Minor magicians take pains to fit this traditional wizardly bill. By contrast, the really powerful magicians take pleasure in looking like accountants.

The Amulet of Samarkand. It was Simon Lovelace's. Now it is yours. Soon it will be Simon Lovelace's again. Take it and enjoy the consequences.

As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.

It's the same with spirit guises; show me a sweet little choirboy or a smiling mother and I'll show you the hideous fanged strigoi it really is. (Not always. Just sometimes. *Your* mother is absolutely fine, for instance. Probably.)

Believe me, I know all about bottle acoustics. I spent much of the sixth century in an old sesame oil jar, corked with wax, bobbing about in the Red Sea. No one heard my hollers. In the end an old fisherman set me free, by which time I was desperate enough to grant him several wishes. I erupted out in the form of a smoking giant, did a few lightning bolts, and bent to ask him his desire. Poor old boy had dropped dead of a heart attack. There should be a moral there, but for the life of me I can't see one.

Most traditional ghost stories feature rather hapless protagonists, who have nasty things happen to them.

I rather think he knew anyway.