Character Sketch: Andrea Wellfort

Andrea Wellfort -- Andy -- is Darian Silver's closest friend in their home village of Norpost. Like Darian, she is very much at home in the woods of the Great Forest, and is as familiar with forest magics as she is with Imperial magics. She is an accomplished archer, a decent fencer, and quite skilled with a quarterstaff. She does not have any particular focus for her magics. 

Andy is quiet, cautious, and fiercely loyal; she is also entirely confident of her own abilities, and will sometimes do things that look insanely dangerous to anyone who doesn't know her. Her father is the village blacksmith, and she sometimes helps him at the forge. She is not looking forward to finishing the next four years of school in Norpost with Darian gone, but she is genuinely happy that he got accepted to Sunhaven.

Character Sketch: Amados Bronin

Amados is beginning his first year at Sunhaven Academy, having applied and been accepted for his unusual talent as an artist. He is still human, though several groups (the vampires in particular) are interested in courting him despite his humble background. He is quietly ambitious, and has learned enough of fencing and sorcery to hold his own, but his relaxed and self-deprecating sense of humor are out of place among the children of the high and mighty. He uses a (very plain) dress sword as a focus, but his real skill is in producing images that connect directly to actual people and places; he spends most of his time working with the Academy's Illustrator to improve his art, and he isn't above producing a number of non-magical sketches or comics to make a point. 

In addition to the usual Tarot-style cards carried by the personages of the Empire, he keeps a personal deck of cards that he can use to connect to beasts, strategic locations (such as the inside of a jail cell), and environmental conditions (lava, hurricanes -- think of the Addams Family library) that he might want to call forth. 

Art is dangerous.

Setting: The Arcane Empire

The Arcane Empire is the setting for the Magic School For Monsters book that I'm (still) trying to write. It is a land populated by human beings as well as magical races, rich in sorcery and under constant threat from the monster-filled wastelands beyond its southern border. Those are the two fundamental elements that define and inform everything else about the empire. 

Regarding Sorcery:

• Almost anyone can use sorcery. The right words and gestures, made together, produce reliable results. No real mystical understanding is required; words and phrases can be learned by rote, and most people know at least a handful of useful sayings.
  
  
• Speakers are the ones who study the grammar and vocabulary of sorcery, in order to assemble their own phrases; the best of them are able, through long practice, to condense long, precise speeches into shorter phrases that can be filled in with keywords specific to a particular situation.
  
  
• Scribes are able to render words and phrases into the hieroglyphs of the Forgotten Tongue, and so add magical qualities to ordinary items. This can encompass anything from creating a doorway that cleans you off when you walk through it, to marking a chest with a glyph that will explode when someone touches it, to adding powerful magics to a sword or shield. Scribes are highly valued by the Imperial military, and learning how to inscribe is one of the best ways to complete your service without ever seeing battle.
  
  
• Images also have power in Imperial magic. An image can be connected to a real place, or to a specific person, allowing a means of magical communication and transportation. This can be done with any size of image, but tarot or playing cards are especially common, particularly among Speakers. 

Regarding Monsters:

• The monsters come out of the southern wastelands, and would lay waste to the empire were the southern border not constantly defended. This is the primary role and purpose of the Imperial military, and the reason why a four-year term of service is required of all Imperial citizens.
  
  
• The monsters come in many shapes and sizes, but even the ones that most closely resemble humans are incapable of infiltration. Their actions, outlook, and understanding are simply too alien for them to pretend to be human. The more humanoid strains are also a relatively new development; Imperial records show no accounts of them prior to about thirty years ago.
  
  
• The monstrous Great Houses within the Empire are almost all the result of sorcerous attempts to create beings better suited to fighting the wasteland beasts (as are their more heroic equivalents within the houses of Light).
  
  
• Sorcery -- Spoken or Inscribed -- remains the most effective defense that the Empire has against monstrous incursions. Regular troops are trained in basic sorcerous attacks and defenses, but officers and specialists are expected to be Speakers themselves, or at least have a good vocabulary. Most have other gifts as well, either dark or light Arcana.
  

