Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 15

New Author Photo

After almost 12 years, I’ve finally replaced my old author photo with a new one in the About Me section.  I figured that the old image of me was sufficiently out of date by this point that it was about time!

 

New Series Title

After much discussion, my new series finally has a name!  The first book in the series, releasing this October, is titled An Inheritance of Magic, and the title we’ve settled on for the series is the “Inheritance of Magic” series.

Yes, I know, not exactly the most imaginative of choices, but I decided in the end that a simple and reader-friendly title was more useful than an original and different one.  For the Alex Verus series, I’d always have to tell people that the first book in the series was Fated, and even then I’ve read dozens of reviews where the reader started with book 2 or 3 or 6 without realising until much later.  At least this way, when I tell readers that the series is called “Inheritance of Magic”, it should be really obvious where they’re meant to start.

Oh, and I changed the URL of the new series page.  So discussion posts elsewhere on the Internet linking to my old series description, like this one, will now link to the wrong place until they’re fixed.  Sorry.  I didn’t want my new series page to have a URL forever reading “New Series”, so figured it was better to change it now rather than later.

New Series – Bookseller Announcement

Here’s the official announcement of my new series from the publishing trade mag, The Bookseller:

Orbit has acquired a new dark academia-inspired fantasy series, “set in a world where anyone can use magic – if they can afford the price,” by Benedict Jacka, author of the Alex Verus novels.

UK and Commonwealth rights to three books were acquired by Jenni Hill at Orbit from Sophie Hicks at the Sophie Hicks Agency. US and Canada rights were snapped up by Anne Sowards at Berkley in the US.

The series sees magical power bought and sold by aristocratic dynasties and vast mega-corporations, telling the story of Stephen, who has a minimum wage job and a cat but who has inherited an unusual talent for magic from his father, and realises that unlocking that potential will take money and training.The first book – An Inheritance of Magic – will be out in October 2023, with the dates for the next two books as-yet undisclosed.

Dates for the next two books might be officially undisclosed, but based on the rate at which Book 2 is currently going, it should be a pretty safe bet that Book 2 will be out in 2024 and Book 3 in 2025.

(Oh, and the article’s got my new author photo, with a guest appearance by my cat.  My current one’s about 10 years old at this point, so I figured it was about time to update it.)

Worldbuilding Articles

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on last week’s question!  I read all your comments with a lot of interest.

Your responses were split, but leant towards “post any additional material after release, not before”.  The general consensus was that most of you would rather learn about the world with the protagonist to avoid spoilers and to preserve the surprise.  A minority said that they’d prefer to know as much as possible in advance since anyone who didn’t want to could just not read them, but several made the point that it might be hard to resist spoilers if they were freely available.

So, with this in mind, I think I’m going to go with the following compromise:

As long-time readers will know, I typically put up the first one or two chapters of a new book ahead of its publication – usually 2 to 3 months in advance.  I’ll start putting up worldbuilding articles on this site, but only after the first one or two extracts have been released.  Specifically, during the pre-release period, I’ll make sure to only put up articles that talk about/expand upon material that’s already been introduced in the available extracts, and which is known to the protagonist.  There’ll be some stuff in the worldbuilding articles that isn’t covered in the book, but I’ll try to make sure that nothing in the early articles spoils any of the surprises or plot twists.  So for those of you who are reading everything on this blog as it comes out, you’ll get to find out more about concepts as they appear, but you won’t have to worry about reading any spoilers.

So, as far as spoilers go, this’ll shake out as follows:

People who read everything on this blog as it comes out, both extracts and articles -> no spoilersPeople who read the extracts, but not the articles -> no spoilersPeople who don’t read the extracts, but do read the articles -> mild spoilers, but only of content that’s known to the protagonist alreadyPeople who don’t read either the extracts or the articles -> no spoilers

So the only people who this runs the risk of annoying are people from group 3, who read my weekly blog posts in full but who for whatever reason choose not to read any of the sample chapters/extracts that those same blog posts link to.  This feels to me like it should be a pretty small group, but let me know if it describes you!

Question for Readers

As long-time readers of this site may remember, back in the early days of the Alex Verus series, I put up a series of articles that I called the Encyclopaedia Arcana:  a sequence of worldbuilding entries about the Alex Verus setting, detailing its society, magic system, and so on.  Encyclopaedia entries made up much of the blog around 2012-2013, but their frequency trailed off as more and more topics were covered, and they eventually ended up getting replaced by the Ask Luna column instead.  But the Encyclopaedia still ran pretty long – 62 entries, which is more than a year’s worth of posts.

I’m going to do a similar series of articles for my new Inheritance of Magic series this year, covering the world, politics, groups, magic, and history of the new setting.  What I haven’t yet decided is when to put them up.  Option one is to start doing them several months in advance of the book’s release;  option two is to start putting them up when the first book comes out in October.

I’m currently leaning towards option one (putting them up in advance) since it’ll give readers the chance to get used to the setting and give them some idea of what to expect from the story.  On the other hand, book 1 is specifically designed as an introduction to the world and explains everything from scratch.  Also, the main character starts out relatively ignorant of many aspects of the magical world, and the reader learns about it as he does, meaning that writing a detailed guide to the world might spoil the surprise a bit.

