There is a moment in Sherlock‘s second-season episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” in which the world’s first and only consulting detective is attempting to get to grips with the fact that his senses, the tools of his trade, utterly reliable for all his past life, have apparently turned on him and are no longer to be trusted. As have many other artists in similar situations — painters who suddenly can’t paint, sculptors who can’t find the shapes hidden in the stone any more — Sherlock briefly comes a bit undone under the pressure of the untoward circumstance.

 

INT. CROSS KEYS -- NIGHT

Sherlock sits by the fire in the pub. His breathing is labored as he stares into the fire, and he’s squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again as if his vision’s giving him trouble. This behavior continues while John sits down with him and briefs him on Henry Baskerville’s condition --

JOHN

Well, he’s in a pretty bad way. Manic. Totally convinced that there’s some mutant superdog roaming the moors. And there isn’t, is there? Because if somebody knew how to make a mutant superdog, we’d know. They’d be for sale. I mean, that’s how it works....

John shares a little more info about what may or may not be clues to the present mystery, but Sherlock isn’t engaging with him. His face works a bit bizarrely as he tries to hang onto his composure. And after a moment’s pause he says something that costs him a great deal:

SHERLOCK

Henry’s right. I saw it too.

JOHN

What?

SHERLOCK

I saw it too, John.

JOHN

Just a moment. You saw what?

SHERLOCK

A hound. Out there in the Hollow. A gigantic hound.

He blinks again, the trouble-with-my-eyes expression: but the trouble they’re giving him is that they’ve shown him something he cannot possibly believe. John too is having trouble believing what he’s hearing from the 2012 finalist for the title of Earth’s Most Rigorous Thinker.

JOHN

Um. Look, Sherlock. We have to be rational about this. And you, of all people, can’t -- Look, let’s just stick to what we know. Stick to the facts.

SHERLOCK

Once you rule out the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be true.

JOHN

What’s that mean?

Sherlock picks up the glass of whisky sitting beside him and stares at it: stares in horrified fascination and loathing at the shaking of the hand holding it.

SHERLOCK

Look at me. I’m afraid, John. Afraid.

Sherlock takes a big swig of the whisky.

JOHN

Sherlock --

SHERLOCK

(another swig)

Ought to be able to keep myself distant. To divorce myself from feelings.

He holds up the glass. His hand shakes worse. John’s eyes rest on it, on his friend’s desperately working face as Sherlock struggles for control.

SHERLOCK (CONT’D)

But look. You see? The body’s betraying me. Interesting, yes? -- emotions? The grit on the lens, the fly in the ointment --

JOHN

(concerned but gently ironic)

All right, ‘Spock,’ just take it easy. You’ve been pretty wired lately. You know you have. I think you’ve just gone out there, got yourself a bit worked up...

SHERLOCK

Worked up?

JOHN

It was dark and scary --

SHERLOCK

Me? There’s nothing wrong with me!

…Sherlock then veers into a fairly emphatic anxiety attack with a side order of unusually driven and angry off-the-cuff deduction. But I had to roll the recording back to get back into sync with it, for the narrative had unseated me at the word “Spock” and kept right on running, leaving me sitting there a bit dazed. I’d expected a lot of things from this episode, but seeing two of my favorite fandoms cross the streams with such flair left me shaking my head and grinning.

Sherlock and Spock. I’ve been a friend of the one since my teens — maybe earlier — and an off-canon chronicler of the other for twenty or thirty years. As such, the confluence of the two universes was hardly news to me: Star Trek (and Star Trek writers) have had the hots for Holmes for a long time, and dialogue references and outright cameos are commonplace. Nick Meyer, the director of arguably the single best of all Trek movies until the Great Reboot, is probably the best-known of the Holmes fans to become involved in Trek’s newer, younger Canon. Data routinely goes sleuthing in the original Holmes’s gaslit London on the holodeck (and Moriarty has escaped from it, creating the predictable mayhem). There’s even the line referred to in the tumblr gif below — which, since all Trek film is canonical, makes the connection concrete: either Spock and Sherlock Holmes, or Spock and Arthur Conan Doyle, are (it says here) related. But whether or not you accept that last statement as gospel truth or a Vulcan “exaggerating”, there’s no denying that 1701/1701A and 221B are thematic and spiritual neighbors. The Trek universe has been nodding amicably toward Doyle’s creation for many years.

But this was the first time the other universe, in mass media at least, had ever nodded back. I don’t know how other Trek fans felt, but I was seriously tickled: as if in some obscure and very satisfying way, a circle had closed.

And of course early in January news got out that Benedict Cumberbatch will have a major role in Star Trek 2. And by all reports, he’s settling into the new job nicely. So as one circle is closed, another one opens. What a world…

(Over here, by the way, is the clip referenced in the script extract above.)

…It’s nice to see the two universes on mutual nodding acquaintance, though. For the great core relationships at the heart of each of them have resonances to each other that may or may not be entirely accidental. The correspondences naturally aren’t exact (and it’d be boring if they were), particularly because in Trek the core relationship is a triad and in Holmes’s world it’s a dyad. But the strength of the similarities is striking.

In both worlds, you could make a case that it’s the rational, logical creatures inhabiting them that give the Enterprise and the upstairs flat at 221B Baker Street their spice and potential drama… for acting reasonably and rationally isn’t normally a favorite occupation of human beings. Though logic is unquestionably a good thing, years and years of Star Trek episodes and many of the Holmes stories remind us that in either past or future, unless tempered by human qualities, the logic becomes a serious pain in the butt and occasionally a stumbling block, or even a liability. So in each world, the most committed humans/”normal people” slowly educate the local logician in the usages and usefulness of the human heart; and along the way, the logician normally manages to teach the humans something about how to really think. Everyone benefits from this arrangement… assuming that they don’t kill each other first. (Cue the iconic music from “Amok Time” here.) But the meat and drama of the stories arises mostly from this learning process, and the ways it goes wrong, or right.
If they don’t kill each other first. This was a close call…

I hardly need to get into the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic very deeply at this late date: the way the characters interact is so well known. Outside of fiction, I’m sure endless reams of material have been written about the putative relationships between the characters seen as id/ego/superego or parent/child/adult or Moe/Larry/Curly or Roddenberry-only-knows what else, mostly as attempts to explain where the Logician fits in and how the others manage to affect him. Some of these theories may actually have some application. On my own time I’ve normally felt that all three characters are too complex to reduce to such simplistic formulae. But there are certainly themes that recur when Kirk is interacting with Spock (in terms of looking past the rigidity of logic toward ways to push out the boundaries of the envelope, or break some otherwise deadly paradigm to save everybody’s lives) and when McCoy is interacting with him (in terms of forcefully putting the emotional/ethical side of a situation and getting up in Spock’s face, sometimes quite rudely, until the message gets across to best effect). And if anything, these tendencies have become stronger and more effective in the reboot, with the reincarnation of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in the personas of younger characters making it plainer that they’re all in the same learning experience together — a three-part work in progress, but with the foundations of a lifelong friendship now firmly laid.

In Sherlock’s boot-forward into the 21st century from the 19th, the same situation obtains, with serious benefits. For example, the unnerving scene above would never have played with a middle-aged Holmes and Watson: to make it work you need two younger men who’re still learning the extent of their powers and settling into their roles. These might at first glance look simpler than those of the Trek core team, since this team’s built for two rather than three — but it actually makes their dynamic even more complicated. Watson, as both doctor and military man, combines the opportunities and challenges of the Kirk/McCoy roles… and winds up being able to affect his opposite number in two entirely different ways.

His own complexities aren’t to be dismissed. Here you have a man disciplined and tough-minded, deeply wounded by his experiences in Afghanistan but not conquered by them — a crack shot possessed of what Sherlock quickly (and almost inopportunely) identifies as “a strong moral component” and “nerves of steel”. But perfectly balancing this is Watson’s slight, charming diffidence, unfailing kind-heartedness, and gentle bedside manner. (Close inspection of the DVD makes available some useful and rather diagnostic background information on him, including his interest in a career in advanced A&E with an emphasis on laparoscopy and other associated styles of “bloodless surgery”. Click here for screencaps with some light clinical commentary.) John’s underlying compassion positions him perfectly to understand and support his scary-smart, high-functioning sociopath roommate day by day. Yet he’s both willing and able to kick Sherlock’s butt physically if circumstances require, or to administer him a succinct no-holds-barred tonguelashing that would do McCoy proud. This is no mere sidekick: this is a teammate, well along in the process of being/becoming a rock-solid friend.

He’s got a BAFTA and he’s not afraid to use it

And John’s presence and qualities point up another of the resonances between the Starship and the upstairs flat. Just as you could make a case that the real narrative of James Kirk’s greatness in Starfleet doesn’t get started until he and Spock meet, realize each other’s strengths, and come to initial terms, you could also say that Holmes is just an Annoying Incredibly Smart Guy until Watson’s transformative influence starts having its effect — tempering that awesome intellect and processing ability with more regularly expressed humanity, taught the best way: by example. In all these characters’ cases, the temptation to employ the way-overused line about “they complete each other” has to be resisted at all costs, because any “completing” in the case of these two teams of characters is decades away… if it can ever happen this side of all their graves.

In particular, the Holmes and Watson story, as it’s been reframed, isn’t about completion at all. It’s about growth, and what each of these men has to teach the other over time. It’s equally tempting, in service of this theme, to reach for the old no-brainer mind/heart-duality model and say that each man brings one half of a whole to the table. But there’s nothing so simplistic about this character dyad, who come to us with many layers of history and complexity laid on in various media over the last century, like a painting that the artist just can’t stop working on. It’d probably be more accurate to say that John has as much to learn from Sherlock about the arts of thought and observation as Sherlock has to learn from John about the uses of concern and compassion. Each man is going to make the other whole — though there’ll be the usual missteps and kicking and screaming along the way. But this is what makes for great and satisfying drama: characters who change each other and are changed themselves — not running together like two drops of water into one, but each growing more perfect in the exercise of some unique gift — say, the conduction of light or the reception of it — simply because of the other’s continued and reliable presence in an otherwise unreliable world.

Maybe that’s a clue to why both these worlds have rebooted so cleanly into this century (besides the fact that both have good solid writing teams, hard at work and intent on taking the time to get it right). Both Star Trek and Sherlock’s world still speak on a very basic level to people who — besides a little adventure and excitement — want and need stories about how friendship and intelligence, working in tandem, have a fighting chance at conquering the world and making a difference, on the small scale or the very large. In both cases you may hear the usual noise about old wine in new bottles. But this presupposes an audience that still thinks the old wine’s worth drinking… and who’re willing to take the chance to see if the new bottles might actually make it taste even better this time round. For such people, it looks more and more like there’ll always be somewhere to beam up to: and a door on Baker Street that, when they knock, will always be answered.

I’ve been a fan of Sherlock Holmes for many, many years. I don’t even really remember when I first started reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal tales of the world’s first and greatest consulting detective, though it has to have been fairly early – probably when I was twelve or thirteen.

There is nothing unusual about loving Holmes. Millions of others have done so before me, with good reason. What’s come up for consideration for me at the moment are the closely associated issues of what Doyle did to his most famous creation, and the fans’ reactions to what he did:  with an eye to what’s going on at the moment at the BBC.*

SPOILER WARNING: though this blog is going to be fairly general, you should be warned: if you have NOT read the Sherlock Holmes stories up until now, and are also watching the BBC’s Sherlock simply as serial drama and have not seen The Reichenbach Fall as yet, then you’d better read no further until you’ve seen it and have come to terms with the result.

Anyway, I spotted this posting on tumblr this morning, and it started me musing. you know I wonder if back in the day when The Final Problem came out Victorians were sending out letters with “Dear sir, have you read the latest Holmes story yet? I simply cannot handle it. I have cried an unseemly amount of tears. I cannot. Oh God.” and then there’s just a big ink scribble because keysmashing wasn’t an option
little drawings of crying people in the margins

When you write, naturally you hope that what you’ve written will have an emotional impact on the reader or viewer: the more profound, the better. But sometimes the profundity of the response can get scary — and this was as true in the pre-online world as in the hyper-interconnected literary world of today. Arthur Conan Doyle ran into the sharp end of this problem as his career was trending upward toward what would be seen by some as its peak.

