Young Wizards New Millennium editions: a little more info

[dianeduane]

First of all, thanks to those of you who've dropped by the new Ebooks Direct store at DianeDuane.com to check things out since we opened it. After a few first-hour wobbles involving instant order fulfillment not happening instantly, we're now running smoothly. (Just for everyone else's info: the 20% discount offer runs until tomorrow, May 31.)

One of the things that went up at the new store site was the basic info page about the upcoming New Millennium editions of the first four Young Wizards books. In the wake of that page-posting I've had a few notes from concerned readers, inclusing this Tweet this morning from @disafan :





 

It's an entirely fair question.

Let me start by saying that, regardless of how many adult readers love these books (and don't think I don't appreciate that!), my main duty in this series is to the younger readers. And in recent months and years, my younger readers have been complaining.

I get a lot of mail from them demanding to know why, in the early books, Kit and Nita are so old-fashioned. Why don't they have phones? Why is the computer stuff in the second and third books, especially in High Wizardry, so ancient and lame? Why is the online "otherworld" which today's teens and tweens are so familiar with, so completely missing? This disconnect with the basics of the background of modern life is putting them off the books at exactly the point I should be getting them hooked.

And the sales figures have to some extent been reflecting this problem. So You Want to Be a Wizard continues to sell steadily, as it has for decades. But immediately after SYWTBAW, the figures drop off enough for me to notice a difference. And then they pick up again with The Wizard's Dilemma, a much more recently written (and more modernly backgrounded) book, and continue to strengthen through the most recent ones. This sends me a fairly straightforward message: the first four books need to be updated for this millennium's audience.

Before ebooks started taking off, before easy POD, there wasn't a lot I could do about this. Naturally I spoke to the US Young Wizards publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the answer came back, "When we reprint the whole series and put them all in new covers -- most likely around the time you turn in the tenth book -- you can do revisions then." And at the time, that was fair enough.

But now I don't have to wait. Now I can scratch this itch, which has been itching me for a really long while now, and get some relief at last.

The revisions are going to be grounded in three basic areas:

Straightforward quality-of-writing issues. So You Want to Be a Wizard was only my second book, after all, and I was still feeling my way along, especially as regards writing for younger readers – it was the first time I’d done that. But now I'm past my fiftieth novel, and believe me, from my present point of view the book really needs polishing. Nothing very violent – its bones are sound. But there are places where more clarity in description is needed, and there are assorted other editing issues that, handled all together, will make this a smoother, more effortless read, generally a better book but specifically a more suitable book as the springboard of a series. I may also add some material (and to the others as well, again as required for purposes of clarity).

Background stuff, including technology, lifestyle, and other modernization issues: This is, of course, a balancing act. Hanging in front of me all through this project has been, and will be, the writer’s version of the Primum non nocere principle: DON’T FIX WHAT’S NOT BROKEN. So trust me not to inject tech where it's not needed, or just for the sake of the change. In fact, in the case of SYWTBAW, previous readers may wonder whether I've changed enough stuff -- and maybe that will be a sign that I've gotten it right. Deep Wizardry will show the updating a little more clearly, and High Wizardry probably most clearly of the four. But at no point do I intend to let it become intrusive. The whole point is for the new material to blend in, not stand out.

As regards changes not having to do specifically with tech: Tween and teen life of the 1980s and 1990s was significantly different from teen and tween life now. Kids are living with greatly changed sets of expectations, limitations and pressures. The New Millennium editions will deal with these as well.

And finally, Timeline issues: The writing of the YW series now spans almost three decades (2013 is the thirtieth anniversary of SYW). While the series has never been out of print during that period, there have been a number of changes in publishers, and this has sometimes meant longish periods elapsing between books. So each of these after-a-long-gap books became a sort of mini-reboot, and now all those inadvertent reboots have to be reconciled. Some very remarkable brains have spent an amazing amount of time on these issues. (The wonderful Peter Murray, one of our admins at the Young Wizards discussion forums, spent truly astonishing time and effort right up to his untimely death trying to pull together a timeline that took the "classic" versions of the series and made sense of the flow of events, including problems with character ages.) So now I get to get to grips with this issue once and for all. I'll be establishing a "go date" for the events of So You Want to Be a Wizard and then tweaking other series timings so that they flow from that, using it to resolve chronology and age problems that crop up in later books.

...That just about sums up what I'll be doing. Around June 21st, people will be able to get the ebook version of the New Millennium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard -- first from the DD.com Ebooks Direct store, then from the Kindle Store and other online distributors such as Kobo -- and judge the results. The other books will follow over July and August.

