I felt pretty comfortable with my standard look, but I never contemplated my typical dark jeans and t-shirt combo and thought ”Damn, I look good today.” It wasn’t even really a look to me. It was just how I dressed… part of my image of myself, but not part of my self-image, if that makes any sense.

When I got all dressed up, I felt like someone had stuffed me into a costume… which really is a pretty good description of most occasions that have involved me being all dressed up, come to think about it. I’d hated being put into dresses for school pictures and holidays and things growing up. The grown-up equivalent of that which I sometimes engaged in with Amaranth or Steff was more fun, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel ridiculous the whole time.

But this night, I wasn’t all dressed up… just a little. I still looked and felt like myself, just without some of what Steff had once described as my “grubby charm”. There apparently was a middle ground between fifty-copper t-shirts and clothing that had more moving parts than I did. I probably wouldn’t throw out the Walled Market clothes any time soon, if only because I would go through my nicer things way too quickly if I wore them all the time… but it was nice to have some things that I’d feel bad about ruining.

I had the thought that I could try to wear my better clothes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I had my design class… it was full of the sorts of girls that made me feel terminally inadequate, and maybe I’d have an easier time impressing Professor Stone if I looked my best. It was kind of weird to find myself thinking along these lines… the idea of trying to impress someone with my looks seemed really shallow to me, and more than a little ridiculous. But the goal wouldn’t actually be to impress him with my appearance so much as to impress him in general, and a teacher who was focused on the aesthetic appeal of things would probably take me more seriously if I paid more attention to my own.

My thoughts about clothing were interrupted by a sudden pinching sensation in my forearm, which probably stemmed from the fact that I’d just been pinched by Cetea, a gorgon who’d had the bad luck of being in the room beneath mine last year.

“Sorry,” I said automatically, as I realized I’d stopped there right in front of the door. “Excuse me.”

“Oh, you weren’t in my way,” she said. She sounded embarrassed, though her face was really hard for me to read. The snakes that wreathed her head seemed confused, or maybe they always all looked like they were trying to go off in different directions. “I was heading for the stairs when I saw you staring at your reflection, and it kind of freaked me out. I was just making sure you were… okay.”

“Um, thanks?” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, and she scurried away towards the stairs.

I decided to wander over to the pent, even though it was still early for the dance and I didn’t expect a lot of people to be there. Actually, that was why I wanted to show up early. After spending the whole summer on campus and then moving into my dorm a week ahead of the crowd, I’d sort of generalized the principle that the key to feeling like I belonged somewhere was to be there first. There was something inherently attractive about the idea of slinking in late when it’s already dark and everybody’s already distracted doing their own things, but that just made me feel like everyone else was part of a crowd I was intruding upon.

Also, it seemed like a fair bet that Nicki would also show up early, since she said she knew one of the CJs.

I was a little worried about spotting her, because when I’d last seen her she’d had shimmering orange-colored hair. That was pretty much the extent of my mental impression of her, visually. I hadn’t noticed her in the previous class, and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to pick her out of a crowd without it. As it happened, she’d kept it orange but I still almost looked right past her when I saw her hanging out by the crystal arrays because she was wearing it completely different. It looked like what she’d described to me, all flipped over one eye. It looked cool, albeit slightly impractical. I wondered if she could see out of the covered eye… with glamour, the hair could be a lot less of a solid opaque mass than it appeared.

She could see well enough to spot me right at the moment that I recognized her. She waved and came fast-walking toward me, in a way that made it look like she was trying hard not to run.

“You came!” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Alone?”

“Sort of,” I said. “We’re all like meeting here, but we sort of left it kind of loose.”

“Oh, I get you,” she said, in a way that suggested she thought that this was the height of coolness, though it goes without saying that it really wasn’t. “You got here pretty early.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t really have anything else to do. I like your hair… it looks like you pulled off the flip thing you were trying for.”

“Oh, yeah, I was actually trying that for the dance,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I’d get it right on the first try, though, and I knew there was a chance I’d run out of juice even if I was doing everything right, so I made it a multi-day thing. That’s the thing about glamour. It can take as much energy as anything else when you’re setting it up, but once you get it in place, it’s pretty easy to maintain. I mean, when I cast it on myself. I’d have to stay really close to someone else to keep their hair glammed up for three days. But it’s pretty much second nature, and it doesn’t drain me hardly at all.”

“You maintain it in your sleep?” I asked, seriously impressed. It was possible to keep a spell repeating in a way that it became second nature, and some people could supposedly literally do it in their sleep, but it was easier and more common to put spells into a magic item if they needed to be running twenty-four hours a day.

“Not all by myself,” she said. “They make these sleeping caps that soak up ambient mana… you just have to do a little ‘hook’ thing between the glamour and the cap and it takes care of it.”

“How much power do they actually hold?” I asked, a little surprised. A porous powerstone that was basically empty would have a little power trickling into it from the background magic, but it was hard to imagine keeping an enchantment running on that. Whatever the caps Nicki was talking about were made of, it would have to be really efficient at attracting and using energy.

