Isolation Never Felt And Looked This Beautiful

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.

Hello! I was wondering if you’ve shared your ao3 account? Like, have you acknowledged “this account is mine,” or do you keep it personal? Totally respect if you keep it under wraps I just wanted to know if I’m missing something. Hope my wording of this makes sense!

No, it's OK, I get it. You're asking "Have you publicly ID'd a given AO3 account as yours?"

No, and I'm not going to. Because it contains fanfic I've written for pleasure—exactly as I started writing it in my teens—and I have no desire to have that publicly connected with me.

Leaving the usual legal concerns aside—and not being even slightly concerned that a judge would fail to find the fiction "transformational", if the truth came out in a court of law—a significant part of this effort is about answering the question: "What would happen if people read fiction of mine and they didn't know Diane Duane was responsible for it? What would their reaction be?" That urge to discover whether the fiction stands on its own, without the inevitable shadow cast by the reputational backstop, still comes up for me in some moods. When the itch has come up, I've scratched it. And all I can say is that, by and large, the results have been satisfying.

Frankly, it's a ton of fun. There's no one to satisfy (at the most immediate level) except me and the local embodiment of the Creative Urge. No one will ever accuse me of "just churning [this] out for more $$$$", because there is no $$$$. And there's room to stretch further and harder than I might normally do in my public work (because there's more forgiveness for failure: and in the arts, I think, failure is absolutely one of the most effective ways to grow). Whatever comes back to me in return for this work—and it is work, some of the hardest I've ever done—is in the form of raw appreciation. So, people, on behalf of my colleagues, let me just say: comment on AO3 fics, yeah? You don't have to be fulsome about it. A word or two will do. And bestow kudos where you may. It's all an AO3 fanfic writer asks.

...And of course some people will say: "Are you off your rocker? You're traditionally published for decades, you have awards, you've been on bestseller lists, how can you not be sure that what you're doing's any good?" ...But you know, no writer is sure all the time. All of us wake up in the middle of the night some time(s), thinking "I'm not sure I've still got it..." and squeezing our eyes shut in terror of future reviews that will contain the horrible conjecture that Maybe We Never Really Had It To Start With. When you've spent a significant portion of your lifetime making stuff (up) out of nothing, the horrible suspicion that maybe it really has been nothing all the time—I mean, nothing nothing—is unavoidable.

So sometimes some of us want to go out in disguise (and I don't mean paid pseudonymic work: that proves nothing in this particular arena) and see how we fare. I know other traditionally-published writers who've done this—names that would surprise you—and who, by and large, have done it for the same reasons. We are the dark figures, cloaked, sitting in the shadows of some of the more prominent fandoms that express themselves on AO3; eyes glinting in the firelight, enjoying the reactions for the stories we've got to tell.

It's not bad here, in the shadows. For one thing, you're in a better position to appreciate the figures moving in the light. There's a lot of extraordinary talent on AO3 (and elsewhere in the online fanfic world), sharing stuff with us out of their own hard work and from their own urge toward grace. It's a privilege to read them. (Some of them are better writers than I am. I appreciate them: and comment, and leave kudos, because that's how appreciation is concretely shown. And I take notes.)

Beyond that, there's nothing much to add except that I have no plans to stop. And also: that I think kindly every single day of the very small and exclusive group of people who know "who" I am on AO3, and have kindly kept that data to themselves. Your confidence honors me, friends. May the Work do you honor in return. :)

And now: I owe you all an update, so you'll have to excuse me while I get on with it. :)

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.

Blue

So You Want To Be a Wizard: All This for a Pen? and A White Hole Dies

Deep Wizardry: UNDER THE SEA/WITH YOU AND ME/AND YOU’RE GONNA DIIIIIE!

High Wizardry: I Wanna Be a Wizard Like My Big Sis! (Creates New Species)

A Wizard Abroad: So You Want to Learn About Irish...

A wizard’s Manual can come in all shapes and sizes. For those who know which links to click, there is a section of Wikipedia where the globe puzzle is full and finished. Articles in this section never have a problem with trolls or misinformation, and cover subjects ranging from a listing of every Power to a deep dive on echolocation spells.

yall arent ready yet but one day were going to talk about how the young wizards series is better than harry potter. the language is more complicated but trust me, its better 

"With!"