Character Sketch: Professor Young

Professor Victor Young is the primary instructor for shadow arcana at Sunhaven, and as such has been assigned to mentor Darian Silver. He is a portly, older gentleman who uses a classical wooden wand as his focus. He is friendly and even charming, but sometimes relies on that too much and asks his students uncomfortably personal questions. His shadow magics are unlike Darian's: his are an extension of his will, completely under his control. He is also skilled in the magics of fire, motion, and battlefield healing. 

Professor Young is a man with secrets.

Writing Progress: Shadow Academy

 Last week was an absolute beating, with about eight major thing all falling on me at once. I finally managed to take a day off on Friday, and even then I wound up jumping in to get a couple of things done. So writing progress in general has been minimal, and writing progress with my Magical School For Monsters projects has been even more so. (I'd really meant to put in at least a couple of hours on that day off -- that was sort of the point -- but I blew about half the day catching up on non-work stuff like oil changes and then took a nap and then had to pick up Secondborn from school and after that I was just done. With all that cleared away, I could use another couple of days off to actually do some writing, but... well... {{insert the sound of bitter laughter here}} Yeah.)

Still, progress is progress, however small. Darian and his group of proto-friends have arrived at the school, and Natalya is taking steps to keep them together long enough to see if they could really become friends. Which is good, because Darian is fairly well worn out from what he's done so far, even if confronting a jerk and making introductions to a bunch of strangers doesn't seem like all that much. 

The Sunhaven Academy of the Midnight Accord doesn't have the sort of formalized division of houses that appear in a lot of Magical Schools (and other YA dystopian setups), but it still has its groupings and alliances and rivalries. The ghouls, for example, stick together and help each other out; what they lack in status, they make up in reputation. And they're tough, too. The vampires, on the other hand, have the benefits of early education and training, but they're frequent spoiled and rely too much on their prestige and status. Even the ones who are really, really good -- and there are quite a few -- are arrogant and hard to work with, and don't see that as a weakness. The ogres don't keep so tightly together; they aren't high-status, but they aren't reviled either -- and they're strong. Shapechangers, meanwhile, are a mixed bag; some come from powerful families or clans, some are personally powerful, some are both, some are neither.

The personal rivalries are just as bad as the social groups. Darian has already managed to insult one of the vampires, Dominic Chaddock, before they even reached the Academy; Chaddock and his cousin are absolutely going to want to put the no-name peasant in his place. And the one witness to the exchange, Nadia Gheata, has told Darian that as much as she enjoyed watching it, she can't be friends with him until she sees how their interactions play out. Darian, who comes from a low-status family and grew up in the hinterlands of the Empire at the edge of the Great Forest, isn't prepared for any of this. He has no status and isn't interesting in building a reputation, he just wants to make peace with his shadow so that it quits disrupting his life. 

Life is about to get very, very interesting at Sunhaven.

Character Sketch: Darian Silver

Darian Silver is a fourteen-year-old with a problem: his shadow magic has a mind of its own and keeps getting him into trouble. With his family’s support, he’s applied to Sunhaven Academy in the hope that a school full of monsters will be better equipped to deal with him than his own small town. Unlike most of his new peers, Darian isn’t ambitious, privileged, or status-conscious; he didn’t come to make connections or prepare for his time in the Imperial Army and a career afterwards. Making a place for himself won’t be easy, but it’s the only plan he has. 

Darian is also unusual in that he has no focus, and that probably half of the magic he knows comes from the Great Forest (and will be weaker or unusable at Sunhaven, which is on the far side of the empire). He is of average height, wiry and slim, and has a good grounding in basic survival sorcery, including some healing.

