Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 45

Free download of Magic U book one, today only!

If you've been meaning to try the Magic University books, the first book in the series is FREE today only at AllRomanceEbooks. Get your digital copy for $0.00!

Clicky: http://ow.ly/4rwU8

For those of you who are slash fans, the book starts out fairly het. Our hero is newly arrived at university and thinks he's straight. Of course, up until he got there, he thought he was non-magical, too… (shifty eyes)

All I can say is that the series doesn't stay heteronormative for long. (Among other things, in his sophomore year he decides to declare his major in sex magic, and has to prove his bisexuality in order to be deemed fit for the department. And you thought *your* university made you jump through a lot of hoops for your degree!)

Update on the Magic U anthology, which will be out soon!

I have received some absolutely fabulous stories! Love love love. Even some femslash, some more OCs, and even a Kyle/Alex! (Yet still no Bell/Kyle. Ah well.)

Here is the current table of contents, split into which books one should have read before reading the story of:

After book one:

Ignorance is Bliss by Cecilia Tan (Frost/Michael) — the story of how Frost and Candlin fell in love in the first place.

Summer Vacation by Frances Selkirk (Kyle/OC, Alex/OC) — Kyle and Alex spend the summer as beach bums.

The Taste of Cloves by D.K. Jernigan (OC/OC) — the clove orange at the Scipionis House New Year's party sparks an interesting night.

Chimera by Rian Darcy (Frost/Bell) — "Does that kid have eat me tattooed on his forehead or what?"

Diary of a Lost Scholar by Frances Selkirk (OC/OC) — Solving a mystery through magical library science and sex magic.

After book two:

Home for the Summer by Deborah Atwood (Ash/OC) — Ash goes back to Maine after his first year at Veritas, but his home town doesn't feel like home any longer.

Aunt Wendy's Ring by Lauren P. Burka (Glendon/OC) — Kyle's roommate makes a surprising connection with a Scip.

Iphis's Price by Elizabeth Hurst (Bell/Brandish) — The story of Frost's rescue from abusive circumstances and the sacrifices of Quilian Bell and Callendra Brandish.

Lakeside Encounter by Cecilia Tan (Kyle/OC) — Kyle's second summer away from Veritas, he learns just how few and far between magical folk are. And when they meet, sparks can fly.

The Stain of Memory by Cecilia Tan (Bell/Brandish) — What happened between Bell and Brandish immediately after everything went wrong in book two.

After book three:

Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves by Sarah Ellis (Lindy/OC) — While Lindy is losing her power, she travels to Collegium Sophia, the enclave of magical women at Smith College, to research her condition.

Empathy by Julie Cox (Kyle/Alex/OC) — The zombie apocalypse (and a threesome) come to Veritas!

Heaven Can Wait by BriAnne Searles (Ash/OC) — Ash has a not-so-secret admirer living in Camella 3 West.

What I'd Do for a Friend by Carline Ball (Alex/Kyle) — Alex is an enchanter, Kyle is a lightning rod. What happens when Alex can't finish a spell without Kyle's help?

I think that's all of them… I'm checking now that I haven't missed anyone!

It's OTW Time!

I've got a guest blog entry up at the Organization for Transformative Works website right now, about coming out of the fanfic closet. They're doing a fundraising drive right now (through March 29th), so please click and check it out.

To the guest blog itself: http://transformativeworks.org/otw-says-youre-not-alone

Musical coincidences & the Magic U soundtrack

I often listen to music while I write (and do other kinds of work). I feel it keeps my brain stimulated in some way that silence doesn't. In the olden days I used to put 6 CDs of varying genres into my CD changer and hit "random" and picking 6 CDs that went well together, yet weren't too similar to each other, was a kind of art form.

More recently I've gotten lazy and have been using XM Radio or Last.fm instead. (I tried Pandora but the ads killed me.) As I've gotten older, I've discovered I don't write as well to music with lyrics in English, so I mostly listen to instrumental, "new age," soundtracks, classical, and "world music."

The fun thing about XM Radio (mostly the "Spa" channel 72) and Last.fm is I discover new things I didn't know about. And sometimes they hit upon a song that fits a mood or scene perfectly.

