After a tedious term in the Wizard's School, Wanda finally has an opportunity to relax. While on his way to the seedier parts of town, he meets up with Mesomorph, a mischievous friend, and they begin to celebrate Wanda's recent advancement to Fourth Order Apprentice: Conjurer. As the ale accumulates, the spells begin to fly ? and so do the barmaids! Then Mesomorph challenges Wanda to prove that he had conjured the succubi he heard about, and Wanda is tipsy enough to comply ? and too tipsy to avoid making mistakes. That's when things begin to get interesting....

A Skein Adventure

Robert P. Hansen began writing in high school, and it has undergone several changes since then. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he played Dungeons and Dragons, read fantasy and sci-fi novels, and listened to soft rock and country music. His writing focused on short stories (fantasy and sci-fi) and fantasy ballads (which were later integrated into the long poem "A Bard Out of Time").

In the mid-1990s, college and work did not leave him much time for writing. Since poems generally took less time than stories, he focused mainly on them, and they often reflected what he was learning in college (e.g., women, writing, psychology, philosophy). He learned how to write sonnets during this time and began to develop his understanding of the craft of poetry. He also started submitting his poems for publication, and several of them appeared in various small press publications between 1994 and 1997.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, his studies became more demanding, but he found time to write a number of short stories that tried to answer this question: Why would aliens visit earth? He eventually had enough of them for a collection (Worms and Other Alien Encounters) that later became its own section of The Complete Sci-Fi Stories. His poetry developed significantly during this time, since he learned a great deal about it while completing his creative writing degree.

After graduating college, he began teaching college courses, and nearly all of his time was devoted to developing and teaching them. As a result, he wrote almost nothing between 2004 and 2012. However, once his courses were in good shape, it freed up a lot of time for writing, and he dove into it with a passion.

From 2013 to 2018, he wrote hundreds of poems on a wide variety of subjects, several short stories (mostly sci-fi), and a handful of novels (including the first edition of the Angus the Mage series). Then his writing got curtailed by a stroke in his optic nerve. One moment he was typing away without any difficulty, and the next, half his visual field disappeared in his right eye, and he couldn't see the text he was writing well enough to continue (even with extensive magnification). It took several years for his eyes to adapt enough for him to be able to resume writing, and when he did, he revisited the Angus the Mage series and revised it for a second edition (which he recently completed).