Earlier today, I had the opportunity to chat with Diane Duane about her board youngwizards.net, her body of work, and her upcoming projects.

[Note: This Chat has been edited for ease of reading. Some temporal distortion may have occured when topics were orderd. You have been warned.]

Diane Duane: Ok, here I am.

Paul Gude: So, before the Chat starts, I have a sort of off-the wall question.

Diane Duane: Sure!

Paul Gude: You were a writer on the Batman animated series, from what I saw on IMDB.

Diane Duane: That's right. Peter and I did a script together.

Paul Gude: Which one was it? (I guess that's not really as off-the wall as I thought.)

Diane Duane: (thinks)I think they retitled it "Red Claw Rising". (They misspelled Peter's name in the credits.)

Paul Gude: Because I'm almost positive I've seen it, since I watched most of them. But, I never paid attention to the names.

(Paul and Diane chat more. Paul mentions spilling chicken divan all over his keyboard during lunch, and Chris enters the chat.)

Groupee Chris: Hi

Diane Duane: Hi!

Paul Gude: Diane, Chris is one of our QA testers and one of my regular at-work chat buddies.

Diane Duane: Pleased to meet!

Groupee Chris: likewise. Now that I have transferred to days it is nice to be able to participate in these chats

Paul Gude: Chris, do you have a question for Diane? I'm being a total fanboy right now.

Groupee Chris: Not yet. I mostly came to watch

Diane Duane: (heh) A voyeur.

Groupee Chris: I like to think of it as multi tasking! I can drink coffee, test sites and watch chat all at once!

Diane Duane: Sounds like work to me.

Groupee Chris: well, yeah it's that too heh

Diane Duane: (pauses to be shouted at by cat)

Diane Duane: One of the felines thinks he's due an extra dinner. His Mistake.

Paul Gude: I was telling the folks around here about "Dark Kingdom" and they were floored to hear about its origins.

Diane Duane: We're floored when we think about it, too. Five years of development.

Paul Gude: I wish I had seen it *before* this chat started.

Diane Duane: Don't fret. It'll keep.

Paul Gude: The Seattle Opera was really pushing the Ring cycle this year.

Diane Duane: Yeah, we want to go see one of the Seattle Rings at one point or another. I have yet to see a Ring anywhere at all, come to think of it, except on TV. We did well on Sci-Fi, though: the ratings were very positive.

Paul Gude: I saw some good comments about it on Netflix site, too.

Diane Duane: Yeah, the Sci-Fi ones were good too. (Mostly along the lines of, "Didn't s**k nearly as badly as Sci-Fi productions usually do.")

Paul Gude: Yes! That was something my wife and I both noticed. The quality looked great.

Diane Duane: But it was worth the work. The production team really wrung their money's worth out of every shot.

(JennyD enters the room)

Paul Gude: Hi, Jenny!

JennyD.: Hi Paul!

Diane Duane: Hi Jenny!!

JennyD.: Hi Diane!

Paul Gude: It's sort of a free-for-all right now.

Diane Duane: What the heck, we're having fun.

Paul Gude:

Diane Duane: We almost had Wolfgang Peterson for director on that thing -- but then he went off to do Troy and the deal had to be redone.

Paul Gude: Diane, all I can say is I think he made the wrong choice. He and I aren't chummy or anything, so I don't feel bad saying it.

Diane Duane: Mmf...not sure I'd disagree with you. Peter was watching Troy last night...now I can't get the noise of that movie out of my head. "Hectorrrrrrrr! Hectorrrrrrrr!"

Groupee Chris: I didn't see Troy. I assume I didn't miss much then?

Diane Duane: A lot of shouting.

Groupee Chris: ah k good then. I can get that from the neighbors

Diane Duane: And Brad Pitt in a miniskirt.

JennyD.: HAHAHHAH, now that's a visual

Diane Duane: He doesn't look *bad* in the short-skirted armor...but there was just something about Pitt that didn't work for me as Achilles. He looks too pouty.

Paul Gude: So, for our members who will be reading the transcript, I feel the need to mention that we're talking about Diane's latest project, an motion-picture adaptation of "Ring of the Nibelungs" which aired under the title "Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King" on the SciFi Channel. It's available now on DVD.