“Not much,” she said. “But again, glamour is low maintenance magic. If I used the same cap a bunch of nights in a row I’d deplete it, but I have a couple extras… they were a required course material for one of my classes last year, and at the end of the semester I bought some off my classmates. Not to be all ‘all non-humans know each other’ or anything, but do you know Mariel? I got the idea from her. The company that sells them won’t buy them back, so we didn’t have to offer a ton and between the two of us we got half the class.”

“Yeah, I know Mariel,” I said. “It’s good to know she has some decent business sense. She was pretty into the idea of being a hair stylist, the last that I knew.”

“Yeah, she can be a little flighty, but she’s actually pretty canny when she’s not… um…”

“Hanging around with Puddy?” I said.

They’d attached themselves to each other at the start of the previous school year, and though my former roommate was not the sort of person to make a commitment to anyone else, they’d been together more often than not, to Mariel’s obvious detriment. When Puddy wasn’t violent, she was controlling, and when she wasn’t controlling… well, she was still kind of an asshole.

I’d seen a few small signs throughout the last school year that Puddy had matured a little and taken steps to get her drinking under control, but after a certain point I’d stopped paying attention to signs because I’d stopped paying attention to her. Well, at several points. Ignoring Puddy had been an ongoing project for some time.

“Yeah, that,” Nicki said. “I know Puddy’s your ex…”

“She’s my ex-roommate,” I said. “Becasue that’s all she ever was, really.”

“Okay,” Nicki said. “I didn’t want to start badmouthing her in front of you, but yeah, she’s… not… good.”

I smiled and kind of half-giggled a little. The fact that Nicki considered that badmouthing… it was really kind of cute. The way she’d sort of glommed onto me by reputation suggested that she listened to gossip, but I was having a hard time picturing her spreading it.

“On the subject of hair styles and flight,” Nicki said, with an air of changing the subject, “did you know that the hair is the heaviest part of a sylph’s body? The rest of them weighs like nothing.”

“Yeah, I’d noticed that,” I said. “When she got her hair cut short, she seemed to get airborne without really thinking about it.”

“I actually asked her about it, after she cut her hair,” Nicki said. “I mean, about why she’d had it long in the first place if she could fly with it short and not when it was long. And it was long when she got here, so I know it’s something she did for Puddy, though I also know that Puddy liked it long… but she seemed kind of surprised at the idea that it would be even, you know, a consideration. Like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can fly now,’ like it’s not a big deal?”

“I guess it’s probably not, for her,” I said.

“You’d know better than me.”

“Probably not,” I said. “It sounds like you got to know her a lot better in your shared classes than I did living in the same dorm…the floors in Harlowe are actually pretty small, especially with the way they’re split down the middle, so it’s actually a pretty good bet that anyone who’s housed as the same gender and from the same year will recognize each other and know of each other, but we don’t all hang out together.”

“’Housed as the same gender’,” she said. “That’s an interesting way to put it. I like it.”

“Well, the school says everyone’s male or female,” I said. “And their ideas about which one a given person is don’t necessarily reflect their identity. I know of at least two trans students on campus, and some of the people who get housed as boys in Harlowe don’t actually have a sex… I don’t know what everybody’s situation is, but I know Steff only stays on the boys’ side for convenience, both in the sense that it lets her be with her boyfriend and in the sense that it would be a hassle to fight it.”

“See, this is one of the things that’s cool about you,” she said. “You’re all up on stuff like that.”

“I’m actually not,” I said. “I mean, when I came here I thought I was all progressive, and I was compared to the woman who ‘d been raising me for the past nine years and the town she lived in, but… well, that wasn’t exactly a hard standard to beat, and I swallowed a lot of pretty regressive ideas during those nine years. I’ve had to un-learn a lot of things.”

“Your grandmother… okay, I gather that you don’t get along, but that’s got to be kind of awesome,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Having a grandmother who was a hero,” she said. “I mean, an adventure-having, world-saving, dragon-slaying hero.”

“She fought a dragon,” I said. “I don’t know if she ever slayed one, but the one she’s famous for dueling is still alive and scorching. And if she ever saved the world, I didn’t hear about it.”

“Well, I didn’t either, specifically, but I just figured… an epic-level paladin fighting in the Chaos Wars…”

“I don’t think ‘epic’ is the word,” I said. “I mean, she kept her career hidden from me, but I think I would have noticed if there were epics being written about her.”

“Okay, but technically, fighting a greater red dragon qualifies her,” Nicki said. “I mean, right? She did that.”

“Qualifies her according to who?”

“That’s one of the criteria the international delvers association uses,” Nicki said. “If you defeat an epic-level threat, you’re an epic-level adventurer. It makes sense to me.”

“Okay, but it was a duel,” I said. “There would have been rules and restrictions, which probably benefited her. It’s not the same as defeating a dragon in actual combat.”

