Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 13

Chapter 2 is up, Book 2 is done

The second chapter for An Inheritance of Magic is now online!  You can read it here.

For those of you who missed Chapter 1, here’s the link to that as well.

And the first draft of the sequel to An Inheritance of Magic is complete!  No title yet, though it’ll probably be something in the same vein (An X of Y).  This has been a long one – 7 months from beginning to end.  Over the next week I’ll give the manuscript an edit and then send it off to my publishers, but right now, I really need a break.  Going to take the weekend off.

Covers, Audiobooks, and Chapter 2

So we’re now 2 months away from the release of An Inheritance of Magic, and we’ve come to the end of the introductory series of worldbuilding articles (they’ve only scratched the surface of the new setting, with a lot more to go).  In the meantime, quite a backlog of news has built up, so let’s get to it!

First off, An Inheritance of Magic‘s UK cover has been launched!

I really like this one – it’s going to have a gold-foil effect that I think will look very pretty.  This is going to be my first ever English-language hardback release, which I’m quite excited about (I’ve had some hardbacks released in translated editions, but that’s not quite the same).  I’ve also signed what are going to be the title pages for 500 signed copies, which will be released via The Broken Binding – I don’t have a direct pre-order link as yet, but once I do, but I’ll post it up here.

The sequel to An Inheritance of Magic is very close to done.  I’m working on the final chapter as we speak, and just crossed the 90,000 word mark as of yesterday.  First draft should be completed in a week or two at the most.  Once that’s done I’ll send it off to my publishers, take a rest, and then start making plans for Book 3!

I’ve also been in negotiations with my US publisher, Penguin Random House, about an audio narrator for the Inheritance of Magic series.  They’ve involved me in the process this time, so I spent a while last weekend going through audition recordings.  One of the narrators really stood out and I think my publisher’s making an offer at the moment, so hopefully I’ll have some news on that front soon!

And finally, next week I’ll be releasing Chapter 2 of An Inheritance of Magic (Chapter 1 went up five weeks ago).  See you then!

A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #4: Wells

Creating a sigl requires an enormous quantity of essentia, and the only place where so much essentia can naturally be found is at a Well.

Despite its name, a Well is not created in the same way as a human-dug water well – a better analogy would be a natural pond or lake.  When essentia currents converge, the essentia pools and accumulates, like streams feeding a body of water.  The Well continues to ‘fill’ until it reaches its natural capacity, at which point it stabilises.

Wells can be permanent or temporary.  Permanent Wells are those fed by stable, well-established currents of essentia, and when tapped, they immediately begin to replenish themselves.  This process of replenishment is slow, but consistent, and a skilled drucrafter who takes the time to become familiar with a particular Well can generally predict with a fair degree of accuracy how long it will take to refill.  The time for a Well to fully replenish itself varies, but tends to average to about one year.

Permanent Wells can either grow or shrink, depending on how they are treated.  A permanent Well that is carefully nurtured can last for centuries, and can even grow in strength, though such growth is unpredictable and slow.  By contrast, a Well that is fully and repeatedly drained, and given no time to recover between uses, is likely to weaken or dry up entirely.  Unsurprisingly, it’s much easier to harm a permanent Well than it is to nurture one.  Growing a Well is the result of years or decades of slow, patient work, while destroying one takes a fraction of that time.

Temporary Wells are a different story.  If a permanent Well is a natural pond or lake, a temporary Well is like a giant puddle left by a flood.  They accumulate more quickly and more unpredictably than permanent Wells do, and they’re unstable.  A permanent Well that’s left untouched will stay filled practically forever;  a temporary Well will eventually diminish and drain away to nothing.  Taking essentia from one destabilises it, further accelerating this process.  Like blooming flowers, or fruits fallen from a tree, temporary Wells have a very short lifespan, and if not used will wither away.

