but too routinely between painful and boring. Only recently had it improved. And while wizardry might occasionally be painful, at least it wasn’t ever dull. “Mom—you don’t understand. This isn’t something you can just turn off. You take the Wizard’s Oath for life.”
so, I’ve taken up tailoring recently. and while I was working on a draping today, I got to thinking about entropy.
(drapings are those things where a tailor takes a blank section of cloth and sculpts a piece of clothing directly onto a model’s body. it ensures a perfect fit. entropy refers to the level of organization in a system. the less organization a system has, the greater its entropy. entropy can only be overcome with energy. it takes effort to organize a system. the natural state of the universe is one of complete entropy, i.e., the lowest energy state possible.)
A piece of broadcloth, before it’s used for a draping, is the cloth in its state of greatest entropy. it’s featureless. uniform. whatever small variations exist between one part of the cloth and another are random and will ease out over time. wrinkles. chalk markings. small snags.
a finished piece of clothing is the cloth at its lowest state of entropy, and by extension, its highest energy state. it is structured and organized. it has many features, all of which interact with each other in a coherent system. seams and darts and buttons and lining all cooperate to give the dress, or whatever it is, a fixed shape and function.
most things are like this. your body. the planet Earth. the Milky Way. they are systems made of organized parts which give them form and function.
(the difference between you and a few buckets of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and a few other atoms combined into an inert slurry is the entropy of the system.)
but in order for those systems to become organized, they needed energy from an outside source. without energy, everything slides towards entropy. the energy that makes your body possible comes from the food you eat. the energy from your food comes, though a few middlemen like cows or cabbages or whatever, from the Sun. the Sun’s energy comes from the fusion of hydrogen into helium. A hydrogen atom is just a proton: maybe paired with an electron, if it bumps into one. And those component particles were created in the first few wild moments after the Big Bang.
All of the energy in the universe can be traced back to the Big Bang. every organized system owes its life to the Big Bang. we’re just sipping from its cup until we die.
(where did the energy that ignited the Big Bang come from? no one knows. there’s room to see God there, if you’re so inclined.)
but the energy of the Big Bang wasn’t infinite. we are, slowly, using it up. the universe is sinking to a lower and lower energy state, all the time. according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the energy of a system can only stay the same or decrease. entropy will win. people refer to this as the heat death of the universe. according to current science, it’s the most likely end point for everything.
so anyway, I got to thinking about this while I was tailoring today.
I spent all day on this project. I put a lot of energy into it. my energy, as mechanical energy, or the physical act of sewing, into the cloth, where it’s now stored as potential energy, which is the energy of positioning. I turned chemical energy (food) into motion and then into shape. each of these transitions is a step down the ladder. a little bit more of our universe’s inheritance, spent.
and I got really sad. that probably sounds ridiculous, right? but I think about this a lot. every time I spend energy, that’s energy the universe can’t get back. a sequin off the Big Bang is now a new dress on my ironing board. was that energy well-spent? should it have gone to something else? it doesn’t matter. it’s gone now. the universe is a little bit closer to death.
then I stopped being sad, and I just felt a deep responsibility to take care of that dress. because, mathematically speaking, there’s nothing superior about organization over entropy. the particles don’t care if they’re in a high or low energy state. your atoms don’t know who you are, and it doesn’t matter to them if you’re you, or a few buckets of slurry. the value of organization is subjective. systems are important because we believe they are. the universe’s life and death only matter if they matter to us.
I like tailoring. my new dress came out well. I’m looking forward to making another one. I’m sorry that someday there won’t be any more new dresses, or anything else.
maybe that’s good enough.
I think this one might be my favorite book in the series...
Chapter Titles: Deep Wizardry
SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD HEARNSSEN PUBLISHED BY PHOENIX PRESS 793.4
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Rónán (anglicized Ronan) is an Irish language male given namemeaning “little seal” (Rón meaning “seal”, and -án being a diminutive suffix). It may refer to: Legend tells of a seal who is warned never to stray too close to the land.