Readers these days who’re more familiar with the written than the writer are often surprised to discover that Doyle didn’t think much of his Sherlock Holmes stories as compared to the historical novels that were his passion.** As so often happens in the writers’ world, Doyle had ideas about what his best works were — but the general readership and the critics had completely different thoughts on the matter.  People went crazy for the Holmes stories, whereas Doyle’s historical novels tended to get fairly lukewarm reviews. (And today they are largely forgotten. If you can name even one, you’re either a Doyle expert or an unusually thorough reader.) This situation drove Doyle up the wall, though he didn’t routinely share that info with the reading public. With other writers – and he was friendly with lots of them — he was a lot more forthcoming about the disappointment. Otherwise he kept it quiet.

More annoying for him in the short term, though, was the fact that quite soon after the stories started making their initial splash, Doyle started receiving mail intended for Sherlock Holmes. Hundreds of letters came in containing praise, presents (though fortunately no cocaine), pleas for help, requests for interviews or autographs. Of course Doyle was here the recipient, many times over, of a backhanded compliment. Happy the writer (so other writers would say) who can create a character so compelling and rounded that people start corresponding with him, her or it as if he/she/it were real.  Doyle was aware of the irony, and tried not to overreact; when he was in the mood, he’d sometimes get playful when answering Holmes’s mail “for him”, signing it “John Watson”.

But increasingly this confusion of identities became an annoyance, as not only readers but sometimes even critics seemed increasingly unclear on the difference between the writer and the written. One critic, the American poet Arthur Guiterman, wrote Doyle a bit of doggerel suggesting that Holmes’s opinions about literary detectives were actually Doyle’s:

Illustrator Sydney Paget’s Holmes

Sherlock your sleuthhound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe’s ‘Dupin’ as ‘very inferior’!
Labels Gaboriau’s clever ‘Lecoq’, indeed,
Merely ‘A bungler’, a creature to mock indeed!

This when your plots and your methods in story owe
Clearly a trifle to Poe and Gaboriau,
Sets all the Muses of Helicon sorrowing.
Borrow, Sir Knight, but be candid in borrowing!

Doyle’s response in kind was polite but (to my ear) none too amused:

But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation’s crude vanity:
He the created, the puppet of fiction,
Would not brook rivals nor stand contradiction.
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.

(When I read this I immediately heard Sherlock!John Watson’s voice saying, “He’ll outlive God to get the last word.”  Doyle would have agreed that the line was right on the money as regards Holmes. But from the writer side, I also wonder if Doyle wasn’t a little annoyed here at Guiterman “not getting the meta”. A fictional detective twitting other fictional detectives for their failings as if he was a real person? That takes a special sense of humor, and a certain level of auctorial cojones. )

…Over time this kind of error, by itself, would have become irritating enough. But there were other stresses in place. Doyle was under increasing personal pressure as Holmes’s ascent into the position of one of literature’s great characters began gathering speed.  Doyle’s father – with whom his relationship had always been problematic – was institutionalized and close to death from chronic alcoholism. Doyle’s wife’s health, always delicate, had become much more so since the birth of her first child. And the periodical publishers who’d been bringing his work out were terrified of anything happening that might slow down the output of their cash cow. After all, the appearance of Doyle’s name on a copy of the Strand Magazine would routinely boost its circulation by 100,000 copies. Once when Doyle returned to London from France on the cross-Channel ferry, he found every fellow British passenger he saw “clutching a copy” of the Strand… and he knew why. Just imagine yourself into his position for a moment. You’re famous. You’re rich, and getting richer. And you hate what’s getting you that way…

Trying to relieve a little of the pressure as gracefully as he could so that he’d have time to do the writing he did want to do while coping with the trouble at home, Doyle tried scaring off the Strand’s editors by setting truly insane prices for his Holmes work. But this tactic backfired: his publisher just whipped out the checkbook and paid Doyle his asking price. With his wife’s medical expenses to think of, and halfway through the building of a new house, Doyle gave in to the pressure… but with rather ill grace. He was feeling increasingly trapped by the necessity of servicing a character who was rapidly becoming perceived as more real than his creator. In 1891 Doyle wrote to his mother and said, in passing, “I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”

He never liked that hat anyway.

She wrote back and said “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!” And for the time being, he didn’t mention the issue to her again. But while visiting Switzerland that year, Doyle was already location-scouting for the solution to what he hoped would be his Final Problem with Holmes. As early as 1892 he went walking among the clifflike ice-towers of the Findelen glacier near Zermatt, and discussed the impending character assassination in the abstract with his fellow walkers, one of whom argued against it earnestly but without making a dent in Doyle’s resolve. In 1893 he visited the Reichenbach Falls for the first time, and there he made his decision. “It was a terrible place, and one I thought would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him.” Doyle headed back to England in August and started work on “The Adventure of the Final Problem”.

If there had been any last-gasp chance that Holmes’s death sentence might have been commuted – any last resurgence of Doyle’s ambivalence toward his troublesome character, for he admired him as much as he resented him —  I think it was destroyed by the traumatic events of the following month. Doyle’s wife developed a severe cough and chest pain. A local physician was disturbed enough by this to refer her to a specialist in Harley Street, and Louise Doyle was quickly diagnosed with the form of tuberculosis of the lungs then known as “galloping consumption” – the worst form, normally quickly fatal. What kind of a blow this was for Doyle, who as a doctor should have recognized the symptoms long before, you can imagine. In any case, he wasn’t the kind to give up easily no matter how bad the diagnosis looked. The preferred treatment – for those who could afford it – was relocation to Switzerland for a prolonged “high altitude cure”. Some time between the last week in September and the beginning of November 1893, when Doyle and his wife arrived at the mountain TB sanatorium near Davos, the Consulting Detective and the Napoleon of Crime plunged down the Falls together, and Arthur Conan Doyle closed the book on Sherlock Holmes.

Or so he thought. The public responded with a massive uproar that amazed everybody, especially Doyle. Twenty thousand people canceled their subscriptions to the Strand. Hate mail arrived at the magazine’s editorial offices by the sackload. Thousands of people wrote Doyle directly, begging him to reverse Holmes’s death. Many people took to wearing black armbands in the street, in mourning for Sherlock Holmes.  The death of the world’s first consulting detective was taken up by the wire services and reported all over the world as front-page news. Obituaries for Holmes appeared everywhere.  Petitions were signed and “Keep Holmes Alive” clubs were formed. Not since the demise of Dickens’ Little Nell had a literary death had such powerful effect right across the whole language area of its readership, and not since then had a fandom made itself so obvious in its grief. The like would not be seen again until the deaths of Spock and Dumbledore.

Doyle resisted the pressure as best he could, thinking it would surely taper off after a while. But it was unrelenting, continuing for years: his creation had already become more powerful than he could possibly have imagined. In 1903, having in between reluctantly written and published “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (as a backstory “untold tale”) to huge acclaim, Doyle finally relented and wrote “The Empty House”, in which the Final Problem was revealed not to be as final as previously thought. Which leaves us looking toward the present day, and the BBC’s Sherlock.

Jeremy Brett as Holmes: Paget could have drawn him

The structure and chemistry of the situation is naturally different here, as the new series is both restatement and celebration of the original, wittily and unflinchingly updated for the 21st century.  Now, in 1893 almost no one knew what Doyle was planning to do to his creation at the Reichenbach Falls (this despite the news having been sneaked in a magazine called Tit-Bits the previous month:  possibly the readers dismissed the news as impossible). Obviously things are different now. Yet over in Tumblr — that great hotbed of unbridled and completely indulged fandoms — there’ve been a lot of messages over the past couple/few weeks either begging DON’T SPOIL ME, or foreshadowing the inescapable results sans spoilers but with a sort of gloomy yet desperate relish.  (In reaction to the DON’T SPOIL MEs I’ve seen a few astonished queries along the lines of “WTF, haven’t you read the stories?!”  – and I keep having to remind myself that yes, it’s entirely possible that lots of people haven’t.  Or haven’t even seen the excellent Jeremy Brett Holmes of the 80’s. Brett has until now been the definitive Holmes for me. Now I find myself strangely torn.)

But there’s no question that the fans are as attached to Sherlock (and to John Watson) as ever the readers of 1893 were to the version in what Holmes fans were the very first to refer to as “the Canon”.  And they have good reason. It certainly helps to have such a strong cast, with such range, and scripts as tough-minded and elegantly constructed  as these have been. But again and again you have to come back to the strength of the actors. Writing the last twenty pages of the “Reichenbach Fall” script must have been a bitch, and probably a bitch again and again, as it got hammered on to make it as perfect as it could be. But even a strong script can be deprived of a lot of its striking power by bad acting. Fortunately “Reichenbach” had no such problems, and if we got down to it, doubtless Peter and I could argue for hours over whether Benedict Cumberbatch’s or Martin Freeman’s performances were more powerful or heartrending in those final scenes. Probably it’s a great timesaver that we don’t roll that way: we’re quite happy to just get on with business while waiting for 2013 – there being a peculiar pleasure in watching another writer do what he does uniquely well. (And that’s as far as I’m going in the analysis direction on this episode or this series. Enough electrons will splatter themselves across the screens of far better or more driven analysts than I in the days and weeks to come.)

Via carororo on Tumblr

Elsewhere in the online world, though, and particularly on Tumblr, the grief is breaking out all over. And it’s wrenching, some of it: despite knowing that Sherlock miraculously (“one more miracle, Sherlock…”) did not take the fall. All you have to do is follow this link to see some of the more recent reactions. Some are philosophical. Some are inchoate. Some threaten to assault the writing staff. (And this too has its resonances: think of all the hate mail that poor Doyle had to deal with, not to mention the one report of the lady who hunted Doyle down in the public street and clouted him with an umbrella.) Many of the postings are eloquently fraught.  There is a lot of Figuring It Out stuff going on. And what fascinates me most is that, in this  somewhat-alternate Canon, the grief is fairly evenly split between Sherlock and John – and not just among those preoccupied with the slashiness of the pair. (“Bachelor?  Bachelor? Confirmed bachelor??!” …Never let it be said that Moffat and Gatiss are afraid of committing unabashed and wickedly cheerful fanservice when it bloody well suits them.) Friendship and its durability, and sacrifice and its price, are the main themes being discussed. Whatever else can be said about a TV show, any entertainment that gets people to discuss such issues in depth and detail is surely worth watching. At the author’s tumblr

Meanwhile: I’m looking forward to sitting down in a couple of days and reviewing the episode, shot by shot, and doing some Figuring It Out stuff myself: for it’s always a pleasure to watch professionals at work, while trying to second-guess them a bit.

And who knows… maybe my avatar needs a black armband.

ETA: Once again at Tumblr, see also this charming development — not just the fandom speaking, but a new metafandom: Believe in Sherlock (Doyle was friends with J. M. Barrie: the creator of Peter Pan would probably also be charmed.)

*Disclaimer: yes, I’ve written for the BBC.  And I had a great time.

**Most of the biographical material above comes from Martin Booth’s excellent bio The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle. It contains a ton of info that isn’t found elsewhere, and I heartily recommend this biography to other Holmes fans who’re looking for more information about Doyle’s complex and busy life, and the way Sherlock Holmes affected it. In particular, this bio was the source for some background information that turns up in On Her Majesty’s Wizardly Service / To Visit The Queen.

 

 

 

As some of you may have heard, this has been an unusual week in this corner of county Wicklow. At some point in the recent past, someone skimmed my bank card — whether during the pre-Christmas period or more recently, we’re still not sure. In the last few days, someone started playing around with a clone of the card, using it tentatively in a few Dublin-area locations. Then, having determined that the clone was workable, they immediately used it to empty the household joint account that Peter and I share.

Ouch.

I should say that I’m no stranger to identity theft, though it’s been a while since it happened, and that was in the literary mode. That set of events*, though it dragged on over a number of years, was  far less annoying. This… this feels more like discovering that someone’s not only broken into your house, but gone through your underwear drawer. And then you  sit up late into the night, trying to retrace your steps for the last three months, and thinking: That balky cash machine when you last went into Dublin for the six-weekly haircut, the one you had to try to get the card into a few times — was that actually a skimmer, and you weren’t just holding your card upside down, as you thought? If not that, then when? You’re always paranoid about covering up your PIN. When did you slip? Or…surely it can’t be one of the machines down in the shopping town — in places you trust? The local supermarket? The good friendly pub with the free wifi? Argh. ARGH. And how much other stuff were the skimmers  able to find out about me, us, every time they stuck their card in that damn machine? AUUUGH….