“If she made a red dragon abide by the rules, then she’s got to be kind of epic. I mean, a paladin’s challenge is supposed to have some kind of real force behind it, but you can imagine the kind of willpower she’d need to go head-to-head with a dragon like that?”

I couldn’t, but I didn’t have to imagine what it felt like going head-to-head against a greater dragon without the willpower to do so.

“Can we talk about something else?” I said, trying not to sound testy. I didn’t want to drive Nicki away or make the rest of the conversation awkward when it had actually been going kind of well.

“Okay,” she said. “Sorry. Like I said, I knew you didn’t get along… I didn’t know it would be such a sore subject.”

“Well, it’s not so much that she’ a sore subject… though I don’t care for her that much. To you she’s an ‘epic’ paladin,” I said. “To me, she’s… she was just my grandmother, an old lady I saw a couple of times a year at most. Sometimes she was a little stern, which at the time seemed kind of scary or even mean, but… she was my grandmother. I knew what that was supposed to mean from books and TV shows, and the cookies and presents and things always seemed, you know, grandmotherly. Then my mom’s dead and suddenly my life is all her, all the time. She’s the one who told me I was a half-demon, and what that meant… and you can imagine what sort of things it meant according to ‘Brimstone’ Blaise.”

Nicki had tilted her head slightly, and she was looking at me out of her uncovered eye in a really quizzical way.

“Or maybe you can’t imagine it,” I said.

“It’s not… it’s just, I guess I had a picture of you in my head, from hearing about you and seeing you around campus,” she said.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said, and I meant it, though I was pretty sure it didn’t come out that way.

“It’s not exactly disappointing,” she said. “More like… enlightening. I’m not saying I don’t like what I see. Just that I’m seeing more than I expected. If that makes sense.”

“Well, you have seen me naked,” I said. “How much more could there be to see?”

“A lot, really,” she said. “You have some depths in you.”

I could just pretend that nothing important happened in the morning class or at lunch, but the chapter where the mistake happens begins with Mackenzie having a little rant about her (wrong) class order and also involves a conversation about figuring out the dance thing by lunchtime.

At first I thought it would be simplest to make the new class order canonical by explaining that Bryony Swain got the short end of the stick again and had her class switched, but trying to shoehorn notice of that in backwards just created more problems.

So, what I’ve done instead is to take the events that needed to have happened in the morning and noon edited them into chapter 34, while taking the end of chapter 34 (the beginning of Professor Swain’s class) and editing it into Chapter 35. To folks who haven’t started reading this yet or aren’t reading this chapter by chapter and haven’t gotten up to chapter 34 yet, they won’t notice anything.

Those of you who are reading along in “real time” are going to have two options here. If you just want to read the new stuff, I’m posting it below. There’s 3,000+ words of it, so it’s definitely a whole update’s worth. Otherwise you can jump back and read the “corrected” Chapter 34. There’s nothing new to read in Chapter 35 except a single short paragraph at the beginning, it’s just some of the old chapter 34 plus what was already there. This chapter/page is just a placeholder and will be removed in the next couple of days.

This may not be the most elegant solution, but it should be seemless to people going through the archive later, and this is (I believe) only the second time I’ve botched the order like this. Just one of the hazards of writing as a public performance.

Anyway, here’s the new events. This takes place after (a slightly modified telling of) Mackenzie awakening in the morning, and before she goes to the local hazards class.

“I’m sure you will be happy to know that everyone who turned their assignment in on time has received at least a C,” Acantha announced at the start of spellbinding class. “Those among you who earned Bs and As may feel suitably proud. The two people who failed to turn a wand in to me by the stated deadline of three in the afternoon yesterday had their grades lowered one full letter level. You may all come forward to claim your wand and your grade by matching your ticket to the attached tag… hand the ticket to me and I will match it to your grade and record it after class. Make certain your name is written clearly and legibly on the ticket.”

The class at large didn’t look or sound excited at the prospect of mostly Cs. There was no mass rush to find out who’d scored higher. Despite the work I’d put into my binding I felt a little trepidation as I approached the desk where the tagged wands were laid out neatly in rows. This early in the semester it was hard to have a real feel for what a professor was looking for and grading on. One person’s “going the extra mile” was another person’s “what are you, some kind of smart ass?”

The dismayed noises and indignant cries that came from some of the first few students who ventured forward made me even more conflicted. It was easy to dread one’s grade in the midst of evidence that the teacher was a harsh grader… but on the other hand, maybe the operative word there should be “strict” and maybe not everyone had even tried to follow her guidelines. She’d made it clear that some people had done better than a C.

It was only the first assignment, I decided. If I’d done well on it than I had nothing to fear, and if I hadn’t then maybe I could learn what to do for next time. I went forward to claim my wand, which was easy enough to find. There was nothing particularly distinctive about it that I could point out in contrast to any of the other homemade ones that were just twigs stripped of park and shaped a little, but it was mine.