When I was writing the tragic scene on the staircase in The Tower and the Tears (Magic U book 2), a heartbreaking song was playing, but I wasn't able to note down what it was. (The XM unit is on the first floor, my office is on the third floor, and I wasn't about to interrupt writing a crucial scene just to go down and find out what the song was.) It was such a searing, haunting song, though, that it's been playing in my head ever since.

Today I finally found out what it was! "Song of the Siren" by Jennifer Cutting's Ocean Orchestra. First off I thought, Siren? No way… since of course book 1 is The Siren and the Sword. Then I saw the way I had Googled it was to find a Youtube video… which turns out to have been filmed by a Harvard alum filmmaker at the Longfellow (Kyle's ancestor) historic site, which is just a few blocks from here, bordering the campus!

So anyway, here's the video and the song:

I just purchased the song for 99 cents from iTunes, too. Since what I often do now instead of filling up the CD changer, is make an iTunes library of soundtrack songs for different books & projects. (The library for Daron's Guitar Chronicles is drastically different from the Magic U one… not a single crossover.)

Some other songs that have made it into the top soundtrack songs for Magic U writing, there's one I think of as Kyle & Frost's theme. It's very quiet and contemplative, Patrick O'Hearn's "Our Temperable Host." O'Hearn himself uploaded it to Youtube with photos by a friend of his, so here it is:

I bought not just this song but one of O'Hearn's albums (funnily enough, a different album from the one that contains this song) that is in the soundtrack for me now. "Our Temperable Host" is from the album Glaciation, but I ended up buying Beautiful World instead.

Then there's the song that pretty much externalizes all the pain and angst and confusion inside Frost's head. I only re-discovered this recently. One of my favorite albums when I was a young, budding electronic music enthusiast in the 1980s (back when FM synthesis was new and the Roland DX-7 was all the rage) was Wendy Carlos's original Clockwork Orange soundtrack. I had heard variously over the years that the bits and pieces used on the soundtrack of the film were fragments of what she had intended as a larger work. At some point I bought a CD of her "Tales of Heaven and Hell" which was touted to be the complete and definitive version. The CD arrived from Amazon.com and somehow was promptly lost in my office for the next five years.

Well, I just found it last week, and put it into the CD player… and got goosebumps. "Clockwork Black" is a disturbing piece of music — it's probably the musical equivalent of a Hieronymous Bosch painting of hell. The parts of the original soundtrack that have survived into the finished piece also twist me right back to my college days when I was Frost's age.

Here's one of the original pieces:

I couldn't find an online place to link you to Clockwork Black, but imagine this done by a demon orchestra from hell, overlaid with the recurring sound of a woman sobbing uncontrollably (an aural motif in the song), and you'll have an idea what it's like in Frost's head. Nightmarish.

And how's this for another coincidence, Wendy Carlos was previously Walter Carlos. I had *forgotten* that part. (Aha, and I see on the CD case itself, a painting by Bosch. Maybe I really don't write the stuff. Maybe I just channel it.)

The final old thing I used to listen to a ton, but which I lost the CD of about ten years ago, is Peter Gabriel's Passion. But while writing some of the scenes in book four, I kept *hearing* it in my head. Just snatches of it. This is literally a CD I listened to so much when it first came out that I had to buy a second copy because the first one wore out. I know, CDs don't wear out. Except they do.

Then it went missing and I forgot about it until now. I decided to do the yuppie instant gratification thing and just buy it from iTunes to listen to instantly. Not sorry I did. I'd forgotten so much of it, but it comes right back. I am sure it resurfaced in my head because I was Kyle and Frost's age when it was burned into my brain.

Here's a song from it in case you don't remember it:

One more, more ambient:

So that's what's been going through my head as I write book 4 of Magic University, which still has no title. I think I just wrote the climactic, halfway point turning point scene last night, and part of me is saying no no no, it can't possibly be half over yet! There's still so much to do! So who knows, maybe it's a false alarm and there's still another 70,000 words to go really…. I just have to plow through and find out what's ahead.

Reminder: Magic U Anthology stories accepted until March 31!

Just a reminder, I'm still taking submissions for an anthology of stories set in the Magic University universe, to be published by Ravenous Romance. The deadline is March 31st.