In the fifteen minutes or so after I discovered that the account was empty, and had the bank staff cancel my card… well, I was not a happy woman. But miserable turned quickly to the desire to Do Something Useful to solve the problem. So I did this and this.

And folks responded. I had no idea how many folks were going to say “WTF?!” and respond. You people, to be brief, ROCK. You rock very hard. Many of you chose to forego the offered discount (and said as much in the clear). Many others said you didn’t know I had an ebook store and were happy to find out, even if it had to be this way. There were tons of other kindly messages of support, on G+ and Twitter and elsewhere.

Can I just say THANK YOU?

Good. THANK YOU. You folks have made the difference, and the household problem is thoroughly solved. If you were contemplating a purchase, please note that there’s now no urgency about it at all at this end: please feel comfortable about standing down.  But, regardless,  thank you for being concerned. And of course, feel free to stop by the store over the next month or two and see what new things there might be.

I also want to thank — at the risk of starting to sound like a denizen of a runaway awards ceremony –  our online colleagues and friends and fellow writers who didn’t have to boost the signal personally, but did so, through your own blogs, and Tweeting, and even through listservs and such. You guys too rock (and though you should know it, you probably don’t spend your days thinking about it: you’re too busy writing). If you have a moment to update your posts to point back to this one so that people will know the situation’s now under control, please do so.

And to you, and all the others who shared or passed the message on, or stopped in and bought something, however large or small:

Thanks again. Those flowers up there? They’re for you. (And to the Swiss contingent: Merci vielmals: mwah, mwah, mwah.) Peter thanks you (he’ll be blogging about this in his own place shortly), and I thank you, and Mr. Goodman, the White Cat, thanks you. Mostly by demanding fish, but that’s how he rolls.

(…Oh, also: Some of you have let us know about formatting problems in one or another of the files you’ve downloaded, particularly the first chapter of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses. Thanks for that: one thing we’ve been missing has been more comprehensive info about how our conversions have been working on devices besides the plain-vanilla Nooks and Kindles, and codes that produce no-problems text in some readers have been causing others to have conniptions. Our staff are compiling your notes and will be getting to work on the affected files in short order. If you notice a reading problem with a file, please use your download link to pick up another copy of it in four or five days and see if the problem has been solved.)

And well.. thanks again.

*The earlier ID-theft perp was a woman who knew Star Trek really well, and knew my works really well, and started going from convention to convention in the mid-80′s impersonating me, able to do so because up until that point very few of my books had my picture in them. Her impersonations of me stretched literally from sea to shining sea. I first heard about her setting up signing sessions for herself in Hawaii; she then had a flirtation with the East Coast before settling down in Omaha — I kid you not, at the Strategic Air Command base there: a vital part of her modus operandi was impersonating military personnel.

After a few years of her playing stay-one-jump-ahead with the MI people, fans finally caught her — in particular, fellow fanzine fans who knew I wasn’t living in the US any more; though the catching did involve some truly surreal scenes. One was the long phone conversation I had with USAF military intelligence officers while sitting on the stairs at Peter’s Mum’s house outside Belfast (and they were most confused about WhyTF they were calling Belfast). Another was when I heard from my Trek editors that the FBI had called the Pocket Books 1-800 sales number to find out whether I really existed, or was just one more figment of this woman’s imagination — her pseudonym, as she often told those she was scamming. Janet Kagan, God rest her, was also one of her “pseudonyms”. 

…Short version of the rest of this story: a fellow fanzine-friend who had become a bookstore’s assistant manager in Omaha had a brush with the woman. Through a chain of friends, she notified me: I notified the MI people: and though they were dubious about whether she’d still be on site when they arrived, they swooped and (much to their own surprise) caught her, and sent her away to do time in one of the five or six states where she’d been perpetrating identity thefts on both military personnel and civilians. When the MI folks picked her up, they found shopping bags full of fake ID and applications for more, including — the MI people told me later — a passport application on which in the “father’s name” field she had listed “Leonard Nimoy.” …All of which just goes to show you: don’t screw with the fans.

Fortunately this woman’s  antics  cost me nothing but repeated annoyance as I attended conventions where she’d previously passed through, and found people looking at me suspiciously, plainly wondering if this was actually the genuine Diane Duane, or whether another one might be along shortly. However, there are some hints of late that she might have finally gotten out of stir and started up her old game again. So if I do Google myself a lot, it’s mostly to find out if I’ve recently been somewhere that I wasn’t…

This is such a cool thing.

Some months back I had a nice email from Melissa Elliott, who’s the Senior Librarian in charge of Young Adult Services at the Burbank Public Library in southern California. (You know, as in “Beautiful Downtown Burbank.”) She was asking whether they could use a quote from one of the Young Wizards books (from So You Want to Be a Wizard, in fact) to decorate one of the walls in their new teen section.

It was absolutely charming to be asked something like this, so naturally I gave my permission, and didn’t think much more about it. But this morning, I had another email from Melissa… with pictures.

It’s funny the impact it can suddenly make on you when something like this happens. You find yourself thinking, “Wait. Somebody took something I said and painted it on a wall? And not as graffiti? What planet is this?”

…Whatever: it’s a planet I like. I very much hope I have a chance to get out to LA some time in ’12, as I’d love to head over to Burbank and see it in person.

 

(ETA: I didn’t even realize we had these in the CafePress shop, so if anyone wants one, feel free…)

In the dimness he woke and knew it was too late. Morning never came so late unless the world was ending.

Fortunately, he knew what to do about that.

He blinked and ruffled his feathers, looking around. This was his place. Surrounding a patch of grass were two holly trees, a pine, a cypress whose branches all went the wrong way, and much shrubbery, mostly beech and thorn. The shelter was good here, even on nights like last night. And in the holly, food appeared hung up: good food that tasted of fat and meat. It was all his. Later, when it was time for sex, there would be someone else who’d get some of it. But right now, he owned it.

This cold white stuff on the ground did complicate matters. It came and went without warning, and here it was again. Now, others who might have spent the morning scratching around the ground instead of stuffing themselves full up here would be turning up in his territory, eating his food. His feathers ruffled up again, this time with rage at the thought. Bastards. Bastards. Kill them all.

He hopped up onto the branch that had the best view across the patch of grass and into the bushes, and sang. Bastards! Who wants a piece of me? Come and get it! Because this was when it had to be said, no matter how much you might have preferred to sit quiet with your feathers fluffed up, conserving your heat. The dim sky was already paling toward that too-cold blue. It would be a bad day, cold, everybody and his family would turn up here trying to get at the tree food, which was what you needed this time of year if you meant to stay alive until dusk –

And suddenly he heard the harsh dark cawing coming from across the hardened path, across the wall, in the wood full of tall starved pines. He shivered. Not so early, he thought, what are you doing up at this hour? But he knew. That one wanted the tree-food too. It had come for it before. Now, in the silence before the morning wind, he heard the flapping of the wings.

Hastily he turned to the food cage, ate a few mouthfuls, felt the fat melt down his throat like blood, like life. Almost before he finished, the darkness had landed with a noisy thrash of leaves and branches up in the holly. A huge expressionless black eye gazed down at him.

He sang. It was almost all he could do. It’s mine! Stay away, or I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! But the outcome was hardly so simple. The black-headed, white-backed shape with the axe-like beak bounced down another branch, and another, its eye on that tree food, that meat. It liked meat too. He’d once seen it zoom down onto the pond and simply pick up a baby duck and fly off with it. I’ll kill you if you get any closer! Don’t push me! I will!

It came closer. It was winter, it was death, the shape now only one branch of holly away. He sang as if life depended on it: because it did. If he had enough to eat, the sun came up. If the sun came up, the world was safe. It was as simple as that. Go away! I have to eat the food or the world will end! I’ll kill you to keep that from happening! Monster, go away, don’t make me rip you up — ! He fluttered at the monstrous gaping head, enraged, desperate.

A clacketing, rattling noise from behind. The black eye went wide, the death-pale bulk roused its wings and flapped clumsily out of the holly tree. Desperate with relief, he flung himself at the food-cage again, and ate with frantic speed as the sky paled brighter, toward day-blue: and between mouthfuls, he sang at the top of his lungs, shuddering with relief and triumph. Bastard! I warned you not to mess with me! Victory! Victory!

The sun peered up over the far hill. The shadows fled. He gorged himself as the black bird flew off, and stopped, and shouted again, Victory!

…She stood there with her teacup in one hand, looking out across the back yard snow at the dot of red breast deep in among the holly branches, pecking furiously at the suet in its little cage. “Boy,” she said to the husband, back in the kitchen, “listen to that little guy. You’d think he’d just won World War Three.”

“Yeah. Where’s the milk?”

The door closed. On the snow, the sun of the shortest day shone.

Victory!

A peculiar thing happens in a number of European countries, mostly (but not all) German-speaking, on or around New Year’s Eve. The TV stations begin showing the same brief comedy sketch again and again. What’s truly unusual about this is that the sketch is in English — recorded nearly 50 years ago in front of a German audience — and has since become a cult classic. For a surprising number of German-speaking people, the words “Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?” are not only the English-language phrase they know best, but are held in the same kind of humorous context as the phrases “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” or “It is an ex-parrot!”

The sketch “Dinner for One” — the German name of the sketch translates as “The 90th Birthday” — doesn’t really have anything to do with New Year’s (though one “virtually present” character does say “Happy New Year” at one point, which may be the source of the confusion). It tells the story of a birthday party. Miss Sophie (played by actress May Warden, who later appeared on Doctor Who and A Clockwork Orange) is 90, and the table is set for herself and her four friends: Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr. Pommeroy, and Mr. Winterbottom. Unfortunately time has taken its inevitable toll, and of the five of them, only Miss Sophie is still alive.

Assisting at dinner is James, Miss Sophie’s butler (played by veteran British comedian Freddie Frinton). It falls to him not only to serve dinner, but to impersonate the four missing dinner guests for a lady who may or may not be entirely clear that they’re no longer among the living. As part of the act, James has to drink their traditional toasts to Miss Sophie — all of them — and becomes progressively more sloshed and goofy as dinner progresses. But he just keeps soldiering on — serving dinner and “channeling” the four missing guests, while also locked in silent battle with the tigerskin that lies in wait for him every time he makes another circuit of the table.

The sketch is a tremendous showcase of Freddie Frinton’s complete mastery of comic timing, and for a long time we were forced to simply describe it at one remove to people who hadn’t been in a country where and when it was being aired. But time has moved along, taking “Dinner for One” with it into the new century, and the whole business is now happily viewable on YouTube — both in its original black and white, and in a newer colorized version. I’ve embedded the color version here, because it’s not a bad effort: but there are those who much prefer the black and white version — I’d be one — and the link to that is here. (Note that the original German version starts with a gentle intro by a German-speaking host, who explains what’s forthcoming to those who haven’t seen it before, and more or less reassures the audience that it’s okay to find this poor dotty old lady a bit amusing. If you prefer to skip the intro, advance the video to about the 2min:25sec stage.)

A holiday tradition has built up around “Dinner for One” in the German-speaking countries of central Europe, and elsewhere too (in Scandinavia, the Baltics, and as far afield as New Zealand). On New Year’s eve it shows on practically every TV network, public or private, in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Some of them show it several times back to back. (At least one of the channels within the last few years showed it for 24 hours straight… quite a run for an eleven-minute short.) It also appears in dubs in many regional European dialects, and even in Latin.

All this loving attention has won “Dinner for One” the uncontested title as the single most rerun piece of standalone television on Earth. People stage drinking games around it; they hold dinner parties based on the one that James serves to Miss Sophie; they hunt down the best recipes for “the fowl” and that “North Sea haddock”; they enthusiastically debate the choice of the wines that go with each course. The skit’s fandom includes millions of people across all walks of life who have nothing in common except this one remarkable piece of comedy, to which they return year after year — most of them swearing that a New Year’s without it is simply unthinkable.

The aspect of this phenomenon that remains truly bizarre is that though “Dinner for One” was filmed in the UK, it’s never been aired there except in one seconds-long excerpt on that most excellent of quiz shows QI, and is almost completely unknown to British people. Every now and then it pops up on the British radar due to very occasional coverage in the UK press, like this 2002 article in the Guardian and this one in 2004: but then it vanishes again. The BBC seems uninterested in airing it: they apparently don’t think it’s funny. (And they have no answer whatsoever for why the Germans, who most British people apparently seem to think have no sense of humor, find the “Dinner for One” skit hilarious and will recite it to each other, in English [whether they understand the English or not] as if it was a Monty Python skit.)