I put my claim ticket down on the desk, grabbed it, and retreated to my table before I dared to look at the note attached to it.

It read:

An entertaining variation. I am uncertain if you fulfilled the letter or the spirit of the assignment, but either way I resolve the question you have hit all marks on one or the other. While the point of the assignment in no way depends on learning and mastering the particular spell that I outlined, in order to prevent the taking of undue shortucts I will reserve the right to demand you demonstrate the understanding of any spell you substitute for in the future if I am not certain you are capable of it. You have more than adequately demonstrated your grasp of the basics of the binding techniques at the core of the exercise.

My heart stuck in my throat a little bit. There was praise there, but it wasn’t unmitigated praise. More than adequate… if a C was adequate, that sounded like a B.

But below that was the grade: 102. Even with her rather exact and precise handwriting, I had to squint to make sure that third digit wasn’t another 0. There was a break down below that showing how I’d earned the points above average, with +2 listed as simply being “extra credit”.

Acantha’s voice whispered in my ear.

“I gave you two extra points for the extra steps you took and for the fact that you finished it in class, but please do not learn the wrong lesson from this and rush everything again,” she said. “It was bold of you to do so when you had time you could have used to ask me how I would receive your attempt. This time you’re being rewarded for boldness. If you want to impress me further, you must next show prudence.”

I nodded. I appreciated the personal explanation about my grade, especially as it came as she was being swamped by people who were demanding an explanation for theirs.

“I don’t understand what I did wrong,” one student said.

“Nothing,” she said. “You will note that I took off no points.”

“But…”

“You put forth an average effort and you have received average marks,” she said.

“This is bullshit!” another student said.

“I explained my grading scale in advance,” Acantha said, “and I set a clear deadline based on the amount of work it would take me to evaluate each student’s efforts individually, and I was flexible enough to accept several assignments turned in after that deadline.”

“Did anyone get an A?”

“I have said as much on that subject as I am able to,” Acantha said. “Other people’s grades are other people’s business. If you are dissatisfied with yours I will be happy to explain in greater detail how I arrived at that figure or how you may earn a higher one in the future immediately following class or during my office hours.”

“I’d like to discuss my grade now,” the guy who’d questioned her credentials on the first day said.

“If you’d like to thank me for taking the time to grade the wand you rolled through my slot at some time after I left my office at four in the morning, the time to do so is…”

“I want to talk about it now,” he said again.

“Yes, well, you do not set the curriculum,” she said. “It would not be fair to the rest of the class to spend their time discussing your grade, and it would not be fair of you to expect me to drop everything to grade your late homework again in the future.”

“It’s only your job.”

“This isn’t my job, it’s a favor to a friend,” she said. “What is your name?”

I halfway expected him to say “La Belle”, but he said, “Roberts. Gareth Roberts.” He said it with a self-assured smirk, like it was supposed to mean something to her.

“Mr. Roberts, your choices number two: you may sit down and hear the lesson I’ve prepared, or you may remove yourself from the class,” she said. “There is no middle ground between those two options… and if you’re about to ask me if I know who you are, I’m afraid I will have no choice but to embarrass both of us by admitting that I don’t.”

“You’ll be hearing about this,” he said as he re-took his seat.

“Just make certain it’s during my posted office hours and we won’t have a problem,” she said, and she began a more in-depth explanation of the spell-chaining that had been at the heart of the exercise with the wands.

It was a little harder to follow than it might have been… she was clearly rattled by having to defend her grading and her authority, and had defaulted back to reciting whole columns of text in a breathless exhalation.

I wondered if it would make a difference to her if she knew that some of us appreciated her efforts, or if she knew someone among the students would have her back. The problem was that I didn’t know how to let her know that I did… or even how to have her back, once you really got down to it. It would take something like a do-or-die moment for me to stand up to a Gareth Roberts if his attention were focused on me, and I just wasn’t equipped to walk up to Acantha with a friendly smile and a greeting.

Maybe the most I could do was not be difficult and keep trying to impress her. Thinking about it just made me feel even more awkward and impotent.

“We will begin our next assignment Monday,” Acantha said at the end of the class. “I will go over the grading scale in more detail then, with specific examples. If anyone wishes to redo the first assignment and turn it in again, I will average their grades together if the second result is higher, but you cannot expect this courtesy to be extended in the future.”

I thought she was being more generous than she needed to be… even if she wasn’t great at sounding generous… but I also thought it wouldn’t get her a lot of slack from the students who weren’t happy with her way of doing things. I had to admit that I preferred teachers who started from the standpoint of an A being normal and took points off instead of keeping with the idea that C really does mean average, but that was just because it was the approach that was easier for us, not because it was necessarily right.

“So, there’s this dance tomorrow night,” Ian said to me at lunch, just after I’d taken a bite of chicken that suddenly swelled up in my mouth and tasted like nothing. It was just the four of us—him, me, Amaranth, and Steff—at the moment, which I had thought would be perfect for talking about the dance, if he hadn’t had the idea before I was ready to do so. “I was thinking it would sort of be like our anniversary. I mean, our first date wasn’t exactly my finest moment, but I think it’s worth recognizing how far we’ve come, you know?”

