Writers Block

So I've been having really severe writers block for the past 2 weeks. This is why this blog post has been so delayed. I made a promise in the last post that I'd talk about the magic system, and pull together Jeshi's character based on the tarot reading. Neither of which has come together in my head. I'll write out what I have so far of the magic system. I came up with it kinda randomally a few weeks back, and I've become very attached to it. The piece I'm not figuring out yet is the partitioning of magic. For the novel, I don't want a HP-like everyone can do everything magic system, but a more focused one. On the previous draft, I used my 6-element spread as a base, but it was a bit unwieldy at times.

The reason I wanted to rework my magic system was that I didn't have a good controlling factor, or drawback. There was no downside to doing magic. In addition, I'd been thinking about Onieromancy, Dream magic, a lot for the Changling game I'm playing in. Somewhere along the way, the following dream magic came out, and it's been growing.

It started when I was thinking that I have a few magic sparring scenes in the book, but they aren't too interesting for the most part. One thing that could make it more interesting is if they could have these sessions in a dream realm instead. And so I decided that all Mages are Lucid dreamers, and that they can have dream adventures. This necessitated a division between the dream reality and the material reality. So I decided that in order to use magic to affect the material world, the mage must enter a state of waking dreaming, to bring their consciousness into the dream world. then they slowly phase the effect into the material world. The danger is that if you phase too much of the dream world into the material world, your consciousness can get trapped behind; Since you were already "awake", you can't be woken up, you're trapped in the dream world.

Now that gave me an interesting drawback, and so I settled on it as the metaphysics of the magic. I still want that partitioning, and most of my mages' abilities are staying as is, but I've been struggling to put the two together into a cohesive whole. However, I'm pretty set on thsese metaphysics, and most people I've talked to it about have agreed that it's an interesting idea. One of them even took it and wrote his own short story about it. Not sure if I should read it before, or after, I start writing my own.

Another debate Iv'e been having recently is whether or not to include a prologue. it's become more and more a staple of fantasy. Dan Wells, in his 5-part talk on story structure at BYU's Life, Universe and Everything seminar, discusses what he calls teh Ice Monster Prologue. It's from Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin, and it allows him to interject a bit of fantasy, to say "This book will have magic, and monsters, and action, but you have to put up with some boring preliminaries first." The Matrix does the same, and most of the Harry Potter books start with a prologue vignette from another POV. I've been thinking about including sucha  prologue myself, but it depends on how much time I'll spend in the normal world before adding in the magical elements. Unfortunately, because of the writers block, I haven't plotted enough to see whether or not it's necessary. It's an interesting scene though, and so I may write it up anyway.

Lastly, I'll talk a bit about books. I'm still on track with my reading challenge, and have read 10 books since my last blog post.

White Cat
Book 1 in the Curse Worker's series by Holly Black, White Cat introduces us to Cassel, a kid from a family of con artists. He also happens to be the only one in his family who can't work curses. The story starts however, when he starts having strange dreams, and finds himself sleepwalking out to the roof of the boarding school he's attending, presumably in order to jump. This allows the plot to catch up with him, and sets him on quite an adventure. This was actually one of the things that got me started on thinking about my partitioning for Magic. In this world, there are 7 types of curse workers: Body, Memory, Dreams, Luck, Emotion, Death, and Transformation. All useful tricks, it got the wheels spinning about what sort of partitioning I really wanted.


My Soul to Keep
This is the third book in Rachel Vincent's Soul Screamers. This is the first time the romance of the series is really challenged, and it's challenged hard. In this story, the super-addictictive supernatural drug has started to make the rounds among the MCs friends, in the mortal world. it's quite a trip to see her tracking down how it's passing in and out, when it's not supposed to be able to. I definitely enjoyed this book as much as the previous 3, and have picked up the 4th book for reading in the next couple of days.