Powers help me I didn’t know his name meANT PRECIOUS BABBY SEAL
AAAAAAAHHHH
AAAAAHH
RONAN SO CUTE
AND THE WINGED DEFENDER WAS STUCK INTO BABY SEAL BOY
You know, I think the biggest disappointment of my childhood was not failing to receive my Hogwart’s letter (or the American equivalent). I mean yes, there was a stretch the summer I was eleven where I was hopeful, but September first came around and I sort of shrugged and accepted it (possibly with some relief because I didn’t want to go so far away from Mama and Da).
No. The real disappointment was that the Wizard’s Oath from Diane Duane’s Young Wizards never took. I don’t know how many times I read that oath out loud and then held my breath and hoped. Hoped, hoped, hoped that I would wake up the next morning and the book wouldn’t just be Nita and Kit’s adventure, but would be in the Speech. It never was.
Keep reading
I’m pretty sure that “writing a strongly worded letter to the laws of thermodynamics” is my new favorite description of wizardry.
“But then she was a dancer. Dancers are tough.” -“The Wizard’s Dilemma,” Diane Duane, (x) (x) Dedicated to Betty Callahan.
This is awful. I just looked it up and Koi fish can live more than 200 years, the oldest on record being Hanako Fish who died at age 226.
Tom and Carl will die before them.
Still breathing hard from what she’d been through, Dairine turned away and walked back to the house, slowly, and went into her room and shut the door. And only then did she allow herself, somewhat later, the very smallest smile.
This took FOREVER. Mostly cause of all the jewels. Thankfully I had a brush for them. It’s supposed to be the outfit described on page 184-185 (in my copy at least)of Wizard’s Holiday:
"Today the long overcoat he favored was in blue, and it was richly, even thickly, embroidered with jewels, in all shades of blue and green, some of them the size of marbles or quails eggs. Guantlets, tunic, boots, all were in metallic blues and greens, and the fillet binding his brows was of some blue metal."
(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. :)
There was a point where, whenever I ran into my stalker...
…I wanted to greet her with “Fairest and fallen, greeting and defiance, now and always.”
Not because I thought she was literally the Lone Power. But because she was clearly one of those people the Lone Power was acting through and loving it. And because dealing with her seemed to be part of my Ordeal.
And honestly because remembering that there are malevolent forces in the universe that use people like her to hurt people (and that she would willingly hand herself over to such forces if she believed in them, she was that kind of person), and that those malevolent forces of the universe can be named, greeted, and resisted, even resisted politely, was very important.
If you ever hear me say anything starting with “Fairest and fallen…” you know I’m serious. I may be wry, I may be half-joking, but some part of me is deadly serious if you hear those words come out of my mouth. It means “I know you. I know what I’m looking at. I know where your evil comes from, even if you don’t. And I won’t put up with it, and I won’t stand by and let this happen.”
The Young Wizards books are among a type of books I’ve read that hide deep and meaningful truths about the universe in the guise of ordinary children’s books. That’s my favorite type of book, ever.
I once read someone on dduane’s tumblr saying that when she was a kid, she would repeat the Wizard’s Oath over and over again, hoping it would make her a wizard.
I wrote to dduane telling her that I hadn’t read them as a kid. But when I grew up, I found that the Wizard’s Oath had already somehow become etched onto my heart, and it only took reading the words to remember how it happened. She said she gets that response from adults now and again.
There are many versions of the Wizard’s Oath, and some fans (including me) have made our own recensions. Each person gets the version they need. But here’s the one from the first book:
In Life’s name and for Life’s sake, I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so — till Universe’s end.
Here’s a version written for a dinosaur who had been living underground in a dystopian city:
“The Fire is at the heart, and the Fire is the heart; for its sake, all fires whatever are sacred to me. I shall kindle them small and safe where there are none, for the wayfinding of those who come after: I will breathe on those fires about to die in dark places, and in passing, feed those that burn without harm to any; the fire that burns and warms those who gather about it, in no wise shall I meddle with it save that it seems about to consume its cofocals, or to die. To these ends, as the Kindling requireth, I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames to shift the darkening ember or feed the failing coal, looking always toward that inmost Hearth from which all flames rise together, and all fires burn undevouring, in and of That Which first set light to the world, and burns in it ever more…”
And my personal recension:
In the soil, we are all growing, together. I will moisten the roots of those who need water. I will never allow the soil to dry out. I will make room for seeds to grow into plants. I will allow the soil to consume the parts of me that are no longer needed, and I will reach towards the sun. I will not touch leaves that may die at my touch, unless it is necessary to prevent some greater harm. I will love sorrel and tree, fungus and slug, alike. I will live inside of love, and let love guide me, to the best of my ability. I will look always to the place where all of our roots reach down as one.