This is a situation that probably won’t change any time in the near future. But “Dinner for One” itself is worth spreading around for its gentle awesomeness. Meanwhile, over at EuropeanCuisines.com, we’ve posted recipes / articles on the four courses:

• “Sherry with the soup”: Miss Sophie’s Mulligatawny Soup
• “White wine with the fish”: Miss Sophie’s Haddock
• “Champagne with the bird”: Miss Sophie’s Poulet roti
• “Port with the fruit”: The traditional British fruit plate

With that: here’s “Dinner for One,” in two parts. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

Now available at last in ebook format are Peter’s two prequels to his Horse Lords series. Now, of course the Horse Lords’ Book of Years purports to tell the true story behind the arrival of the Horse Lords in Alba. But as usual, when the victors write the histories, the truth has been known to suffer. Events that could prove embarrassing or even shameful to later generations get covered up, as do any suggestions that the heroic deeds of past generations might not have been so heroic after all…

Book 1, Greylady, begins to tell the real story of the arrival of the Horse Lords in the realm of Alba, and how they turned the Art Magic that they initially hated and feared into a terrible weapon that would first be used against the realms they conquered. It also tells of Bayrd al’Talvlyn, a young, landless and idealistic captain at the time of the Landing in Alba — and the distant ancestor of Aldric Talvalin — who suddenly finds himself catapulted into the murky political and magical maelstrom surrounding the subjugation of the native Albans. And in book 2, Widowmaker, the story continues into the time when the Art Magic begins to be turned to truly deadly purpose against the invaders from over sea. Bayrd al’Talvlyn struggles to preserve his new young clan from the enmity of the recently deposed sorcerer Kalarr cu Ruruc, while preserving his newly conquered land from those who want it, and those who want it back…

These books have been hard to find since they went out of print in the UK in the 1990s. They’ve never been in print in the US. But now they’re back. Greylady and Widowmaker are now available as ebooks in .mobi format (for the Kindle) and .ePub (for Sony Reader, Nook and the iPads and iPhones), joining the print editions of Widowmaker and Greylady presently available at Lulu.com.

Yes, they’re my husband’s books. Know what? They’re hot. And I’m not just saying that because I married the guy. They’re worth reading. Please go buy some. Thank you.

(BTW: for a limited time we’ll be offering a 20% discount on everything in the store to celebrate the prequels’ release! Use the discount code CLANWARS at checkout. Info on how to use our discount codes at the store is here.)

It all started with this tweet from @DonSpeirs:

“@wilw @dduane fan project for #Kimvention2012 – What do you think the 6 Tasks of Snowman Hank were? #kimpossible #snowmanhank”

…All I can say is… it got me thinking. Too many people know that I love the Kim Possible series dearly, for a number of reasons including the relative smoothness with which the characters grow and change. And then the tweet reminded me of the Christmas episode, which is… quirky. (And which I particularly love for its self- and extra-referential qualities.)

So I sat down for several days and did some development thinking, and then wrote. (For those who’re interested in seeing some notes on how a writer goes about making a nonexistent Christmas special out of a minute and a half of video and a few lines of dialogue, they’re here.) And below you’ll now find what an animation writer in a hurry (and possibly also a few drinks gone in pre-Christmas cheer) might have turned in to a tolerant story editor at some 80′s network as the first-draft outline for “The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank.” (I more or less imagine the story editor as being Art Nadel, that prince among producers, who gave many a new animation writer his or her leg-up into the industry in the Eighties.)

I don’t often get to do the disclaimer thing, so here it is:

The Snowman Hank character originated in an episode of the Walt Disney Television Animation  series Kim Possible, and therefore is the property of Disney. (But you knew that.)

This is a work of fan fiction and is copyright to Disney Enterprises Inc. if to anyone.

Everybody clear on that?

Good. Then let’s roll. …One other thing: there are songs in this. Songwriting isn’t in my skillset, so I’ve merely indicated what the songs should be like, or do to the listener. Use your imaginations.

 

 

THE SIX TASKS OF SNOWMAN HANK

 

ACT ONE

We open on a snowy Rockies landscape over which towers the imposing and magical BLIZZARD MOUNTAIN. Running down the mountain slopes, Snowline Canyon ends in a sheltered spot called HANK’S CORRAL.

Here we meet SNOWMAN HANK, who for most of the year lives a somewhat solitary and sedate (if musical) life as protector of the local forest and mountain creatures. But he’s not right in the middle of his favorite time of year, and his busiest. It’s Christmas Eve, and tonight it’ll be Hank’s job to round up the magical walking fir trees of Blizzard Mountain in his corral, and then head them down to Snowline Junction — the last stop on the steam train line that runs down to Summertown at the foot of the mountain. It’s from Blizzard Mountain that all the people for miles around get their Christmas trees, and Hank knows that they depend on him to make a really important part of Christmas happen.

It’s almost time for the big Walking Tree Roundup, and Hank is practicing [THE TREE ROUNDUP SONG] one last time before it’s time to start the real thing going. But he’s interrupted in his practice by a huge ruckus outside the Corral. Within seconds a COYOTE comes tearing into the Corral in hot pursuit of a SNOWSHOE HARE. Though these two are both friends of Hank’s, they’re natural enemies, and they never miss a chance to make each other’s life miserable if they can.

Hank breaks them up in a way that suggests he’s an old hand at this. The hare, JOSH, and the coyote, LUCIUS, immediately start squabbling over who’s going to deliver the important news they’re carrying to Hank, and he has to break them up all over again. Finally the news comes out that the rustic road that runs up and down the mountainside – the one the Walking Trees use on their way down to the train depot — has been blocked by a landslide.

“So let’s go clear the way,” Hank says. Slinging his trusty guitar CHANTEUSE over his shoulder – because Hank would never go anywhere without her – he heads up the mountain along with Lucius and Josh (who keep fighting all the way). This time it takes [A ROLLICKING SONG ABOUT NOT BEATING UP ON THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU EVEN IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM MUCH: TITLE GOES HERE]  to break up their squabbling  and get them on track to be of some kind of use to deal with the blocked road when they reach the trouble spot. (The trees, already eager to get going, can be seen bopping in time to the music in the background as the three friends move along. The implication is that Hank’s music is itself magical and one of the things that helps the trees move.)

Shortly they get to the place where the road is blocked by a huge heap of stones and rubble. Josh and Lucius start vying with each other in trying to get rid of the rocks, but they’re too small to do much but produce a lot of inadvertent physical comedy, and they make no real difference at all. Finally Hank uses his guitar again to play a MAGIC DANCE TUNE so bouncy and irresistible that the piled-up stones just boogie off to either side of the road and then roll down off the side of the mountain.

Josh and Lucius cheer, and Hank, pleased, reckons that he can go back home now and start getting ready for the Walking Tree Roundup. But just as he’s turning to make his way back, from further up the road someone slowly appears who none of them were expecting to see. It’s a tortoise called TERRY.

Terry’s another old friend of Hank’s, very old (though he looks fairly young) and very wise. Normally he wouldn’t be out and around at this time of year, but now he looks around with the air of someone who’s half expected what he sees. “Yup, this is about when it was supposed to happen,” Terry says.

“When what was supposed to happen?” says Josh.

“The tasks,” Terry says. “Years ‘n’ years ago, the Medicine Woman of the Blizzard Mountain Tribe told me how it’d happen. There’d be a time when the rocks start rolling, and the rivers wouldn’t flow, and the trees wouldn’t walk — and a winter would come that there wouldn’t be a spring after. Then someone’d have to do six tasks to put it all right. Looks like this was one of those tasks…”

“But there’s nothing wrong with the trees!”

“You sure about that?”

Worried, Hank starts playing Chanteuse and singing the TREE ROUNDUP SONG – even though it’s not time for it yet – and though the trees try to get up out of the ground and follow him, they aren’t able to. He’s horrified. “They can’t walk! And if they can’t walk there won’t be any Christmas trees for the kids down in Summertown!”

“So there you go,” Terry says. “Better get started on fixing this up before Christmas comes…”

Hank isn’t wild about the idea that he’s the one meant to do these mysterious tasks, but he agrees – however reluctantly – that he has to at least find out why the trees can’t walk, and solve the problem somehow. “Won’t be easy,” Terry says. “You’ve got to find what’s been lost and give up what you’ve found… make a friend, make an enemy, underneath the ground. When the rocks start rolling and the rivers won’t flow, then what can’t move will show you the way you have to go.”

All this is obscure and troubling, but Hank’s not the type to shirk a job that needs doing. “Better get on with it, then,” he mutters, and starts heading up the mountain along the newly cleared road. “But how come you never told me about this before?”

“Wasn’t the time, and anyway, you never asked,” Terry says as he slowly follows Hank and the others. “Don’t wait up for me, son, you just get going, you’ve got five more tasks to do…”

“What kind of friend are you gonna make under the ground?”  Josh wonders. “Or what kind of enemy?” says Lucius. They start squabbling over which of the two clues is more important, and Hank has to separate them again. “One thing at a time, boys,” he says. “I’m more worried about the idea that some river might stop flowing. There’s only one river on Blizzard Mountain, and a lot of critters depend on it. Better go check it out…”

They make their way further up the mountain and are met by a PRAIRIE DOG named  PAULA. “Snowman Hank!” she says, “thank goodness you’ve come! It’s the river!”

“Lead the way,” Hank says.  Following Paula, they make their way to the nearby riverbank – and find the river frozen solid!

 

ACT TWO:

“Hotspring River’s frozen clean over,” Hank says as they survey the icy expanse. “Never thought I’d see the day!”

“How can this be happening?” Josh cries. “This is plumb freaky!” says Lucius.

Hank’s inclined to agree. But for the moment he unslings Chanteuse and starts to play and sing [A JOLLY BREAKING-THE-ICE SONG]. As he does, the ice starts to shatter and is gradually carried away down the watercourse. “Thanks, Hank!” Paula says. “We knew you could help!”

“Not sure I have, though,” Hank says, reslinging Chanteuse. “That river’s never frozen before, not even in the Big Snow of ’33. Whatever’s going on, it needs more looking into. Come on.” And he starts uphill.

“But where are we going?” Paula says, falling in with the others.

“You got trouble with a river, go to the source,” Hank says.

“You mean – the Haunted Caves of Blizzard Mountain?”

Everybody freaks a little at the very idea. But Hank just keeps going with a look of increasingly grim determination, and the others follow him…

Soon they’re entering an area where the trees are very high and thick and close together. “Shadowpine Forest,” Hank says. “These are the oldest trees on Blizzard Mountain.” And he sounds a little uneasy, which doesn’t help the others’ composure. “Don’t normally bother them this time of year. They’re full of old tree thoughts, they deserve their peace…” But it’s while making their way through this spooky area that they start hearing strange high voices calling.

“Ghosts!” Josh shrieks, and “Ice goblins!” Lucius yells, and both of them dive for cover (in pointedly opposite directions).

But the sound has nothing to do with goblins or ghosts. Hiding from them under the huge trees – because they’re as unnerved by Hank and his friends as Hank’s companions are by the voices – they shortly discover two CHILDREN, a brother and sister named BOB and BABS. “What’re you young un’s doing all the way up here all by yourself in this weather?” Hank says, for the snowclouds are moving in.

“We were looking for a Christmas tree,” Bob says, apparently recovering instantaneously from being encountering a talking snowman with a guitar.

“Our family doesn’t have a lot of money this Christmas,” says Babs. “Our folks said we might not be able to have a tree this year. So we thought…”

“You thought you’d come up and try to find one for yourselves,” Hank says softly.

“And then we got lost,” Bob says. “And we couldn’t find our way down again,” says Babs. “And we’re cold… and we just want to go home!” they plead in unison.

“Your folks’ll be going plumb loco looking for you,” Hank says. “We need to get you back to your family!” And he looks like he’d rather do nothing else. But all the same, he looks up the mountain. “Might not be safe for you right now, though,” he says. And as he speaks, the first flakes of snow start falling. It’s getting dark…

“We’ll take them down the mountain, Hank,” says Lucius. “I’ll help him,” says Josh.