Crimson Wind
Book 2 in Diana Pharaoh Francis' Horngate Witches series. I hadn't remembered a lot about the first book, sicne it had been a year since I read it, but I enjoyed this book just as much. In this book, Witches arent the best people, in general. They're almost completely driven and consumed by greed and power. The MC is a servent bound to a witch, something called a Shadowblade. Shadowblades and Sunspears make up the witches defensive forces: Sunspears can only be out in the day, and Shadowblades can only be out at night. The issue is that the Guardians, basically the magical guards, are starting to wage war on humanity, and it's up to the MC and her friends to try and stop them. In this one, we finally see the event that the author had reported in John Scalezi's The Big Idea blog, and it was just as awesome as I could have hoped for. All in all, I'm enjoying the world and can't wait to see more of it.


Trick of the Light
This book has been touted by the author and many readers for it's surprise ending. And let me tell you, it packs a punch. The MC is a bar owner who's also supporting/helping two "brothers" (they're foster brothers really) in the fight against demons. Demons are all over the place, especially in the MC's town: Las Vegas. The plot kicks off whne the MC finds a clue leading to something called The Light, a weapon that both Heaven and Hell are desperate to get their hands on. And the MC gets caught in the middle, with her own agenda to follow. The surprise ending delivers on the hype it's been receiving, and so I won't spoil it here.


Magic Strikes
Magic Bleeds
The Kate Daniels series, by Ilona Andrews, has seen some of the best worldbuilding I've seen in Urban Fantasy for a couple of years now. I had read the first 2 books a couple years ago, and remember thinking that it (especially the first one) left me with more questions than answers. However, upon reading these I'm not sure where I got that from. Weres are pretty much treated as expected, any mammal form can be used as a ware base. There's also a subset of Wares which are animals in their birth form, and are able to turn human later. Naturally, the more traditional kind aren't too fond of this other kind. The more interesting point of worldbuilding is the Vampires. Vampires are mindless rage-filled creatures. They are only held in tight control by Necromancers, people called Masters of the Dead. It's one of the best treatments of Vampires I've ever seen. Magic Strikes is about an attack on the Shapeshifter community, and a supernatural fightclub-esque thing called the Midnight Games. Magic Bleeds is about a mysterious magical plague. Both of these books seem to bring out some of the awesome blood magic in the world. The blood magic has some awesome features, some of which I wish I could steal and bring to Jeshi. Problem is, now that I've read these, my own idea seems either lackluster or derivative. Cant' decide which is worse.


Cat's Claw
Book 2 in Amber Benson's Calliope Reaper-Jones novels. Callie is Death's daughter, and after a lot of bitterness on both sides has been pulled into the family business. This plot is designed to show us more of the process by which souls are treated, and we get a nice characterization of Bast, and the Egyptian dead. Any Buffy fans will also recognize Amber Benson as the actress who played Tara. Yes, they're the same person. I don't really have much to say about this book.

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn
I picked up this book at Comic Con, 2 years ago, and hadn't gotten around to reading it yet. I decided to read it on the plane ride last week, and was able to pretty much tear through it on the way back. It's a quick read, setting up a series based on a fantasy Chinese culture. There are 12 Dragons, which correspond to the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, and each of these dragons bind themselves to a human, called the Dragoneye, and grants that human powers of magic. The MC is one of the hopefulls to bind himself to the Rat Dragon, who's year has come. But of course, its a novel, and everything goes wrong. It was a very enjoyable read, and I'm looking forward to teh sequel in April.

A Touch of Dead
This is a collection of short stories in Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse universe. I've only read a few of the books, and that's been scattered througout the series. Some of the worldbuilding and word choices in these short stories made me go "WTF?" For example, the Fae are allergic to Lemon and Limes. Deathly allergic. One of the characters is actually killed as such. Maybe it's a function of not having read most of the series, but it threw me for a loop. In the same story, she also uses the term 'fundament" to refer to her butt. There are a couple other word choices which made me feel like the author was reaching for a thesaurus, but the character is a simple barmaid. Well, not so simple, but still.