Wells in Europe are classified according to the Faraday scale, which is a measure of how many sigls the Well can sustainably make in a year (this typically means leaving at least 10% of the Well’s essentia untouched).  A Well with a Faraday rating of 1 can sustainably produce exactly 1 D-class sigl per year.  This is doubled for each half-class above D, as follows:

• A Well with a Faraday rating of 1 can produce 1 D-class sigl per year.
• A Well with a Faraday rating of 2 can produce 1 D+ sigl, or 2 D-class sigls, per year.
• A Well with a Faraday rating of 4 can produce 1 C-class sigl, or 4 D-class sigls, per year.
• A Well with a Faraday rating of 8 can produce 1 C+ sigl, or 8 D-class sigls, per year.
• A Well with a Faraday rating of 16 can produce 1 B-class sigl, or 16 D-class sigls, per year.

. . . and so on.  A-class sigls require a Well with a Faraday rating of 64, and S-class sigls a Well with a Faraday rating of 256.  Such Wells are very rare:  the entire UK contains perhaps twenty Wells capable of producing an S-class sigl, and there are countries in the world with no S-class Wells at all.

A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #3: Sigls

Sigls and the effects they create are the ‘finished product’ of drucraft.  Essentia comes first, Wells come second, and drucrafters come third – the creation of sigls is the second-to-last link at the end of a very long chain.  When an observer sees a drucrafter use a sigl, they are witnessing the end result of years of work (if measuring the skill of the drucrafter), decades of work (if measuring the development of the sigl), or millennia of work (if measuring the evolution of drucraft itself).

Sigls look to the untrained eye like gemstones.  They are very small – about a twelfth of an inch in diameter for a D-class sigl, or between a quarter of an inch and a fifth of an inch for a class B.  Their colouration and pattern provide hints as to their branch and type:  for instance, torchlight sigls are typically translucent and a very pale blue.  They are usually set into pieces of jewellery such as rings, necklaces, or brooches, which makes them resemble gemstones even more closely.  To the uninitiated, the only clue that the sparkling stone on someone’s finger might be more than it appears is that, unlike gemstones, sigls are usually formed in the shape of a perfect sphere . . . but very few would ever notice so small a detail.

Sigls are made of aurum:  pure essentia, crystallised into material form.  It is this fact that makes sigls so small;  when shaping a sigl, a drucrafter is essentially creating mass out of pure energy, which consumes a massive amount of energy to produce a very small amount of mass.  As a result, aurum is, pound for pound, among the most valuable substances on Earth.  An A-class sigl with a diameter of one centimetre – about the width of one of your fingernails – is worth millions.

Of course, it’s not the aurum alone that makes sigls so valuable:  what makes a sigl valuable is what it can do.  When activated by the personal essentia of the drucrafter to which it is bound, a sigl pulls in power from the surrounding environment, transforming that essentia’s raw potential into a specific magical effect.  And these effects can be truly formidable.  At higher levels, a sigl can render its bearer invisible to human eyes, make them light enough to jump buildings, accelerate them to superhuman speeds, make them stronger than a bull, or even alter the flow of time.

However, while a sigl can do any of these things, it can’t do all of these things.  While resting in a Well, essentia is pure potential, capable (in theory) of anything.  But once that essentia is shaped into a sigl, its potential is actualised into a fixed form, closing off all other paths.  Sigls only channel essentia in one very specific way and for one very specific purpose, which is chosen at the moment of their creation and cannot thereafter be changed.  If the drucrafter changes their mind later on and wants the sigl to do something different . . . well, they’ll have to get a new sigl.  And if they have the wrong sigls, or no sigls at all, then their drucraft is of very little use.

What this means in practice is that the primary limit on a drucrafter’s abilities is not their level of skill, but the sigls they possess.  As such, in the drucraft world, talent and ability often come second to resources and connections.

A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #2: The Three Disciplines

Drucraft is comprised of three disciplines, namely:

Sensing:  Perceiving essentia.Channelling:  Controlling essentia.Shaping:  Creating sigls.