Diane Duane: Hey, you do good plug.

Paul Gude: I always imagine my parents trying to follow a chat transcript and go from there.

Diane Duane: It makes sense.

Diane Duane: The funny thing about that project is that it's gone through so many names. About six so far, just in the English-speaking versions.

Paul Gude: "Curse of the Ring," "Kingdom in Twilight..."

Diane Duane: Yep. Also "Sword of Xanten", "Ring of the Nibelungs" ...originally it was just "The Ring"...and there was another name too, but I can't remember what it was. Not to mention the many, many names in other markets. The last time we took a count, it was in seventy markets worldwide. Still trying to find out what the Japanese title was.

Groupee Chris: wow that is a lot.

Diane Duane: It did quite well...which makes it easy for us to pitch our next projects, whatever those may be.

Paul Gude: Ooo! Do members of your community get scoops on that sort of thing?

Diane Duane: Occasionally. It depends on how far we want the news to travel. Interestingly, the same production company is looking at doing the first "Young Wizards" book as a movie for TV.

Paul Gude: That would be great. I'm right at the point when they've cured Fred of the hiccups.

Diane Duane: Heh. It starts getting busy after that.

Paul Gude: I am in awe of how you were able to make a white hole cute.

Diane Duane: Dialogue is king. If we do go to this one company for the movie, I'm going to try to talk them into using Stephen Fry for Fred's voice.

Paul Gude: That would be a great choice. I'm going to hear it all the time now.

Diane Duane: Fry is that most dangerous of creatures, an intelligent actor.

Paul Gude: How many registered members do you have now?

Diane Duane: We're at about the 1800 mark.

Paul Gude: And can you compare that to how many visitors your normally get to the youngwizards.net homepage?

Diane Duane: Hmm. Well, the homepage is mostly a portal. There's very little on the .net side except for the Forumsthe info pages mostly reside on youngwizards.com, and the .net front page links to that. We would normally get about three hundred new/unique visitors a day on each of the portals (they're identical).

Paul Gude: One of the great things about it is that you've got a homepage that lets people see what's waiting for them inside.

Diane Duane: It seems the simplest way to handle things.

Paul Gude: You were saying earlier that you advertize the site on your book covers now.

Diane Duane: Yep, we started putting the URL on them shortly after the sites went live. I'd say about thirty-forty percent of our members come to us that way. The rest come in via Googling or wandering in via directs from other sites, etc.

Paul Gude: For those of our readers who are curious, how many "Young Wizards" books are there now?

Diane Duane: There are eight in print: the ninth is in its final stages and about to go to the publisher. It also has to be said that the first book precedes the first Harry Potter book by about eighteen years. I've gotten in the habit to mentioning this these days, as a lot of peple don't bother checking the copyright dates, and jump to conclusions.

Paul Gude: I wasn't even going to invoke the name, but I had noticed that too. You started the series quite a while ago. At the time, the idea of a message board of this sort would have been pretty new.

Diane Duane: It would have, yes. Though I've always been a bit cutting edge this way when possible: one of my early Trek novels has serious business going on inside the ship's BBS. And in the latest YW book, one of the young wizards carries his wizard's Manual around in an iPod implementation. The WizPod page at YW.com gets a lot of hits.

Paul Gude: I'm going to have to take a look! (Obviously some readers will want to join to see inside, too.)

Diane Duane: I'll dig up the URL. check here -- http://www.youngwizards.com/ErrantryWiki/index.php/WizPod

Paul Gude: That would be great. You've got manual approval set up on your community. Do you find it to be much extra work?

Diane Duane: I do, but I think it's worth it. A lot of my users are youngsters, and I'm concerned about their security: I prefer to keep a tight rein on things.

Diane Duane: My mods are available to give me a hand if things get busy on the home front,

Paul Gude: That's another good point. Can we talk a little bit about your chat policy? I was impressed with the way you communicate with your members.