Character Sketch: Joseph Bradford

A first-year student at Sunhaven, Joseph Bradford -- Joey -- is a vampire (living, not undead) with an affinity for rats. His focus is a familiar rat named Whisper, and he can take a variety of rat-based shapes including a regular rat, a terrifyingly large rat, and a rat-person crossbreed. He is Dominic Chaddock's cousin, and one of his closest friends. (This is mainly because the two of them give each other permission to be perfectly horrible to anyone they don't like, or anyone who they think deserves it, or just anyone who happens to be around when they're in the mood to be cruel.) He is tall (though not quite as tall as Chaddock), with dark hair and eyes and an unusually pale complexion. Joey is not above using his familiar or his shapeshifting to spy on other students, and is perfectly willing to use whatever he learns for embarrassment, leverage, or outright blackmail. He stays in Chaddock's shadow because it keeps people from realizing just how much of Chaddock's cruelty originates with him.

Character Sketch: Nadia Gheata

Nadia is starting on her first year at Sunhaven Academy. She is fully human, small and slim and pale and blonde, and only slightly unusual for choosing to study at Sunhaven despite being born to House Tecuceanu, which holds a wide area of farmlands and vineyards near the center of the empire. Nadia has a solid general background in sorcery, with a specialty in ice magics. She is well-versed in Imperial politics, though generally from the perspective of the Houses of Light; she is also surprisingly capable with staff or spear. Her focus is a red-gold ring that she wears on her left hand; it becomes a longknife or a sword when she needs it to. She fights left-handed, but does all of her writing, drawing, etc. right-handed. 

Nadia is still feeling her way along in an unfamiliar environment; she knows the houses and clans of the Midnight Accord, but she isn't intimate with them.

Character Sketch: Etta Chen

Etta is a private, studious girl -- though she's very cheerful and encouraging when she makes time for established friends. A magical transformation gone awry has left her with an oversized, scaly right arm and shoulder, with six fingers and claws; the scales are a sandy brown, pale against her black hair and dark skin. The arm is highly resistant to further transformation (also cold, heat, and physical damage) and effectively prevents her from shapechanging. Also, she's right-handed and the change forced her to learn how do a lot of more delicate things with her left hand.

Etta originally applied to Sunhaven in the hope of having her arm restored, but so far nobody has managed it. She is now in her third year, and becoming reconciled to it; the arm has come to serve as her focus. She is a particularly accomplished fighter with longsword or rapier, and alternates between fighting right-handed to put her armored arm forward, or fighting with a blade in her left hand and her right arm serving as a sort of armored gauntlet with claws.

Shadow Academy: The Departure

This is not my actual opening scene. This is one I wrote out as a possible opening scene, but it starts out too far back from the main focus of the story, which is Darian and his time at the Sunhaven Academy of the Midnight Accord. 

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

Darian Silver looked across the carefully-cleared field to the tall stone tower of the skydock at the far end and the massive beast that floated in the air beside it. "Dad," he said, faintly exasperated. "We talked about this. You helped me with application letter. We all agreed that this was best." 

Eric Silver shrugged. "I know, but agreeing that something is a good idea isn't always the same thing as actually being willing to go through with it when the time comes. I just want you to know that you can change your mind."

Darian nodded, conceding that his father had a point. But... The alternative would be to climb back in the wagon, go back home, and try to finish the next four years of school under Schoolmaster Devinter, who already thought he was a troublemaker -- and then join the Imperial Army with no better control or understanding of his shadow than he had now. It sounded like a recipe for disaster.

Aware as always that he was thinking about it, his shadow reached down through his hand and flowed along the handle of his small pack. Darian held himself still, focusing on what it was doing, and felt it touch his extra clothes and the small pouch of coins that his father had added. After a moment it withdrew, leaving the contents of his pack undisturbed. 

Relieved at that, Darian said: "I think that's our answer," and watched his father nod in acceptance. 

"You still have the cards? And your letter?" 

Darian touched the front of his jacket, feeling the small wooden case in the inner pocket. "I've got them." He'd checked them at least three times before they left home, twice on the road, and once again when they'd arrived here at the airfield of Urngardt, but it was still a relief to find them where he expected. 