Looking for erotic or romantic short stories, roughly 2500 to 7500 words, either involving the characters in the canon, or original characters but in the setting of Veritas, the magical university hidden inside Harvard.

Full details are posted here: http://ravenna-c-tan.livejournal.com/199051.html

Remember to send submissions to my fanfic address [ravenna_c_tan @ yahoo.com] and not any of my other addresses or its likely to get swallowed in spam.

Herb Dinner Rolls (with Guinness)

Tonight I Iron-Chef-ed it. it's St. Patrick's Day, so I bought some Guinness stout on the way home and used it as the secret ingredient in every course. I ended up cutting two courses from the plan, actually, since the freezer drum for the ice cream maker wasn't pre-frozen (so no Guinness ice cream) and corwin's trying to lose weight, so at the last minute I decided not to make the Guinness cheese fondue after all. But I decided to go ahead with the dinner rolls I was making to cube up for fondue dipping.

The rest of the meal included Guinness-glazed chuck roast (the glaze consisting of a Guinness reduction with maple syrup and balsamic vinegar), Guinness-braised cabbage, Guinness-glazed carrots (glaze #2 consisting of Guinness reduction, butter, brown sugar, and a dash of sweet soy), herb roasted potatoes, and roasted sweet potatoes.

For the dinner rolls I looked at a recipe on Cooks.com for "quick and easy dinner rolls" and decided to up the amount of yeast, get rid of the egg, cut the sugar to almost half, use olive oil instead of melted butter, and add herbs. And Guinness. It made 11 rolls in the large muffin tins. Here's the details:

Herb dinner rolls

3 teaspoons active dry yeast

1 cup lukewarm water

3 scant tablespoons sugar

1 tsp. salt

1/4 c. extra virgin olive oil

3 cups flour, sifted

Herbs — 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon each of rubbed sage, thyme or rosemary, dash of paprika

Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm water in the bottom of the mixing bowl.

Add sugar, salt, and oil. Sprinkle in the herbs, get them good and wet.

Add half the flour, and beat with a wooden spoon until smooth. Add rest of flour and beat again until dough balls up. If it's too dry, here's where the Guinness comes in! I added about a tablespoon. (A dash of water probably works, too.)

Spray muffin pans with spray canola and then fill half full with blobs of dough, let rise until double.

Bake at 400°F for 15 minutes, turning the pans halfway through.

Serve while hot and crusty!

Have some more kitten photos

I haven't posted kitten picspam in a while! In this set: Pu-Ehr gets revenge on Oolong for bombing his photo last time. Lots of toothy yawns. Etc.

Kittens Feb 24-Mar 3

The Introverted Writer and Other People's People

Watched Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lighting Thief with my mom and dad (whom I'm visiting this week). And it brought up a whole bunch of thoughts for me.

First off, on the subject of watching movies in the first place. I don't do it often. I go to see maybe 5 movies a year, typically on opening night as a social sort of thing (Harry Potter, Star Trek, etc) and once in a while because everyone has raved (Inception). But my parents are retired and they like movies. My dad has always loved movies and thinks the Turner Movie Channel is the most awesome thing ever. Well actually he finally just got a DVR, and THAT is now the most awesome thing ever. Since he knew I was coming to visit, he has been SAVING UP movies on it that he thinks I might like watching.

Also right now, I am in the middle of reading a PILE of books, as I'm on a couple of award juries right now. So I'm reading things like Katharine Beutner's ALCESTIS (Greek myth retold from a female point of view, and just one step to the literary left of Jacqueline Carey, good stuff) that I would not probably have gotten around to picking up in a bookstore.

But the thing is, although I do buy a fair number of books every year, the majority of them are nonfiction. I don't buy a lot of fiction. I've been telling myself for years it's because if I'm going to read a novel, I should read one in my slush pile instead of one for fun. For fun and enjoyment I actually read 5-6 published novels a year. About the same number as I take in movies, actually.

This may not be a coincidence. Sitting here with my dad, who has saved up movies I might like, it's becoming clear to me that I am not just "too busy" to read or to watch movies usually. (I also have no TV.) I make a real effort to stem my intake of fictional media. This effort used to be unconscious, but I'm becoming more and more conscious that I do it on purpose. The question is, why?