Diane Duane: Well, it is quite heavily screened in terms of words we don't allow. Specifically...on registration, language policy is set up: we don't allow language "stronger than the 'crap' or 'dammit' level." Anybody violates that after being warned, out they go. That said, it's rare: we had to ban a member this last week, and it's about the first time in a year and a half that I've had to do such a thing.

Paul Gude: How do you catch the posts? Are you using trigger words, or a censor list?

Diane Duane: Both. As I said, the control is quite tight. I get the very occasional complaint about this...but as soon as people understand that this is, as it were, my virtual living room, and not a public utility...they normally fall into line.

Paul Gude: (Some of our users don't know that these tools exist.) Did you compile the list of censored words yourself?

Diane Duane: I took the basic list and tweaked it. Sometimes it needs tweaking: everyone knows the standard joke about getting banned when you live in Scunthorpe and try to tell people about it. Some of our users' specialized vocabulary has required tweaks of that kind. Other than that, I do once-a-month chats with the membership at large -- normally we get twenty, maybe thirty people in there, many of them kids and some of them very buzzed about being in the presence of A Real Author. I try to keep the "We're Not Worthy" stuff to a minimum. It's always dangerous to start believing your own PR.

Paul Gude: That's healthy, but folks like me can always pick up the slack. I think you're doing a great job with the world you created.I have to admit that I've just gotten into the books, but I can already see how a young community of readers would be instantly drawn to forming their own culture around the book. Do you see weird slang popping up that you didn't create?

Diane Duane: All the time. And unusual forum usages. We have one forum which contains a single topic called "The Topic of Great Randomness". Nearly ten thousand messages in that one topic at the moment, and it's been going for two years straight. I'm assisted somewhat by the fact that I never postulated that it was going to run so many books and no longer. This gives me the freedom to keep doing this until it starts to bore me: at which point I have no guilt about stopping. Right now I can see it going on for another three books at least -- after that, no idea.

Paul Gude: I hate using words like "positive" and "fun" to describe it, because they're too bland. You've got a real push for not downplaying your characters' intelligence.

Diane Duane: Well, this series was always intended for the smart kids who're tired of taking heat for being smart. It's only now that being a nerd is beginning to acquire some cachet.

Paul Gude: It's taken a long time, that's for sure. That's why I think your community is so great. The library kids of the world can first find the books, and then find new friends through the site.

Diane Duane: We seem to have a lot of members who're very relieved to be able to chat with each other, not just about the books, but about the challenges of trying to exist in a world where brains are frequently mocked. And at the same time the books can't be accused of being escapist literature: the kids have to live in *this* world and deal with its problems.

Paul Gude: The pressure to "dumb-down" so that you fit in is eased when you have some peers.

Diane Duane: Absolutely. The feeling of being ALONE is probably the most crippling thing that kids have to deal with. That sense of not being understood: it can really get in the way of life. In the Forums I get a lot of the "It's so great to find other people who know about these books!" Naturally, when the first movie comes out, the profile will lift much higher.

Paul Gude: I think that's why an online community works so well for your readership. You may be the only one in your town who has read them, and the idea that there's someone just like you across the world is so amazing.

Diane Duane: Absolutely. And our distribution is surprising. The membership is mostly concentrated in North America and the UK, where the books were first published: but we have growing membership from places like Russia and Holland/Belgium, where they've been in print for a while now. Also a lot of Aussie & NZ members who get the UK editions.

Paul Gude: Are there different translations as well?

Diane Duane: Oh yeah. I think we're in about five or six languages now. The newest ones were the Finnish and Mandarin Chinese translations that started a couple of years ago.

Paul Gude: That's so cool. (I've entered the fanboy mode again.)

Diane Duane: It's fascinating to look at something that has your name on it and not have the *slightest* idea what it says.

Paul Gude: We're getting near the end of our time. Do you have any final words for aspiring authors or administrators out there?

Diane Duane: Well, for the authors: don't take no for an answer...just write. Writers write: that's what they do. And persistence will often do the job when talent won't.

Paul Gude: Excellent advice, that.

Diane Duane: For the administrators? Probably most of them are a lot more experienced than I am. It's them I should be listening to.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Paul Gude,