"Good." His father hesitated, then bent down and hugged him. Darian released his pack long enough to return the gesture. "Take care of yourself, Darian. Learn everything you can. Make good friends."

Darian clenched him tighter for a moment, then let go. "I'll let you know when I get there. Is... Is Mom going to be all right?" 

His father drew back a little, looking thoughtful. "Your mother is wrestling with some things that... don't really involve you. She'll be fine, and better once she knows you're well and happy." 

"I'd better get going, then." Darian shouldered his pack, made a vague gesture that was almost a wave, and then started across the field. 

First drafts and older writings

Last night I tried to settle in and do some more writing on Shadow Academy, the Magic School for Monsters project that I'm working on. I'm torn, because I like the opening I have currently, and I like the things that happen after it, but it also feels like I'm getting distracted by them. Also, I know I have a bad tendency towards Kitchen Sink Syndrome -- throw in every cool idea that comes along! They won't clutter up the book until you can't even find your way back to the original plot! Surely not! 

...So yeah, I kind of find myself looking at a choice: use a different opening, or press on and trim this later.

This is, admittedly, better than what happened with my last project, where I literally couldn't seem to find an opening that I liked well enough to continue on with. Kitchen Sink Syndrome, again: I had so many ideas for the project that any given opening closed off some ideas that I really liked, until finally the whole thing stalled. 

So I sat down and tried to think about the Shadow Academy storyline, and whether to try a new opening that's closer to the action or continue on this intriguing little bit of wayside world-building, and... I couldn't muster any enthusiasm for either approach. Which is not a huge surprise; 2021 has been hugely stressful, I'm exhausted, and we'd just finished a very full day. 

I would really, really, really have liked to get some writing done. 

But in a fit of uncommon good sense, I decided not to force it. (I know there are writers and writing advice who say, "Push on, and clean it up during editing!" but that does not seem to work for me. The inevitable result of me trying to do that is crap writing followed by frustration and burnout.) Instead, I went back and looked at an old throw-away project that I was playing with a couple of years ago in an effort to write something that I wasn't deeply invested in and could possibly finish. 

And it was more or less what I remembered. It's a fantasy story about a couple of princes who get roped into accompanying the daughter of the High King to a wilderness-lost temple so that she can renew her family's link to their patron god. I remember that at one point I got overtired and determined to Get Some Writing Done and then got frustrated with the project and gave up, but for the life of me I do not remember why. What I read back through last night is... fine. Nothing I couldn't pick back up. Enjoyable reading, even.

(I think, looking back at it, that I was trying to get it going on a regular schedule on Patreon so that I could finish setting that up, so it seems likely that the crap stuff that derailed me is all over there rather than in the document that I was looking at last night. I will not be going back to review any of that; it'll just derail me again.)

So I finished reading it, and added a couple of lines, and went to bed. 

I'm so proud of me.

Character Sketch: Marta Black

Marta is paralyzed from the waist down, in a way that Imperial Sorcery has not been able to repair. (There was a magical plague that swept out of the wastes shortly after she was born.) She uses a wheeled chair, but is also perfectly capable of levitating when she cares to make the effort. Her father is a crafter and her mother is a clerk; they both put in their time in the Imperial Army before returning to civilian life, marrying, and having children. Marta is focused, organized, and adept at sorcery; she applied to Sunhaven because the Bright Academies generally expect their students to be physically whole. She has every intention of showing them exactly what they're missing. Her focus is an amulet which she wears around her neck; it resembles a stamped coin, with the image of a wheel on one side and a shield on the other.

