Young Wizards Series - Blog Posts
Winter Reading Reviews '16
Winter '16 Reading Reviews #bookreviews #amreading
A couple weeks late, but it gave me a chance to finally finish Tigana, which has been haunting me since the fall. This review has minor spoilers for Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan, Before the Awakening by Greg Rucka, The Force Awakens by Alan Dean Foster, Games Wizards Play (Young Wizards series) by Diane Duane. (more…)
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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...)
rebloging from my main blog.
This is the first place I ever found Young Wizards fandom
And I don’t want to lose you, cousins, so I’ve made us a Lifeboat, if you will.
https://discord.gg/83Fz8KM
I’ve never heard of us having a discord server, but if an established one already exists, please someone link me.
Question about the consequences of the events in Deep Wizardry. Will the Master Shark be replaced by another shark like the Silent Lord is replaced, or on a more permanent basis? Or was his power simply lost, and there will never be a Master Shark again?
This may sound odd, but this is a matter to which I think I’ve given absolutely no thought whatsoever. …Which is unusual for me.
And now that it comes up: Mere replacement of Ed’rashtekaresket – either qua Ed, or as regards his particular unique developmental, historical and spiritual positioning – seems impossible. I rather think that there will be (meaning “almost certainly already is”) a shark now holding the Master-Shark position in lieu of the original office-holder. Except that shark will be holding it, as it were, by vicariate. (And I’m invoking “vicar*” here not in the Home-Counties-C-of-E mode that means “your [cozy] local clergyman who invites you round for tea”, but rather in the sense in which Catholics use the word when they speak of the Pope as “the Vicar of God on Earth”: of someone acting as a stand-in or deputy for someone of much greater inherent power.)
I think that should there be need for the attriibutes we think of as the Master-Shark’s to be exercised, then this vicariate Master would do so, enabled by (and channeling) the power still embodied in the original… who, as we know, appears to be Not All That Dead, Not Really Dead Anyway. (But then that would be somewhat in his nature, and shark-nature generally, so no surprises there.)
That make sense? Hope so. :)
*In passing, I coudn’t not link to the dictionary.com definition of vicar because of the quotes about Obama and soccer riots. Tea, meet keyboard…
Well ouch...
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.
"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.
This fills me with a most delicious panic.
Cousins, we have work to do.
Most of the Universe is dark. The protons, neutrons and electrons that make up the stars, planets and us represent only a small fraction of the mass and energy of the Universe. The rest is dark and mysterious. X-rays can help reveal the secrets of this darkness. X-ray astrophysics is crucial to our understanding not only of the Universe we see, but the quest to determine the physics of everything.
Source (Chandra X-ray Center Observatory)
Thank you for the welcome! This is one of my oldest fandoms (started reading around the time Wizard's Dilemma came out) and I can't believe it took me this long to make a blog for it... :) I love this fandom's tumblr presence. You're all such lovely people!
Started this blog because everyone needs a place to dump their space porn and YW fandom stuff….right?
Started this blog because everyone needs a place to dump their space porn and YW fandom stuff....right?