Well for one, there's the issue of unconscious plagiarism and influence, but that's not the main one for me, I think. There's the famous story about William Gibson walking out of Blade Runner because he didn't want it to taint what he was writing at the time. It is a concern of mine; no writer writes in a vacuum.

In fact, now that I think about it, I've been simultaneously interested and wanting to avoid the Percy Jackson "Lightning Thief" movie ever since seeing the trailer and thinking, hm, what if he's too much like Kyle? The protagonist of my Magic University books is a hero-type who discovers late in his teenhood that he has magical heritage. Also, there's a whole lot of lightning in Magic U.

Anyway, we sat down and watched the Lightning Thief movie. (I haven't read the books.) As it turns out, Percy and Kyle have less in common than I might have thought (though they're both cousins of Harry Potter, make no mistake), and no one is using lightning quite the way I do. Although I was highly amused that Poseidon comes right out and calls Zeus "impotent" in the opening scene of the movie, just because Zeus has lost his lightning bolt. No, not the slightest bit phallic or metaphorical for male power, is it? Hah. Yeah, okay, so there is a similarity there… I'm hardly the first one to use that metaphor. Heck, the ancient Greeks weren't even the first.

What I hadn't expected was that the story would use the American landscape in the Tim Powers vein. If Harry Potter is quintessentially British, this was classically American, canonically American ever since Tim Powers (and later Neil Gaiman) defined modern American fantasy. Being classically American, the story begins in New York, where so many immigrant tales begin, and ends with Hollywood as the entrance to Hell. These metaphors are not subtle and I don't think they're meant to be. On the way we have the lair of the Lotus Eaters as a casino in Vegas, and you find scary old Medusa… where? The suburbs of New Jersey. Yeah, go figure. (Also, what is up with the mystical secrets of Upstate New York? The summer camp for demigods reminded me a lot of the X-Men, no?)

Anyway, yeah, classic abandoned child issues, et cetera, it all plays out (in the film at least) as a fairly classic quest story in the Greek mythological mold. (Except with a happy ending, and no one goes mad or eats their children or anything like that, as tends to happen in the myths…) The film was fun. I enjoyed it. My dad enjoyed it. (What's funny is he thought he had Tivo'd the new Clash of the Titans, but I think he'd gotten this instead. I think he might have liked this even better, actually.)

But anyway, back to the issue of why I limit by fiction intake no matter what the medium, but especially books. I used to read dozens of books a year, and write less than one a year. Now? I write 250,000 to 350,000 words of fiction a year–exceeding the amount I take in. Why? Here's my theory:

All the "common wisdom" is that if you're going to write, you have to read. Read read read. But you know what? All the "common wisdom" in the world also says being extroverted is normal and being introverted is "anti-social." I don't buy into that anymore. I'm an introvert and although I have excellent social skills and can work a room like nobody's business, being with people is exhausting to me and makes me need to recharge ALONE. What I'm starting to think is that I'm a "fiction-consumer introvert" as well. Taking in a lot of outside stories is exhausting to me and just makes me need to spend more time with my own imaginary friends.

It does mean I feel like an outsider a lot. All my friends are talking about TV shows and books they've liked. I don't join new fandoms easily since I don't consume new things very fast. It's pretty much the same experience as being the introvert who doesn't like going to parties or hanging out at the mall like everyone else, so you miss out on what's going on. And people look at you funny when you say you haven't read this or that thing.

And there are a lot of books I would like to read, because I've met the writers and admire them and have heard wonderful things about their books. But sometimes I just can't. Sometimes it means I read part of a book standing in a bookstore, usually a chapter or two, just enough to confirm usually that a writer is as awesome as I had hoped (Confession time. I've done this with Catherynne Valente, N. K. Jemisin, Charles Stross… and many others I can't think of off the top of my head.) I always figure at some future point I'll read the whole books.

This is also true of books of writers I know I admire and know I would enjoy because I've read previous books of theirs. I'm a fan, too, no? Tim Powers' Last Call changed my whole conception of what was possible in American fantasy. I think there are at least five books of his sitting on my shelf unread, though, since then. I think I'm at least one book behind on Neil Gaiman, too. I'm seven or eight books behind on Laurell K. Hamilton at this point. I have a pile of unread Jacqueline Carey. I have unread Ellen Kushner on my shelf. The only two series I am actively waiting for the next book are Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books (buy them buy them buy them they are so very awesome) and Naomi Novik's Temeraire books. Aaaand actually the latest Temeraire is out, but only in hardcover, so that's my excuse why I'm waiting on that one.