All right, lovely YW people on my dash (and beyond), willing to hook me up on whats so awesome about it? The title sounds dorky but apparently this is good
book character fancast for repfest: #5
Xolo Maridueña as Kit Rodriguez, Young Wizards by Diane Duane
Since it came up in the chat, the “official”, from Diane Duane herself, pronunciation of ‘dai stiho’.
So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane
I’m a little nervous about doing a review of this book, actually. For one thing, it’s one of the foundations of my ethical code today. Who I am is, in a large part, based on this novel and the ones that come after. That makes it a little hard to be objective and give a nice unbiased review, but I’ll do my best. Another thing I’m nervous about is that the author, who I (obviously) respect, is a regular Tumblr user, and is probably going to see this at some point. Finally,this series has a devoted fandom comprised of intelligent, wonderful people who know a lot about the series.
Still, all those reasons to be nervous should make it clear that this is a series you really shouldn’t miss!
So You Want To Be A Wizard is the first book in what is, at the moment, a nine book series. The tenth book, Games Wizards Play, is due out… sometime… Well, we know it’s coming! Recently, the series got a revamp. The first book is copyright 1992, so the timeline needed a bit of help after twenty-two years. If you’re looking to get into the series, starting with the NMEs is a good choice.
But let’s talk about the book itself.
It opens with Nita Callahan, reader extraordinaire and space devotee, running away from bullies from her middle school. She manages to duck into the library, and as she’s hiding, her finger is snagged by a book - when she pulls it out, it’s a book called So You Want To Be A Wizard. Naturally, she thinks it’s a joke, but. Well. It doesn’t read like a joke. And if she was a wizard, if she had magic, maybe she could stop getting hurt. So she takes the Wizard’s Oath, and though momentarily lulled into a sense of complacency by finding another teen wizard and learning about exciting magic things and meeting a white hole, presently finds herself engaged in a struggle against the forces of entropy, embodied in the form of the Lone Power, where the stakes are the Earth itself.
But that’s the plot. What makes this series so exceptional is the motivations of the characters, wizardly and otherwise, and the level of responsibility with which they interact with their world. In retrospect, that first scene with the bullies is pretty telling for the series as a whole. It’s seriously treated - Nita is a victim, and she is not responsible for their actions or what happens to her. She is, however, responsible for her own actions; she chooses to antagonize the bullies to claim some power from the situation. What her Ordeal (the quest when you accept the Oath) lets her realize is that she already has power - she controls her own choices, her anger and what she does with it - and it shows her how to claim it. As a wizard, she has the power to terrify those who want to hurt her; as a human, she has the power to break the cycle of violence. The very nature of wizardry in this universe demands that she choose to “guard growth and ease pain”, but it doesn’t require her to forgive the bullies. That she does choose to use her power for forgiveness shows how strong she is as a person.
Choice is in many ways the center of the book, and of the series. A species makes a Choice that defines their relationship to wizardry and entropy. Each wizard chooses to take the Oath. In the course of wizardry - and life in general - choices come up all the time. There are consequences to all of the choices you make, but what you do with your free will is in the end up to you. Figuring out what to do with your free will isn’t easy, though, and it becomes increasingly difficult as the series progresses and the characters age - the choices we make as children are always more straightforward than those we make as adults, when our ability to see the complexities of a situation grows, which is another thing I appreciate about the series. The characters are in no way static, and the books do become more difficult as the characters gain the age-appropriate abilities to handle the problems that come up.
Those problems aren’t always wizardly, either! There’s at least one very long-running romance subplot between Nita and her best friend Kit, not to mention a plethora of truly excellent sibling and parental contretemps. The familial relationships are absolutely phenomenal, by the way, and are pretty varied. Both Nita and Kit have complex, realistic, and person-specific sibling relationships. And the parents! One problem I often have with YA literature is that parents are very sketchily characterized, mostly a name and a figure to rebel against. Which makes sense - one’s perspective as a young teenager is limited, and one’s ability to see other people as people is also limited. Part of adolescence is learning to recognize that other people are distinct individuals, and in their lives, you’re on the periphery if you register at all. In this series, the parents are well-characterized from our perspective, and as the kids age, how they perceive their parents also changes. I’d like to see more of Kit’s parents - we get some of them, but not nearly so much as we get of the Callahans. There’s a good reason for that, but it’s a spoiler.