I forcibly swallowed the lump of food in my mouth, my gaze slipping sideways to Amaranth. She’d brought up the point that Ian or Steff might make their own plans for the weekend, but the whole time that we’d been talking about the subject, it had never occurred to me that those plans might very well have involved me or the dance.

“Oh, well, if you guys already have plans…” Ian said.

“I don’t know if ‘plans’ are the right word,” Amaranth said, in an impressively neutral voice. “The subject of the dance has come up, but I don’t know if anything definite has been decided.”

“Oh?” Ian said. He looked at me. “Do you think you’ll go, then?”

“I actually got asked by someone else,” I said. “I mean, asked if I would be there. It’s not like a date, and I don’t know if I’d want it to be. My thought was that if I was there with someone else, there might be less awkwardness.”

“Oh, yeah,” Steff said. “The more awkward people get together in one place, the less awkwardness there is. I don’t know how things could get less awkward than that.”

“Well, there’s a thought,” Ian said. “Who says you have to go with just one of us?”

“Unless it’s like that,” Steff said.

“We talked about that,” I said. “And I thought about it. But I really wasn’t sure how the dynamics of a multi-person date would work out.”

“Just as a point of interest, most dates are multi-person,” Steff said. “Unless they’re surrounded by quotation marks and involve a box of tissues and a small jar of oil of slipperiness.”

“Well, okay,” Ian said. “Let’s look at it a different way. Why do you need to go with any of us?”

“I can just say anything right now and nobody would notice,” Steff said.

“We’re all very impressed with your cleverness, sweetie,” Amaranth said.

“Because I don’t want to go alone,” I said to Ian. “And leaving everyone at home if I can’t figure out who to go with doesn’t really seem like the way to avoid hurt feelings and resentments.”

“I’m not saying that anyone stays home, unless they want to,” Ian said. “People go, they don’t go… why does it have to be a matter of ‘going with’ each other, explicitly? We’re all adult-ish… and in theory, being in this relationship… these relationships… whatever… it doesn’t work if we’re trying to stake out territory like a bunch of high schoolers.”

“Says the nineteen-year-old,” Steff said.

“Hey, you’ve got to grow up sometime,” Ian said. “I’m just saying, it seems a little middle school to worry about who’s going with who. I mean, we know who’s involved with who. If some of us show up at the dance, why does it have to be any different from when we all show up at lunch?”

“I think a dance is a little more special than a meal,” I said.

“Okay, it happens less often,” Ian said. “But we’re talking Generic It’s The First Week Of The New School Year Dance sponsored by Campus Something Or Other. It’s not that much of an occasion.”

“You said it was like our anniversary,” I said.

“Not an anniversary-anniversary,” Ian said. “More like a milestone. Anyway, I’m not so much interested in reliving any memories as replacing them with newer and better ones.”

“Well, I think Amaranth and I are definitely going,” I said. “So I guess I’ll look forward to seeing you there.”

“How about you, Steff?” Amaranth said.

“I might drop in,” Steff said. “Just to get a look at the new crazy.”

“The what?” I said.

“I mean the next perfectly well-adjusted individual to take a healthy interest in you,” she said.

“Have I ever mentioned how much your support means to me?” I said.

“I love you, too,” she said.

Two and Dee arrived at the table shortly after that.

“Our apologies for being late but we had an issue arise with our room,” Dee said. “I believe somebody entered it without our knowledge or permission, but it is difficult to excite any interest in this transgression on the part of our resident adviser or the campus guard.”

“Also, a card came for you but it ended up in our mail,” Two said to me after exchanging greetings with everyone. “I was going to turn it in at the counter but Dee slid it under your door.”

“What kind of card?” I asked.

“An appointment card, but I didn’t read it because it wasn’t addressed to me,” she said.

“An appointment card?” I said. “Was it from the healing center?”

“I didn’t read it because it wasn’t addressed to me,” Two repeated.

“It was from Professor Elizabeth Bohd and it directed you to appear in her office at five this evening,” Dee said.

“You weren’t supposed to read it because it wasn’t addressed to you,” Two said.

“My apologies to the recipient, but I have already explained to you that I was not able to not read it,” Dee said.

“Thanks, Dee,” I said. “That’s during my melee class, though. Was there any explanation?”

“None,” Dee said. “The handwritten portions of the document fairly leaped out at me, but they consisted of nothing but your name, room number, and the time and date.”

“She must have figured you’d be done with classes by that time,” Amaranth said. “You’ll have to either drop by during your afternoon break, or send her a message that you can’t make it and asking when she’d like to see you instead.”

“Or, alternately,” Steff said, “tell her to eat a dick.”

“Steff!” Amaranth said. “That’s not called for.”

