"A red book, smallish but plump, comfortable and shabby"

And then there's what happens to Half Magic in Seven-Day Magic. The former is a book the children in the latter have read, as we learn on the opening page:

          "The best kind of magic book," said Barnaby, ... "is when it's about ordinary people like us, and then something happens and it's magic."
          "Like when you find a nickel, except it isn't a nickel -- it's a half-magic talisman," said Susan.
          "Or you're playing in the front yard and somebody asks is this the road to Butterfield," said Abbie.
          "Only it isn't at all -- it's the road to Oz!"

That may look like gratuitous self-puffery, especially if you've just come from Magic or Not?. Putting himself on the same level as Baum, no less. And yet, somehow, here the fictionalization of Half Magic -- highlighting that it is after all a novel -- doesn't betray it, but validates it. ( How he gets away with it, with light, unavoidable spoilers for the first half of the book. )

Still, I can't, off-hand, think of an author who's done anything like Half in Seven. Not that many have slipped into their own books (ETA: that is, wrote characters of one book into another of their own), aside from Heinlein's last novels. Their own fictions come to life (a la Pat Murphy's recent one), sure. Any others?

---L.