I had the idea for Blood Magic a few years ago, as a way of combining several ideas that I’d been looking to explore, but had not yet found a suitable medium in which to explore them. For one thing, I’d long imagined a magic system built around the shedding of blood. Costs are an important feature of so-called “hard” magic systems, and what more visceral cost of magic can there be than blood? For another, I wanted to write something episodic in nature, like the older television shows where you could just watch one, possibly from the middle of the series, without needing to have watched any of the episodes that came before, or being obligated to watch all of the episodes that come after to know the conclusion.

Around the same time, I was interested in the idea of writing fairy-tale type stories. Castles, wizards, princes and princesses, magic swords stuck in stones, farmers’ adopted sons with mysterious birthmarks: these are often considered the common tropes of fantasy writing, and as such are considered sort of overused when it comes to serious fantasy. Yet these are the very things that draw many people to the genre in the first place. This interest led to a short story, The Boy and the Bee, and also to the first “episode” of Blood Magic.

There is a very Arthurian flavor to Blood Magic, which is not surprising, considering the fairy tale, fantasy trope inspiration behind the world-building process. My intention is to release an “episode” a month, consisting of a stand-alone (or occasionally two-part) story in the short to novella length range. Each “episode” will be freely available directly on the site, although in the fashion of the television show format by which this was inspired, there will be advertisements periodically within the text.

Despite the name, Blood Magic is not a dark series. There are certain, darker elements, but the stories themselves are not particularly dark. I hope that you enjoy Blood Magic.