I Am Not a Serial Killer
I've been listening to Dan Wells talk on Writing Excuses, the writing podcast with Dan Wells, Branden Sanderson, and Howard Tayler. This is Dan's first book in his series about a teenage sociopath. The MC struggles to not give into his obsession for serial killers, mostly because he thinks he could easily be one. The plot kicks off however when people start dying, and his unique obsession allows him to see more into the murders than anyone else seems to be able to. When the supernatural elements come into play, the MC seems to be the only one other than the killer with the full picture of what's going on. The plot though, is less about the murders and more about how the MC, John, deals with the relaxing of his strict rules and battles with the monster, the serial killer, inside him.

Building a Magic system

As we prepare to run Dresden Files for the summer, I've been thinking about the magic system for my novels. I mentioned it in an earlier post, some of the rules and considerations for magic in general. This time, I'm going to take a less structured approach, but instead discuss some of the things I've been considering for my own system.

In my previous post, I discussed three basic portions to a well-defined magic system: Source, Control, and Drawbacks. To this list, I'm going to add thematic considerations, and move forward from there.

Control
I'll start with this for no better reason than it's first alphabetically. In the first iteration of the novel, I had nothing but a pure expression of Will. From a magic standpoint, that's pretty boring. In the second case, I was dancing with ideas of Sympahty and Runes, both of which I discussed a little before. In the latest version, I've got a highly individual, varying expressions of control. I've picked mostly 5, but there's some room for other consideration.

1. Blade - This is a variation of the physical / dance expression of magic found in Marie Brennan's Doppleganger (I believe it's been re-released as Warrior & Witch). The energies are focused through combat (will probably include dance here). 
2. Bard - This one explores the magic of Song. 
3. Weaving - This might be weaving fabric, or it might be more general symbology. There's still some room for exploration
4. Herbology / Alchemy - This one is mostly for a single character, but a couple others can get some use out of it. This weilder makes potions, poltices, etc.
5. Smithing - The act of creating an object, and binding energies to it.

Some of these might get transformed with the Themes I talk about a little later.

Source
 The one thing that hasn't changed since this story's conception is that the source is elemental in nature. The elements also will be part of the expression of magic, parts of the themes. More on this later.

Drawback
This is the big thing. I've no idea what drawback I feel like employing. I've been dancing with a couple life energy ideas, or working out a weakening of emotion, but that seems...well dangerous. I dont' want to give my magic users cause to forget emotions, because then they'll all become psychopathic. So I don't think I want to go that way. Memory is cool, but I'd feel too much like a rip-off.

Themes
In this, I'm investigating the sorts of magical effects. That's kinda what I mean by themes here. As mentioned before, I really want to have the elemental effects. I was having a few other effects per person, but I've recently decided that each character gets general elemental control, one literal expression, and one figurative expression. I'm not sure yet how the first two will be separated in all cases, but some of them will be handy. For the character I've posted before, Jeshi, the element is Fire. Her figurative expression is giong to be the blood magic, which I've been workign on. It might not be as figurative as I wanted it to be, but I think it'll fit. Blood is the carrier of the inner fire, and as such is symbollically attached to a persons life force, and to their magic. My protagonist for the first book is going to be limited to Water, as much as I wanted fire as well. That was too mary sue-ish. The literal expression is going to be a mistform, which might still be mary sue-ish, but I think it'll work. THe figurative expression will either be traveling magic, or shapeshifting. While I prefer the latter, the former might be more useful. If I decide to limit it to one personal expression, then I'll drop the mistform.

So that's about all I've got for the moment, but I think it's a decent start.

Bonus Post: Magic

So I've been contemplating this blog post for a long time. Truth be told, the idea is a few years in the making. But let's see if I can't make some progress on it. This blog post will be quite incomplete, but hopefully it'll give you, faithful readers, and me a sense on what's out there.