“What’s not called for is a teacher calling her in on the carpet when she’s not even in any of her classes,” Steff said. “You aren’t, are you?”

“We don’t know that she’s doing that,” Amaranth said.

“Right, we don’t know anything because she didn’t feel the need to explain herself,” Steff said. “She didn’t invite Mack to stop by, she summoned her like a gen… genuine person one would summon.”

“I actually think this does constitute an invitation,” I said. “I mean, we don’t really know each other socially to the point where it would be appropriate for her to just shoot me an a-mail asking me if I want to hang out, and… well, she’s always very professional about things.”

“This isn’t professional, it’s rude,” Steff said.

“I mean, I don’t know if she knows another way to reach out,” I said. “I think she’d be too self-conscious to send me an echo or an a-mail… In her own way, she’s as awkward and gawky as any student.”

I was actually thinking about Dee when I said this. Dee’s stiff and formal manners and the stock she put in things like formal declarations of friendship and explicit invitations weren’t necessarily the same thing as Professor Bohd’s reserved manner, but I thought they shared a common root. Acantha’s torrential lectures could probably be put in the same category.

“What, now professors are more afraid of us than we are of them?” Steff said.

“I agree with Steff,” Ian said. “Bohd’s a big girl, and I don’t believe for one minute she’s afraid of the student body.”

“I didn’t say she was afraid,” I said. “I just don’t think she knows more than one way to relate to students, and that’s as students.”

“But you think she should go anyway,” Steff said.

Ian nodded.

“Because the benefit of standing on how right you are doesn’t measure up to what it could cost you,” he said to me. “You’ve got another three years here. It’s not crazy to think you’re going to need Bohd’s support at some point.”

“It’s not really a debate for me,” I said. “I like Professor Bohd, so I’m not going to blow her off. Maybe I’d like her better if she were a little warmer and less, you know, brusque about things… but there are enough people at this university who would be happy to smile while they kicked me.”

“As a woman in a ‘high magic’ discipline, she’s probably used to having to defend her right to the same respect her peers get,” Amaranth said. “And that’s without even considering her non-human ancestry. I don’t think any of us can judge her for being a little prickly.”

“Oh, come off it, Amy,” Steff said. “You don’t let Mack get away with prickling at people, and she’s got more demon blood than Bohd and she’s been out about it longer.”

“Professor Bohd is only ‘out’ about it in the first place because she wanted to support me,” I said, “and other students in my position. Anyway, it’s my decision.”

“And I’m proud of you for making it,” Amaranth said.

That meant a lot to me, of course… among the things it meant was that now I actually had to follow through with it.

The A part of the Q&A project is still on for this weekend… I had the foresight to work on it in advance so I won’t have as much work to do over the weekend… but that aside, there’s no use looking for anything new from me before Monday.

-AE.

While the studio insists they need a free hand to develop the story in a going-forward fashion unhampered by undue restraints like continuity, we have what is known as a “gentleman’s agreement” about my vision, which producer Robert Lieberman has promised to respect in the morning. I was a little bit unsure about his first choice of casting for the re-envisioned Puddy role, but I’m sure Sebastian Roché is a fine actor. I haven’t seen any scripts yet, but I assume I’m going to be seeing them sometime tomorrow as I’ve been told they expect to run a statement from me endorsing the whole first season in Friday’s Variety.

Ian fans will be happy to learn that they’re planning an increased focus on the Mackenzie-Ian dynamic, with Mackenzie’s lesbian leanings treated as more of a “thematic element”, I think was the phrase that was used. I’ve been reassured that the lesbian elements will feature all the more prominently in the on-air advertising campaigns, so I suppose at least they’ll be represented.

And people who enjoy the action sequences will also be in for a treat, as the creative re-imagining of the concept will involve Mackenzie and her sidekicks fighting a different monster each week, with the defeated ones having a choice: come to MU and join the fun at Harlowe, or be sent to the Nteenth Dimension, a hellish (though they seem shy about using the word “hell”) world ruled over by Mackenzie’s father, Lord Pytch (who is actually sort of a composite character, apparently) and his demonic (they don’t like that word, either) Downsiders.

I haven’t heard confirmation on this next part, but the buzz is that H.R. Giger’s going to be creating Mackenzie’s “ultimate form”, whatever that is.

The show… which has been shuffled between the working titles Magisterius University Nights, Professor Magisterium’s School For Gifted Monsters, and The Legend of Magisteria… is slated to air next fall on the newly-rebranded Syfy Channel.

Discuss this news item on my blog.

Here’s what you need to know. I need your help. Not in the sense that I’m going to drown without immediate action, though it is end of the month and I do need to keep up on my bills. I need your help to get me to a position where I can do more than keep treading water, where I can grow, where I can fly, where I can create, where I can shine.

