Tanya Huff - What Ho, Magic!

WHAT HO, MAGIC

By

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

"Introduction: Tanya Huff is" Copyright 1998 by Michelle Sagara West

"The Chase is On" Copyright 1989 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Amazing Stories, July 1989 "Underground" Copyright 1992 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Northern Frights, Mosaic Press, 1992 "I'll Be Home For Christmas" Copyright 1992 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in The Christmas Bestiary, DAW, 1992 "Shing Li-ung" Copyright 1992 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Dragonfantastic, DAW, 1992 "First Love, Last Love" Copyright 1993 by Tanya Huff.

Originally appeared in MZB's Fantasy Magazine, Fall 1993 "Word of Honor" Copyright 1995 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Tales of the Knights Templar, Warner, 1995 "The Harder They Fall" Copyright 1995 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in MZB's Fantasy Magazine, Summer 1995 "A Debt Unpaid" Copyright 1995 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Northern Frights 3, Mosaic Press, 1995 "February Thaw" Copyright 1997 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Olympus, DAW, 1997

"Symbols are a Percussion Instrument" Copyright 1997 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Tarot Fantastic, DAW, 1997 "A Midsummer Night's Dream Team" Copyright 1997 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Elf Fantastic, DAW, 1997 "This Town Ain't Big enough" Copyright 1995 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Vampire Detectives, DAW, 1995 "What Manner of Man" Copyright 1996 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in Time of the Vampires, DAW, 1996

"The Cards Also Say" Copyright 1997 by Tanya Huff. Originally appeared in The Fortune Teller, DAW, 1997 "The Vengeful Spirit of Lake Nepeakea" Copyright 1999 by Tanya Huff. Published here for the first time.

All rights reserved by the publisher. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

WHAT HO, MAGIC!

An MM Publishing Book

Published by Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc.

PO Box 7

Decatur, GA 30.031

Editing & interior layout by Stephen Pagel Copyediting & proofreading by Teddi Stransky Cover art by Todd Lockwood Cover design by Neil Seltzer ISBN: 1-892.065-04-5

http: //www. angelfire. com/biz/MeishaMerlin

First MM Publishing edition: March 1999

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

Tanya Huff is

This book is the first collection of some of Tanya's short stories, and the stories, bristling with an elegant wit that never becomes either self-indulgent or pretentious, speak more clearly for themselves than I ever could.

I'd like to concentrate on the work, and the work alone, but there's so much of Tanya in the work she does it would be like telling half a story when I know more of it: doesn't feel right. Besides, anyone who's reading this has already bought the book, a sure indication that I'd be singing to the choir.

So, briefly, Tanya Huff is scum. A maggot. Moreover, I mean both words in the nicest possible way.

Perhaps a little background is in order.

The first time I met Tanya, I was fifteen years old. I was at my first convention, and very nervous; she was at her umpteenth, and very confident. She was also dressed up as Belit. I couldn't think of anything clever to say to her a recurring theme so I didn't say anything at all because, well, I was intimidated. Nevertheless, I remembered her clearly.

The second time I met Tanya was as a customer at Bakka, the science fiction bookstore in Toronto where we'd later spend six of her eight-year tenure working together. She had just sold a novella to Pat Price at Amazing the Kelly Chase story and she was determined to sell a novel before she reached the other side of thirty.

At that time, I was scribbling poetry and editing fledgling attempts at my own fiction, and she seemed to have stepped across the impossibly wide divide that separates the published and publishable from the unpublished. She was very matter of fact about the sale and her future career. I was impressed and intimidated so I didn't mention the fact that I was writing.

I started working at Bakka very shortly after that, part-time to her full-time, and when I finally graduated to full-time, we overlapped on four of our five days. During those years, as most of you probably did, I read Tanya's fiction. But I got to read it before it was published.

It was torture.

Poets tend toward melodrama and abuse of the language; they're always at least a bit infatuated with words and the cadence of words, and before they find their feetwell, it isn't pretty. That was me.

Misery loves company. Unfortunately, I never did get any, not that way.

Tanya has never had that problem. I'm fairly certain she knows what purple prose is, but I guarantee she's also incapable of committing it.

"Here, Michelle," she'd say, "I think this is too slow. Or too boring. Or maybe not enough is happening.'" So I'd read her very polished, highly amusing and often deeply moving writing and then I'd slink off to my computer with an inferiority complex the size of a small planet. This was her idea of not good enough!

Tanya, I thought, you are scum. But I wasn't about to say that because I didn't want it to be taken the wrong way.

Well, the years went by. I managed to figure out that I wasn't Tanya Huff, and I wasn't going to be Tanya Huff, so I settled into my own style of writing, rewriting and revising. I started, bit by bit, to feel less intimidated. Maybe it was because of the times I'd watch her spend twenty minutes in the back room of the store writing the same sentence over and over again until the cadence was exactly right. Maybe it was the month she spent writing the same four pages of a novel over and over again because she knew where the book was supposed to be going, but her instincts as a writer are far too strong and too good to let her hack her way paint-by-numbers style through the plot; if she blocks, it's for a reason. The book veered sharply to the left, and once she and her subconscious settled on a reasonable compromise, she took the driver's seat again.

I still read everything she wrote as she finished it. Novels were bad, as they came chapter by chapter; short stories came in a complete chunk.

When she finished "I'll Be Home For Christmas" I had yet to start a story for the same anthology. I read hers, and almost didn't start one. "No," I told her, "there's no way I'm writing anything contemporary; it'll only get compared to that, and I can't come close."

I was very glad that I didn't have that problem with "Shing Li-Ung", one of my favourite stories, because I wasn't asked to write a story for that anthology. As someone with some background in being a banana white on the inside, yellow on the outside, in case you haven't come across the term I found the story to be particularly moving and well thought out, and I liked the end.

In fact, I like the way most of Tanya's stories end. Although she's at home with a very dark edge as the two horror stories in the anthology clearly show for the most part, she deals in hope. In ideals. In what it takes to meet those ideals half way. Her characters know, like she does, that life is tough, and that people aren't perfect but they don't use the excuse of imperfection to become self-indulgent, whiny jerks. They deal with their lives. They live up to their promise.