Magic is a tricky thing. It's a staple of most fantasy, and yet every author puts their own spin on it. This makes it tricky to write, since there's so much possibility. The purpose of this entry is to try and break it down into categories, with examples, and maybe some commentary.  So let's get started.

Magical Effects
The focus of this entry is on active magic, but I would be remiss if I didn't discuss, at least at some level, side-line magical effects. This is probably some of the most common magic out there, because it requires the least amount of though on developing a coherent system with it's own rules and drawback.

In this sort of magic, the effects are usually environmental, rather than intentional. Wayside school has a missing 13th floor, and nobody gives it a second thought. The Indian in the Cupboard is another example, where all of the magic is contained in the little cupboard. For the ease of discussion, I'll lump many werewolf and shifter mythologies in here as well, since often times the main drawback is lack of control. In scope, the magic is often either very limited, or very broadly applied. In both cases, it offers little flexibility.

In writing these, the effects are only as important as the conflict it draws for your characters. If bringing pumpkins to life makes your characters life harder, and if it fits the theme and mood of your story? Then consider adding it, because everyone loves talking pumpkins.

Focusing Will:  Word
So now onto our exploration of more active magics. In most cases, magic is an exercise in will. The system, be it incantations, runes, whatever, simply serves to focus the will. In some cases, the Dresden Files being the most recent example that's crossed my bookshelves, you can do magic without the words, but it's usually harder and always more dangerous.

One of the most common ways of focusing magic is through incantations. In most cases, the language used to focus the will is important. It can be an old language (Eragon is one example, though it also uses aspects presented later. Another is Name of the Wind, and a third is Earthsea, and who can forget Harry Potter). Many times, an ancient language appropriate to the setting is used, though it does occasionally happen that a language specific to magic is created. Another possibility is that it can be any language except your native one.  I know I've seen this last one in a few cases (Dresden touches on it), but I can't think of a clear example. In most cases where this last one is used, the explanation is that your native language is too closely colored by your own interpretations to correctly formulate spells. A third important category is where your native language is used. The main example of this I have at the moment is The Belgariad.

Blood
Another common motif is the importance of blood. In some cases (The Hollows books), it's enzymes in the blood that kindles magic. In others (one of the systems in the Dragon Nimbus Histories), spilling blood strengthens a spell, offers more power. Sometimes (Meredtih Gentry books), the blood is simply the target of the magic itself.

The thing with blood, is that it holds life. In any magical undertaking, its a powerful symbol. I don't think I've seen a single one where blood was present and unimportant.

True Names
True names are another big power. Giving someone your true name gives them power over you. In some cases, this is why practitioners take crazy monikers. In some cases (The Hollows, Dresden Files), true names are only a problem for sentient beings. In some cases, this is restricted to humans, in others it can include supernatural creatures as well. In other cases (Eragon, Name of the Wind, Earthsea), everything has a true name, and it is by speaking that name that you gain power over it. In still other cases, magic is worked by changing the true name (Earthsea has some examples of this).

Sympathy
Another interesting method is using Sympathy. Name of hte Wind is the one that comes to mind that uses this to the greatest effect,  but it's present in the Dresden files, and any other piece that uses the vodoun/voodoo tradition. The idea is that magic is transferred through similarity. Pieces (hair, skin, blood, nails for people or animals, a branch for a tree, etc.) are the best similarity for a whole, but sometimes other things can be used. The more similar the items, the less effort it takes to create an effect.

Math
Sometimes, magic is ordered by the structure of math. I'll also toss programming languages into this category, because what's important is that it's structured. In this case, magic is really a exercise in adding order to the chaos of reality. Some examples of this include the Mathemagics, Wizardry Compiled, and the WebMage novels.

Runes
The last method of focusing will I'll talk about is Runes. These are shapes, often very specific ones, which are used to focus energies into magic. Name of the Wind has some sigildry in it,
School for Adventurers and the Mortal Instruments also use runes to great effect. Many modern occult practices also set great store in symbols and runes, rooted in the ancient nordic and celtic traditions. It's also worth noting that a special case symbol, the circle, is often used as a barrier for protection.