All drucraft is an application of one or more of these things.

Sensing is the first and most basic of the disciplines.  A drucrafter’s sensing skill is a measure of their ability to feel the essentia around them:  both the personal essentia in their body, and the ambient essentia in their surroundings.  Although sometimes looked down upon, this is an absolutely essential foundational skill that must be mastered before a drucrafter can progress any further.  Most failed drucrafters fail because of an inability to learn sensing.

Once a drucrafter has learned to sense their own personal essentia, they can begin to control it.  Channelling allows a drucrafter to command their own essentia, moving it around inside of their body and eventually sending it flowing into a sigl.  Sigls vary greatly in the amount of channelling skill required to use them effectively:  learning to use a basic triggered ‘on/off’ sigl is relatively easy, but more complex or variable sigls require much more precision.  The ability to channel is generally considered to be the point at which someone becomes a true drucrafter, and most are content to stop at this stage.

A minority instead choose to push on and learn the third and most difficult of the disciplines:  shaping.  Shapers are the creators of sigls, and as such are absolutely necessary for the survival of drucraft as a whole, but relatively few channellers choose to pursue this path due to how demanding it is in terms of time, skill, and resources.  A prospective shaper must first have a high level of skill in both sensing and channelling, then must spend a significant amount of time and effort in mastering the creation of essentia constructs.  Finally, they must learn to turn those essentia constructs into actual sigls.  Since this requires a Well, opportunities to practice can be rare, and failures costly.

The three disciplines must be learned in ascending order;  one cannot channel without first learning to sense, and both channelling and sensing are a prerequisite for learning to shape.

Learning drucraft is not a quick process.  Even a gifted and hard-working student will typically take at least a year to learn each of the disciplines, and this is very much a lower limit.  In practice two years per discipline is more common, and this is only to reach competence, not mastery.  Achieving manifester level, which is the point at which one may fairly be considered ‘expert’ at all three disciplines, can easily take a decade or more.  This, combined with the high cost of sigls, tends to put drucraft mastery out of reach of those without the resources to be tutored in it from an early age.

A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #1: Essentia

What is drucraft?  It is the art and skill or working with essentia.

Essentia is fundamental and omnipresent, a universal energy source that only interacts with the physical world in limited ways.  It can occupy the same space as material things, and when doing so takes on some of their characteristics.  It ebbs and flows, following invisible currents like those in the ocean or sky, changing as it moves.  From time to time these currents will converge, following the shape of the land to form a location called a Well.  The essentia that accumulates in a Well is still mutable, but is inclined towards a certain aspect of reality.

In its raw form, essentia is almost completely inaccessible to living beings.  A living creature spends every moment of its life surrounded by essentia;  it is in the air they breathe and the food they consume;  it suffuses their bodies both in waking and in sleep.  But it is no more accessible to them than the chemical energy locked away within a piece of rock.  A thundering waterfall may contain more power than a hundred men, but not one of them can simply thrust an arm into the water and take it.  The water rushes on, oblivious to their desires, and it will continue to fall long after they and their descendants are gone.

But with the right tools and the knowledge of how to use them, that power can be harnessed.  A water turbine draws upon the power of a waterfall, siphoning off its energy to generate electricity.  In the same way, through millennia of work and research, practitioners of drucraft have developed techniques to draw upon the power of essentia.  In the case of drucraft, the tool that makes it work is the sigl.

A sigl is a tiny piece of crystallised essentia, created when a drucrafter of sufficient skill draws upon the reserves of a Well and converts them into physical matter.  Sigls have the power to conduct essentia, transforming its raw potential into a specific effect.  They are single-purpose tools, locked at their moment of creation to both their maker and to the effect they were designed to produce.