So there you have it. I'm an introvert for fiction as well as real life. Other people's characters can drain me as much as real people can. So I limit my interaction with them, controlling my exposure carefully.

Which makes being on a fiction award jury a lot like… being at a big convention. When it's over, I'm going to sleep for a week.

And now that my parents have gone to bed, I'm going to spend some quality time with Kyle. Magic U book 4 awaits me.

Magic U Book 4 teaser!

I promised if 25 people tweeted about the upcoming Magic U book, which I'm still writing, I'd post a teaser chapter. They did!

If this is your first time reading a sample of Magic University… enjoy, but note there are serious SPOILERS for books 1-3 here! (If you'd prefer to read a sample of book 1 or 2, check out this previous post for those: http://blog.ceciliatan.com/?p=543)

And now, the teaser. Shortly before classes start again for his senior year, while he's living off campus in a nearby house, Kyle gets a visit from the Gladius house master.

Master Brandish had come by the house where they'd all been living for the summer two weeks ago. When the doorbell had rung, Kyle had ignored it. Alex habitually answered the door, as he was the one with the best knack for brushing off the visitors and kooks who came seeking Kyle. ("Jedi mind trick," is all he would say, with a shrug, when asked how he did it.)

Kyle knew that talk of the Burning Days was spreading like wildfire through the magical community. He was receiving letters now, not just from scholars, but from magical people all over, asking for his advice or his help on how to get through the coming cataclysm. Some had lost their Sight. Others were too weak to cast enchantments.

He didn't know what to tell them. I'm just a poet, he wanted to say. I can't save you. I'm not one of the Prophesied Pair, I'm just the messenger.

Because surely if he were one of the Pair, he'd know what to do by now? And if he were, he'd have another half, a lifelong mate, who would face every challenge with him.

He didn't have that. He had a collection of friends and lovers who supported him and made sure his bed was never empty if he didn't wish it to be. Toward the end of the summer Alex and Jeanie had broken up spectacularly, only to end up closer friends than before, but in the aftermath, Jeanie and Lindy had become a thing, and since then Lindy had been spending more time with Jeanie than with Kyle. He wasn't jealous. It was a beautiful thing, Lindy and Jeanie. What he had was good. What he didn't have was someone special. A soul mate.

But the Prophecy wasn't what Master Brandish had come there to talk about. Or was it? She took a seat in the front room, with a glass of lemonade that Marjory brought for them, and eyed the coffee table cluttered with magazines and books.

"Professor Hargreaves is taking a sabbatical," she said without preamble. "I've asked Professor Bengle on your behalf if he'll take over as your senior advisor , if you agree. You are of course free to ask someone else, but I happened to run into him just after Felicia gave me the bad news."

Kyle tried to absorb this, but his mind had not been on school or schoolwork for weeks. His advisor was gone? "On such short notice? When did she tell you?"

"Yesterday. She's still having some… issues after what she went through last year. I've also taken the liberty to check your registrations for next semester, since you will have a hole in your schedule where her seminar on poetic deities would have been."

"Oh, right, The Goddess in Words or whatever…" He couldn't quite remember what the title of the class had been. "I'll need another poetry course to replace it with, I guess?"

She nodded. "Professor Bengle is offering a magical literature survey that might interest you instead? Of English and Anglo-Saxon poetic works on the Faerie Queen."

"Like Spenser?"

He was surprised by her wry snort. "Spenser was far too wrapped up in mundane concerns."

"Like Shakespeare wasn't?" Kyle argued.

"The Fairie Queen is largely a mundane political treatise and has very limited magical value," she said. "Though who knows what he might have wrought had he lived to complete it…" She shook her head suddenly, not in disagreement, but as if shaking herself of a dream. "How do you do it, Kyle? I didn't come here to argue with you."

"You also didn't come here just to change my class schedule," he said, rotating the cold glass in his fingers. If that was all it was, she could have called on the phone.