Lucius starts bristling. “I don’t need your help, you varmint – ”

But Hank shakes his head. “Better if we all stick together,” Hank says. “Safety in numbers.” He tries to sound cheerful and confident, but the look on his face as he leads the group out of the Darkpine Forest and onward up the mountain suggests that he’s not sure how safe they’re all going to be. He starts playing and singing [A CHEERFUL WE’RE-ON-AN-ADVENTURE SONG] as they head up the mountain, and the kids and animals chime in. But Hank is worried…

The snow is falling faster now, and it’s almost night as the group reaches the place where Hot Spring River comes out of the mountainside. The river’s banks are almost completely covered with ice and the river’s stream is narrowed to a mere trickle:  almost as they watch, it freezes over again.

“Thought this might happen,” Hank says. “I’ve got to go in and find out what’s going on. ‘What doesn’t move will show you the way…’” To the children he says, “Hate to say it, but I think you’d best come with: we still ought to stay together.”

“We’re not afraid,” Babs says.  “Much,” Bob says.

“That’s the spirit,” Hank says. “Just keep your eyes open. We’ll sort out whatever’s wrong in there and get you back down to Summertown and your family by Christmas.”

The kids produce flashlights they’ve wisely brought with them.  Everyone’s a little nervous, but Hank’s unwavering certainty that good will prevail becomes the solid center around which all of them coalesce, like the single grain of ice at the heart of a snowflake.  All together, they move into the cave and vanish in the darkness…

 

ACT THREE:

The group makes its way deeper and deeper into the cave, weaving their way among stalagmites like stone Christmas trees and stalactites like huge stone icicles. Though they’re creepy, the caverns are also glitteringly beautiful, and even Lucius and Josh, who’ve been paranoid about ghosts, are beginning to relax a little.

At one point, however, the kids become too cold to go on, and the party pauses for a rest and to try to warm them up. There’s no point in trying to cuddle up to a snowman, and Hank knows he can’t be of any use to Babs and Bob that way: but all the other critters crowd in close, and shortly Bob and Babs are wearing a coat of live snowshoe rabbit, coyote and prairie dog fur. Hank unlimbers Chanteuse and sings [A HEARTRENDINGLY SEASONAL SONG ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY: SOMEBODY GET SONDHEIM IN HERE, PLEASE, OR ELSE RAISE JOHNNY MARKS OR IRVING BERLIN FROM THE DEAD]. And as he sings the part about looking for a family until you find one, the critters exchange sad glances.

The kids, rested and warmed up, now jump up and are ready to carry on. Josh, though, and Lucius, have a quiet word with the snowman. “Hank… you know you have a family. You have us.”

“I know I do.” But it sounds like Hank’s not terribly sure. He gets up. “Come on, folks. We should get moving. The sooner we’ve found out what’s going on here, the sooner we can get you kids back down to your nice warm house in Summertown…”

They start moving again through the cavern and are surprised when ahead of them they hear a voice calling for help. Hank immediately follows it: the others rush headlong past him, and alarmed, Hank hurries to stop them. Which is a good thing, because in the darkness they nearly fall into a bottomless crevasse! They just manage to stop in time — though Josh and Lucius pitch over the edge together. The crisis of the moment forces them to bypass their normal sniping and help each other up and out.

Carefully the group makes its way around the edges of the crevasse to the other side. Far down the passage they can see a faint light, and between them and the light there’s the silhouette of a skinny wavering shape.  To their surprise, they find it’s a snake (in a Stetson) named BOOMSLANG BILL. As they get close to him, Bart coils up and rattles and threatens them. “You consarned little varmint!” Lucius says, but he’s not willing to get too close. Neither is Josh. Paula, though, seriously annoyed at what just nearly happened to the other two, simply flings herself at Bill and sits down on him just behind the head.

He thrashes around, but can’t make any headway: Paula is substantial. “You can torture me, but I won’t talk!” he shouts.

“You better stop wiggling around or I’ll give you something to talk about, snake boy!” Paula says.

But Hank steps in. “No need to be mean to him just because we got off on the wrong foot,” he says. “So to speak. Pardner, what’d you mean by acting like you were in trouble? You nearly made us fall right down that almighty hole!”

“I was following my master’s orders! He told me to do it.”

“Your master, huh,” Hank says, grabbing the snake out from under Paula. “And just where might he be?”

The snake indicates the faint light down at the end of the tunnel, and starts shivering. “Down there…”

“That’s where it’s coldest, all right,” Josh says. All of them are feeling colder now.

“Well, I reckon he’s the one we’ve come to see,” Hank says, “so you’d better just bring us to him. You have any problems with that?”

“Yes!” Bill shouts. “Uh, actually, no,” he adds a lot more quietly.

“Good,” Hank says. “You do right by us, son, we’ll do right by you. Lead the way.”

The group heads toward the faint chilly light in the distance.  Boomslang Bill is plainly confused by the treatment he’s receiving. “How come you aren’t…you know…”

“Nobody’s gonna torture anybody, snake boy,” Paula says. “We don’t operate that way. What’re you doing working for some bad guy anyway?”

“My mom said I had to,” Bill says after a moment. “She said this job would be perfect for me. Because I was so cold-blooded…” And suddenly he bursts into sobs. “I never asked to be cold-blooded!”

The critters exchange skeptical looks. “Sounds like an occupational hazard for a snake,” Josh mutters.

“That’s just the problem! I didn’t want to be venomous! But there are all these expectations – “   Bill continues to vent, while the other critters, somewhat bemused, take turns listening to him.

At the end of the tunnel they soon find a huge cavern, definitely haunted… but not in the usual way. At the center of it is a DARK, MANLIKE SHAPE on an icy throne.  In the entrance to the cavern, everyone freezes at the sight.

Then Hank unslings Chanteuse and very slowly moves toward the throne. It’s a gunslinger moment: snowmen don’t wear spurs, but you can almost hear them jingling.

The shape on the throne doesn’t move, just watches Hank come. The watcher looks like Jack Frost gone bad, a Black Bart-like anti-Santa in black and icy silver Western attire.  Around the crown of the black Stetson he wears is a second crown of ice, and the cavern around his throne is filled with nasty-looking four-legged ICE GOBLINS that growl and glare at the visitors.

Hank, though, stays casual and grimly calm. “Who might you be, stranger?” he says. “And what’re you doing on my mountain?”

“I’m King Zero,” says the figure lounging on the throne. “Absolute Zero… but you just call me Zero.”  He chuckles. “I’m from as far away West as you can get… right out past the Sun, where there’s nothing but night. I’m what’s darker than night, and colder than any winter in the world. And as for what I’m doing here, why, I came to see you, Hank!”

“Me?”

“Of course. Who hasn’t heard of Snowman Hank and his famous enchanted guitar, and the magic mountain they guard? I thought I’d mosey out this way and see the man, or shall I say snowman, for myself…see if he’s all he’s cracked up to be. And now that I’ve seen your neighborhood… I think I like it here. Might just settle down… forever.”

The children and all the critters shiver with dread, and Hank plainly isn’t pleased by the prospect. “Wouldn’t have thought you’d mind, Hank,” says Zero. “You’re a snowman. Summer’s your enemy.  While I’m here you can go anywhere you like, any time of year, instead of having to stay all alone up above the snowline like a prisoner.”

The “not being alone” reference plainly hits Hank where it hurts. But he shakes his head. “Some kinds of alone ain’t so bad,” Hank says. “And you moving in here would mean there’d be nothing alive on the mountain soon, or for miles around. Even the trees would die. Can’t have that.”

“Don’t rightly know that you can get rid of me, though,” says Zero. “Don’t think you have the power. And now that I’ve got you here, here you’ll stay, you and your friends.”

He gestures, and the snarling ice goblins move in from all sides, cutting off any retreat and surrounding the visitors. Zero laughs an evil laugh as the children cling to each other in terror and the animals shiver in fear. “We’ll have a long long while to get acquainted. Forevermore…”

 

ACT FOUR:

Everyone is (understandably) thoroughly freaked out by the idea of being prisoners of the evil Zero inside the icy mountain for the rest of their lives (if not longer). But Hank is holding his nerve. “If it’s me and Chanteuse you came to see,” Hank says, “then I don’t know if it’s smart to antagonize us.” Zero turns a cruel, cold look on him. “But on the other hand,” Hank says, “if we’re so all-fired famous, then maybe you’d like to find out why.”

“A private concert?” Zero says, and smiles a wicked smile. “You interest me strangely.”

“I’ll play and sing my best for you,” Hank says. “But there’s a price to pay.”

“And what might that be?”

“You let the children and my friends go free.”

Zero considers this with nasty pleasure for a moment. “They’re not important,” he says. “Done.”

“And one more thing,” says Hank. “If you’re not afraid to have a little gamble.”

“Afraid??”

Hank ignores the threat in the word. “I bet when I sing for you, I can make you cry.”

“If I do?”

“Then you’ll take yourself right off my mountain and never come back.”

“And if I don’t, and you lose?”

Hank shivers. “Then you can stay. And when the others go, I stay too.”

All the critters and the children shout “No!” “You can’t do it, Hank!” “We need you!”

But he’s not listening. And neither is Zero. “To have Snowman Hank as my personal entertainment for all of time…” A long pause, and another of those awful smiles. “Done again. Sing your song.”

Hank lifts up Chanteuse and strikes a chord, and SINGS. And sure enough, at the end of [AN IMPOSSIBLY TENDER SONG ABOUT LOSS AND LONGING THAT WOULD MAKE EVEN A BROADCAST STANDARDS AND PRACTICES SUIT CRY], one lone tear steals down Zero’s cheek (and freezes there).

Zero is obviously furious at losing the bet, but for the moment he holds still. “And now,” Hank says, “if you’ll excuse us, we have to go — ”

“But it’s too late for you already,” Zero says, and smiles another of those wicked smiles. “Don’t you understand? It’s almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and your time’s up.  Not all the tasks are done. The river… the blocked road… finding the lost… and facing me down at the heart of Blizzard Mountain… those four things you’ve done. Soon, when you take the children home as you promised, before it’s Christmas, you’ll lose what you found, and that’s the fifth task. But you still won’t have brought the trees down to Summertown. That’s task number six, the one you’ve always done easily every year until now. Not tonight, though. You’ve only got time to do one or the other before midnight. And if the trees don’t walk before Christmas Day… I can come back.”

Everyone gasps. Even Hank quails at this awful news. But after a moment he straightens up and looks at the guitar in his hands –

And throws Chanteuse to Josh, Lucius and Paula. “Take her and run for it!” he cries, snatches up Bob and Babs, one under each arm, and flees.

“Take me with you!” Boomslang Bill cries. Paula grabs him, and the whole crowd runs back the way they came through a cavern now trembling with Zero’s rage. Stalagmites totter and stalagmites rain down from the cavern ceiling, and there are near-misses and close calls, but with help from Boomslang Bart, who knows the way better than any of them, they manage to break out into the open.

Down at the mountain’s foot, the bells of Summertown strike quarter to twelve on Christmas Eve. Hank doesn’t give the rest of the group a moment’s thought: he bellyflops down in the snow. “Get on my back!” he shouts to Bob and Babs, and the moment they do, he throws himself over the nearby cliffside and starts the wildest toboggan ride down the mountain that anyone could imagine.

It’s a scary ride but also a wonderful one – for what could be better than tobogganing down a mountain in the moonlight on the back of a snowman who knows the way? Bob and Babs hang on for dear life, laughing all the way –

Until they come to the bottom of the mountain, and Summertown. In the distance, Hank can hear voices calling the kids’ names: and he sees lights moving around as their parents search for them. At the bottom of the mountain the kids jump off and run to their folks, and Hank stands and watches this, happy even though he’s also deeply troubled.

As he turns to look back up Blizzard Mountain, he spots Terry the tortoise coming slowly toward him. “Nice work, Hank!” Terry calls. “I knew you’d get it all handled. The road unblocked – the river unfrozen – the one who got it that way sorted out — those lost kids found and brought back to their folks – “

“But it doesn’t matter, Terry! Christmas in Summertown is ruined. There aren’t any trees to gather around and sing carols on Christmas Eve. No trees for the presents to be under first thing in the morning.  I never did the last task. I failed!”

Terry tsks at him and leads him back down around the last curve in the mountain road. “Hank my boy… does this look like failure to you?”