Shadow Academy: Progress is progress, I guess

I got a bit more done on Shadow Academy last night, despite being exhausted and unfocused. It's not much, but it's more than I had so I'll take it. (And it's still, basically, the story of a young man going off to magic school and what happens there.) I've also, in the interim, found recommendations for two more books in that same genre: 

• It Ends In Fire by Alex Schvartz, in which a young woman enters Wizard School for the express purpose of taking down the whole of magical society.
• Carry On, by Rainbow Rowell, the story of the worst Chosen One ever in his last year at Wizard School. Intriguingly, this book -- the first in a trilogy -- appears to have grown out of another book of hers, Fangirl, in which the main character is heavily involved in the fandom for the trilogy. 

I haven't managed to read either one, yet. (I'm finishing something else first.) But once I do, these two are next up on my list. (I may add Fangirl as well, if I enjoy Carry On.)

I feel like a lot of people are processing their thoughts about the Harry Potter books right now; it's been long enough to get some distance and perspective on them, and perhaps the author behaving badly has also caused a lot of people to reexamine them. I don't know, but I don't see that as any reason not to write my own Wizard School book. 

Character Sketch: Headmaster Stavros Petrovski

Stavros Petrovski was born to a side-branch of the imperial family, and raised for a life at court. He attended Starhold Academy and graduated with honors before being commissioned as the mage-assign for an obscure company on the western edge of the northern border. From there, he rose slowly through the ranks, always in front-line positions. It was therefore no surprise that he died in battle when a gnawer barreled through the line and attacked him. 

It was, however, something of a surprise when he held himself together after being killed, destroyed the gnawer, and continued providing the sorcerous support that allowed his unit to hold their section of the line. The servitors were thrown back, and afterwards Stavros' unit was able to move forward and clean out the nearest nest. He was promoted, then promoted again; by the time he retired from the Imperial Army, he was a sorcerer-general. After his retirement, he took a place at Sunhaven Academy and eventually became its headmaster. 

Headmaster Petrovski has a lean, rangy build and moves with the easy grace of a young athlete. His skin, however, is tight and withered, and there is a massive gash across his left cheek that exposes pale bone and teeth. (He uses magic to speak.) His eyes are withered back into their sockets, and replaced with gleaming red sparks that seem to be further back in his skull than should be possible.

Character Sketch: Aiden Smith

Aiden is a Cobalt, one of the blue-skinned people who live in the Great Forest and mine the mountains beyond it. He is beginning his first year at Sunhaven, and hopes to bring what he learns there back to his people and perhaps help them achieve a better position with the empire. (Cobalts, as a general thing, are familiar with the magics of the forest rather than those of the empire; they are generally considered a separate people rather than imperial citizens, and their freedom is assured mainly by the Great Forest's evident dislike of anyone who tries to exploit its resources. Otherwise, they'd probably have been assimilated into the empire by now.) Aiden is tall and slender, and his focus is a familiar: in this case, a small semi-dragon that usually rides on his shoulder. He wears a silver ring to help him remember his family.

Sleep is my friend

So after a week or more of thinking, "I really ought to get to sleep earlier," I finally put myself down right after we finished eating dinner -- well, not right after, but as soon as possible after. That was about seven-thirty, I think. 

I slept straight through to six-forty this morning. 

So, call that about eleven hours. And I feel much better for it. Like, I think I finally got that system reset that my body's been wanting. I'm still yawning, of course -- I haven't been awake that long, after all -- but moving, feeling, doing things? All feel like less of a struggle. 

Writing progress has been minimal this week. I had an idea for one of the D&D stories, but it's too far out on the timeline for me do anything with it right now. I may just pass it back to my DM to play with. And I need to get back to work on Shadow Academy, which is currently still just a bunch of character sketches and an intro scene; I need to get the story going. 

Work is still busy and looks like to get busier for the next several months, but there's not much to do there except ride the wave and learn as much as I can; we're going to need it. 

Oh, yeah: and get sleep. Sleep is my friend.

One interesting side-effect of getting that much sleep: I remember my dreams, and my dreams were weird. Like, I had taken a travel detour to watch a zombie movie, and that movie was also ground zero for a zombie outbreak. A lot of avoiding zombies, blocking their way, and getting out of the theater. So either my brain is deeply recursive, or it's very confused. Possibly it's a reaction to our idiot governor reopening the state before we're full vaccinated. Or the whole thing was a metaphor for this project at work...