"No," she agreed, and took a sip. "I came here to ask you to move back into Gladius House."

Kyle looked at her in surprise. "Why? I mean, does it matter that I kind of squatted over at Camella House last year? I was under the impression that no one minded."

Her answer was an examining look that left him feeling like he was missing something. He suppressed the urge to fidget and took a sip of lemonade instead.

"I'm trying to convince Frost to come back, too," she said, calm and quiet.

Kyle took a more hurried gulp then.

"I thought you might want to know."

He nodded.

"I've offered him the room in the tower, if having a roommate is too… problematic for him," she said. "He doesn't want anyone to know about his condition and I cannot fault him for that, even if I am insisting he rejoin house life."

"Will he just hide at night?" Kyle blurted. Surely their housemates couldn't care less if Frost was a girl half the time. Would they? Was that any weirder than having a classmate who was part-siren?

"I've given him leave to explore some options for obscuring his condition magically," she said.

Kyle tried to imagine what it would be like, living under the same roof as Frost again. "You're sure you want us both to move back in? He seriously tried to kill me last year."

"Teleporting you into Persy Cavendish's breakfast was hardly a lethal attempt," she said, trying to maintain a deadpan look but a smile reached her eyes nonetheless. "And yes. Your mother hen wants all her chicks in the nest."

"Why do I feel more like our general wants all her soldiers in the barracks?"

Now she did smile. "Kyle. This is going to be a very important year."

"And you don't want me frittering it away with a bunch of slackers?"

She narrowed her eyes at him, her mouth growing tight as she chewed over her next words before speaking. "I do not want you to miss any opportunities you may have to…" There she trailed off for a moment, as if there were no words careful enough.

By the time she finished the sentence, with some vague words about the threads of his future life, though, Kyle had already filled in the blank with a hundred encouraging words about Frost. "If Frost will be there, so will I," he said.

She nodded as if she expected nothing less.

"Does this mean you'll help me… um, make up with him?" Kyle dared to ask, wincing at his own choice of words.

Master Brandish set her glass down on the floor beside the chair. "You are on your own there, Kyle. Mr. Frost is not interested in hearing my advice on matters of the heart. The only thing he would welcome from me is news that we can fix his broken enchantment."

"I've been wondering about that," Kyle said. "Is there only one way to change a person's gender? I mean, magically. Actually, I've been wondering about that, too. What would happen if he took hormones? You know, underwent mundane gender reassignment treatments while female?"

Master Brandish stared for a moment. "That is a very good question. I do not know. But to answer your first question, yes, there are some other ways of changing gender, though none so complete and permanent as the method previously used."

"Except that it wasn't permanent."

"No one counted on a force as disruptive as you, Kyle." She said it kindly, with a bit of a smile. "Frost cannot be replaced like the broken Founding Stone was. We have looked into a few other options but it is too risky that we might merely reverse him into being male at night and female during the day. Or, in his opinion, make things even worse by undoing things completely and leaving him in female form irrevocably."

"Irrevocably? You mean the same switch you pulled before can't be repeated."

"You have it exactly," she said. "At any rate, I believe that unless he's going to spend the rest of his life as a celibate hermit, he needs to take this final chance to establish himself with his peer group."

"You think he's stuck the way he is?"

Brandish shrugged. "One's last year before graduation is often one's last chance to experiment with who one will become as an adult."

"That's not what I mean," Kyle said, though when he thought about it, he could see Brandish's point. "If he's going to be half and half, though, he'd better get used to it, I suppose? You know he pretty much told me he thinks 'celibate hermit' is his destiny."

"Given his history, I would call that wishful thinking on his part," Brandish said. She shook her head. "Especially given how needy he is. Celibacy only drives him to idiocy. He's a bit like an anorexic, except his problems are with sex rather than eating. It's very difficult to encourage him to a 'healthy diet.' I'll be frank, Kyle. I think you should be part of his regular diet, but barring that, I'd prefer it was you who were there when he finally binges."

Kyle had forgotten the lemonade in his hand, his throat going dry. "Is that what it is? When he hates me and drives me away, it's like he's… purging?"

Brandish favored him with a small nod. "You know I would not normally discuss anything like this with a student about another student. I'm violating his confidence even by speculating about it to you. So I need an oath from you, Kyle."