Sigls are durable, but not eternal.  Essentia resists being given physical form, and when so transformed, it eventually returns to its natural state.  The process is slow, often taking hundreds or thousands of years, but is also inevitable.  Gradually the sigl sublimates, transforming bit by bit into free essentia, which drifts away.  This essentia is reabsorbed into the currents flowing across the land, and the cycle begins anew.

An Inheritance of Magic – Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of An Inheritance of Magic is now online!  You can read it here.  Chapter 2 will be going online in a bit over a month, on August 18th.

Next week will kick off my my new series of worldbuilding articles, A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft.  The first one will be an introduction to essentia, and will go up on July 14th.

And finally, we’re almost due for the release of An Inheritance of Magic’s UK cover, which Orbit should be launching on July 17th.  Unlike the US version, this edition will be in hardback – it’s the first time I’ve had an English-language release in hardback, so I’m quite excited about it.

Reviews, Updates, And Extract Next Week

Various bits of news for this week!

Inheritance of Magic #2 is coming along.  I’ve just finished the penultimate section of the book, making it roughly 5/6th complete – it’s now sitting at 75,000 words out of a planned 90,000.  With a bit of luck I should be able to get the first draft finished in another month or so.  Fingers crossed!

Back on the subject of Book 1, I’ll be posting up Chapter 1 of An Inheritance of Magic next week, after which I’ll be putting up worldbuilding articles for the rest of July.  You can see a full release timeline here.

And finally, we’ve got another early review of An Inheritance of Magic.  This one is from the author’s trade mag, Publisher’s Weekly, and is quite complimentary, calling it “page-turning” and saying that readers will be “eager to see where things go next”.  I won’t post the whole thing up here since it contains a few major spoilers, but it’ll be coming out in the magazine’s July 10 edition.

See you next week for the reveal of Chapter 1!

A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft

It’s now about three and a half months until the release of An Inheritance of Magic, and you know what that means:  it’s time to start on a new series of worldbuilding articles!

The setting for my new series is actually quite thoroughly developed by now.  I spent much of 2021 and 2022 working out the details of the new magic system, the world, and the major players that operate in it, and as a result, by the time An Inheritance of Magic was sent off to the publishers, the setting was already complete enough that I could include a short glossary at the back of the book explaining technical terms and the rules of the setting.  By necessity, though, glossaries have to be compact, so the glossary entries are each quite short.

The new series of worldbuilding articles that I’ll be putting up here on this website will be a bit more casual:  since I’m not limited by page space, I can go into a bit more detail and go off on tangents which I personally find interesting but which weren’t crucial enough to put into the book itself.  Page space is a very limited resource when you’re writing a novel:  the more description and explanation you put in, the more it slows down the story, so for each paragraph of world information, you have to ask yourself “is this really important enough to be worth it?”, and there’s often no right answer to that question.  Putting stuff up online is a nice compromise that lets readers who are interested in this stuff find out more without annoying the ones who’d much rather I just get on with the story.

Like the old Encyclopaedia Arcana, the new series of worldbuilding articles are going to be presented in an in-universe format.  At the moment, my working list of articles is something like this:

EssentiaSiglsWellsSensingChannellingShapingDrucraft HousesDrucraft Ranks

. . . though that might end up changing as the articles get written.

The first four articles will be coming out between July 14th and August 4th, following on from the release of Chapter 1 two weeks from today.

Inheritance of Magic – Charlaine Harris

The early reviews and blurbs for An Inheritance of Magic are starting to come in, and here’s a nice quote for it, this one from Charlaine Harris!

“Benedict Jacka gives us a flawed protagonist but ensures we are always on his side. Stephen Oakwood has many strikes against him: absent father and mother, financial woes, dead-end jobs. But he perseveres in the face of danger and death, and he loves his cat. It’s more than enough. Benedict Jacka is one of my must-reads.”

Charlaine Harris tends to get put in the “mystery” or “paranormal romance” categories more than the “urban fantasy” one, but she’s massively successful, so this quote’ll probably end up featuring on at least some of the covers.