Hank turns and stares… for hundreds of trees are making their way down the mountain, and the children and adults of Summertown are rushing out to greet them. The Walking Tree Roundup is under way without him! Leading the way are Lucius (carrying Chanteuse on his back) and Paula and Josh (helping steady the guitar on either side), while the guitar triumphantly plays the Walking Tree Roundup song by herself! Scrambling along after them are a horde of Josh’s snowshoe rabbit relatives, helping act as informal traffic cops to guide the trees to the families waiting for them. Everyone sings and dances around the trees as they walk to where they’re needed, settling themselves down in front of people’s houses to be decorated out in the open.

A crowd of Summertown’s kids, led by Bob and Babs, rush to Hank and dance around him, too, singing, “To the people far and near, Snowman Hank brought holiday cheer!”

Hank is dumbfounded. “But I didn’t do it – “

“Of course you did, you big snow-brained galoot,” Terry says. “Maybe not directly. But you helped them make it happen!” He laughs. “Who said you had to do all the tasks? You gotta learn to delegate, son.”

“I guess I do!” Hank laughs, as Josh and Lucius and all the others run over to him with Chanteuse. “How’d you get down to the Corral so fast? And then down here?”

“Same way you did,” Lucius says.

“You rode my guitar down Blizzard Mountain?”

Hank grabs Chanteuse from them: she twangs happily as Hank gets his mittens on her and spins her around to make sure that she’s okay. Boomslang Bill promptly falls out of her, headfirst into the snow. “I helped steer!” Bill shouts, somewhat muffled by the snow and his hat.

Terry chuckles. “Anyway, Hank, you should know that Christmas always comes if you make room for it! You made the room… by being willing to set aside what made you happy for what someone else needed more. And it’s more than that…”

“You’re right.” And Hank breaks into the first verse of the song that lies at the core of the story, while his friends gather around and join in the singing.

“It’s not the turkey and the stuffing,
“Or the gifts around the tree:
“It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling
“That begins with you and me!
“Put away those petty problems
“And embrace your fellow man;
“Then join the celebration
“All across this wonderful land!

“Have a ringlin’, jinglin’,
“Kris-Kringlin’ Christmas!
“Have a Hopalong, singalong, happy holiday!
“And when the snow starts falling,
“We’ll voice a hearty cheer
“For the rootin-est, tootin-est, high-falutin-est
“Favorite time of year!”

 

We now start the second verse (somebody else can write this, I’m sure) which will continue over the end titles. But first the camera pans back up to the top of Blizzard Mountain, where Zero is standing outside the cavern entrance, looking down at the light and happy activity. For a moment he frowns. Then as a shred of the song floats up to him, his face relaxes, and he rubs one black-gauntleted finger over the spot where that tear froze, and sniffs once or twice… and smiles.  “Oh well,” he says under his breath to his minions, “They say Greenland is nice this time of year.”

And he vanishes, leaving us to watch the celebrations down at the foot of the mountain as the adults and children of Summertown, some strangely assorted animals, and a singing snowman, all join together to welcome Christmas….

(For some notes on how this outline was written, click here.)

So here’s where we talk a little about the process of planning and writing the outline for The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, from the point of view of someone who’s done a fair amount of animation work.

Why did I do it? Partly for the challenge. Even well-established writers ought to be stretching themselves every chance they get: part of the job, as I conceive it, is to try not only things that others have never tried before, but things that you’ve never tried. The more I thought about Snowman Hank and his six tasks, the more this piece of potential storytelling struck me as being like a writer’s version of the very ancient game show “Name That Tune”. “I can name that tune in… three notes!” “I can make an outline for a Christmas special out of… a minute and a half of video and six or seven lines of dialogue!”

Some challenges are just too good to pass up on. But once the challenge is accepted, the real work begins. Having decided to do something like this, it must be done as well as if there was real-world money and a real-world production team involved. What’s the point otherwise?

So. When you’re about to start playing in someone else’s universe — a subject on which I’m fairly expert — the first thing you do is take some time to carefully examine the canonical material so that you don’t get carried away, or plunge off in the wrong direction, with whatever you’re developing. This particular piece of work illustrates the need for such care more clearly than a lot of pieces of work I’ve been involved with, specifically because there’s so little to work with.

…Or at least it seems like that at first glance. When you play back the YouTube of A Very Possible Christmas, there’s no getting around the fact that there is barely a minute and a half of material that actually shows Snowman Hank. The rest of the material dealing with Hank and his canceled special comes up in dialogue: mostly from Ron, though a little from Dr. Drakken. Nonetheless, if you’re trying to back-engineer the story itself, you’re given a fair amount of useful material to work with.

Just glance at the initial scene where Ron is watching the Snowman Hank promo. You discover the following:

(a) The overall “western” feel of the milieu. Hank has a corral. (Though there’s no sign of any horses or cattle, so this is an issue that’s going to have to be dealt with. Yes, there are horseshoes on the trees around the corral… which aren’t likely to be real horseshoes: you try decorating a Christmas tree with one-pound lumps of metal and see what happens.)

(b) The extra characters who appear in the promo are all western. A tortoise, a snowshoe hare (in fact a number of them, later on): a coyote (too small for a wolf, and also seen hugging the snowshoe hare as they “embrace their fellow man”, coyotes and hares/jackrabbits often appear together in western lore): a prairie dog, and a rattlesnake in a Stetson. (It doesn’t get much more Western than that.)

(c) The fact that Snowman Hank’s “special” has been around for twenty years. This by itself raises a couple of questions: (a) is it a Christmas episode of a series, or is it a stand-alone special like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or Frosty the Snowman, both of which it pretty obviously recalls?

…And there’s something else that comes up while we’re examining this footage. If you look at the jolly sun that’s seen hanging around in both the initial sequence and the “fantasy” closing sequence of the episode, you’ll see that it is literally hanging from a wire. Just what gives with this?

Your first impression might understandably be that Snowman Hank’s special, possibly like the show from which it was descended, was originally live-action, and shot on a small TV soundstage rather than being stop-motion or animation in its original incarnation. It would therefore have been like some of the live children’s TV shows of the ’50s and 60s such as the Soupy Sales Show or even Howdy Doody.You could even make a case that the Snowman Hank Show started as live-action, was canceled, and then was resurrected in an animated form (re-animated?) later on.

Given the presence of the wire together with the fact that Ron lets us off the hook by referring unambiguously to “my favorite cartoon snowman”, let’s for the time being assume that this was what happened, and move on. (Who knows, maybe the KP producers originally thought of the Snowman Hank series as live action and then changed their minds, and somebody forgot to tell the storyboard artist to get that wire off the sun, and the thing got past in storyboard-checking because everybody was busy with something else. God knows this kind of hiccup happened sometimes on Dinosaucers, when half the time there were storyboards stacked up on your desk ten episodes high like a heap of phone books, and you weren’t always sure whether you were supposed to check episode 31 or whether your co-story editor had done it already.)

Anyway, for the time being let’s pretend that this is an animated show from the start. And whether or not there was a series first, when you’re doing a special you’re still going to have to introduce all the characters to a new and larger audience. On the other hand, if this is an original special, written from scratch, you can tell Hank’s six tasks as an origin story. In fact, you could even do that if it was a series: see above. So that’s the way I chose to do it. (Especially since none of us know who these characters are anyway, and all of them need explaining.)

Ron helps us out again by succinctly telling us what the show’s about, when Kim offers him his Hanukkah present to try to make him feel better after the news that this year’s airing has been canceled in favor of “XXTreme Xmas”.  Ron’s response:

RON STOPPABLE

Is it a cartoon snowman who teaches kids the power of family, friends, and turning the bad guys good?

(This also being a theme that underpins a fair number of episodes of Kim Possible; but that fact should surprise no one.) …The narrator of the trailer also helps us by describing the story as “heartwarming”, which in its way tells you something about what the action, and character interactions, are going to be like. This is not going to be a gigantic special-effects fest that ranges across the globe, but something relatively intimate and character-driven. The invocation of friends and family tells us that these institutions are going to be threatened and then saved, in the persons of some of the characters, during the course of the story.

And another limiting factor is going to affect the story that can be told here. How long should we assume the Snowman Hank Special to have been?  Most animated Christmas specials have run only half an hour. If “now” for KP is assumed to be around 2000, then “twenty years ago” was 1980, and full animation was still expensive and time-consuming to produce.  No one was going to take a flyer on a one-hour special unless the original material was a runaway hit.  However, there have been exceptions: and also, if Snowman Hank was a series previously, it has some status as a pre-sold property. So what I’ve outlined here is a one-hour special, broken into four acts as was more normal in the 80′s before the structure (and permitted number) of commercial breaks changed. The object thus becomes creating a story that will comfortably fill that space without feeling either too stretched (sometimes a problem when adapting a literary property, for example: only the genius of Chuck Jones could make the brief Grinch story fit perfectly into half an hour) or too hectic and rushed to be properly heartwarming.

So having settled all that, now we come to the story itself and the titular Tasks. Ron implies that there is a Bad Guy to be defeated — or, more difficult, turned — so the threat to friends and family has to come from, or via, the Bad Guy. Since we have all these ancillary characters — the animals, and usefully, those two human children — it makes some sense to use them and their attitudes and actions to point the way to the Bad Guy and the problem he/she poses.

The writer on “A Very Possible Christmas” was plainly well grounded in previous TV holiday traditions, and there are references to other Christmas specials liberally sprinkled throughout the episode. Probably my favorite is when Dr. Drakken starts gloating about Christmas being the perfect time to do dastardly things –

DR. DRAKKEN

Because it is Christmas! The one time of the year when she is off duty. Busy with her twinkle lights, and mistletoe, and carols, and roast beast, and fram-franglers, and zoob-zooblers --

Shego grabs hold of Drakken’s shoulders and shakes him.

SHEGO

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dr. D!

DR. DRAKKEN

What??

SHEGO

You’ve stopped using words.

Though of course he hasn’t: the language comes more or less straight from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And there are also a lot of other sly Christmas-cultural references scattered through the episode — Drakken’s remark about everybody having “a blue Christmas” this year, taken together with the Elvis Santa on the Possibles’ mantelpiece: a very cranky bear possibly stranded in the episode from a Coke advertising campaign: various other bits and pieces. It’s fun to try to catch them all.

In any case, after digesting as much as possible of the episode’s context, and sitting and thinking about it while suitable mood music plays (what I used, you can get from Amazon below: some of the nicest renditions of Christmas music around, easy on the ear and not overly intrusive. Beegie Adair is terrific), there still remains the biggest challenge: trying to write an outline for something that might conceivably become a much-loved special that has been shown and reshown for “more than twenty years”. Yeah, let’s just sit down and attempt to commit a classic, shall we? says the back of the writer’s brain in a skeptical tone.

See larger image Quiet Christmas (Audio CD) List Price: $14.99 USD New From: $11.27 In Stock Used from: $8.49 In Stock Release date September 1, 2004.

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained; and though there’s no way to tell in the real world what will turn anything into a classic, all you can do is your best with whatever raw materials are presented to you. And beyond that, one accessory that a working writer quickly grows as his or her career develops is an unusually high level of certainty that if he or she really puts her/his mind to something, it can be successully pulled off. Sure, doubts creep in while you’re in the middle of a project: but you learn to override them — or at least to judge them critically to see whether they’re just nerves or genuine signals from your writer’s-brain that something needs to be fixed. Later on there can be notes. (In fact, later on, there will be notes. There’s no avoiding it. But you strive for a situation that causes you as few notes as possible.)

Anyway, there it is: the first-draft outline for The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank. It’s not at all perfect. I can already see things that need fixing, characters who need beefing up, and various structural tweaks that would need seeing to in any further stage of development. But that’s always the way it is, starting about five minutes after you turn in any first draft of anything. …Is it anything like what the KP production staff would have come up with? Almost certainly not. Though that writing team had a particular cast of mind which I really like, we’re all different writers,usually coming from very dissimilar places both physically and creatively. Give this assignment to a Paul Dini, or a Christy Marx, and you would get something entirely different. This is just my take on the concept. Maybe someone else will come up with something better. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

At any rate, I hope you enjoy it! It was fun to do. (And now I have another Christmas story to work on. I leave it to the Young Wizards fans reading this to consider (with an eye to Wizard’s Holiday) the possible ramifications of a story with the title “How Lovely Are Thy Branches.”)

This is so cool! I didn’t know that this was going to be coming out so quickly.

Just this last Friday, Audible popped out the audiobook edition of Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South.

A goddess in the making… or a demon reborn?

