Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld

smiled. “Don’t think ghosts exist in my world. But maybe. I’m starting rewrites this week.”
    “Me too.” Darcy felt a smile on her face. Had she just had some slight influence on Imogen’s novel, just by being here and half knowing something about cats?
    Maybe that made up for the fact that she was plundering her parents’ religion for purposes of YA hotness. Darcy took a slow breath, letting that thought slide away again.
    “But I have to come up with a mancy for book three.” Imogen swiped her phone a few times, then read from the screen. “There’s hundreds of them: austromancy, spheromancy, nephelomancy. The only hitch is, they’re all crappy powers. But I guess it’s not fun if it’s not tricky.”
    Darcy contemplated these words. In her experience, tricky was mostly hard, not fun. If she’d known how tricky it would be to write a character traumatized by a terrorist attack, who had to process the horror of a massacre across four slow-moving and depressing chapters, she would’ve chosen a more peaceful way for Lizzie to think her way into the afterworld.
    Everyone loved that first chapter, but it had made all the ones after it a lot trickier.
    Kiralee returned, a trio of drinks clustered between her hands. “I was just having a think at the bar, and I may have solved your mancy problem!”
    “Oh, great. Another one.” Imogen lifted two of the glasses from Kiralee’s grasp and handed the Guinness to Darcy. “Let’s hear it.”
    “Why not have book three be about a flatumancer?”
    No one said anything for a moment.
    “Does that word mean what I think it means?” Darcy asked.
    “From the Latin, flatus .” Kiralee’s eyes were sparkling. “It’s a license to print money!”
    “So you’re suggesting,” Imogen said carefully, “that the finale of my impulse-control-disorder-based dark fantasy trilogy should be about a character whose farts are magic?”
    “Well, her farts wouldn’t have to be inherently magic. But couldn’t one control magical forces by farting? It’s an act of willpower, after all. And it requires a certain purity of spirit.”
    “I hate you,” Imogen said.
    Kiralee turned to Darcy. “What’s a better name: Fiona the Flatumancer or Freddie the Flatumancer?”
    Darcy, trying not to laugh, was unable to reply.
    “I think they’re both equally good,” said Imogen. “In that neither is good.”
    “But wait,” Darcy managed. “What do you do with flatumancy? I mean, besides the obvious?”
    “Well, I haven’t worked out the entire magic system yet.” Kiralee waved her drink vaguely. “But the spells will all have evocative names: the Cushion Creeper, the Air Biscuit, the Brown Zephyr, and of course the dreaded Secretary of the Interior!”
    Even Imogen was laughing now. “Sounds like those spells all do pretty much the same thing .”
    “Only because I haven’t mentioned the Flaming Flabbergaster!”
    “You plagiarizing cow!” Imogen cried. “The Flaming Flabbergaster is clearly pyro mancy!”
    “Pyro- flatu mancy, yes,” Kiralee said, maintaining an air of absolute dignity. “But let’s not be pedantic.”
    “No, let’s not,” Darcy said, and the three of them clinked and drank.
    *  *  *
    The night went on like this, a mix of serious talk, utter bullshit, self-promotion, and slumber-party giddiness. It seemed to last all night, and yet it was still before ten when Darcy looked around and realized that YA Drinks Night was ending. The bar had grown crowded, but now it overflowed with random nonwriters who had wandered in. She recognized only a handful of faces.
    Her new friends began to congregate in a last cluster.
    “Anyone fancy sharing a cab to Brooklyn?” Kiralee asked.
    Someone did, a writer of gothic gay romances who lived in Mississippi and was staying with friends. Darcy’s quartet of sister debs was organizing dinner at a pizza place nearby, but she felt too dizzy from her four beers (or was it five?) to go anywhere but