So I’ve decided to do an unscientific write-in poll on the subject.  Based on what I’ve said so far, leave a comment or Tweet telling me whether you think you’d prefer to have this kind of worldbuilding material available before the release of the book, or after.  I’ll listen to the responses and take it into account when I’m planning my posting schedule for the summer and autumn.

Inheritance of Magic Update

Copy-edits on An Inheritance of Magic are done as of this week.  There’ll be a few more tiny changes, but the manuscript is now >99% identical to the version of the book that will be released in October.

Otherwise, I’m mostly occupied with working away on the new book.  I’m expecting this to be the pattern for pretty much all of spring.

Ask Luna #189

From: Adam

Dear Luna,
Now that the dust has settled and Richard is gone for good I was wondering if anyone has answered the question of why he vanished for years?
thanks,
Adam

Now that the dust has settled and Richard is gone for good, nobody cares.  They’ve all got more pressing problems to worry about.  Besides, how would they find out?

From: Dover

Dear Luna,
How did Starbreeze and Alex first meet? I have this idea that I involved one of them reaching the other from danger but I’m not sure which way around it was. How did it happen?
Thanks
Dover

I actually don’t know.  Alex had a sort of ‘wanderer/journeyman’ phase in between escaping from Richard and settling down with his shop.  It went on for years, and as I understand it he got up to a LOT of weird stuff in that time, including meeting a lot of strange magical creatures.  Starbreeze wasn’t the most unusual, by a long way.

From: Celia

Hi, Luna!

Hope you are well. I was wondering what Ji-yeong was up to these days? Also, did she pilfer Vihaela’s mist cloak? She was near the body for a while, and it wasn’t clear what happened to the cloak. Although it does seem fair for Ji-yeong to get some loot since Alex never DID give her sword back. Shame on him!

Thanks!
– Celia

From: Maya

Hi Luna! Do you know if Ji-yeong ever approached Landis? Did they end up dating? Thank you.

So . . . various stuff happened between those two, but I’m not going to go into details.  Partly because it’s private, partly because I don’t actually know all the details, and partly because it’s very definitely still an ongoing thing and I have no idea how it’s going to turn out.  

From: Olivia

Hi Luna,

Do you have any contact with Alex and Anne these days? Is there any possibility that Alex will discover that he doesn’t like peace and quiet after all, and wants to help others and reenter the fray? (Or maybe something a bit happier, like taking care of magical creatures, or solving mysteries. Or scrapbooking! …Will he be back?)

Also, if a television series were ever to be created, who would be your top choice to play yourself?

I definitely don’t have any ongoing contact with Alex and Anne and wouldn’t know anything about what they might or might not be doing.  That said, if I were them, I wouldn’t expect them to totally retire.  Think of it as more like . . . taking a break.  I think they kind of deserve one.  

As for a TV series, who knows.  Between the shop and everything else, I don’t have time to watch anything these days!

From: Randal

Why can’t Alex cook? I would have thought using his pathwalking skills he could explore the outcomes to find himself eating something amazing, then work back to see which ingredients, temperatures, etc he used to make the meal?

Doesn’t sound too dissimilar to cracking security codes or finding names by watching for certain reactions in the futures.

There’s a big difference between being able to do something, and being interested in doing something.  Alex can cook just fine, but he’s not actually interested in it.  So he does enough to turn out a competent meal, then stops.  He doesn’t do all the practice and experimenting that people who really enjoy cooking do.  Sure, if he had the interest and motivation then he could probably use that magic of his to produce dishes that were pretty amazing, but he doesn’t.  

Fallen Audiobook sale

The audio edition of Fallen is on sale for 50% off right now!  The link to the discounted edition is here.  Unfortunately I think the sale’s only valid for the US and Canada, but feel free to give it a try in other countries.

Copy-edits for An Inheritance of Magic are underway and going well.  The book’s on schedule for publication this October.  Still don’t have a series title as yet.

And in the meantime, I’m still working away on Book 2 of the new series.  This is going to continue to keep me busy all through the spring and probably well into the summer.

Missing Week

Sorry about the missing post last Friday.  I had some personal emergencies that dominated the week.

The new book’s going well, at least, though!  Another chapter’s done and I’ve got a good idea of how the rest of the beginning section is going to go.  Copy-edits for An Inheritance of Magic are also due to arrive today – for the next fortnight I’ll be doing those in parallel with writing Book 2.

Underway

New book’s making good progress.  The first chapter’s almost done;  usually I find that to be one of the major sticking points, so it’s always a good sign when I get past it.

It’s always a bit strange giving these kind of updates.  For most of you reading this, your main interest is probably Book 1 of the new series, and even that’s a distant thing far off in the future (release date is about 9 months away).  For me, on the other hand, Book 1 is basically over with.  All the major decisions and nearly all of the minor ones have been made, meaning that there’s not very much reason for me to think about it anymore.  It already feels like past history, and by the time it comes out in October I’ll probably be spending most of my time planning out what I’m going to do for Book 3.