In the remote mountain village where she was born, Mariarta dil Alicg lives the untroubled life of a peasant girl – until, soon after a mysterious stranger’s arrival, she starts to hear voices in the wind. The voices whisper strange secrets in Mariarta’s ears, promising her the power to command the stormwind, hinting at an unknown, magical heritage, and prophesying a fate marvelous past all of Mariarta’s imaginings.

Then a curse falls on Mariarta’s village, shattering the lives of her family and friends. Mariarta must set out across the mountain realm of Raetia in search of a way to break the curse – while also hunting for the truth about the beautiful and terrible being who Mariarta discovers is trying to possess her soul.

Mariarta’s search will lead her into hidden domains of sorcery, both dreadful and wondrous, and will finally embroil the young woman in the growing rebellion against her land’s cruel Austriac oppressors – but not before Mariarta comes face to face at last with the immortal Lady of the Storms and challenges her to one final battle for control of her life, her soul, and her destiny….

The audiobook is unabridged, and is nicely read by Jessica Almasy, featuring Audible’s usual high production standards.

(And for those of you who prefer to read it in e-version, of course it’s also available over here at the Ebooks Direct Store in the major formats.)

In either format, this work is rated PG-15 for mature themes, language (Romansch), and the reinvention of democracy…

Enjoy!

(PS: For those readers who use Google Earth, we have a basic placemarks file available, showing the major (and minor) locations involved in the book. You can download the file at this link.)

 

It started with this tweet from @DonSpeirs:

“@wilw @dduane fan project for #Kimvention2012 – What do you think the 6 Tasks of Snowman Hank were? #kimpossible #snowmanhank”

…All I can say is… it got me thinking. Too many people know that I love the Kim Possible series dearly, for a number of reasons including the relative smoothness with which the characters grow and change. And then the tweet reminded me of the Christmas episode, which is… quirky. (And which I particularly love for its meta qualities.)

So I’ve posted over here what an animation writer who was in a hurry (and possibly a few drinks gone in pre-Christmas cheer) might have turned in to a tolerant story editor at some 80′s network as the first-draft outline for “The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank.” (I more or less imagine the story editor as being Art Nadel, that prince among producers, who gave many a new animation writer his or her leg-up into the industry in the Eighties.)

(ETA: sorry for the delay in this, folks: I wound up wrestling with a cold over the last few days, and it slowed things up.)

Here’s the original Kim Possible episode, so that everyone has a referent for the peculiarities to follow.

 

 

My author’s copies of the new graphic novel arrived last week, so now I have some to give away as part of the celebrations surrounding the release of the new revised/expanded ebook edition of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses: The Author’s Cut. (Which you might also like to look into if you know the book. Or you can find out more about the book here if you haven’t heard about it before. Also part of the celebration, for those interested: a very-limited-time-only 30% discount on the complete 9-volume Young Wizards International Edition ebook set. Details are here.)

In any case: on to the giveaway!

I’m going to mention this blog posting here and there over the next few days — on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr — and where you’ve seen it mentioned, you have a chance to win an autographed copy. I’ll be sending these out to three winners from each social network where the offer’s made.

Here’s what to do to be in with a chance to win:

If you’ve seen this mentioned on Twitter: The Twitter contest’s done. Congratulations to our winners, @anagenesis4E, @cshabsin and @cclemons!

If you saw this offer mentioned on G+: The contest’s over. Congrats to our winners:  John Davis, Rowan Fairgrove, Spider Boardman.

If you came here via Facebook: Your contest’s done. Congratulations to the winners: Murray J. Anderson, Pat Steed, Joan Oakland.

If you saw this offer on Tumblr: The Tumblr contest’s over. Congratulations to the winners: kayloulee, ussrosalind, falldiewakefly.

Here’s what you’ll be getting!

Once upon a time, there lived a prince…

But not your ordinary prince with some run-of-the-mill royal destiny. When Ivan’s three sisters are married off to enchanted princes and he goes off in search of his own true love, he finds himself matched up with the sorceress and warrior maiden Marya Morevna, fairest princess in all the Russias. Shortly the two of them are navigating the emotional “white water” of one of the world’s more traumatic fairy tales — but not without help, not without high hopes of a happy ending, and not without a lot of funny stuff along the way.

This story was serialized in Eclipse’s groundbreaking fantasy comic The Dreamery in the late 1980s, and its parts have now been brought together for the first time in graphic novel format. Featuring artwork by the fabulous Sherlock, the graphic novel also contains a new final section written for this edition — “Prince Ivan and the Bachelor Parties of Doom.”

Order now and start preparing yourself to make the acquaintance of the Little Humpbacked Horse, who just can’t get enough junk food… the Raven Prince who knows the ins and outs of the world’s strangest military equipment catalog… the terrible secret in the cellar of Marya Morevna’s palace… a whole heap of the most opinionated talking animals you’ll ever meet… and an final event that starts out with “vodka and strategy games” and ends in the world’s biggest fairytale smackdown!

 

 

 

THE MISADVENTURES OF PRINCE IVAN
A graphic novel by Diane Duane
Art by Sherlock
104 pages, paperback, 5.5″ x 7.75″
ISBN: 978-1-936404-01-8
Price: $9.99
Published by About Comics

 

 

It’s been in the works for a good while now, so it’s a pleasure to announce that the new revised ebook edition of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses — which anticipated CSI-style forensic drama and introduced it for the first time into an SF/fantasy setting — is now available in the Ebooks Direct store.

The new edition of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses comes with an afterword that talks about the evolution of the book, and also with the worldbuilding notes that set up the histories of the sheaf of universes where the story’s set.

From the afterword:

As usual, when you look at a work almost ten years after you’ve written it, you find things that the almost-ten-years-on writer really wants to fix. There are little edits all through this edition, and some material that was edited out in the original edition has been restored; but in particular, the last few chapters have been rewritten to try to clarify exactly what the heck is going on.

Previous readers of my work will know that I have no trouble at all playing Cosmic Conkers – i.e., banging two universes together and seeing which one breaks first — but this situation was big and complex even by my standards.  I hope the revisions satisfy both old readers returning to a favorite work, and new ones reading it for the first time. (In particular, some readers have mentioned that they’ve never read the book because the original cover gave them the idea it was a romance. I hope the new cover will have remedied this.)

…Every now and then people ask me when I’m going to do another book in this worldset. Until now the answer had been, “I’m not sure where else I can go with this.” Now, though, after the revision, I begin to see some ways forward. We’ll see how this realization plays out over the next year or so.

– While it’s always dangerous to ask a writer what his or her favorite book is, I have to admit to having a real soft spot for this one — maybe because I spent more time working on the project than on almost any other in my career: so I’m delighted to be able to relaunch it now, in this new and improved version, in e-format. You can read an excerpt from an early chapter here, if you like.

Right now the book is available in the two main ebook formats: .ePub (for the Nook, iPad and Sony Reader) and .mobi (for the Kindle and all MobiPocket-friendly readers). And people who have devices that use both formats can also pick it up in a bundled download that contains both the .ePub and the .mobi files.  We’ll be adding more formats to the selection at the Ebooks Direct store over the next week or so, and in mid-December we’ll be launching the book in the Kindle Store at Amazon and other online facilities.

Enjoy, all!

ETA, November 1 — Contributors: You beat our goal of USD $1000 (by pushing the contribution total up to more than $1100)! THANK YOU so much for your help — you’ve made a huge difference!

“Not On My Patch” is now available at the Ebooks Direct store in all the major formats. All proceeds from the story will continue to go to UNICEF.

I love Hallowe’en. (Or Halloween. I prefer it with the apostrophe.)

I was always an enthusiastic Trick-or-Treater when I was little. It would have been, I think, the golden age of that cultural phenomenon in the US –  a time before anyone had ever thought of anything like razor blades  in apples (or the rumors of them), a time when no one was yet so terrified that you’d be snatched by some stranger that most kids were allowed free run during their play time, and therefore no one was unduly disturbed by the idea that you might be walking around in the dark in ones or twos at age seven or eight or nine;  a time when mostly parents hadn’t yet learned the art of depriving you of the night’s loot, but were content to leave it with you, and let you discover the dubious delight (rarely repeated) of making yourself sick by overindulgence; a time when very few people seeing you wearing a witch costume thought that you were seriously advocating devil worship.

Particularly I remember doing the “Trick or Treat for UNICEF” thing. We were shown how to take the little waxed paper milk containers of the time — my yearsmates will probably remember them, the ones with the little stapled-on pop tops — and wrap these in the orange and black paper labels that the UNICEF people sent our school. We would go around collecting pennies and nickels and dimes for UNICEF while we were trick-or-treating, and hand the cash over to our teachers, on November 1st, to be sent back to UNICEF to help children in other countries have things we took for granted in the New York suburbs in the late ’50s and early ’60′s — like clean water, and vaccination against polio and measles.

So it was a little weird, the other day, to discover that UNICEF’s “Trick or Treat for Halloween” campaign is just a year older than I am. When I realized that, I thought, “I ought to do something special for these guys.”

And so I offer you “Not On My Patch.” At a shade more than 14,000 words, it is the longest Young Wizards-universe  short work to date (both “Uptown Local” and “Theobroma” are way shorter). (Continuity geeks: “Not On My Patch” takes place after the events of The Big Meow and A Wizard of Mars.) I’m inviting you, between now and the end of Hallowe’en in the USA, to make a contribution of more than USD $5.00 to UNICEF for the right to be one of the first to read this story. Here’s the formal pitch:

“Not On My Patch” is the first of a series of planned YW short stories scheduled to be published together in late 2012 in a one-story-per-month anthology entitled The Wizards’ Year.

We’re offering “Not On My Patch” to advance readers this year as part of an effort to help UNICEF celebrate the 60th anniversary of its annual Halloween “Trick or Treat for UNICEF” campaign.

“Not On My Patch” is now available for reading on the Young Wizards website! If you want to read it, here’s what you need to do:

Go to DD’s donations page at the UNICEF USA website and make a donation of USD $5.00 or more directly to Trick or Treat for UNICEF. (Donors from outside the USA: please note that the “State” dropdown has a “none” option at the very bottom of the state list. Choose that so that the form will allow you to fill in other info and complete the donation. Don’t forget to change the country dropdown, too.)

Once you’ve donated: the UNICEF USA website will send you an email confirming your donation. When you receive it, just forward a copy of it to this email address:

youngwizards4unicef@gmail.com

We’ll immediately send you back a link to a web page where you can read the story or download an e-reader-friendly file (.ePub / Sony Reader & Nook, .mobi / Kindle, and .lit / Microsoft Reader formats). The email will also contain a password that will enable you to open the page.  (E-reader users: we had upload difficulties due to local network congestion [i.e., all of Ireland is out celebrating Hallowe'en and YouTubing it to each other], but links to the files are now available on the story page.)

False virus alert warning: Some folks have noted that their virus scanners have been taking exception to the anti-cut-and-paste encryption that’s been applied to the story’s text, or to the simple fact that the story appears in a frame. If you run into this problem, please email Lee the Web Lady and we will arrange to have a PDF sent to you.

Until Halloween 2011 is over in the USA (at 00:01 Hawaiian Standard Time on November 1st), only direct donors to UNICEF at DD’s UNICEF USA page were able to read the story. But as of November 1st, “Not On My Patch” is available at DD’s online Ebooks Direct store, where all proceeds from the story will continue to be donated to UNICEF. The story will continue to be available until November 30th, at which time it will be withdrawn and will not be available again until it appears as the October story in the anthology The Wizards’ Year in late 2012.

Thanks for investigating our plan to help make a difference in the 60th birthday of the “Trick or Treat for UNICEF” campaign!

...So there we go. Friends, please help! …And thank you. 

So there we were in Nürnberg, aka Nuremberg, home of the polymath who drew hares and hands (does he make anybody else think of Alan Rickman in that first image, or is it just me?) and of my favorite shoemaker-poet-philosopher-opera star, and I was cussing out my handy.