For that, I need folks who are willing to become micro-patrons of the art. Sponsors of my stories, of my creativity, of me as an artist. You can do that here and sign up to pay $5 or $1 a month. If three hundred people give me $5 a month, my basic needs are taken care of and I don’t have to play “refresh monkey” with my PayPal account to see if I’m going to be able to pay a bill that’s falling due… and anything else I make, from ads and merchandise and other contributions or whatever can be used for promotion, for travel, for getting out there and meeting folks who can help me make great stuff happen.

(That includes the folks who read, some of whom I got to meet this weekend).

Three hundred $5 a month sponsors… if I was starving, if I said they were going to shut off my cable and power and I wouldn’t be able to keep writing, I know you folks would come through for me. Please come through for me now so I don’t have to say that word later.

It’s a very safe transaction because if you change your mind later, or your circumstances change, or I ever give you cause to feel it’s not worth your money… it’s a simple cancellation. I don’t have telemarketers to call you and ask you why. I’ll appreciate the patronage you gave me, for as long as it lasted.

Again, for more details, see my blog.

I’m writing this as an update to the old post instead of making a new one, because I’d hate for anybody to read it, run off and break open the piggy bank, and then find out that the crisis has passed.

I went to bed last night on pins and needles. After realizing that I’m not a yogi, I went to bed on a mattress instead, but I still had a lot of tossing and turning followed by some bad dreams. Even having seen the first few notifications come in right after I posted, I took nothing for granted. I thought a number of things might happen, but I didn’t think the benchmark I set would be met and exceeded overnight.

Yeah. Um, it’s going to take a while to total it (because some of it’s in eChecks that haven’t cleared, and some of the Amazon payments haven’t processed yet, and so on), but… there’s like $5,000 here. Seriously. $3,000 was enough to get me out of immediate danger and buy a little breathing room on the future.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

I can only conclude that I’ve underestimated you, in several senses. I’ve underestimated the number of you and I’ve underestimated your generosity and your willingness to support something you enjoy and maybe just your ability to reach out and help another human being. I could go on and on but I should probably post this soon as more people are going to be waking up and I hate to be responsible for causing unnecessary panic.

I’m not going to say “OMG STOP DONATING!!!!!!” if anybody still feels like participating, but at this point nobody needs to sell organs or try out for a reality show or anything drastic like that.

I’ll give you guys a full total later, when the dust settles and after I’ve done the day’s writing, which is also when I’ll update the Void Dogs and Star Harbor Nights banks. I am touched and I am impressed by the number of people who made hundred dollar and larger donations. I am equally touched and impressed by the number of smaller donations that came with a message saying that it was what they could afford and they wished they could give more. As Friar Tuck said to the churchmice, nobody can give more than their last farthing.

And now I’m quoting Disney movies, which means this is officially bordering on maudlin. I’d love to send a personal response to everybody who sent so much as a word of support… and there are a lot of you… but I think that most of the people who did so would much rather I spend my time writing something besides thank yous.

So, here it is, once and for all: thank you.

Original message preserved below.

How important is MU to you?

What would you do to save it?

For some of you, this story is just a bit of fluff entertainment, a casual distraction in your daily routine. Is it a distraction that’s worth paying $1 or $5 to keep around? Other people have described it as being more to them than that. Is it something you’re willing and able to pay to keep around?

It’s no secret that I’ve been scattered lately. There have been days when I haven’t been able to write because things have distracted me, and I haven’t even put up a placeholder or twittered or blogged about it, and the reason for that is that I’m embarrassed.

Some people are saying, “This was inevitable. You can’t write at this rate forever. Writing does not work that way.” To which I respond, it isn’t inevitable. You can. People do. Whether or not you consider what they do “art” or “literature”, there are very successful authors out there who write for six to eight hours a day, every working day. I can do that. I can. I have.

Yes, things are distracting me, but they’re things that wouldn’t be able to distract me if I didn’t have one big distraction right now.

Here it is: I’m broke. I’m worse than broke, in fact. My donation/ad/book model worked so well for so much of the year that when it started to bring down (right around September, naturally) I kept brushing off the lean weeks as being anomalies. I even “topped off” the donation total myself once so I could keep up my momentum. When the donations kept being short of where they needed to be, I didn’t keep doing that, but I didn’t make the mental adjustments, either.

I was already a little in debt because of my taxes and because when I started I was too slow in making the changes to my “impulse buy subroutines” from “I get a huge bonus every other paycheck” to “I don’t get a paycheck”. I had my budget worked out and it worked and I sticked to it… until I craved fast food or saw something shiny, usually in the bookstore, and then my brain registered how much money was in my account, not how much money was coming in.

So, I wasn’t where I needed to be financially, and then my income fell at around the same time my roommate was off her feet for the better part of a month. She had sick leave to use for it, but she was used to having overtime on every paycheck. Then I got sick, and had to go to the doctor and buy medicine. It was nothing dire… just seasonal stuff, but I had to go back a few times and my health care plan consisted of “don’t get sick.” Yeah, I failed.

Right now, I’m living donation to donation, which is like living paycheck to paycheck only worse.

