#middle kingdoms

...Have to snicker a little when, in order to fit the fifth member of the core marriage into the shot, I have to stick him half a mile away...

Anyway. This is just to let everybody know that for Pride Month of 2026, the Ebooks Direct Pride Package has been really ridiculously discounted.

...From the product page:

This package contains all our Middle Kingdoms material—some of the first LGBTQ-representing epic fantasy in the 20th-century fantasy field, now continuing into the 21st. It also contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the Young Wizards universe—Advisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, on their first canonically-"out" venture as a couple. The main part of the collection spans more than forty years, from the publication of Diane Duane's two-time Astounding Award finalist The Door Into Fire, first published in 1979, through its main-sequence sequels (both also Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winners) The Door Into Shadow and The Door Into Sunset, to 2018's and 2019's interstitial Tales of the Five novels, The Levin-Gad and The Landlady. The collection also includes such otherwise hard to find short works as Lior and the Sea and the two current volumes of the "Sirronde's World" group, The Span and Parting Gifts.* And finally, it also includes the Middle Kingdoms novelette Overdue (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2), and the short Young Wizards work Owl Be Home For Christmas.

All that for $19.99? Seriously, I need my head felt. So please go validate my mental state by buying the package. ...And happy Pride!

(Meanwhile, a project for the course of the month is to put all the queer, bi, and/or ace characters in my various series into that shot. That bridge should be a little more crowded by the time I'm done...) 😏

The votes are in, and for July we'll be reading...... 🥁🥁🥁

A fic featuring Eldritch!Abomination! WWX! gives you strong Tale of the Five feels. Or specifically, Sunspark the elemental feels.

Let me expand: Middle Kingdoms is an early-continuing fantasy series by Diane Duane. It was formative and amazing and one of the first LGBT positive series I'd ever read. The story starts when a prince seeking to unlock his magical abilities ends up needing to rescue his boyfriend, also a prince, who has gotten himself into a lot of hot water.

On the way to rescuing his man, Our Hero Herewiss meets a being that turns out to be a fire elemental named Sunspark. The elemental is endearingly clueless about how humans work, and ends up being drawn in to an alliance with Our Hero. An alliance that turns decidedly romantic as Sunspark learns new things like love and compassion and all the complicated stuff that it was not, by design ever intended to feel.

And Eldritch!Abomination! WWX gives me the same vibe. E!A!WWX is the result of a half dead Wei Ying who has been dumped down a hole after being tortured by Wen Chao. At the bottom of the hole is a demon who sounds a lot like a Earth/Ice type elemental! A very hungry elemental that apparently completely falls in love with Wei Wuxian, to the point that it becomes Wei Wuxian. With predictable, very bad results for Wen Chao and his men. Whom E!A!WWX eats.

This leads to some intentionally unintentional humor because E!A! is utterly clueless and needs to have Humaning explained to him.

...Which is something else that reminds me of Sunspark! This is because in the Middle Kingdoms setting, elementals basically reproduce by fission. Elementals are generally by nature solitary, and when they encounter each other they fight. Sometimes one will eat the other, sometimes they'll just tear off bits of each other and sometimes they'll come together in a moment of mutual destruction that results in a bunch of new baby elementals that all share the traits and memories of their two parents, plus any other elemental traits snagged by the original elementals from their previous opponents.

The licensed stuff - Star Trek, Spider-Man, X-Men etc - is on Amazon, but you'll find D's own ebooks - Young Wizards, Feline Wizards, Tale of the Five / Middle Kingdoms - here as "Author's Preferred Text".

There are also several freebies, including one from me, called "The Longest Ladder". One of the penalties of writing shared-world / licensed shorts is that they don't revert to the writer. This one wasn't licensed, and did revert, and it's the short I'm most proud of. Mum loved it, because of Reasons: I was able to make my Dad a hero, because that's what firefighters are, and doubly so during a Blitz, when it's not just the fire but the enemy causing the fire that's trying to kill them.

My own novel-length ebooks are on Amazon; they supersede the print versions because they've all been revised (plot holes closed, continuity errors corrected etc.) and are again "Author's Preferred Text".

Facebook/Meta's just-announced change in its fact-checking and moderation policies (which would, among other things, allow users to refer to LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill"), and its sudden vanishing of trans- and nonbinary-friendly themes, has made it plain to me that some of the book-series-oriented spaces I've maintained over there for years are no longer safe places for users, especially younger ones, to be.

I have therefore begun deleting them.

The Middle Kingdoms page (being both the smallest and the one now potentially most dangerous to keep) was the first to go: I nuked it about ten minutes ago. (Naturally I checked it first to make sure nothing of any note was going on in there, and also naturally, I took a backup.)

The Young Wizards page will be the next to be deleted, probably tomorrow. The Ebooks Direct page there will also be deleted over the weekend. Neither of them was all that busy, ever: but that's not the point here. Meta is no longer a safe or appropriate place for them to be. (It doesn't hurt that many of FB's employees are furious about this policy change too... but their boss, I firmly believe, doesn't give a shit about that.)

The DD Facebook page may suffer the same fate. My personal "main" account...? I have a lot of older friends over there for whom FB is their lifeline and main digital platform. I'm going to have to think about how best to handle that. It may be that there will be no more public posting from me there: just DM'ing. ...And I'm still working out what makes the most sense to do about the Middle Kingdoms Instagram account, and my own personal one. Neither of them has been heavily trafficked, and I may nuke them too.

(sigh) All this comes as something of a wrench. But at the very least, as regards the part of my creative work that contains LGBTQ+ themes and characters, I refuse to leave any of it there. To do so would risk having its continued presence seen as support for the platform's boss (and, as @petermorwood remarks in passing, "would-be capo"), who's already busy genuflecting to the US government's incoming (mob-)boss's agenda.

So, as the man says,