When they're safely out, I'll begin the minor revisions on volumes 5-9 that will be needed for all the rest of the books to fall into line with the more intensively revised first four. The economy being what it is at the moment, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt cannot presently commit to reprinting the revised series as a whole. But when they're ready to go back to press, I will then have a complete set of revised texts from which the series can be reset. And for those who still prefer the "classic" editions, I'll make sure that they can still be obtained in both POD and ebook versions. But this situation won't occur for some while yet, so let's put it to one side for now.

That just about sums it up for the moment. Any questions about the above? Please use the comments.

Thanks!

Comments

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Wow. I didn't know you were updating them. Since DEEP WIZARDRY in particular is a desert island book of mine, I can see I'll have to get the New Millennium Editions to check out the changes!

[platypus]

Deep Wizardry is in my top handful of books, too. I suppose it'll lose the pay phone scene, though I honestly can't think of all that many many other time/tech references in it. I do understand the desire to fix the oddly elongated timeline of the series, and I'll certainly read the new versions out of sheer curiosity, but my battered paperbacks will probably remain the copy of record with me :). I actually like the slightly less polished style of the early books; some turns of phrase have remained with me for more than twenty years. But nobody's coming to take away my existing copies, so I'll try to look at the new versions as some fascinating bonus material!

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

One of the problems of living in The Future is having to mentally rearrange your mind so you have to say, "This book was written in 1986 and set in The Present, which means that people don't carry phones around with them, and computers tend to have old-timey ASCII interfaces which you type at."

Of course, if you've grown up with iPads and the like, the idea that there are people who don't have a little portable computer that you just wave your hands at and it does what you want is still a bit alien. All teenagers today, for example, have grown up with having access to Google. They're used to automatically having their minds augmented with a little bit of typing, and suddenly being an instant expert on any field that comes up in discussion.

That kind of thing just blows my mind. I've gone from living in an era where color television was, although widespread, still pretty neat, to living in an era where everyone potentially knows everything about everything--simply by reading the Wikipedia page which of course exists. Here's an example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minami-Urawa_Station)--that's the Wikipedia page about my local train station. Of course, the Wikipedia administrators have decided that the article is a stub, although it says all I think that needs to be said about some suburban commuter train stop. Perhaps they're hoping for some juicy gossip.

The point is that from here in THE FUTURE, the world already looks completely different than it did in the 1980s, when I first started realizing that I lived in THE FUTURE (that computer in my home? Holy crap! My own computer! My previous experience with computers was something the size of a largish closet that spit out vast quantities of punched paper tape and chad). Now computers are so common that I have three in my motorcycle, and one of those is so unimaginably futuristic that I merely have to tell it where I want to go, and it will give me detailed directions how to get there, with a constant play-by-play based on its understanding of where I happen to be at the moment. If that's not living in the future, I don't know what is.

Oh, in case everything does go horribly wrong, I did take the precaution of purchasing a no-computers-required motorcycle as a backup measure.

[zellion.livejournal.com]

I didn't know either. The technology issues never bothered me, even though I'm only 29, (I love, love, loved the computer stuff in "High Wizardry") but hey - I want my kids to love these books someday too, and whatever it takes.

[jerel.livejournal.com]

I think for the modern young reader, the second and third books do seem terribly out of date, enough to where it will throw them out of the narrative and make them put the books down. Those of us who are enjoying (or re-enjoying) the books as adults, I think we're more willing to accept the disconnect, even as we notice it.

I re-read High Wizardry fairly recently, and I did wonder how it might be different if it were first published today. Now I won't have to wonder. :)

[glaikery.livejournal.com]

Mostly I'm commenting just to wish you the best -- the Young Wizards books have meant a lot to me for more than half my life now (granted I'm only 22, so that may not mean as much). And I'll be really interested to see what happens with this new effort.

However, I also wanted to mention for the sake of mentioning that at eleven, having had reliable internet access at home and school for several years, and not remembering not living around a computer (I was very lucky and grew up near a university) -- I thought the tech in High Wizardry was pretty much the best thing, in part because it was just slightly behind my...contemporary tech knowledge, I suppose. The idea that you could make a computer do almost anything "with the right peripherals and a smart programmer" was thrilling and awesome, and much more so presented with the interface Dairine was dealing with, and it's often made me wish halfheartedly that I had been getting into computers three years before I was born (sorry!).

I'm a strange 'modern reader', I'm sure, but like zellion mentions, the tech never bothered me in the slightest -- I would go so far as to say I almost preferred it, but we return here to my being strange. (The chronology things I've found more difficult but rarely have been bothered, assuming they stemmed from the updates beginning with Dilemma; and I can see that teen life is quite different and can certainly understand wanting to reflect those things in YW.)

