The Funny Thing About Comparing The Young Wizards Books To Harry Potter Is That Not Only Did They Come

Fun fact of the day

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.

New York Post

‘Sightings of a lifetime’: Whales and dolphins flock to NYC waters

Here’s one increase in traffic that won’t have you pounding a car hood: The city’s waters have been rife with sightings of marine life all s

Thank you for sharing this! This is another one of those situations where we are just now seeing the noticeable, dramatic payoff of years and years of quiet, unnoticed environmental work.

“Experts say years of conservation efforts have resulted in some of the healthiest waters in generations, with booming fish populations, clearer ocean waves and more chances to interact with our urban aquarium.”

This quote also really got me:

“‘It never gets old, it’s always thrilling,’ said Celia Ackerman, a naturalist with American Princess Cruises who captured the images. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, Ackerman couldn’t wait to move out of the city so she could study marine animals. 'I would have never imagined I could enjoy them here right in my backyard.’”

Twice a year, you may experience some degree of television interference due to sun outages.

RCN I have news for you, if the sun goes out I am not going to be worried about missing Wheel of Fortune.

(Sun Outages are actually when the sun moves directly behind a TV satellite and interferes with its signal, which makes it sound like the sun is photobombing my TV, but “sun outages” just made me lol.)

New Galactic Supercluster Map Shows Milky Way’s ‘Heavenly’ Home

A new cosmic map is giving scientists an unprecedented look at the boundaries for the giant supercluster that is home to Earth’s own Milky Way galaxy and many others. Scientists even have a name for the colossal galactic group: Laniakea, Hawaiian for “immeasurable heaven.”

Image 1: Scientists have created the first map of a colossal supercluster of galaxies known as Laniakea, the home of Earth’s Milky Way galaxy and many other. This computer simulation, a still from a Nature journal video, depicts the giant supercluster, with the Milky Way’s location shown as a red dot. Credit: [Nature Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo)

Image 2: This computer-generated depiction of the Laniakea Supercluster of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way galaxy containing Earth’s solar system, shows a view of the supercluster as seen from the supergalactic equatorial plane. Credit: SDvision interactive visualization software by DP at CEA/Saclay, France

The scientists responsible for the new 3D map suggest that the newfound Laniakea supercluster of galaxies may even be part of a still-larger structure they have not fully defined yet.

"We live in something called ‘the cosmic web,’ where galaxies are connected in tendrils separated by giant voids," said lead study author Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu.

Galactic structures in space

Galaxies are not spread randomly throughout the universe. Instead, they clump in groups, such as the one Earth is in, the Local Group, which contains dozens of galaxies. In turn, these groups are part of massive clusters made up of hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments in which galaxies are strung like pearls. The colossal structures known as superclusters form at the intersections of filaments.

The giant structures making up the universe often have unclear boundaries. To better define these structures, astronomers examined Cosmicflows-2, the largest-ever catalog of the motions of galaxies, reasoning that each galaxy belongs to the structure whose gravity is making it flow toward.

"We have a new way of defining large-scale structures from the velocities of galaxies rather than just looking at their distribution in the sky," Tully said.

As someone currently spite-writing the second draft of a project...this fills me with such a sense of purpose and inspiration. XD

What inspired you to write Young Wizards? A relative, a dream you had? Did the story come to you as you were writing it, or was it hammered from bits and pieces of thoughts made plain on text? Were there parts you struggled with, parts that came easier than others? (Have you already answered these questions in an interview you can link to?)

What inspired me to write So You Want To Be A Wizard?

Partly humor. Partly rage. (More about both under the cut...)

The subject's come up in interviews every now and then, but let's tl:dr; it here.

The humor: Often enough while I was nursing, and seeing the bizarre things people would do to their own bodies, I wished out loud to other fellow professionals that human beings came with some kind of instruction manual. Now, I'd known the "So You Want To Be A…" series of (US-published) career books from my childhood. One day when I was thinking about them—and for no reason I can understand at this end of time—the word "…Wizard" plugged itself onto the end of the title template.

Instead of a simple instruction manual for people, I found myself considering what a wizard's manual would look like. Where would it come from? Who would it have come from? Might it, itself, be an entirely bigger manual than the one I'd been joking about—but the full instructions and background material you'd need for (maybe) understanding life, but (definitely) doing magic? A book as big or as small as you needed for the work in hand, and full of the answers to questions you never thought you'd get answers to? ...

From that basic concept, the wider concept of wizardly culture built itself up over the next couple of years. ...Naturally I'd read Le Guin's "Earthsea" books years before, and I'd noted (but decided to pass on) the concept of a school-for-wizards. While it was interesting enough, it'd already been done by a writer far more skilled. What interested me more was a DIY-ish approach, where you learn by yourself, do things that interest you, and join up with other like-minded practitioners when the mood moves you or circumstances require.

Anyway, now comes the rage. While all this was percolating in the background, I was finishing up a YA series by another writer. When I hit the end of it, I was profoundly upset by the events of the series’s closure. They seemed to me to have treated strong and resilient young characters as helpless creatures without agency, subjecting them “for their own good” to an amnesic end-state they absolutely didn’t deserve. I got mad about this. I dove into the writing of the first Young Wizards book with the intention of treating my young characters a whole lot better—since if there was anything I knew about kids from my nursing, it was that a lot of them were tougher than many of the adults around them.

Once I was started, the writing went straightforwardly from book’s beginning to book’s end (because as I was already a screenwriter, and screenwriters outline, the novel was naturally outlined too). The writing took about six months, as right then I was also writing for Scooby and Scrappy-Doo to pay the rent. I turned in the book and didn’t think much more about what might happen next (though I knew there was quite a lot more story to tell) until I ran into Madeleine L’Engle at some event of my publisher’s. She took me aside and said, “I read your last one. I liked it a lot! When’s the next?”

That was when I realized I had a problem... so I got busy.  :) ...And I’ve been busy with the Young Wizards universe ever since. I’m busy with that universe right now, though it may not look like it. And I expect to be busy with it for years to come.

HTH!

Young Wizards will always be the best YA series because you’ll fall in love with and cry about sentient tears in spacetime, sharks, amalgamations of spheres, computers, gods, macaws, and most importantly you’ll begin to believe fiercely in the beauty and heartbreak of the universe.

Gorgeous ‘Pillars Of Creation’ Shine In New Hi-Def Hubble Photo

“I wonder how much trouble you get in for busting a worldgate.” // “How can I save her?”

A mix for Kit Rodriguez: Loyalty, Bravery, Empathy incarnate. He will cross time, space, and neighborhoods for those he loves and those he must protect.

 Titanium by David Guetta // Sugar, We’re Going Down by Fall Out Boy // The Cave by Mumford and Sons // Shut Up and Dance by Walk the Moon // Boys Are Back in Town by The Hitters // and ten others

Listen  (15 tracks, 55 mins)

NASA Is Considering The Use Of Soft Robotic Squids To Explore Europa

NASA has chosen its next batch of proposals under its advanced concepts program, including the use of soft-robotic rovers for exploring gas-giant moons, and autonomous robots capable of crawling, hopping, and rolling around the surface of the Moon.

follow for more soft robotic squid