I felt bad about Mike Flanagan not being included so I decided to make another poll.

Inspired by @ktlsyrtis 's poll.

Please, please, please reblog this so it reaches the widest audience possible.

Also sorry if I'm not the only one who's done another poll.

Diane Duane really is the where's waldo of authors. Like oh, I just finished, Star Trek (TOS), those Star Trek books look pretty cool. Huh that cover with Spock on it looks neat. Proceed to read one of my favorite novels in the entire world. Ok ok it's by Diane Duane. Gotta remember that. Starting TNG like yo it's Diane Duane again! She wrote this episode :). Oh well, I guess no more Diane Duane Star Trek as I have found all of them for my collection. Damn, well my friend really likes Spiderman/Venom. Her birthday's soon. Guess I should get her comic books? And with steel chair it's Diane Duane again! And oh wait, what other comics did she write? She wrote a comic book for Star Trek! Better read that! An X-men novel!! Hmmm, y'know I've been reading a lot of sci fi and comic books recently. I would really like to get back to my roots and read some fantasy, preferably with some wizards. Diane Duane once again snipes me from the google recommend books page. Doing some research on Barbie to get ready for the Barbie Movie. Barbie: FairyTopia is cowritten by Diane Duane and Elise Allen. A bomb is dropped on my house. Watching a video essay on Batman because it's 2AM and youtube thinks I might like that. I've never watched Batman the animated series, but I guess I'll give it a try. Diane Duane strikes once again. Talking with my friends about their favorite authors and where they live during a vacation in Ireland. Huh I actually don't know where Diane Duane lives. Look it up and get punched into next week. Get tumblr. Ha that was a funny! Waldo once again has been sighted.

TL;DR: Diane Duane has got range and I haven't looked up all the things she's done and keep getting pleasantly surprised.

37 Years Ago Today...

There are many phrases which ease the tension of a wedding rehearsal.

"Cuff keys? I thought YOU had them..." is not one.

There are many phrases used during the course of a wedding ceremony.

"One Ring to Rule Them All, One Ring To Bind Them..." is not one.

Not even when the wedding takes place at a Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention where the phrase "Hey, great hall costume!" from a small child suggests the small child has either Failed To Get It...

...or is Witty Beyond Their Years.

Don't use the phrase "Oh good, it IS you!" at this point...

... or "Will you marry me?" at this point.

Just get on with things.

We've been getting on with things for 37 years as of 10 AM Eastern Standard Time today, and we intend to continue doing so for a good few years more.

Love you, hon.

Happy Anniversary!

Can't believe Diane Duane invented love with this passage that's so crazy

GASP

From the episode of the cansino guy with an alien in Pijamas bff that later disappears after travelling to the beginning of the universe

Midnight Pals: Magic Systems

[at Unicorn Fuck Club] Brandon Sanderson: hey robert what kind of magic rules do you have Sanderson: in my fantasy world, there's 18 laws of magic Sanderson: sorted into 23 categories and 65 sub-directories Robert Jordan: huh Jordan: well in my world, girls do girl magic and boys do boy magic

Sanderson: wait what? Jordan: girls do girl magic and boys do boy magic Sanderson: how does that work Jordan: saidin is stored in the balls

Jordan: why, how does your magic work Sanderson: ah well if you experience an emotion in my fantasy world Sanderson: then a sprite representing that emotion with physically appear and dance around Jordan: is that like Big Mouth then Sanderson: what Jordan: its a cartoon show Sanderson:

Sanderson: oh idk maybe Sanderson: i haven't seen it Sanderson: i only watch saturday's warrior on loop Jordan: look, i just think it makes sense Jordan: that the fundamental mystery powers of the universe would bisect neatly along binary gender lines JK Rowling: goddamnit!!! Rowling: why didn't i think of that

Rowling: ugh, inssstead i only have magic dividing people into uebermensssches and untermensssches Rowling: it could have been sssso much more!