Character Sketch: Julia Huntington

Julia Huntington is in her second year at the Shadow Academy, and while she isn't especially adept at direct combat her skill at bone magic is more than enough to make up for it. Her family has belonged to the Midnight Accord for generations, though her particular branch holds little in the way of political power; they allied with the vampires and ghouls and beastmen and shapechangers because of their skill at necromancy, for which the Houses of Light despised them every bit as much as the others. Julia is socially awkward, and frequently seems nervous or distant. Her focus is a bone mask which she wears to cast spells, and she frequently has one or more spirits hovering around her to take part in her magics.

Character Sketch: Julian Arden

Julian Arden was heir to the chivalrous House Brightblade until he and his brothers unlocked a forbidden door in the cellars beneath his family's house. Unexpectedly bound to a bloodthirsty magic dagger, he was suspected of fratricide and refused entry to Skywall Academy. He wound up at Sunhaven by process of elimination, and is now in his third year there. The dagger serves as his focus, and gives him access to some of its own unique abilities. He has recovered somewhat from the grief-stricken mess that was he was when he first arrived, but has stayed mostly apart from the social life of the school in favor of making his own quiet way. He was disinherited but not disowned, and remains estranged from his family. Instead, he remains on campus or visits with friends on holidays.

Writing Progress: Getting There, I think

So, I haven't made any visible progress on Shadow Academy. Last week was supposed to be the week when I'd regroup, re-evaluate my projects, assign some priorities, and generally just get my feet under me. Instead, well, work just fell on my head like an avalanche of snot. (It's a rare natural phenomenon, found only in the Eastern European nation of Mucosia.) I've spent most of the last couple of days trying to export data files on stored documents -- time-consuming, since some of these document types contain upwards of 65,000 documents -- and work on other projects in between, and listen in on training for a new set of applications that we're in the process of switching over to. 

Work, basically, has eaten my life. 

But I've been thinking about the story, and how it shapes itself from my opening scene, and what the vampire prince Dominic might say upon first meeting Darian, and how Darian might respond. It'll work, I think, and it'll carry the story forward, and as I bring in more characters we'll get some interesting groupings even before we get to the final arrival at the Sunhaven Academy of the Midnight Accord.

I've also had a few oblique thoughts about Remant and a book-length project set in the milieu that I've tentatively been calling A Remnant Of Heroes. But I'm not working on that one now; it was originally intended to be a series of shorts, somewhat like the Conan stories, to occupy me when I needed a break from other projects. Just take the character, throw him into something interesting, and see what he does. 

Only... he needs a longer story arc, and I'm not ready to focus on that right now. Not yet. Someday, time and attention permitting, but first I have to survive June.

Here's hoping your projects are going well, dear readers, and if you want to talk about them in the comments I'd be excited to hear from you.

Character Sketch: Natalya Petrović

Natalya is the second daughter of the Emperor, a position colloquially referred to as the Shadow Princess. (The first child -- referred to as Sunborn or Brightborn -- traditionally attends one of the classical academies, while the second is sent to Sunhaven and frequently either becomes a monster or marries into one of the houses of the darker aristocracy. Natalya is still human and very much on the fence about the idea of eventually getting married, at all, ever, to anyone.) She is marked out from the other students by the company of her bodyguards, and would very much prefer to be studying somewhere else in some less-visible role. She is tall and lean, with dark brown hair and olive skin, and uses a court sword as her focus. She has a solid background in sorcery, fencing, politics, and the Imperial economy. 

Not much work on the story itself right now; I've complained before about how much I hate the October-November-December "holiday season", but in looking back I've come to the conclusion that May is when things usually fall apart. On the plus side, I'm still doing things like this to keep my focus on the project, so... yeah, once the pace slackens a bit I should be able to come back to it. I hope.