In the past year, the economy’s gone to hell. My rent has gone up. The price of food and gas, two essentials of life, both went way up. They’re going back down which gives me hope for the future, but that doesn’t do anything for the recent past and the present. People have lost their jobs or seen their hours get cut back, and anybody who loses income in a bad economy is getting hit twice: fewer dollars to spend and less spending power with each one.

I’m sure some people are going to jump in here and say that by updating less when things got tough I didn’t do myself any favors in terms of encouraging more contribution from my readers. Sure. That’s true. It’s a vicious cycle. We can even say it’s a chicken-and-egg thing. I’m not going to sit here and debate which one came first, because, to bring this to a point, it doesn’t matter.

I can’t afford to keep doing this. As things stand, I just plain can’t.

I’d like to. I’d love to. For that to happen, I need to get out of the hole I’m in and stop trying to bridge individual $5 and $10 donations together to pay my credit card bills and utility bills.

So, here’s the deal. I’m repeating what I did when I started out: one big donation drive through December to help me shore me up. I’m going to set the goal at the same level: $3,000. I have more readers now than I did then, but I know that isn’t a guarantee of anything. I know a lot of you have been sending money all along and I don’t know that you’ll be able to send more.

You can donate through the links on Star Harbor Nights or Void Dogs and I’ll credit the donations to those stories’ banks as well as counting it towards the goal. It all goes into the same place in the end. If I’m forced to close up shop as a writer and go back to a day job (not the day job, unfortunately… the company I used to work for has downsized my old department and is in a hiring freeze, or I would not be nearly so concerned about my position. That was my fallback. It’s now gone.), I’ll still work my way through the backlogs on those, give people the stories they have paid for.

But trying to write and work at the same time was driving me crazy even when I had a job where I could sit and think for hours without being interrupted. It drove me crazy enough to quit that job, in fact. If I have to go back to work… especially since I’m not likely to get another job that will be so conducive to uninterrupted bouts of mental activity on company time… MU is going up on the shelf. Will it ever come back down? I don’t know. If I could predict the future, I wouldn’t be making this post.

Regardless of how much money I do or don’t get, I’m making a pledge: from here on out I’m Doing It Right. I’m done worrying. If my grand experiment is to be interrupted at this point, that’s that. C’est la vie. Que serra, serra. Alea iacta est. But if I go out I’m going to go out like a writer, writing. I did shit today. I was dealing with a situation involving contractors (fortunately nothing I have to pay for… the one perk of renting) that didn’t eat up the whole day time-wise, but again, I’ve been distractable. It left me in a mood. Tomorrow I’m getting up and I’m writing and I’m producing. The day after that I’m doing the same thing. And the day after that. If things turn around for me before they reach a tipping point otherwise, I’ll be in great form.

It’s possible the response to this post will be a bunch of mocking laughter and words to the effect of “You had your shot and you blew it, and now you want more money?” You know, at this point I don’t even care.

I’m laying it out on the line. A little over a year ago, I was writing and working a day job and I said, “I can’t keep doing this.”, and you folks came through for me. You came through wonderfully. I need you to do that again, and I realize even as I type this that we may be in a situation where you can’t. Even though more people are reading and enjoying MU now than were then, the world has changed and maybe that’s not enough people to keep this show on the road. If not, then it’s time for me to put on my interview clothes and start looking for another line of work.

What will happen to MU in that case? I don’t care to speculate. I don’t know what kind of job I’m going to be doing or what constraints it will put me under or how much time I’ll have where I can do the sort of sitting and thinking that is conducive to being able to go home and write. I feel like MU isn’t the sort of story that would work being told once a week or less.

After I post this I’m going to bed so I can wake up tomorrow ready to be productive. This means I’m not going to see what kind of a response it gets for six or eight hours. I have to tell you that’s probably not going to help my insomnia. In the morning, if appropriate, (i.e., if there are donations), I’ll add a meter to the donation page.

If this works… well, I won’t make the same mistakes again. I’ll save what I can and guard what I save. I’ll buckle down when things get tough. I’ll make it through another year of this, and call the first one a learning experience.

If it doesn’t… well, I’m not going to blame anybody. It’s the economy, stupid Dear Readers. I’ve had enough emails to the effect of “I wish I could donate” and “I’m sorry I can’t donate” to know what’s going on. I’m not even going to feel that bad about it. I had a year. That’s more than some people thought I’d manage.

Here are the donation links.

When I make a donation entreaty… and it’s been a while since I’ve done more than a one-liner, precisely because I’ve known it’s hard out there for everybody… normally I add that if you can’t donate, it’s just as good to spread the word. If you bring in more readers and they bring in more readers and so on, then even if you and your friends are all broke somebody’s going to find $5 and feel like I’ve brightened their day enough to be worth that. Right now, with the future of MU up in the air, I’m going to leave it up to you whether or not you want to get more people hooked on it.

Regardless of what happens, thank you… whether you’ve ever donated or just been here to read, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to write for you.

(Cross posted to my blog.)