Anyway, though, all YW is important to me but High Wizardry in particular is, and it is not a tiny part of the reason I've ended up in Computer/Info. Science; I cite those scenes when Dairine opens the non-bit-Apple as A Reason. So if the books are being updated, thank you also for what they 'were'/are in "Classic" form! I am quite curious to see what happens. :)

[glaikery.livejournal.com]

[Clarification: 'best thing' in the sense of 'this is the greatest', not 'best thing in the book'; I wouldn't try to decide the latter.]

[false-alexis.livejournal.com]

I am just dropping by to agree with pretty much everything in this comment! I always enjoyed books that were about 'contemporary tech' and about 10 - 20 years too old for me, because that was the only period of technical history which I had trouble learning about from other people. (Too recent for other people's nostalgia, too old for my memory.)

Of course, at 30 years out, the updates start to make a lot more sense... and in 10 years time, it will be 'slightly dated' again! In new and exciting ways.

Mostly, though, I hope this update brings in more young readers.

[robotamputee.livejournal.com]

I completely agree! I'm only 17, picked up SYW exactly a week and a day after Wizard's Holiday came out, so I'm almost as far removed from the time and place of the earlier books as you can get. While occasionally the dated tech and lifestyle references becomes an issue (I've had to ask my mum about some odd cultural relic several times) I find the differences so interesting! Especially, like you said, in High Wizardry. Then again, I just find all previous cultural definitions of "modern" interesting.

The biggest thing for me is the timeline, which has caused quite a few headaches. I look forward to one day doing a marathon read-through of the series without having to mentally adjust the flow of time in my head almost every book. And, as everyone else has said, I'll still always have the 'classic' editions to go back to. They were such a huge part of my childhood, especially the first three, that they'll always hold a special place in my heart, no matter how old they get.

Ultimately, I see the upcoming New Millennium editions as a kind of companion to the series, instead of a replacement. A great way to get new readers hooked, and an exciting prospect considering it will have at least some new material, but forever separate from the books that I grew up with.

I see now..

[poeticsolace.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

The technology aspect of the books is just what I was talking about! I'm glad there will be newer versions. I never bought all of the books, just the later ones (though I spent so many hours in the library, I'm surprised I never found the manual and took the Oath!), and later SYWTBAW and DW. I like a physical copy of a book in my hands, so I'll wait for those to come out! :)

[honorh.livejournal.com]

Having come to the series just last year, I did notice some of the technology issues--the office with an electric typewriter and a Dictaphone (what young reader will even know what that is?) in the first book and the computer in the third, in particular--but it doesn't really throw me out of the book. I can see where it would for the target audience, though, so I'm interested to see what you'll do with the new editions. I think they're terrific books, so whatever you can do to draw in new readers is a plus. I'm currently trying to turn my nieces and nephews on to them.

(Edited for better icon)

[mitchy.livejournal.com]

I applaud you for tackling such a project, which won't be easy by any stretch of the imagination. Part of me is appalled that young readers now have so little tolerance for anything outside of their day to day experience. Part of me wants them to STFU about how things are now and appreciate exactly how things were in the past and enjoy the differences, not complain about them. On the other hand, I really do understand that you have to be concerned when sales figure drop offs are noticeable. So I will look forward to seeing what you do with these much loved books (particularly A Wizard Abroad, which is still my favourite). Good luck!

[gheofabulousduk.livejournal.com]

I grew up with these books--in the nineties! So for me, interestingly, the technology seemed to grow as I did. When I was eight and reading High Wizardry, it made sense that they had huge clunky laptops. Then a few years later, as I read later books, iPods started showing up. It was wonderful!

But this, what you're doing now? This is great! I'm so excited about this. I will be happily purchasing the New Millennium Editions. New readers won't be scared off by the older tech any more! Yay!

~Duk

[danceswithlife]

As a 54 year old history buff I agree with mitchy's concern that younger people may have little tolerance for what it was like "in the old days." *Gulp.* I was going to suggest you have older characters mention such things, but then, young readers probably hear it from parents, grandparents and teachers and roll their eyes like we did when hearing about the depression when we were teenagers.

But for me what's of higher concern than you sales staying high (although I deeply hold the intention that your writing supports you as you wish!) is that what you have to say about life and living in all your books, but perhaps in the YA ones especially, is so important. I found your books in my early 20's as I was giving up Catholicism, and then giving up belief in God. Your YA books were a big part of what filled the gap for me while I worked my way back to spiritual awareness--they show how it's possible to commit to compassion, and curiosity, and open mindedness, and hope, and service to the Good (and what the cost can be to do so), when many of today's organized religions are still failing (IMHO) to do this. I'm putting together a book of morning and evening prayers for myself, and your Wizard's Oath, and morning and evening meditations--in various iterations--will be a part of that.

