JD 2455550.52 / December 20th, 2010: five days till Christmas, and the aliens are coming!
It’s the day before the Winter Solstice. The biggest pre-Christmas blizzard seen for decades is heading straight for the New York metropolitan area. But in one small corner of the Town of Hempstead, everyone’s attention is on other business. That’s because there’s a party tonight at Juan and Marina Rodriguez’s house… and the guest of honor is a being from three hundred lightyears away who looks a whole lot like a Christmas tree.
The motive force behind the festivities is the redoubtable Carmela Rodriguez, intent on fulfilling one of the great wishes of the wizard known as Filif — specifically, to finally get him into a full set of Christmas decorations. The two-day party that ensues (with an epic sleepover in the middle) brings together a cast of old and new friends to eat, drink, exchange presents… and deal with a local holiday-season problem in a very wizardly way.
This 30,000+ word novelette is a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe and takes place between the events of A Wizard of Mars and the forthcoming Games Wizards Play.
Purchase it from the DRM-free, in all the major ebook formats, or from Amazon.com in Kindle format.
Please note: How Lovely Are Thy Branches is also included in the compendium volume Interim Errantry.
Also available: The How Lovely Are Thy Branches Advent Calendar — 25 days of extra dialogue / outtakes from the work. Download the ebook or PDF formats free from our cloud storage at Box.com:
Advent Calendar generic .epub | Advent Calendar Kindle-friendly .mobi | Advent Calendar .PDF
You might also be interested in…
The New Millennium Editions of So You Want to Be a Wizard, Deep Wizardry, High Wizardry, A Wizard Abroad, The Wizard’s Dilemma, A Wizard Alone, Wizard’s Holiday, Wizards at War and A Wizard of Mars have been revised and edited for their 21st-century readership.
All nine volumes feature new material which does not appear in the original editions, and continue the new 2008-based timeline established in the New Millennium Edition of SYWTBAW.
Box sets come at a significant discount from the individual-volume purchase price. All the books are DRM-free, and the box sets come in reader-tailored formats for all the major e-readers, as well as generic .epub and .mobi formats. (Yes, the NMEs can be loaded into your Kindle or Nook: we have versions tailored for the most popular Amazon and B&N readers, and are adding more.)
The Young Wizards New Millennium Editions are available exclusively from Ebooks Direct.
For more information about the rationale and goals underlying the NME updates, please see this 2012 posting at DD’s weblog “Out of Ambit”.
