Charmers is my first professionally published story (I should really add that to my author bio), which I am very excited about, even now.
The Naming Review
I read a lot, and I’ve been reading for a long time, especially in the fantasy genre, but something I’ve noticed since I began to make a deliberate study of writing in order to improve my own storytelling is that I've become much more critical of what I read.
Magic is Science is Science is Magic
Long before Arthur C Clarke coined the phrase “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” before Howard Taylor riffed on that claim to assert that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun,” and probably even before Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, people, and especially writers, have been fascinated by this idea of an equivalency between science and magic.
Mistborn: Final Empire Review
Even before I went on a spate of re-reads this year, I was planning on re-reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. A new book is scheduled to come out in the fall, the last in the second Mistborn era, and I wanted to make sure that I was fresh on the whole story to maximize my enjoyment when I read it.
Verdon’s Tragedy Sneak Peek
As you hopefully saw in our recent weekly writing update, I finally finished the first draft of Verdon's Tragedy, a side story set in the Fo'Fonas world. Even if revisions go smoothly, I don't expect a release date sooner than December 2022, but I want to share some thoughts about the story and the writing now.
Overpowered Characters
It is worth noting that “overpowered” cannot really be defined on an absolute scale. Rather, it is more useful to discuss characters being overpowered on a relative scale. If you make your hero a goddess, and all of her enemies are mere mortals, you don’t have much of a story, but if all of her enemies are also gods and goddesses, then that character is no longer overpowered. This raises the interesting intellectual exercise of trying to write an interesting story about the relationship between two omnipotent and omniscient beings, but I don’t think tiny human brains are adequate for such a task.
Blood Magic S2:E2: Witch’s Heir Release
I hope that you've been following along with Blood Magic this year, because it's already been pretty exciting. I'm very pleased with how the revised editions of the first season episodes are coming together (revised versions of the first two episodes of season one should now be live here on the site), and the first two episodes of the second season have been pretty strong, as well. At least, I think so, which is mostly based on how the writing process went for them. Usually, that's a decent guide.
The Frankenstory
Between working on Blood Magic and Fo'Fonas, which while very different are both larger-scale projects than anything I've attempted before, I'd like to think that I've been getting a lot better at building characters and plots. Certainly Blood Magic has forced me to stretch in this respect. Since I've been working a lot on them, I decided that I needed another, newer project to keep my writing fresh, since I find that if I sink too much into one or two projects I start to get too deep into the world and the storytelling suffers as a result.
Ghostwater Review
Of all seven Cradle books that have been released so far, Ghostwater was my favorite. This novel delivered on all of the promise that I perceived when I read the first book. It has the most robust character development of the series so far, digs into the technical details of the magic system, instead of just building out to the next level, and it gives insight into some fascinating aspects of the world and the story that have only been alluded to before. Perhaps most strikingly, it is drastically more imaginative than other books in the series, which is a testament more to the level of imagination involved here, than it is an insult to the imaginative level of the other books.
What is Fo’Fonas, Anyway?
About a year and a half ago, I had an idea for a magic system, inspired by how a relatively primitive culture might perceive the four fundamental forces of nature. Just to explore the magic system, I decided to write an expository scene. When I finished, the scene was almost twenty pages long, involved the main character climbing a really, really long staircase, and I realized it was chapter 1, and that I had a chapter 2 to write. About seven months later, I finished the rough draft of what I realized would become the first novel of an epic fantasy series.
IGC Publishing 