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"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.

Finally! A black hole that you can visit and survive!

Want a trip through a black hole without having to experience that pesky death? You’re in luck. There’s a special kind of black hole that’s not just survivable, but might get you to another time, or another universe.

Black holes are, traditionally, the scariest things in the universe. Huge, mysterious, inescapable, they wander through the universe and eat everything that gets too close. “Too close” is defined by their event horizon. This is the point at which they go dark, because it requires so much energy to escape them that not even light can get away. Since not even a photon can cross the barrier, no event that happens inside the horizon can ever have an effect on people outside.

Unless, something very odd was going on in the center of the black hole. Most black holes spin - this is something that was discovered way back in the 1960s by physicist Roy Kerr. It wasn’t exactly a shock, because most of the material that collapses into a black hole was already spinning. Sometimes, however, the spin on Kerr black holes goes a little above and beyond. Ever spun a glass of water, or soda bottle, so that the liquid inside swirls? Sometimes, if you spin it enough, the liquid actually parts, leaving a clear center and a spinning ring of water around it. The same kind of thing can happen in Kerr black holes. Instead of a singularity at the center, there’s a ring. And you can go through the open portion of that ring without touching the gravitational crush.

What’s on the other side? A lot of people have wondered. Some people think that these kind of black holes might be our key to time travel. They might be wormholes that let us hop between different points of the universe. Or they might be portals to different universes entirely. First we’ll have to find a few, and then we’ll need a few volunteers to go through. Preferably ones that haven’t seen Event Horizon.

Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Second Image: Dana Berry/NASA

Via NASA, Astrophysics Spectator, Discovery.

It was our destiny to walk in the light of other stars.

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

Lawrence M. Krauss (via thorosofmyr)

In the OH SWEET POWERS THAT BE, HOW DID THEY FIND OUT...? dep't...

I was just ordering some flour from our local miller, Kells Wholemeal. Their big bag of plain flour is way cheaper/better value than buying it bag-by-small-bag from the grocery store. (We "decant" the flour bags into five-kilo plastic birdseed buckets, and stack them up out in the boot room at the back of the cottage.)

The other thing we usually get from them (besides yeast and bread flour) is chocolate for baking. I was adding a bag of this stuff (which is extremely good)...

... and then noticed something slightly unnerving.

...The notation: "Only for use as an ingredient in food making."

And my first thought, off But what the hell else are we going to be using chocolate for...?

...OH SHIT, THEY'VE FOUND OUT ABOUT CARMELA. THE JIG IS UP.

And then I relaxed. Because (a) She doesn't get that much of her chocolate in this country. If she's after this stuff, she'll grab it elsewhere in the EU.

And (b):

...They've got to catch her first. :)

(per the note from @anoddreindeer: Huh, weird about that. I need to check what the SSL on the main [under-construction] Errantry Concordance site is up to. Meanwhile, dropping the "s" off the "https" seems to sort it for the moment...)

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!

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

Y’all I’m positively howling, it’s almost EXACTLY what Dairine said to Nita about Kit waaay back in Deep Wizardry

Paging the newly-fledged-and-recruiting Dairine/Mehrnaz squad @hencegoodfortune @shamrockjolnes @inkidink @imaginariumgeographica