A STRANGER’S GUIDE TO RAVENSMOOR
Being a Compendium of Practical Advice for the Newly Arrived, with Particular Attention to Lodgings, Employment, and the Avoidance of Misfortune.
Compiled by a Gentleman lately of the Athenaeum, whose present lodgings are not known.
Eleventh printing. The publisher has corrected the errors of the tenth printing, and retained several as a courtesy to collectors.

I. On Arriving

You will give your name to the landlady, and you should choose it with care: Ravensmoor files everything and forgives nothing, and the name you sign is the name the city will use in its records, its gossip, and — the Guide is obliged to be thorough — its obituaries.

The landlady will also recite your watchword: a single sentence that proves you are you, on the regrettable day when everything else that proves it has been mislaid. She says it once. Write it somewhere no one looks. Should you lose both your key and your watchword, the management’s sympathy will be genuine, and useless.

II. On Composure

The rust-colored measure at the head of every page is your composure — the store of steadiness from which all work is drawn. Every errand, every undertaking, every evening of self-improvement spends a little of it. Idleness restores it, at a gentle fixed rate, which makes rest the only commodity in Ravensmoor that is entirely free of charge.

When your composure is spent, you may rest, or drink, or stand at the window and watch the fog. Many prefer the fog. It never asks how the writing is going.

III. On the Nerves

The green measure is your sanity, and the Guide’s advice is brief and firm: keep it high. Sleep regularly. Take the sherry in moderation and the Amontillado on someone else’s recommendation only. Decline invitations delivered after midnight. Do not read what the dead have underlined.

Certain work in this city pays in more than shillings and costs more than composure. The wise stranger declines it. — another hand has written here, in different ink: the low road sees more.

IV. On Words, and the Press

Everything you survive in Ravensmoor becomes material. The city calls this material Words, and it accumulates with every errand run, every night endured, every curiosity indulged past the point of sense. Words in hand are private; the city cannot read them. To be read, carry them to Blackletter & Sons, the printer’s, and commission a work — a pamphlet if your store is modest, a novel if it is not, a masterwork if you have stopped sleeping.

You will choose the work’s tenor — respectable, scandalous, scholarly, or macabre — and this decides not how much the city speaks of you, but what it says. Mr. Blackletter prints in his own time; the larger the work, the longer the wait. Genius sets slowly.

Your lifetime of Words is your career, and it only climbs. Spending Words on publication does not undo what you have survived; nothing does.

V. On Standing

The city keeps two accounts of every resident: how much it speaks of you, and what it says. The first is your standing, and it climbs a ladder whose lower rungs — Unknown, Noticed, Discussed — are crowded, and whose upper rungs are not. The second is your reputation’s flavor, earned by the tenor of what you publish and the manner of what you do.

Be advised that standing opens doors and marks doors. The author everyone discusses is also the author everyone’s rivals have heard of. The Guide has known writers who prospered in obscurity and writers who were ruined by applause, and notes only that the applause was louder.

VI. On the Disciplines

Four private capacities, trained at cost and spent nowhere, for they are not spent — they are consulted, at the moments the city tests you:

Vigor, for the body: locked doors, long stairs, cold water, and the various occasions on which Ravensmoor is physically underneath you.
Nerve, for the dark: the held lantern, the steady hand, the refusal to run when running would be reasonable.
Cunning, for the people: forged letters, false directions, and faces that do not quite settle.
Erudition, for the page: ciphers, registers, dead languages, and knowing which book should not be on that shelf.

Training is purchased with composure and coin, and the price rises with mastery, tutors being no fools.

VII. On Intrigues

Ravensmoor’s favorite sport is played entirely on paper. Your rivals — and you will have rivals; publication is a provocation — do not duel. They review. They rifle notes. They arrange for your inspiration to desert you, a condition the city calls Writer’s Block, under which work still pays in shillings but refuses to become manuscript.

Precautions may be purchased before dangerous work — a locked notebook, a fair copy lodged elsewhere — and are consumed in your defense. If blocked, know that a remedy is always in reach: comfort, retort, honest exhaustion, or the porter at Bellshire, of whom the Guide speaks well and no further.

Should you wake at Bellshire Sanitarium after a catastrophe, remain calm. The night has several exits, and dawn is one of them.

The Intrigues page keeps a ledger of moves made against you. Read it without illusions: it names only the clumsy. A saboteur who is caught is a name in your ledger; one who is not is a suspicion at every dinner party you attend thereafter.

Suspicion, however, may be pursued. For any unattributed deed you may spend an afternoon asking questions — one afternoon per matter per day. You will roll the dice of chance, weighted by the disciplines on both sides: your erudition unmasks a reviewer, for prose betrays its author; your cunning traces a burglar, for boots remember their owners — while the culprit’s own cunning and vigor decide how little there was left to find. An afternoon that answers costs only the legwork. An afternoon that answers nothing costs something worse than fatigue: you will see the culprit in every face on your street for the rest of the evening. The Guide does not recommend asking daily. The Guide knows you will.

Lastly: the city tires quickly of bullies. Pile-ons bore it, and it has means of expressing boredom.

VIII. On the City’s Amusements

The Raven & Rose restores the nerves at honest prices — the sherry is tolerable, the Amontillado is better than the establishment deserves, and the back room does not exist.

The Athenaeum shelves every work the city has published, including, in time, yours. Reading one’s neighbors is instructive; reading one’s rivals is irresistible.

Bellshire Sanitarium engages literate persons for well-paid work of a clerical nature. The Guide will say no more.

The Lazarus House, on the Carrow Fairgrounds, is a harmless amusement of the last century, lately reopened. Its frights are wax and rubber. Its cellar is a cellar. The Guide has toured it personally and found nothing.

IX. Advice Nobody Took

Collected from residents who are no longer available to repeat it:

— Publish before your rival does. Regret is not a tenor.
— Buy the fair copy. The shilling you save is the manuscript you lose.
— The sane see fewer doors. This is called safety.
— If a portrait follows you with its eyes, do not take it personally. If it follows you with its feet, take the stairs.
— When the paper prints your name, check the spelling. When it prints it twice, check the locks.
— No map of the Maze agrees with any other. The maps are not wrong.

The Guide wishes you a profitable stay, and reminds you that Ravensmoor keeps its pictures, its records, and, in several documented cases, its visitors.