Sources of Magic: Internal
The next topic on the agenda is where does hte magic come from. Probably the most limiting, and yet still very common, methods is to have Magic be internal. It is usually a finite quantity inside the willworker. When the magic is consumed, the mage usually is weak, almost on the brink of death. She has spent all her will, all her life in trying to achieve her aim.

Elemental
Another common source is the elements. Usually, its the standard 4: Earth, Fire, Wind and Water. occaionsally another one will pop up (Heart, Void, Spirit). Sometimes it can be even more specific, including most anything that can occur (Stone, Plants, etc.). The last one bleeds into the next category. Some examples of Elemental-based magic are Warrior and Witch, the Darksword books, and Weather Warden.

Environmental
Sometimes the magic can be drawn from anywhere in the environment, or from specific things. Some of the Magic the Gathering books involve pulling energy from the land. This was also present in Dragon Ball Z a few times. Some cases are more limiting, such as the Circle of Magic books. In those cases, specific objects, ideas, or events can grant magical power, but if you're locked out of those, then you can be in big trouble. The Dragon Nimbus books are another extreme example of this, where the magic can be drawn from dragons.

Ley Lines
Sometimes the magic comes from very specific areas of the earth. While there's no common explanation for these veins of power, the fact that they exist is a common trend, even in modern mysticism traditions. they are usually invisible, though those with the sense can detect them. In some cases, the lines can be colored by the emotions of humanity, in other cases they're pure. In either case, being trapped without a line near by is recipe for disaster.

Drawbacks
The third part of any magical system, and the part that I'm having the hardest time working on. It is, however, probably the most important. When you introduce magic into the world, there's always a price. Some of the most interesting ones I've come across recently are: Sanity (Magic or Madness), casting magic eats away at your mind, causing you to slowly lose it and Memories (Magic in the Blood), every time you cast you loose a memory. Common ones include energy, and control. I think I've read one where lifespan was the cost to pay as well. Control is an interesting case, because it relies on external (or sometimes internal) policing. The line between white and black magic is thin, and all to easy to cross. Crossing it means that your own kind will hunt you down (Rouge Mage, The Hollows). Either that or you give yourself up to a non-practitioner (Rouge Mage, if memory serves. Also some aspects of Bitter Night are similar). If you see references to Mana, then that's a toll of energy, of life force, which is usually fairly hard to come by.

Conclusions
So I didn't get as much commentary in there as I wanted, but it still got the point across. If you're looking for small magical effects, then keep it only to the level that it services the plot. More active magic needs three basic components for an interesting story: a method of control, a source, and a drawback. The drawback is what provides the drama, and to an extent the realism. The source is usually simply thematic, but sometimes there can be mroe to it. And the method of control helps you define a progression (learning spells, learning words, etc.), to allow your characters to grow.

Books mentioned
Wayside School - Lewis Sachar
Indian in the Cupboard - Lynne Reid
Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
Eragon - Christopher Paolini
Earthsea - Ursula K. LeGuin
The Belgariad - David Eddings
Dragon Nimbus - Irene Radford
The Hollows - Kim Harrison
Meredith Gentry - Laurell K. Hamilton
School for Adventurers
Mortal Instruments - Cassandra Claire
Mathemagics - Margaret Ball and Larry Elmore
Wizardry Compiled - Rick Cook
WebMage - Kelley McCullough
Weather Warden - Rachel Caine
Warrior and Witch - Marie Brennen
Darksword - Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Magic the Gathering: Whispering Woods - Clayton Emery
Dragon Ball Z
Circle of Magic - Tamora Pierce
Magic or Madness - Justine  Larbalestier
Magic in the Blood - Devon Monk
Rouge Mage - Faith Hunter
Bitter Night - Diana Pharaoh Francis