QUESTION 1: Thank you very much for “A Family Affair.” I hope I do not sound pushy, but are you still planning on posting “Shadowland”? If so, do you know when?
Ha! If you saw some of the emails I get, you wouldn’t think of yours as pushy! But yes, to answer your (very nice) question, “Shadowland” is the other half of the story begun in “A Family Affair,” and it will be out eventually. When that will be depends on when I get the chance to work on it again.
I told myself when I pulled the story last year that it wasn’t going back up until I was happy with it. Writing “A Family Affair” was part of that process, as the problem all along was that I was writing two plotlines and trying to cram them into a single short story, along with a fair amount of world-building, and it wasn’t working. That’s why I don’t do short fiction all that often, because I always end up plotting as if for a novel and screw myself up. Anyway, I finally bit the bullet and realized that, to do the story justice, I was going to need a couple of novellas, not the short story originally promised. And novellas take a good deal more time to write. But yes, you will see a new and improved “Shadowland” sooner or later. I have spent far too much time on the darn thing now not to post it! :D
QUESTION 2: In “A Family Affair,” mention is made of Rosier’s not forming a new body yet. Why does Rosier look like Pritkin when he forms a body? Does he always look like Pritkin or can he look however he wants when corporeal, assuming he is not inhabiting someone else’s body?
Yes, Rosier really looks like Pritkin. He can use a glamourie to look like virtually anybody, of course, but the form he takes naturally looks a very great deal like his son. Or, to be more precise, Pritkin ended up looking like daddy.
Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?
QUESTION 3: (Relaying a question from another forum) What do your long-lived characters (Pritkin and Mircea, specifically) think about the moon landings achieved by the Americans?
Something along the lines of “Oh, they finally realized that it isn’t made out of green cheese? Well, good for them.” The magical community has ley lines, which go a lot of places. And shields, which work to hold things in (like air) as well as to keep things out, if that’s how you design them. So they investigated the moon ages ago and found it completely lacking in interest. There are mysteries in the magical community—things they can’t do, places they can’t go, phenomena they don’t understand. But that wasn’t one of them.
Question 4: I’m confused about how long Pythias live. Agnes seemed to be a normal human, yet she apparently lived about 400 years. Also, since Cassie is a demigod, would she live longer because of that, or as her position as Pythia? Furthermore, would anyone be able to resurrect her like the sons of Ares?
I’m sorry, but where did you get the idea that Agnes lived for four hundred years? In fact, she lived a much shorter life than usual for a magical human (which would normally be about 200 years.) As Plutarch said, the Pythias’ lives were shortened because of their service to Apollo. Channeling power meant for a god when you aren’t one does bad things to your health. And, of course, Agnes had Myra helping her to shuffle off the mortal coil even faster than would already have been the case.
As far as the sons of Ares were concerned, resurrection was one of their special gifts (at least where each other were concerned). Cassie doesn’t possess it. If she came back from the dead, it would be as a zombie, and does anybody really want to see that?
Question 5: In HTM Cassie explains to Jonas that her visions don’t come ‘made to order’. If this is true then how come in CTD when she asked to see what would happen if she went back in time and stopped MAGIC from being destroyed, it worked? Or was that vision a one-off thing?
Cassie did not ask to see anything in Curse the Dawn. She had a vision, yes, but it was a spontaneous thing, not something she generated herself, or asked for, or particularly wanted. That’s how her visions always work. Otherwise, she’d have conjured up the winning lotto numbers years ago instead of working a couple of jobs while trying to avoid Tony (who she would also have been able to see coming.)