Excuse me: my mobile/cellphone/smartphone, for you English-speakers. A strange confluence of business and private stuff (Peter’s 55th birthday, aka “The Day Before The Rapture Didn’t Happen, AGAIN”) had brought us to Germany for a few days. Since we seem to keep winding up there, I’d just bought a local cellphone SIM so I wouldn’t keep getting smacked by utterly extortionate data roaming charges by my home provider every time I turned on Google Maps to find my way around. For reasons best known to itself, the new Fonic SIM, though correctly authorized in all possible ways, was refusing to receive or transmit data: thus causing the cussing. And then while flailing around trying any old thing to change the parameters of the problem, mostly by fiddling with the phone’s network settings, I did something or other to it — the Powers that Be only know what — and data suddenly started to flow.  There was general rejoicing, and over the next few minutes I checked the email, and then loaded  Tweetdeck. And what’s the first thing I find a tweet pointing to in the “mentions” column after several days away from the @ end of things?  This.

Jo is a peer and colleague and a thoughtful reader, and her assessment gave me the chuckles. Partly because parts of what she’d written seemed to me to be hilariously right on the money, and partly because other aspects of it were amusing for, well, some of the wrong reasons. See below. But let me first thank Jo for the really nice things she had to say about the book (and also the positive comments from the other folks who responded to the posting). However, one note in passing:  insulin shock is what you get when there isn’t enough sweet stuff in the bloodstream. Jo was most likely thinking of  hyperglycemia. (I leave as an exercise for the reader the issue of what writers one should read to produce insulin shock.)

The burden of Jo’s posting, though, is that The Door into Fire worked for her some time back, but doesn’t seem to work now. She says that after a recent reread, she’s found it just too sweet, and she doesn’t care to reread the sequels. (BTW: the timing of Jo’ s initial reading of Fire could be even earlier than she thought, as there was a Methuen/Magnet UK edition in 1981, featuring a truly goofy, inappropriate and anatomically challenged cover — one which had also been used on a book by Andy Offutt a couple of years previously. See the second image in the “graphics” area of Fire‘s publication info page for the wonderful awfulness of this cover, rivaled only by that of the US paperback first edition.)

While any writer is naturally going to be disappointed to hear that someone doesn’t want to read a given work of theirs any more, it’s more useful to consider the whys and wherefores than to waste time bewailing the circumstances or complaining that the reader is interrogating the text incorrectly. (Immediate image: Third-degree room with blazing Luxo Sr. lights pointing at a plain wooden chair. Copy of TDIF strapped into chair, struggling futilely against its bonds. Shadowy figure beyond the lights growling, “We have ways of making you talk.” TDIF glares into the light with steely composure. “You’re wasting your time,” it says in Pierce Brosnan’s voice.  “You’ll never break my contextual integrity — ” …See, this comes of all that ’80s animation writing. Never mind….)

A good place to start is to admit where the complaining reader is plainly right. TDIF is a first novel, and it’d be useless to deny that there are … infelicities. While tidying up the text for the ebook edition of Fire, I kept running into bits of attempted prose that repeatedly left me thinking migod you didn’t ort to write a sentence like that molesworth or variants on that theme. Finally I gave up and tweaked some things, because I simply couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them the way they had been — and after thirty years and more than fifty novels’ worth of progress as a writer, I don’t think anyone would blame me. However, 98% of the material was left as it was when the book was last in “physical” press in the US, as I thought that people who sought it out in ebook form would be wanting something that closely matched the book they’d originally read. Was I occasionally appalled enough to wish I could rewrite the whole thing, or to wish I’d been a way better writer thirty years ago? Naturally. Would attempting any kind of serious rewrite have been a smart idea? I really doubt it. From somewhere in James Blish’s Spock Must Die I can hear seriously-good-SF-critic!Jim saying, in Spock’s character and voice, “The true scholar prizes all drafts, early and late.”  So Fire gets to stay pretty much as it was.

(BTW, I think the piece of verse that set Jo’s teeth on edge is supposed to be sort of clunky due to originally being a jumprope rhyme. If it doesn’t say as much in the original TDIF, I should go in there and amend the citation. [I know a similar rhyme is so denoted in TDISunset.] In the meantime, it’s always possible the rest of the poetry in the book really isn’t worth anything. Poetry is so tough to judge at the best of times, and possibly toughest when on the execution end. So this is an issue probably better left to the readership, though I’d also suggest that Jo’s opinion, after publishing a bunch of poetry collections, is to be taken seriously.)

The issue of liking a book once upon a time and not liking it as much, or the same way, later on, is complex from both the reader’s and the reader/writer’s side. Both sorts of viewpoint are likely to change without warning due to satiety, boredom, or the mere passage of time and the long slow shift of preferences that can sneak up on you while you’re not looking. And Jo wouldn’t be the only one to have this going on. Eddison, for example: I don’t read him the same way now that I did ten years ago, or twenty. Or C. S. Lewis. Or Heinlein. Maybe it’d be a poor reader whose tastes didn’t shift at least somewhat with his or her own increasing accomplishments as reader and (in Jo’s case) writer; and this being the case, a book that worked for you ten years ago just may not cut the mustard now. (Though routinely I’ll try a book again after a few more years, on the off chance that something was going on with me that I was missing.) So as regards this issue, Jo’s entirely off the hook as far as I’m concerned.

It probably wouldn’t do any harm, though, to do a little light writer-side analysis as regards the sweetness issue: the kind one of my psych instructors in nursing school suggested was useful when trying to get a lead on a patient’s motivations. You simply ask yourself “How do you raise a person so that they come out like this?” — and then see if anything in their past maps onto the educated guess, or vice versa. One fragment of the (usually complex) answer revealed by this technique may be useful in finding some other fragment of it: the way the patterns on a few jigsaw-puzzle pieces can help you intuit the shape of a missing one and search for it in the pile of pieces yet to solve.

So the answer to “How do you raise a writer so she grows up to write The Door into Fire?” might look something like this:

Start with a NY suburbs kid, routinely the skinny, booky, bullied one, with very few exceptions living a desperately banal suburban life — one nonetheless rich with Tolkien and Norton and Heinlein and the other late-50s-early-60s greats. Into this life, between ages ten and sixteen, drop both the profound grief associated with the loss of a beloved parent, and another significant personal trauma which we’ll deal with briefly later.  Both these events leave the kid with a sense that in various important aspects — about which apparently nothing can be done — the world really, profoundly sucks. Then add to this initial clinical picture the fact that the kid’s been writing fanfic (first Tolkien, then Trek) for most of her life, not knowing that’s what it was or would come to be called.

You could make a case — says the analyst in me — that such a developmental history could in later life very well produce a writer with a fondness for constructing utopias, or at the very least worlds where people were kinder and nicer to each other, and things worked better than in the present one.

This kid went to college on a NY State Science and Nursing Scholarship with dreams of becoming a professional astronomer. These dreams foundered abruptly when the dreamer discovered that she couldn’t handle calculus and other necessary higher math. She then promptly used the other half of her scholarship to go to nursing school at a gigantic state hospital, where along with the anatomy and physiology, medical-surgical nursing, public health nursing and pediatrics, she discovered psychiatric nursing.

The psych nursing, strongly based as it is in the understanding of human motivation, became her first great strictly intellectual love. But as this process went forward and developed, the writer-in potentia found herself dealing with many chronically mentally unwell people, many seriously physically old and sick people who had no hope of ever becoming well, and a whole heap of corpses. It’s one thing to see dead people at a distance. It’s another thing entirely to have them repeatedly die in front of you, or very close by. (The thing about people being more likely to die at 4 AM? It’s true.) It’s yet another matter to be the one who washes these people postmortem and wraps them up,  sometimes two or three times in a shift, and turns them over to their relatives… or worse, hands them over to the guy who takes them away for burial in the hospital’s Potter’s Field because the former patient’s relatives dumped them here after diagnoses of dementia, and don’t give a shit what happens to them now.  All the above can seriously color your outlook, driving deeper the sense that Life Often Really Sucks (especially the Death part of it) and it would be nice if there was somewhere it didn’t suck, or at least not so much.

So, to the earlier picture of a writer with a tendency toward the construction of utopias, we can here safely add the suggestion that pretty serious overexposure to death/entropy relatively early on is going to mean that these themes too start turning up and working themselves out in the writer’s work, in a relatively unaccepting mode. Nothing so crude or simplistic as denial… but a repeated suggestion that mortality in these other worlds can sometimes be hornswoggled, or that entropy can sometimes be fought to a standstill. Fantasy, of course, and understood to be such. But personally satisfying.

During this period, the writer’s Tolkien fanfic gradually veered into a different direction. A new universe got  established, a lot of backstory got laid down, and some of it crystallized out into a single plotline that eventually started becoming The Door into Fire. This work continued through the time the writer graduated nursing school, completed her certification exams and became an R.N., and went to work at one of the best psychiatric clinics in the US (now a part of NYU/Cornell Medical Center). With her work’s increased focus on human interaction and motivation (surprise, surprise), these themes also started working their way through into her writing… while local circumstances continued  to reinforce the sense that, Death aside, a lot of the behaviors of living people weren’t really very nice either, and if one couldn’t significantly offset this trend in one universe, it’d be nice to offset it in another.

After that, all that needs to happen is for the subject to meet people who actually make a living as writers (this concept had never previously occurred to her in terms of her own work, which tells you exactly what an innocent we’ve been dealing with here). She writes her first novel, with all the influences described above operating at full. The book goes off to Dell Books, and it’s bought two weeks later.

…Enough of case-study mode. And yes, of course this is all a posteriori stuff, especially since I’ve been drawing the conclusions as well as describing their precursors. But the reasoning still holds up, and more than adequately suggests reasons/motivations for the tone and mood of The Door into Fire. An undeniably sweet-natured book, especially by this decade’s standards for heroic fantasy. Positively utopian: seriously contaminated, from the present-day writer’s point of view, by visions of a world where some people, as regards sexual orientation and preference, get a built-in fair shake unavailable in our reality — a world born of the writer’s never-answered question to her long-lost mom after a bedtime story, many years previously: “Why can’t the prince rescue the prince?”

So that’s  all the apologia Fire is going to get. But, being the first of three books, it doesn’t stand alone… which itself opens up opportunities. If you’re a writer, sooner or later you find yourself looking over your early work and saying to yourself,  “Wow, did I ever miss some stuff there.” If you’re writing a series, you often enough have a chance to take another run at issues that got scamped the first time out, or the second: or to put a little more strain on your core assumptions and see how they hold up. Even utopias can do with some stress-testing.

In a reply to one comment to her posting, Jo mentions her intention not to go on to reread The Door into Shadow, apparently because the management of a core character’s problem-resolution is too reminiscent of “hippy-psychology” and would make the reread more difficult for her, not less. This is something I’ve occasionally run across before, so let me touch on it lightly before finishing up.

Psych tends to get  popularized with great abandon — sometimes, I suspect, to make it less scary. So I’m used to watching as terms and concepts which my psych teachers and colleagues previously used very precisely are assumed into popular culture and routinely stripped of all but their most superficial meanings and implications. This tendency is annoying, especially as it backwardly devalues earlier, more exact usages in cases where the reader isn’t aware of them: but there’s not much you can do about it.

When Shadow comes up for discussion, some people have occasionally assumed that the self- and other-redemptive arcs in it are an outgrowth of what Jo describes as the open-yourself-up-and-get-over-it school of pop psych.  All I can say here is that there’s a certain amount of “write what you know” going on. During my professional practice I assisted or mediated in a number of such prolonged therapy sequences, and a surprising percentage of them were successful. (It irks me a little at this end of time that the new and admittedly often-effective antidepressive and psychotropic drugs are now routinely, maybe too routinely, considered the first line of action for the troubled patient, with one-to-one and group therapies now being casually and a little scornfully dismissed as “talking therapies”.  Sometimes words work at least as well as drugs; sometimes way better.)

Anyway, one of the above cases was my own. I can assure readers concerned about the possible philosophical or psychological underpinnings of the core character-business in Shadow that it’s no abstract plot construction, but a prose restatement-and-farewell to childhood issues in my own past life. Lots of writers work out personal stuff in prose, so I don’t think I have to spell out the details here: Shadow‘s readers will almost certainly figure it all out if they have the inclination. I’m sure there may be people for whom the resolution in question isn’t edgy, bloody or retributive enough. The only possible response to such folks is: Tough. Go get your own. Mine worked for me.

…Meanwhile, the scheduling of further stress-testing of this particular universe is still up in the air. All I can do at this end is promise to keep the Middle Kingdoms true to themselves, without rendering the readership unduly hyperglycemic. But now, as with Fire, one way or another I’ll be writing the book that’s in me to write, as well as I can at the time. And whether it’ll stand up to rereading thirty years later, I’m sure the readership will let me know.