Their parents aren’t the only adult figures in these kids’ lives, either. Tom and Carl are Senior wizards who live just up the road, and provide an excellent sort of hands-off mentorship. They’re very clear from the beginning that they don’t have all the answers. The kids can ask for aid and answers, but they might not get them. I’m making a note of their care in establishing themselves as fallible early on, because the kids do forget this, and I feel like they should get some recognition for the effort. Good try, guys!
It’s an eminently quotable book, funny and heartbreaking by turns. It’s a great book to give kids - magic and mystery! Travel the universe, meet the gods! Be scared witless and thrilled breathless! Develop a strong ethical code based around the Hippocratic Oath, individual responsibility, empathy, and the strength of forgiveness, belief, and second chances! Save the world, with or without magic!
That last is actually the last thing I really want to talk about. Although it doesn’t come up much in the first series, one of the things that makes this series so very influential is the idea that you don’t actually need magic to change things. The wizards get to play in the grand scheme of things, but regular folks are no less important or influential. Sure, we can’t stop a sun from exploding, but we can slow entropy in a thousand other ways. We can conserve energy, spread order and kindness and cooperation, help the hurt, counsel the despairing, and if all that fails, we can stare evil down and refuse to go along with it because that, too, is a choice we have the capacity to make.
tl;dr - amazing book, with surprisingly nuanced discussion of ethics and excellent characterization. Purchase it for one and all! The only content warning I have for this one is bullies, though feel free to contact me if you want content warnings for the remaining books. This book is available as a multi-format package from Diane Duane’s ebookstore for $6.99. Hard copies can be purchased from Amazon for $7.19, but it’s not the NME, so be warned! You can also get the hard copy from your favorite local bookstore! If you want an ebook, I recommend getting it straight from the source. They’re excellent quality ebooks, reasonably priced, and frequently on sale as well.
last night i dreamed i was an orca, and my pod needed me to find out why there were no more fish in our part of the ocean, so i dove down really deep, to where i could draw spell circles on the ocean floor, and performed whale magic to find out.
i don’t remember why there weren’t any fish, but i think the whole point of this dream is that i was a whale wizard, and that’s basically awesome.
If Young Wizards characters had Tumblr Blogs:
Nita: A “hipster blog” of sorts with flawless color coordination and all sorts of cheerful posts: beautiful landscapes, inspiring quotes, book reviews, and so on. The pictures of cats, whales, and birds are tagged like they’re the selfies of her close friends. Because they are.
Kit: The geekiest and most exhaustive space blog you’ll ever see. If Mars were to be blown up, it could be rebuilt with perfect accuracy with nothing but the posts about it on his blog. Also reblogs a lot of Dairine’s science-fiction-related posts, and he and Nita are one of those Cute Couples On Tumblr.
Dairine: A fandom blog devoted to Star Wars, Star Trek, and all other things science fiction. Very passionate and argumentative about everything; strongly held opinions get her into a lot of protracted Tumblr debates. Gets into arguments with Roshaun a lot, especially.
Carmela: A glorious, thoroughly disorganized mess of recipes, fashion, NSFW posts, anime, and life advice. Sends Kit a lot of deliberately weird asks.
S’reee: Friendly reblogs of her friends’ posts, interspersed with long, incomprehensible audio posts like remixed whalesong (which they are). And discussion of conservation issues.
Filif: Primarily devoted to very colorful fashion photosets, with the occasional picture of a flower tagged “nsfw.”
Sker’ret: One of those people who reblogs just about everything he comes across, with great enthusiasm. All of those legs lend themselves well to some truly epic keysmashing when he’s excited about something.
Roshaun: Exhaustingly long rants (never, ever put behind read-mores, either), occasionally interrupted by food porn posts, fashion, and impromptu lectures on stellar dynamics. And failed attempts to comprehend memes (“Imagine how is touch the sky” reduced him to nothing but rows of question marks eventually. It doesn’t translate to the Speech well).
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.
"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.