So, please, Diane. Do what you need to do to find those kids. They need you. And I look forward to buying and reading the results :-)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I suppose it needs doing - though I suspect that I won't like modern Spot as much as the 128k(?) Apple IIc version of yore. Although thinking about it, it might be a lot easier to enter Speech on an iPad...

[noirrosaleen.livejournal.com]

This will be VERY interesting to read. Definitely hanging onto my older books, because I grew up with them, but I don't think I'll mind getting the reboots too... ^_^ Will the short story be in SYWTBAW for the reboots, too? I originally read it in Dragons&Dreams, but getting ahold of THAT book is like pulling teeth.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

And these books are recent enough that they probably can be updated to not chase away younger kids. (There are of course always some younger kids who can read historical novels perfectly happily, and some number who can actually get to "historical SF and fantasy"; but not so many.)

Thinking back through my life, things didn't change "much" for the first 35 or so years; until the hand-held cell phone and then the public internet hit. Then things changed pretty fast for a while, and are continuing to do so. And actually, it takes intellectual analysis for me to understand how much the cell phone changes things; while I've had one since, oh, about 1991, it hasn't drastically changed MY life until it started being mobile Internet too (about three phones ago now). The huge improvements in cars haven't really changed that much in how people act; the huge improvements in airplanes, ditto. The huge improvements in computers behind the scenes have changed my work, but not my life really until the public Internet hit (well, maybe earlier, everybody I knew in Massachusetts was accessible via DECnet email in the early 1980s).

[thelauderdale.livejournal.com]

A few years back, when I was in library school, I had a publishing class in which we were supposed to take a book and talk about how we would go about the business of publishing it, were it submitted for publication today. The book I chose was So You Want To Be A Wizard, and your web site was a trove of information. I remember considerations of changing technology and culture being part of my "suggested" revisions for the hypothetical manuscript. And now, reading this post, I can see how you are going about it in real life.

The business of updating and changing previously published books bothers me as a reader, but it's as old as writing. In the 18th century Samuel Richardson finoodled constantly with Pamela, trying to appease his audience by changing the way she fainted. Better to have her land face up or face down? In the 20th century Tolkien significantly rewrote a portion of The Hobbit to bring it more in-line with The Lord of the Rings (and he was still fiddling with it up to the time of his death, from what I've heard). T. H. White wrote Madam Mim out of the The Sword In the Stone altogether, though she was, amusingly enough, kept for the Disney adaptation.

It happens, I see the need for it, and it's darned interesting to see how the author goes about it, but I can't help finding it a little sad. Even if the book is meant to take place in an eternal now, like the Wizard books, I still tend to see that now as inherently shaped by the "when" in which it was written: just a part of the book's spirit. So my approach (and obviously this varies, depending on the book in question) is often to seek out an older edition where I can...

That’s personal, of course. Whether I would do that for a young reader to whom I was giving the book as a present is another matter.

[moonreviews]

Dickens also wrote a "good ending" for Great Expectations when it was published in the newspapers, because the newspaper thought they'd sell less if his story ended badly, but he wrote a "bad ending" because he liked that better himself.
The edition I read had a * somewhere near the end and it said: From here on there's one ending, go to page [..] for the other ending.

[moonreviews]

This year, Scholastic has also started publishing the Animorphs series again, with some changes having to do with technology. The series was originally written in the 1990s and so far they've only re-published the first two books. They made the references to technological things more general ('computer' instead of a certain computer type for example), but if the main characters had mobile phones and they made more use of online social networks the story would probably very different! The aliens they're keeping their identity a secret from would be able to find them much more quickly now (and then there wouldn't be 54 books, maybe only 10 books).
I think it's a bit easier to "update" the Young Wizards book, as I don't think they're very outdated (only some things). I started reading them less than 7 or 8 years ago, but I read a lot of old books so it didn't bother me at all.
I'm curious about the differences you're going to make, but as I am not buying e-books yet(*) I'll just read about the differences on the forum (as there probably is going to be a topic about it).

(*) Most books I want to read I can easily get in paper-book-form. I borrowed an I-Pad-like device (with Android OS) from my father last week so I can try if I like reading e-books on it. All e-books I've wanted to read so far are out of copyright already (for example Tarzan books or Jane Austen) and I could find versions online, so I'm going to read those on the I-Pad-thing to see if I like reading books that way.

updated versions

[lisa prolman (from livejournal.com)]

I got my son hooked on the audiobooks a few years ago before he was reading a lot on his own (he'll be reading them this summer, though), and he commented on the technology. He loves Darryl's Wiz-Pod, by the way. I told him the early books were being revised, and he is excited as he is interested in seeing the changes to see if they affect how he sees the story.