The Three Bears, the stuffed kind, not the fairy tale…

So I spent the day in my writer brain, meaning I walked to Harvard Square and went on a peripatetic journey of tea/coffee shops, stopping for an hour to write in each one. I started with jasmine bubble tea with soy milk at Dado Tea, then met some folks for chocolate at Burdick (oh yum yum), then went into a place I hadn’t been before, Crema Cafe, where they made a really nice “ginger steamer” (ginger “broth” with honey, very nice), and finally to Starbucks on the way home. I thought about making one more stop at Simon’s on Mass. Ave, since I still had 29% battery life left, but decided I needed some notes on my desk to go on to the next thing. (Yes, I still have some notes on paper.)
HOWEVER, the actual point of this post is to bring you picspam of the absolutely awesome gift I received which came as a total surprise and blew me away. I’ve been so amazed at the things the Magic U books have inspired readers to do. Deb/Tryslora made all those wonderful icons. Soiled Dove Mercantile sent me that incredible mini-top hat. Now this!
Not to keep you in suspense any longer, but it’s three stuffed bears, dressed/costumed as the three main characters in the Magic University books! Kyle, Alex, and Frost!

Kyle has to be between Frost and Alex, since they don’t get along, of course. Even in the thumbnail here you can see Kyle’s shoulder bag, Alex’s Harvard/Veritas T-shirt, and Frost is all dressed up for Tea with the Master. 🙂
Major picspam and large images below the cut:

Large version of the three bears.

Yes, this is the Harvard (and therefore Veritas) logo. 🙂

Of course, I couldn’t do something on my desk without a cat getting involved. Hi Renki.

Here’s a closeup that shows some detail on Alex’s cargo pants!

Another closeup of the T-shirt! It’s so perfect!

Yes, the pockets of the cargo pants are functional! And do you notice the yellow stitching on his boots?

Yellow stitching of course means he’s wearing Doc Maartens!

Now here’s Frost.

With his jacket open you can see the cute little tie he’s wearing, and the buckle on his belt! And the detail on his oxford shirt! Ahh! My oxford shirt fetish!!

I don’t think I ever specify what Frost’s shoes are like in the book, but here he is wearing Converse All-Stars, which are perfectly fitting. (Another of my characters, in another book, wears them, too.)

On his jacket we have the Gladius House crest! (A letter G and a sword.)

Close-up of the crest! So brilliant. Deb asked what the house colors were and what their crest looked like a while back, but I had no idea it was so she could pass on the info to BriAnne, who was feverishly working away on these!

And now, our hero, Kyle Wadsworth, in flannel shirt, with shoulder bag and all.

In case you couldn’t see it above, he’s got the diamond stud that Caitlyn gives him in book two!

And how’s this for an interesting coincidence? His shoulder bag looks ridiculously similar to MINE. (Mine which came from the Terminus Harry Potter convention and so is emblazoned with the “Aeolian University” crest, the magical university of the four winds. Yes, I am a big geek.)


This bag is truly brilliant and inside is also REALLY similar to the one I carry, with the little pockets for pens and such. And what’s that sticking out of one of the pen holders?

Why, it’s a little sprig of timothy grass! (If you haven’t read the books, that won’t make sense.)

What else has it got in its pocketses? In the zipper compartment, of course, he has his journal and his Tarot cards!

It just keeps getting more brilliant! Inside the journal is a poem Kyle writes in book two of the series! And yes, Kyle has a Waite deck.

One more shot of the three of them lined up.

And here’s more of a GQ pose…
Anyway, if it wasn’t clear before… these are utterly unbelievably brilliant and now I want to sit here and PLAY WITH THEM.
In fact, what I did once I got to Crema Cafe was sit down to write, and although my plan had been to work on The Prince’s Boy, I decided to have the bears do a Tarot reading. What is funny is that in the writing session I did before going to meet up with Rikibeth and BriAnne, i had been wishing I had a set of Tarot cards, because I was thinking I wanted to just see what Kyle would pull. And I didn’t want to use the Internet card servers. Now I had not only a set of cards, but Kyle and Alex.
So I put the bears on the laptop, got the little deck out of Kyle’s bag, and went to look what order the cards were in. The Ace of Swords wasn’t followed by the two, it was followed by the Page of Swords. And then the Page of Pentacles (coins)… I know these little decks usually come in order, not pre-shuffled and BriAnne later told me yes, she put the three cards that represent the three guys first, and shuffled the rest.
Anyway, I mildly shuffled the rest and had Kyle pull a card for himself, thinking about his future, and what is to come in book four, the final book of the series which I am supposed to be writing right now…
He pulled the Hierophant, which is, basically, the Master of All Magic. Whoa. I pulled two more for him to see what else… and got the Nine of Cups, which usually stands for artistic and creative satisfaction (or possibly sexual), and the Three of Coins, which again is the artist gaining mastery of craft. Wow. So Kyle’s poetry is absolutely great.
To which Kyle-in-my-head asked, but what about love? I ended up writing a scene with the reading in it, and as for the question of love, well, that is what the whole book is going to be about now, isn’t it?
Thank you so very much BriAnne! And your co-conspirators, Deb and Rikibeth! *goes off to play with bears some more*
[ETA: No, the bears are not “anatomically correct”!! Get your minds out of the gutter, people! LOL]