Rowling: sssso in my world Rowling: the sssuperior wizard raccce issss sssimply born knowing magic Sanderson: right, right Rowling: then they have to go to sssschool Rowling: you know, to learn Rowling: Rowling: magic Rowling: alssso there are bad wizardsss who want to exterminate non-wizardssss Rowling: the bad wizardsss represssent queer people now Rowling: that's why we need to get them before they get us Rowling: anyway if you're an elected repressentative writing eliminationalisssst lawsss, feel free to reference my fictional booksss for jussstification Tolkien: Martin: Rowling: i don't get it, that alwaysss getsss a big hand on mumsnet Diane Duane: in my world, anyone can learn magic Rowling: SHUT UP DUANE Duane: from a book Rowling: SHUT UP Duane: you can get it at the library John Bellairs: oh yeah i think i've seen that book

Good Omens Fandom assemble! It's that time again...

Another Amazon Prime poll that we need to turn around. You know what to do:

https://www.youtube.com/@PrimeVideo/community

Currently at 25% in 3rd place, but I know we can change that quickly. NOTE: if you're on mobile open the link in your browser and choose 'desktop mode' to view the community tab (shoutout to everyone who put this tip in the comments of my last poll post!)

How the heck is there not more talk about Tanith Lee??

Like my gosh, the woman wrote, according to her wiki, 90 books, over 300 short stories, two World Fantasy Awards, and was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award/Augus Derleth Award and wrote for tv shows.

Like, it's not like she just wrote a heck ton but wasn't very good! She was clearly very good she won awards, and i've read a swath of her stuff across different genres and really enjoyed most of it. I mean that even if not each one has been my cup of tea I can at least appreciate the skill and quite a lot I have truly enjoyed. She's got great prose and style and imagination. Not everything obviously was a banger, but they've all been at least well written, which is harder to come by in writing than you might think.

But nobody ever seems to talk about her?? And I feel like the fantasy crowd on here would really enjoy her stuff. The woman has done stuff in pretty much every genre from what I can see, but I never see her listed on fantasy authors like Clive Barker or Diana Wynne Jones or Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett or Diane Duane even though she was writing at the same time and has a similar sort of '80s Doing Cool Stuff with Fantasy vibe' I feel like people who like those authors would enjoy though she's very much her own style of author.

Anyway this was really just me putting out a rant that such a prolific and talented author seems to have fallen by the wayside and I think it's really a shame

Heck she even did a witch-queen fighting againt vampire Snow White a whole decade before Neil Gaiman did his phenomenal Snow Glass Apples and it's also excellent, give a look here:

Ok, after that last poll, it had to be done!

Last week, I stopped by one of the B&N branches where I used to work and was happily surprised to see @dduane’s words!

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..."

Shoutout to Diane Duane, Peter Morwood, and Neil Gaiman for just popping up on my dash and even in my notes every so often with THE most delightful takes and facts about fandom and fandom history. I'll be reading a response to a fandom post like "go off fandom veteran!" and then I do a doubletake and it's a beloved sci-fi/fantasy author just delightedly engaging in fandom with us.

Wait a fucking moment

I knew there was a reason this movie slapped

@dduane was a bit vague about presents...

...but I remembered she'd been muttering about a plushie she'd seen on Tumblr.

She knew about - in fact the courier gave her - the smaller one, but I managed to intercept the bigger and hide it until Christmas Morning.

Then she and me and Ed and Eddie all had a nice cup of tea and some bikkies.

As you do.

Last year, for a few months, I got to serve Daniel Radcliffe, and I snuck in a suggestion to read @dduane 's Young Wizard series. He was like "I've never heard of it but I'll check it out." And I know he's probably sick of Wizard stuff but when I explained how the magic worked he seemed interested.

I legit missed working at that café but I resigned due to physical and mental health reasons. I wish I was still there. I miss everyone.

I have dreams of directing an animated series based on the Young Wizards series and having Dan play Ed lol 😆 but that's just a fan's dream. It's called Fantasy because it's what the fans want to see, after all. ✨️

I've also wanted to co-write a magical adventure with Lev Grossman and Diane Duane! But that's also a wild idea for another day.