Cross your fingers for me

Or light a candle, or talk to Jesus, or whatever it is you do. I’m not going to say why and honestly I feel like I’ll know whether I got any supernatural assistance within a day or two. Just help me out if you get a minute, OK? Thanks.

(No, this is not lottery related, although I suppose it could be.)

In which I require the internet

Calm_890c76_254933Longshot here, as Google has already failed me, so I need somebody who reads as much as I do, but has a better memory.

I’m trying to track down a short story.  I suspect it’s been at least a decade since I’ve read it and considerably longer is entirely possible.  It may have been as long as a novella, but I’m thinking no more than 5-6000 words.

The basic premise, to the best of my memory, was that a wizard’s power was in some way connected to being able to keep something secret.  Every magic user had a secret of some kind, and if someone else found your secret, something bad would or at least could happen.  I don’t recall the details.  Anyway, that was the scenario, and the big twist at the end of the story was a wizard using an illusion spell to convince a woman (who may herself have been a wizard, or may simply have been a spy for one) that she’d spent the night in a torrid lovemaking session with him.

His secret was that he was a woman, you see.  That was the big twist at the end.  One presumes that the torrid lovemaking session involved some illusionary man-penis, but I don’t remember the story being quite that explicit.

My best theory is that I read this in Dragon magazine at some point, which means that it probably came out in the late eighties or early nineties, but again it could have been later than that.  I never really did a lot of reading of short stories, so that’s not too awful a guess, but if I’m wrong I’m completely out of ideas.

Anybody remember this?  I’ll send you an autographed copy of the Luther Siler book of your choice if you can figure out what the story was called and where to find it.

(EDIT:  Holy hell, Little Red Pen found it 

  

A #Scrivener help beg

The internet isn’t cooperating.  I love the hell out of Scrivener’s Compile feature, especially the way it builds the Table of Contents for me without me having to carefully hyperlink everything.  But:

Screen Shot 2015-08-30 at 6.42.09 PM

Does anyone know how to prevent it from actually adding the “Chapter Seventy” part in front of the chapter title?  Because it’s doing that throughout and I’d prefer that it not do that.  I’ve been fiddling and haven’t figured out what the problem is yet.

(EDIT: Figured it out, naturally.  Leaving the post up so you can get a gander at some chapter titles.)