"Oath?"

"A promise."

"Not to tell him we spoke about him?"

"No. Promise on your manhood itself that you will have his unambiguous consent if you have sex with him in the future."

Kyle wasn't sure when he stood up, but he found himself staring in surprise down at her, his mouth open but no words coming out.

"You understand, of course, why I make this demand?" She seemed unperturbed by his sudden dismay.

"I would never force him! You… you can't think that I would!"

"Promise me."

"Am I supposed to wait for him to come to me?"

"I didn't say that."

"But if I make a move on him, would you see it as coercion? How am I supposed to make this promise?"

"If you 'make a move on him,' he's likely to rebuff you anyway, is he not?"

"I thought you said he needs me?"

"Yes, the way an anorexic needs a hamburger. Dreams about you, fantasizes about you, and then hates himself for giving in."

"How am I supposed to get around that?"

Brandish sighed. "The only cure for hate ever discovered is love, Kyle. If you love him, you'll find a way."

Call for submissions: Magic University anthology

Some of you may know I've been working on an anthology of short stories set in the universe of my Magic University books. Many of my favorite writers I know through fanfic have contributed stories to it, but my editor wants me to try to get at least two more stories in before Ravenous Romance publishes it.

So I'm putting out an open call for more contributions. I'm looking for erotic short stories set at Veritas or in the magical world of the books, length from 2500 to 7500 words. You can use my characters or your own, and stories do not have to be "canon compliant." (If you want to pair or ship characters who don't get together in the actual canon, that's fine.)

Tales from Magic University will be published in ebook form by Ravenous Romance just like one of their regular short story anthologies, which pay $10 up front as an advance against a share of the royalties, split among all the contributors. They pay quarterly.

The deadline for new contributions is March 31st. If you're intrigued, please read on for more details!

All submissions should be sent to my fanfic address [ravenna_c_tan @ yahoo.com] either as attachments or in the body of the email. Please include your real name, pseudonym (if you have one), mailing address (so they can send you a contract and a check), and your phone number (in case I have a quick question while editing the story).

If you're participating in the project, here are some guidelines you should know:

1. You get to keep the rights to any original character you create or use. If you want to write your own original fiction later with that character, you will be welcome to. However be aware that your character could show up in a Magic U book, too.

2. I'm supportive of fanfic in my universe. The publisher is aware that what this anthology will be is, essentially, sanctioned fanfic. Once the ebook is released, you will have the right to post your story (if you want) in your Livejournal and in fanfic archives. In fact, I will be encouraging folks to do so to help build more interest in Magic University!

3. If you want to give it a try but haven't read the books yet, email me and I'll send you a review copy PDF of book one and send you the notes I've compiled for other writers. There's also a start at an online reference to the world here: http://blog.ceciliatan.com/?page_id=318 The world is Harry-Potter-esque, but with some very important differences.

4. As I mentioned before, you don't have to stick with the canon pairings. I have suggestions for some "missing scenes" and fun set-ups to get characters together if you are interested…! For example, I probably won't be putting Kyle and his best friend Alex together in the actual books, but you know, sometimes an enchanter really needs a lightning rod…

As for who else is in the book, here are the stories already in the hopper:

Chimera by Rian Darcy (Frost/Bell)

Diary of a Lost Scholar by Frances Selkirk (original characters)

Quenching the Fire by leela_cat (Brandish/Bell)

Aunt Wendy's Ring by Lauren P. Burka (Glendon/OC)

Place Where I Belong by Deb Atwood (Ash/OC)

Ignorance is Bliss by Cecilia Tan (Frost/Michael Candlin)

What I Did on my Summer Vacation by Frances Selkirk (Kyle/OC, Alex/OC, with a hint of Kyle/Alex)

Lakeside Encounter by Cecilia Tan (Kyle/OC)

The Stain of Memory by Cecilia Tan (Brandish/Bell)

I would love to have some femslash in the book. I would love to see someone tackle a Dean Bell/Kyle scenario. But you're also welcome to come up with new ways to play in the sandbox, too, just check with me about whether they'll fit and how.

Remember: March 31st deadline!

P.S. yes, it's OK to forward a link to this message to writers you know! :-)