i first read your books when I was a kid, and honestly thought id hallucinated them ("so you want to be a wizard" is a fantastic title, but admittedly feels a bit like a fever dream), but rn the whole concept of wizardry and how they technically defeated the lone power early in the series but they still keep fighting for humanity bc the fight, though eventually won, is still worth it, is honestly one of the main things keeping me going. idk where im going with this, but i wanted to say. your books are instrumental to me. even tho I thought that id made them up bc I found them at the library many years after the "so you want to be [x]" series stopped being popular. i hope you have a nice day and get to have something nice happen to u
I'm so glad the books have worked for you! Thanks for letting me know. 🙂
You may laugh a little to hear that there was one afternoon not too long ago while, in the middle of doing some research, I started wondering whether I'd hallucinated the source of the title of SYWTBAW myself.
I'd had an ask from somebody here about the origin of the concept of the Wizard's Manual. A brief discussion of the history of the title was going to flow from that, and I needed to find the name of the publisher of that original series of 1950s and 1960s career books from which the format had come: "So You Want To Be A {Scientist / Teacher / Nurse / Physicist / (whatever)]").
And I went Googling for that info, and ... could I find it? Could I find anything about those books (which surely, it seemed to me, ought to be at least somewhere in the first few pages' worth of search results)?
Nope.
As I kept searching, and finding nothing, I started becoming increasingly horrified. My memory told me that those books had been all over several small-town libraries when I was a child. Was it possible... that my memories were wrong? Had I imagined or invented those books? Had I made up that title out of whole cloth?
For about five minutes I sat there in a cold sweat, typing in search after search and (frankly) freaking out.
...Finally, though, way WAY down the search results, I found what I needed. The books' publisher turned out to be Harper (or later, Harper & Row): and the author of many of them, to my great delight, turned out to be Alan E. Nourse... who was not just a nonfiction writer, but also wrote SF, and who'd written a book called Star Surgeon that I'd dearly loved as a young reader. (A full collection of Nourse's books and other writings is preserved at Boston University.)
So THAT all turned out to be OK. But jeeeeeez... talk about a bad few moments. 😅
Anyway: thanks again for letting me know the books have mattered to you. It matters to me a lot. 🙂
I could swear that I remember seeing those book titles before I ever read SYWTBAW for the first time (which might have been from the 1983(?) edition with the dragon on the cover, or might have been from the Support Your Local Wizard omnibus edition). I would guess that would’ve been when I was Nita’s age or just a little younger, which suggests that in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s they were still around in our small-town library.





















